They Had Some Left

Text: 2 Kings 4:38-44

Several years ago Dana thought it would be fun if few of the family and friends ran a 5k race together.  So, she got a group to commit to a St. Patrick's Day race race in Burlington.  It was cold and snowy and everybody was running in green leprechaun hats.  Needless to say, we were of various levels of fitness and natural talent when it came to running.  Our team was Dana and her friend Janine.  This would be Dana's first race and so she trained a bit for it.  Janine had raced a time or two, but was not in shape for this event.  For the men, there was Dana's brother Mark who is shortish and carries a lot of muscle and body hair; not exactly the runners build unless there are hobbits who run.  He trained a bit for this event.  There was me.  I ran regularly in those days and was not the portly charmer I am today.  I was in the best shape of us all.  If it were about winning I could have smoked Clan Clarkson easily, mercilessly.  But, then there was also Dana's brother-in-law Scott, he's a bit of a beanpole.  Though His dad ran marathons, Scott didn't care much for running.  To train for this event he ran only one time and that was only around the block.

So race day came, we decided that we would all run together.  When it comes to running events these days for most people it's more about participating in the event than it is the winning or personal bests or so I thought.  The race started and we were doing well.  As a group you're only as fast as your slowest runner and we were passing people.  Then just passed the 3k point Scott, the once-around-the-blocker decides he's had enough.  Instead of packing it in and walking, he takes off.  I'm looking at Mark and Mark's looking at me.  We're figuring that we'd reel him in along the way.  A minute or two goes by and no Scott dogged out in the ditch.  So, I decide to leave Mark and go after him.  Like I said, I was in pretty good shape, but I never even caught sight of Scott.  True to my word, when I got to the finish line I didn't cross.  I turned and went back for the rest of the group which had begun to stagger.  So, I got Dana and finished with her.  Needless to say, we were all pretty gobsmacked by Scott's race. 

I'm fairly convinced that when it comes to running, you get out of it what you put into it.  If you train hard for a race, you will most likely do well.  If you train just enough, you will do mediocre.  If you don't train at all, don't expect to finish and if you do, expect considerable pain for the next week or so from all the damage you've done to yourself.  This is especially true the longer the race.  If you do not train, you won't perform well and you will hurt yourself.  Though Scott appeared to have proven me wrong that day, all he had done was exchange genetic giftedness for training and truth be told he hurt for the next two weeks.

You get out of it what you put into to it.  I know that works as a basic principle for running, yet does it work for life in general?  Do we automatically get out of life what we put into it?  We'd like to think that’s the way life is.  We want to believe that hard work, honesty, generosity, compassion, and being an over-all positive and upbeat camper pays off.  Yet, the wicked prosper is a familiar lament.  Tragedy strikes.  Left field does exist and things do come flying out of it.  It is good to be honest, to work hard, and to finish the day with a good conscience knowing that you've played fair, but there's no guarantee that life will be full and fulfilling and that you we will get out of it according to what we put in to it.

 And that brings us to an obscure moment in the life of an obscure Hebrew prophet named Elisha and a glimpse of the Kingdom of God blossoming within this world showing the blessed way.  A man from an obscure place called Baal-Shalishah (Lord of Three) in the high levels of central Israel brings his offering of firstfruits to Gilgal where Elisha the prophet was located.  In Elisha’s day Gigal was the religious center for the Northern Kingdom of Israel just as Jerusalem was in Judah.   That this man was bringing the offering of the firstfruits signifies that he was a faithful Jew in a land of idol worshippers.  The Law of Moses stated that every Jew should bring the first ten percent of his harvest to the temple to give thanks and for the support of the priests and their families.  This man realizing that the priests in Gilgal were corrupt, they claimed to be priests of the Lord yet served many gods, took his offering to Elisha, the true prophet of the Lord.  Elisha didn’t hoard the offering to himself.  He orders it to be given to the school of prophets, the band of men who followed him.  There were one hundred of them.  Elisha’s servant was quick to point out that this little bit was not going to far.  Elisha sternly commands him again adding “thus says the LORD, 'They shall eat and have some left.’”  So, he did and as the Lord said they had some left.  Twenty loaves of barley bread and a sack of fresh grain ears more than satisfied one hundred men.  They had some left.

I guess at this point I could give examples of how a $100 gift to Presbyterian World Services and Development can do the same for victims of disaster and oppression throughout the world.  Yet, things like that are not really miracles.  What would really be a miracle would be fixing global economics to be faitr and just for all people.  There are still villages throughout the world where people don’t even have a well and have to walk miles daily to get their water while we kick back and theo-philosophically concider the truth of the maxim that you get out of life what you put into it.  That’s the sort of maxim wealth leaves us pondering.  If we take wealth out of the equation, that maxim disappears because it really deals with trying to blame the poor for being poor.  It’s very easy to tell someone that the reason they don’t have what they should is that they don’t work hard enough and their attitude is atrocious.  The maxim particularly falls apart in economies based on agriculture.  It doesn’t matter how hard you work or what your attitude is, the ground will only yield what the ground is going to yield.

Elisha and the man from Baal-Shalishah show us a different way.  Life in God’s Kingdom is not about me getting what I think I deserve out of life.  It is about gratitude, generosity, and others rather than ourselves having something left over.  The man from Baal-Shalishah came at the end of his harvest in what was a time of famine.  His work for the year completed for the year completed.  His boat had come in for the year so to speak and it wasn’t much.  What if ten percent of your annual income was twenty barley loaves and a sack of grain ears?  It was as much back then as it is today.  That might last a person a little over a week.  Yet, in gratitude to the Lord who had provided he generously brought his measly offering as a gift to support Elijah and the prophets and at the end of the day he went home having seen the impossible come about at the word of the Lord.  At the end of the day he knew the Lord is faithful in the midst of famine.  Sometimes it is better to know without a doubt that the Lord is faithful, tangibly faithful in the midst of famine rather than to know you’ve got food for the next seven days.  Ponder that.  Amen.

The Lowdown on Hell

Text: 2 Thessalonians 1:1-10

Well, it’s summer.  It’s hot.  We’ve no air conditioning here.  So, I figure talking on Hell would be appropriate; and if can I make this sermon last a while, I figure we will get a taste of an eternal Hell.  I though a good title for this sermon would be “What the Hell Is Hell”.  A bit tongue in cheek I realize, but that seems to be the question that is at the fore of discussions on it.  “What is Hell?” is a  very confounded question to answer.  Sorting out Hell is a lonely and isolating task that leaves one with nothing short of a Hell of a mess.  Is Hell a fiery abyss where people are tortured by demons for all eternity or is it an eternal state of being where a person by his own choice unhindered by sin continually rejects the full onslaught of the passion or burning fire of the Trinity’s unconditional love poured upon them.  There is a spectrum of belief on what Hell is making it just as important to ask “who's Hell”.  Eastern Orthodox churches understand Hell quite differently than do Western churches whose beliefs on the subject are rooted in medieval Roman Catholicism when the Church used the threat of an eternal fiery punishment in Hell to keep a largely illiterate Europe in line socially and politically. 

For your information, The Presbyterian Church in Canada makes a double confession.  By our adhering to the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the bastion confession of Calvinism and from which our denomination seems to be effectively distancing itself, we confess Hell to be “eternal torments” where the wicked who do not know God and have not obeyed the gospel of Jesus Christ are “punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of His power” (33.2).  So how did we come up with that?

Well, we draw “eternal torments” from Jesus' parable of The Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 where the goats who showed no compassion were sent away into “eternal punishment”.  Allow me here to murky the water and wrestle with the Greek.  If we look at where the word we translate as “punishment” shows up in other classical Greek works contemporary with the Bible, we find that “correction” might be a better word than punishment.  Thus, “eternal punishment” might be better translated as “eternal correction”.  Moreover, “eternal” may not be referring to time, but rather to its quality by nature of being from or of God.  For example, when we read eternal life in the Bible it almost never refers simply to life that goes on for forevermore, but rather to the quality of life found in the Kingdom of God or in knowing God in Christ, a quality of life that comes from eternity.

We must also take note that the method of eternal punishment or correction is an “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”  Once again, take what I just said about “eternal” meaning a quality from God and since we are using metaphorical language rather than literal (its a parable after all) add to it that Deuteronomy 4:24 and Hebrews 12:29  both metaphorically state “God is a consuming fire”; i.e., the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is experientially like a consuming fire.  It may just be that this “eternal fire” of “eternal punishment” is experiencing the presence of the God who is love in, might I say, a corrective or purgative way.  You see, God in his love by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ the incarnate Son of God has destroyed evil, sin, and death and is presently about the work of refining it out of his Creation.  It may be then that this eternal fire of punishment for the wicked is really a purgative exposure to the presence and the power of the God who is love that is not meant to be for forever.  The Eastern Orthodox traditions from very early on in church history have understand Hell this way. 

The second passage involved is the one we read from 2 Thessalonians.  In it Paul is not making a doctrinal statement about Judgement Day and of the end of the wicked.  He is actually trying to comfort persecuted Christians there in Thessalonica.  He is basically saying: The fact that they are being persecuted for Christ and are enduring will work out to be proof of God's righteous judgement when Jesus returns when they will be rewarded for their perseverance and experience relief.  Their persecutors and those like them who do not heed the fact that Jesus is Lord will, on the other hand, suffer the consequence of persecuting Christians by means of (not away from) being exposed to the presence of the Lord.  At his coming Jesus will be openly revealed to be the Lord (rather than Caesar being Lord) and the persecutors will bow the knee in shame, wailing and gnashing their teeth as the burning, consuming fire of the presence of the God who is love works them over with a love from which they cannot hide.  Note that Paul there has not mentioned the resurrection or the judgement that will follow. Rather, he has simply said that the persecutors of the church and those like them who do not heed that Jesus is Lord even though having been told that when he returns are going to experience his presence in a way that confronts them with their shameful doings. 

Moving on, The Presbyterian Church in Canada's second confession of faith, Living Faith, confesses Hell to be simply “eternal separation from God” which is a theological euphemism based on what is likely to be a mistranslation of a preposition in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 which reads “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”.  The “away from the presence of the Lord” there should probably be read with the sense of “by means of” reading “the eternal punishment that comes from the presence of the Lord.”  It's like being an eight year old and Mom and Dad come home and catch you in the act of smoking.  Although you probably will eat the cigarette, you won't be permanently separated from the family.  There is a fundamental belief of the ancient church saying that there is nowhere that God is not present quoting Psalm 137:7-8, “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?  If I ascend to heaven, you are there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!”  Sheol is the Hebrew name for the concealed, underworld holding place for the dead.  In most instances it just means “the grave”.  Yet, it's the closest thing to Hell you'll find in the Old Testament and the Spirit of the Lord is even present there.  The early church couldn't fathom an eternal separation from God for that would entail a cessation of existence.  The point of Hell is that it is a form of existence.  So, maybe we in the church in this day and age might what to reconsider describing Hell as eternal separation from God.

So, I've only breached the surface of Hell here and hopefully I've done it in such a way as to avoid giving you fodder to have me defrocked for teaching contrary to the beliefs of this denomination.  To close, one of the comforts of the Gospel is that God has reconciled the world to himself in Jesus Christ.  He has dealt with sin once and for all on the cross.  Jesus took upon himself our sin and its consequence of death and died with it.  Jesus death on the cross was God's judgement of sin and us a sinners.  Thus, at the cross sin and the fact that we are sinners has been utterly dealt with.  They have been born away from us by Jesus.  We are forgiven.  There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ.  As I said, that is one of the comforts of the Gospel.  The Gospel itself is about the resurrection of our Lord Jesus, the incarnate Son of God and new life in him by the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is that God has saved, is saving, and will save his Creation and fill it with his glory, with his very self.  God is doing this because God is love.  Notice that I did not say that the Gospel is that there is a Hell of eternal punishment which we all deserve for our sins and the way to avoid Hell is simply to believe that Jesus died for our sins.  That is Good Friday faith and it falls far short of Easter.  Amen.

God Gets His Hands Dirty

Text: 2 Samuel 24

This story of David's census and the resulting plague is one that I find very troubling.  The God it presents us with seems so utterly unlike God as he has revealed himself to us in, through and as Jesus Christ.  Jesus, through his words and his actions reveals to us that God is gracious and forgiving and loves us so much as to go through even death for our healing/salvation when we certainly cannot say we deserve it.  God--the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--is gracious.  He wants us in his presence so that he can extend his favour to us and do everything to the nth extreme for our ultimate good.  Thus as the Apostle John wrote, God is love - agape love which in Greek is the highest form of love based in choice rather than hormones and feelings and unselfish action for others rather than benefit of self.  Agape love isn't just one of God's characteristics or attributes.  God is agape love.  So, how can God be so capricious, angry, and vengeful, and act out with death-dealing as he does in this story?  How is that love?  Isn’t that what President Assad is doing in Syria.  We cannot say he loves his people when it is so obvious that his love is power.

This story and the challenge it presents us with, the challenge of having to deal with God behaving like all the other gods, is easily mishandled.  We should not wave accounts of God's wrath around as the smoking gun of Puritanical Revivalism and use it and the fear of judgement to wor conversions out of people or to make people toe our line.  Nor should we commit the classic blunder of dismissing it outright because it does not concur with our post-Enlightenment or Liberal sentiments of how a loving God ought to be.  That's as big a blunder as getting involved in a land war in Asia or going against a Sicilian when death is on the line.  We must not judge the story or the culture from which it arose or the actions of the God it presents us according to today's blatantly un-Enlightened standards and rather simply deal with the text on its own terms and the God who is agape love will have his say about who he is.  What we find at the heart of this story is a righteous God having to deal with his people becoming “like the nations” and David heading down the road of being a king that is Assad-like rather than Christ-like.  Unfortunately, God gets his hands dirty and people die.  Yet in the process, the means of God's higher purpose of grace grows. 

So the story, 1 Samuel 24 is out of place.  Whoever compiled 1 and 2 Samuel as we have it appears to have had in hand this story of how David acquired the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite and he didn't know where to put it in the story of David's life attested in 1 and 2 Samuel.  So he tacks it on at the end because it's important.  The threshing floor in it and the place where David offers his sacrifices on it are important because it became the very spot where the Ark of the Covenant would be placed once Solomon built the Temple.  The lid of the Ark was the Mercy Seat, God's throne on earth, the place where Israel's sins would be forgiven.  It is the place where the LORD and Israel would be united in the blood of sacrifice sprinkled on the Day of Atonement.  This is what I meant by the means of God's grace growing.  If all these events had never happened, David may not have been able to secure the location of the Jerusalem temple from the Jebusites without having to shed both Israelite and Jebusite blood in battle.  One other thing to note about this spot, it is Mt. Moriah where Abraham attempted to sacrifice Isaac.

So, why was this census such a thing as to warrant the LORD's anger and a plague?  The Bible says “Again (or increasingly) Yahweh's nostrils flared against Israel so he incited David against them saying 'Go count Israel and Judah’.”  The first thing to notice hear is that there is culpability on the part of the people.  They are not innocents. They are doing something that is making the LORD quite angry.  His nostrils are flaring.  (Hebrew does not have a word for anger.  They just say the nostrils flare.)  We don't know what they were doing.  I suspect it had something to do with in the wake God's establishing them to be a nation as he promised to Abraham they were starting to do the things that nations do—exploit their neighbours and the weak among themselves and find themselves a national god to bless them while they go about it.  So, in order to rein them in the LORD ordered a census instead of having one of their enemies like the Philistines yet again displace them.

A census was a dangerous thing.  Back in those days, whenever a king counted his people it was to find out how powerful he was by finding out how many people he had at his disposal to tax, to conscript into forced labour, or to raise an army.  In this case, since David gets his main general Joab to do the counting, it appears David the warrior-king, wants to know how big of an army he can raise.  But, there was a catch.  In the ancient Near East (and there is some biblical precedence too) they believed that soldiers must be ritually pure for war.  There were purity rituals and rules regarding fasting and abstinence that men must observe before they are even counted to be an army ready to go to war in the name of a god.  If they were not “right with god”, then they their god would plague them.  This was the case in Israel and Judah.  This is why Joab protested the census.  He knew the men of Israel and Judah were not ritually pure and to count them in that state was an invitation to plague regardless of whether it was at the LORD's command or not. 

So, the LORD used a military census that he knew would result in the consequence of plague for Israel and Judah as a means of judgement.  They were not in the rights with the LORD and this was his way of letting them know that being an exploitative military power in the region wasn't what he had in mind when he promised Abraham that he would make his descendents to be a great nation through whom he would bless the nations.

Being God's people has costly consequences when we do not act like the blessing God is making us to be.  In a real world where sin and death are dreadful realities God is not above getting his hands dirty and dealing in death to get us to the point where we beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks.  God gets his hands dirty.  Jesus shows us this.  Instead of calling down legions of angels to prevent his crucifixion which would had resulted in the deaths of thousands he more or less falls on his sword and lets himself be crucified.  Judas wasn’t the only one to commit suicide that day.

The LORD has a lesson here for David as well.  As king, David is responsible for the well-being of his people which included looking after their relationship to the LORD who made them to be a great nation.  Apparently, he had not been doing this.  It is astonishing how easy it was for David to think the reason the LORD wanted a census was for David to know how great a military he had.  If David were truly the righteous leader that he claimed to be, he would have done as Moses did centuries before when the LORD wanted to destroy Israel over the Golden Calf incident.  He should have mediated on behalf of the people.  Joab tried to get David to see what was going on.  He knew the people were not ready.  David was apparently blinded by pride and power.  So God gets his hands dirty to teach the leader of his people that the lives of his people have value and are not expendable at the king's whim to find out how great he is.

So to close, we still have a question as to how we balance a God who gets his hands dirty with a God who is agape love?  Though it appears that God is dealing dirty here, he is simply using our sin to show us our sin.  The consequence of sin is having to live with the consequences of sin and they are costly.  There are real consequences to our actions that can be as brutal as death itself.  When it comes to what is best for everybody, God does not step back and say, “I’m a God of love and I won’t get my hands dirty because some peacenik somewhere says its immoral.”  If that were the case there would be no such thing as justice and justice is a core component of God’s love.  God gets his hands dirty.  In this case 70,000 Israelites died.  Yet, in this messed up world how many more would have died if the LORD would have let Israel and David continue on in their way of becoming just like the other nations, exploitative powers exploiting in the LORD’s name and calling themselves blessed?  The true question here is why God continues to let us get away it.  Amen.

Jesus and the God Particle

Text: Ephesians 1 and 2

The confirmation of the Higgs Boson this week was for me something really big.  It goes by the nickname of “the God Particle” because without it you and I and the whole creation would not exist.  We would have no mass.  It is what makes physical matter to be physical matter.  It’s the stuff that stuff is made of.  Without it all the other particles are pointless (there’s a joke there that I don’t expect you to get.)  The Higgs Boson Field is where everything in this universe is gathered together, held together, or has a basic unity with each other by nature of having mass.  You and I and this table are all separate things.  Because of the workings of different forces in the universe that came about as things began to cool after the Big Bang we are separate things but in the Higgs Boson Field we have a basic unity with one another.  We have mass.

When I read Ephesians 1 and 2 (Colossians 1 also) I can’t help but think of by the resurrection of Jesus God was creating by his great power a new Field in his universe which I will call the New Creation Life Field in which God is bringing all things together, gathering all things up in Christ Jesus so that if we aren’t finding our “being” in union with him by means of the Holy Spirit to share his relationship with God the Father then it is fair to say that we are not.  We are dead-spiritually massless.  The world of the old creation dies, but the world of the New Creation is being made alive, made alive by the power of God at work through Jesus Christ, God the Son himself entering into the Higgs Boson Field as a human being.  This is a very real hope to which we have been called.  God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and of earth in love has God Banged death out of the old creation by means of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

You are probably thinking I’ve been in the heat too long, but I’m just trying to get as concrete as I can (and nothing is more concrete than Physics) about what Paul meant when he prayed in Ephesians 1:17-23 that as we come to know the Father through the Son in the Spirit that God would give us the ability to know more completely and more personally two things: one, that we are truly welcome partakers of the spiritual fellowship of the Trinity in that we are children of the Father by the grace of adoption through the living relationship with God through Christ Jesus, the only begotten Son, in the Holy Spirit; and two, that we, whom God from before the foundation of the universe chose and destined to have a living and life giving relationship with himself in Jesus Christ, may know (I mean really, experientially know) the immeasurableness of his power for us in the way he manifests it, which is resurrection into New Creation life now and in the future.

Paul says God put this resurrection power to work in Jesus Christ: “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.  And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:20-23).  That’s the God Bang creating the New Creation Life Field through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.

Paul then says that God for no other reason than his love for us put this power of grace to work in us saving us from the power of death that’s at work in this world and in which we have willingly participated.   Paul is describing our real experience of New Creation resurrection life in Jesus Christ by the working of the Holy Spirit when he writes: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:4-10).

This New Creation Life Field that God brought into existence by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and by which God is gathering up all things in Christ Jesus, our resurrected and ascended Lord, has been God’s plan from before the foundation of the universe.  God did not do this to rectify humanity’s sin.  The Fall is not even mentioned here.  From before the very beginning God has wanted to adopt humanity into his family, his self, and impart to us the inheritance of a creation that in every way is full of the knowing of him as the waters cover the sea (Is. 11:9).  The gift of the Holy Spirit who makes us call out to the Father in faith both from need and in praise is the proof of what I’m talking about here.  Just as the Holy Spirit is proof to us that all this resurrection and New Creation stuff is real, so also we and our fellowship are the proof to the rest of humanity that this is all going to go down.  We are a new humanity, a new humanity in which all barriers that we humans build between ourselves are being demolished by our being gathered together into Christ. 

In closing, we gather around the Lord’s Table to share the meal he gave us.  This is more than just some symbolic ritual that we do.  Through this meal we are really participating in the New Creation Life Field in Christ Jesus.  Just like we are all here participating in the Higgs Boson Field by the essence of just being here, so when we gather around this table and share this meal we are being gathered up in Christ and being made alive.  Come to this table, to this meal with all your death and be made alive in him.  Let him bear away your sins and grief’s for he is here to do just that.  It’s his table and grace is the rule.  Amen.

Advantage: Me

Text: Psalm 30

Psalm 30 ends, “You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to you and not be silent. O LORD my God, I will give you thanks forever ^(NIV).”  Eternally grateful, I believe, would be our way of describing it.  Eternally grateful and so full of joy that others see it.  I don’t know about you, but to me that seems like a good place to be.  Yet, how does one arrive at it.  Like the rich young man who asked Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” which means enter the Kingdom of God, we want to know what we can do to be grateful and joyful.

What can we do?  Jesus answered the man, “Get religion…keep the commandments.”  The man said, “I’ve done that since I was a child.  It’s not working.”  Jesus says, “This time I’ll be more specific.  Go sell everything you have and give it to the poor and then come and follow me.”  The rich young man walked away sad for he was very rich.  Jesus then tells his disciples, “The more you have, the harder it is to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  “Who can be saved?” they said among themselves.  Jesus replies, “It’s impossible for humanity to save itself.  But, with God all things are possible.”  I think Jesus is trying to say there to that young man and to his disciples that being eternally grateful and full of joy, which I’m led to say are a key component of our outlook on life after salvation, are not attainable by our efforts.  They are a gift from God.

The Psalmist appears to have known that rich young man’s predicament.  He too was wealthy, well established and he would add, by God’s hand not his own.  He writes, “As for me, I said in my prosperity, ‘I shall not be moved.’  Yahweh, by your favour, you established me; you made my mountain stand strong.”  He was secure in the assurance of faith that arises in knowing that it is God’s faithfulness alone that had established him.  It was by God’s favour that he had it so comfortably content.  God in his steadfast love and faithfulness had established him for God’s purposes and it was blessedly good for the Psalmist.

Yet, in the next breath that comfortable contentment is gone.  Death came knocking on his door and it seems God decided to look the other way.  “By your favor, O LORD, you made my mountain stand strong; you hid your face; I was dismayed.  To you, O LORD, I cry, and to the Lord I plead for mercy: ‘What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the pit?  Will the dust praise you?  Will it tell of your faithfulness?  Hear, O LORD, and be merciful to me! O LORD, be my helper!’” ^(ESV)  He goes from comfortable contentment to dismay.  In case we don’t know what dismay is, its definition goes: sudden loss of courage or resolution from alarm or fear.  Given the Hebrew word that’s used there which is almost exclusively used for this sudden terror that falls upon the enemies of God, terrorized by God would not be too far a stretch to say what he’s going through.  He’s been faithful only to find himself suffering what otherwise is reserved for punishing the wicked.  It’s not that God is getting him for something specific that he’s done.  It’s just that God, who once showed him favour and established him well, has now decided to hide his face, to disregard him.

Once again, the Psalmist gives no reason or cause for this what appears to be sudden and capricious change on the part of God.  He had fallen out of grace with God, but for no specific reason.  What was he to do?  What would you do?  Job’s famous saying, “The good Lord giveth and the good Lord taketh away” is the sort of thing heroes of good literature say, but for us we are more apt to shake our fists at the sky and say “What the….”.  I hear a bit of that when the Psalmist points out to God, “It isn’t going to look good for you if I die.  Who’s going to praise you and tell of your faithfulness?”

What happens next in Psalm 30 is a very pregnant pause.  Something happens that changes that Psalmist.  God does something.  Salvation happens.  Resurrection, we might say, happens.  God acts.  The Psalmist says, “You turned for me my wailing into dancing,…”  Missing iin some translations (NIV and NRSV) is the “for me”.  He doesn’t just say “You turned my wailing into dancing.”  He said, “Lord, you did it for me.”  The Psalmist is not making generalities about God being the type of God who gives us joy…blah, blah, blah.  This was a matter of life and death between a faithful man and the God who loves him.  God did this healing for him, for his own benefit and advantage and it took him from comfortable content—excellent cup of coffee first thing in the morning sitting on my dock at my cottage on my lake—to eternally grateful and full of joy—the after-effect of salvation—summoning God’s people to give thanks and praise.

So, returning to the original question: How do we get to be eternally grateful and full of joy?  Well, its God’s doing…and be ready to suffer.  John Calvin writes: “You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.”  God lets the faithful suffer for the purpose of working for our good and salvation.  Calvin says that a key component of faith is “to recognize that God has destined all things for our good and salvation but at the same time to feel his power and grace in ourselves and in the great benefits he has conferred upon us, and so bestir ourselves to trust, invoke, praise, and love him.”  I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth but I know there are terminal illness survivors out there who have felt God’s power and grace at work in their very selves.  Add to that, the terminally ill who have suddenly found themselves at peace.  I know alcoholics and addicts who have felt the power and grace of God move in their very selves to remove the addiction.  I know people who have been riddled with shame and guilt only to feel it taken away from them as the power and grace of God moved within them.  I could go on.  The point is that in this fallen, broken, totally frilled world we live in we, God’s faithful will suffer, but our suffering is not without purpose.  God uses it to bring his very self more obviously to us and into us that we might know him in his saving power and grace.  We must let this go beyond speaking generalities about God for when he works savingly in us whatever it is we know its personal, that he did it for me to make me in the specifics of my own brokenness eternally grateful and full of joy.  Amen.