(in the series Psalms in the Key of Easter)
Texts for Sunday, April 24, 2005
Luke 6: 17-23 Psalm 84
In this little course on the Psalms, we have now learned two words that lie deep on the heart of wisdom, refuge and righteousness. The meaning of taking refuge in the Lord is almost impossible to convey to anyone who has not suffered, or to anyone who has shoved her sorrow back behind awareness, behind a grim smile. Refuge is not theoretical. It is not comfort in the notion that God will do good, will make revenge, will bring the faithful to heaven. No: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. [Psalm 46.1] And righteousness, we learn, meant for the psalmists not the conventional morality of the citizens of our fair city, not “being good,” but rather this: dependence on God in all things, not on oneself. Righteous describes not the self-made man, but the God-made man and woman. Today we are going to tune our ear to a third great chord of the psalm tradition. Hear what it is to be blessed.
The word may be translated “happy” or “fortunate” but the roots of these words lean on the idea of good luck. Happy derives from “what happens.” One is happy because of good happenstance. Fortunate comes from a Latin word for “chance.” This is easy to understand. We are naturally so terrified of mishap and misfortune, so ready to number only life’s good things among our blessings, and block from our thoughts the things that caused us pain. How often our ordinary prayers ask merely that good things come in the place of bad. But the wideness of blessing as told in the Psalms goes far beyond the satisfactions we naturally seek. Just listen to Jesus, schooled in the Psalms: “Blessed are you poor; blessed, you who weep now.” What wisdom had grasped those ancient souls?
On first hearing, Psalm 84 sounds like wisdom for those graced to have lived right all their days. The poet yearns for God’s house, to be at worship in the temple. “My soul longs, indeed faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.” Who can aspire to this? The poet watches swallows swooping through wide openings in and out of the great temple. In their trust of the air beneath their wings and the safe-laid nest right by the altar, the poet glimpses a shard of heaven’s light for human lives: we too can trust the ground on which we walk, indeed, the whole creation; we too may fly to refuge in the sanctuary of God and make there our home. “Happy are those– blessed are they who live in your house, ever singing your praise. ” How beautiful. How lovely. But let’s be real. We don’t feel this way about church. If one of our members wanted to spend all the day long right here, what would you think? Now, our opinions of others’ devotions aren’t worth two pennies–still, this fair psalm may seem to some a blessing beyond belief, a level of love for the Lord too high. If this is blessing, I’m out of here.
Stay. Let us take a walk behind the psalms. No one knows when this psalm was written. Bible scholars have shown that even those said to be written by David probably weren’t, but many may be very old indeed. This one certainly sounds as if the great temple built by Solomon (around 950 B.C.) gave the poet his inspiration. That puts some kind of date on the psalm, for that temple did not stand after 587 B.C. Set that fact alongside another psalm fact. The psalter is a collection, a hymnbook containing precisely 150 songs. The scholars can show that “the psalter” in some form was first published, so to speak, no earlier than 450 B.C. That means this Psalm 84 was preserved after the temple was razed by the armies of Babylon, after all of Jerusalem’s leaders were hustled away to exile. Someone hung on to this song, even when there was no temple to look at, even when the swallows and sparrows nested only in imagination, even when it became nearly impossible to sing to the Lord in a strange land.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hung our harps upon the willows there. For there our captors required of us a song; they, who had wasted us– mirth! saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’ How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I set not Jerusalem above my chief joy. [Psalm 137. 1-6]
So, let us return to Psalm 84, for we only have it now because they chose it then, to guard it and keep it, after their home was lost and all the forms of God’s promise they had ever known were vanished. Have you been there? Not with a building, especially, though perhaps–but with a love which was true on this earth? With a passion for work or a cause that came to its end, or failed? With a gladness for the heat and strength and joy in your body? With a hope for some dear one whose mind or will but crumpled under life blows, and still your hope stayed vigil, and though she cried out– this hope in you–she would not sleep, she would not quit, she would not not? If you have stood in a space like that, and have stood–that is, have wanted to be there, have been strangely glad to be there, glad to be so alive, so able to feel after things eternal by the faculty of faith, then blessing you know; the exquisite, holy joy you know of seeing what is not there–of seeing things that never pass away–seeing what is real right through the crude matter of creation, right through the two woods of the cross, right through the stone of the tomb. Your ear is wide open for blessing. Hear the word of the Lord, O exiles, from whose presence the beloved is cast out–but Godself has come in stead.
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs– faints–for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. Blessed: those who live in your house, ever singing your praise. Blessed: those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are these highways to Zion. They go from strength to strength. The God of gods will be seen in Zion. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob! For a day in these courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk in wholeness of life. O Lord of hosts, blessed: whoever trusts in you.
Something has happened here. The literal meaning of the psalm has fallen to the floor like an unneeded garment. Beneath, a raiment so beautiful now shows, so perfect, so fit for your need of God, that words cannot convey it. The literal is lost, the dogma is done, and life abundant floods in like light beyond the storm. This is blessing’s dwelling place– shimmering, vibrant, present, real; yet so evanescent, so volatile, so unlike the substance of things visible and edible and tangible that blessing itself will seem at times but a dream or a mood, and misery will feel real. For blessing will not compete for your attention with arguments, pro and con. Pleasure and pain, misery and mirth will rise and fall through your life, like a child on a swing. But blessing has no swing, no opposite. Blessing is ever-present, eternal, absolute. You go there when you must; you enter at God’s call. The door is never locked, and never literal. Blessing is “a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” [2 Corinthians 5.1]
Why does this matter, to be blessed? I will tell you. It matters so that you may be a blessing. Those who only count their blessings–that is, those for whom happiness depends on what happens; for whom the good life is defined only by the good things they’ve got–they cannot bless the world. What have they to say, who only know “fortunate” by chance? Be lucky like me? Be stout of heart, and prosperous, and fortunate in children, like me? This is not good news. These are curse words of judgment, a door slammed and locked and literal in the face of the young, the frightened, the failing, the miserable.
It matters in this world that you learn blessing, so that you may bless others, so that this earth may be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. More blessed. It matters. If in my speaking of this sermon you realize that though you believe in the possibility of blessing, you have not really known it, have not really trusted your soul to the wind to swoop in through the open door of blessing’s dwelling to make your own nest there, not yet, it matters that this day you make a new covenant with your God, to ask to be blessed in your emptiness, not your fullness, that you may be a blessing. And God will look on the face of his anointed, Christ Jesus, risen to dwell in you and in all, and you will be blessed to be a blessing.
To William Butler Yeats, it came this way.
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, April 2005
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