Sunday, February 5,
2017
In the Fantastic Four super hero
comic books, one of the enemies of
the Fantastic Four is Galactus, an alien so large, he travels through the
universe consuming planets. When they
made the Fantastic Four into movies, in one of the films, another alien, the
Silver Surfer, came to earth to warn us of Galactus’ approach and intention of
eating our planet, and all of us. The
Surfer told the Fantastic Four, “It is called Galactus, ‘Destroyer of worlds.’”
What kind of Greek trip am on that I
would read Psalm 16 and think of Marvel comics and the Fantastic Four? It’s not the first thought I had in my
reading of Psalm 16. In fact, I’ve been
reading that Psalm over and over for almost a month now. I’ll get to that in a bit, but first, what
about that? What about Psalm 16 and
Galactus and the ‘Destroyer of worlds?’
It is actually something a great Bible scholar
said about the Psalms and what Israel was doing when they sang the Psalms in
worship and what God did through the Psalms in the heart of Israel and in us
when we worship through reading, praying, singing, and most importantly
believing the Psalms. In his brief
commentary Abiding Astonishment,
Walter Brueggemann wrote the Psalms “intend … to unmake, deconstruct, and
unmask … worlds which seduce and endanger Israel.”[i]
In this sense then, the real God, not the
Marvel Comics Galactus, is the ‘Destroyer of Worlds.’ God destroys worlds – threats, ideologies,
lies, false theologies, idolatries, fears, seductions. The Psalms reiterate again and again that God
is faithful and is Almighty. No threat
will come to Israel that possesses more power than God. Foreign invaders like Egypt and Assyria and Babylon
and Rome will hurt Israel, but only because God permits it. And those injuries always come in conjunction
with Israel turning away from God, turning to false God, trusting in unwise
alliances, and exploiting the poor.
Unfaithfulness and exploitation always, always accompany the arrival of
a foreign power in Israel’s history.
God is never off the scene. God sometimes moves to the background to
allow Israel to live with the pain that comes with her sins. But God is always present to destroy the
invader and ideological and political worlds that threaten God’s order. God is a destroyer of worlds.
What’s true of what God does for and in Israel
is also true for the rest of human society.
First through the creation mandate to scatter over the earth, then
through the priestly mandate to Israel to be a Holy nation that draws lost and
sinful humanity back to God, then through Israel’s prophets who imagine a
future in which all kingdoms of the earth find their fulfillment in the worship
of God, and finally in the Great Commission to make all of the world followers
of Jesus, the words of the Psalms ring true for the church. God is a destroyer of worlds, the forces that
would seduce, threaten, and ultimately kill the church.
What are some of those forces? What draws our attention away from the
Gospel? What tries to tell us who we
are, when we know our identities are based on who we are in Christ?
Some voices insist we must advocate on behalf
of refugees. Their lives are fluttering
in the wind and we in the wealthy west must open our hearts and our arms and
homes. It’s matter of valuing lives. Yet, the same voices will not permit space
for the unborn when the conversation switches to crisis pregnancies or unwanted
pregnancies. Then, we can’t talk about
the baby’s life, only the woman’s choice.
Some voices insist that we get very specific
in damning certain sins, like homosexuality.
We must declare it an evil that threatens our way of life. And this insistence ignores completely the
way Jesus welcomed people – all people, and gave extra love to those who needed
most, people rejected in society. The voices
insisting this righteous condemnation ignores the truth that the Holy Spirit is
leading the church to love all people and welcome all people.
Conversely, there are voices that are just as
loud that demand that all relationships be affirmed by the church. A Christian baker or photographer sees his
work as a kind of ministry. But then
these voices tell him, he has to serve a same-sex wedding. His reading of scripture tells him that’s
against God’s will. Those voices aren’t
interested in his reading of scripture.
He either has to go against what he thinks God is telling him in the
Bible and bake the cake for the same-sex marriage; or he has to give up the
business he loves and believes is a ministry.
What forces draw our attention away from who
God tells us who we are in Christ?
Some voices insists that our primary identity
involves the country of our citizenship, instead of our belief that we are
subjects in an eternal kingdom. As
citizens our top concern should be for border security. We know our calling to go out; ‘go into the
all world baptizing and making disciples.’ It’s hard to remember our call when so many
voices vie for our attention and compete to tell us who we are.
I’ve done a very rough run through of just
some of the issues that have dominated the headlines in the past couple of
years, right up to today. I believe we
have a call from God to care for all lives – refugees, the unborn, persecuted
persons in other countries, disadvantaged persons in our own community. We are called to love these individuals and
help them know Jesus as their Savior and thrive as his disciples. We are called to love and welcome people who
are confused about their own sexuality or who openly claim a sexual identity
that is outside the parameters of what’s allowed in scripture. The church must be in the mercy-giving
business. If condemnation is to come,
let it come directly from God to the individual. We’re to be mercy, love, and
grace-givers. And because theology is so
complicated, I think we have to create space for people to have different
beliefs on issues, but still feel at home among us.
The grand issue is calling. We are called to the cross – to confess and
then leave our sins there. We are call
to receive forgiveness and new life. All
these issues and many I have not mentioned turn into idolatries that seduce and
endanger us. God is the destroyer of the
worlds that would come about if we forfeited our unity in Christ for the sake
of commitment to issues instead of commitment to Him as Lord. We’re not to be an issue-driven church. We’re to be a Kingdom-driven church. We love refugees and speak for the unborn,
and we love and welcome straight people and gay people because love is a core
Kingdom value intrinsic to who we are.
Through the Psalms, through the church,
through the work of the Holy Spirit in the world, God destroys some worlds to
make room for the world God is constructing, creating. There’s one line that has daily drawn me back
to Psalm 16. “In your presence, there is
fullness of joy.”
I look to God and say it over and I over. I sit down to pray and begin with
silence. I try to shut out the noise of
the latest rally or protest, the latest outcry or accusation that leaps off the
new website. I get my mind as quiet as I
can before God, praying for the Spirit to fill the void. After a minute or two, I then begin filling
the quiet with that phrase, “In your presence, there is fullness of joy.” I need to remember that God is present and
what it means because God is present.
Reaching for that palpable sense of God’s
presence, I then proceed into prayer and Bible reading and then into the
day. This yearning for God to be present
and make sense of the world that seems to be devolving toward chaos is what led
me to the whole idea of the ice berg. If
you haven’t been here, I’ve proposed that our mission in worship has been to
seek more and more of God the way we might see more and more of the iceberg
beneath the surface of the water.
This not escapism, an attempt to pretend the
world’s problems don’t exist. They do
and we Christians must be a witness in the midst of the conversation. But whether it is the refugee crisis, the
abortion question, the conversation over sexual ethics, or something else, we
do not come it as people of a particular stance. We see as if we are standing in the Kingdom
already. We see it in the light of who
God is. Saying that, I do not give an
answer as to what view the church holds in any specific case. Rather, I insist that we who are in Christ
view each issue through a prism of love, grace, and mercy.
The debates over each of these issues that
have produced such division turns the issues themselves into idolatries, but we
will not be seduced into walking to our own destruction. We are followers of Jesus who know God is
present and thus we keep our attention on him.
We look to the Holy Spirit to know how to think, act, and speak. And we keep looking back to the Spirit
knowing the Spirit is dynamic, always on the move, leading us onto new
paths.
The Psalm itself gives markers both of God’s
presence and of who we are because God is present. In these markers we see the worlds God
destroys. We also see what God makes – a
world of beautiful relationships; a world run by love.
The first marker is verse 2 – “I say to the
Lord, you are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” A few weeks ago, I came across a quote that
is going to be part of my self-understanding going forward. My life makes no sense apart from God. Either I do good and help people because I
yield to God love in me and allow God to direct my life, or I rebel against
God’s love and thus I live selfishly.
Either way, the only way to understand a Christ-follower is in terms of
his or her relationship with God.
Similarly, the only good in our lives is the good God brings into our
lives. Other pleasures will turn out to
be relatively harmless forgeries or life-destroying seductions. We are aligned with God when we can truly say
the good in our lives comes from him.
The second marker is verse 5 – “The Lord is my
chosen portion and my cup.” Originally
this may have be sung by Levites or referred to Levites. In ancient Israel they were the one group not
allotted land. They were assigned to
oversee worship, so their food and their provision was mandated in the
commandments. When society was obedient,
they provided; thus, God was their portion.
The verse speaks to us to remind us that in
addition to giving us all that is good in our lives, God meets our needs. It’s basic to the Lord’s Prayer. “Give us this day, our daily bread.” Through the disappointments and triumphs,
life’s wins and losses, God is always present.
God works in our pleasure and our pain, always making us new and
preparing us for the eternal Kingdom.
That leads to the third marker of God’s
world-making in Psalm 16 and it comes in verses 10-11. “You, O God, do not give me up to Sheol, or
let your faithful one see the Pit. You
show me the path of life. In your
presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures
forevermore.” God gives us good things
and our lives make no sense apart from him.
God is our portion, provider of all we need. And, God’s future for us is rescue from
death; rescue to eternal life.
The word Sheol and the concept of the pit are
both Old Testament descriptions of death and separation from God. The idea I’ve been trying to present is that
God rescues us by destroying divisions and temptations that separate us from
Him. God destroys those worlds without
him in our lives that would arise as we follow those temptations. Where verse 10 says God does not let His
faithful one fall into the Pit, we see a Messianic prediction. God will rescue the Messiah and we believe
that rescue comes when the Messiah, Jesus Christ, is resurrected.
First Corinthians 15 says Jesus is the “last
Adam,” the “life-giving Spirit.” As he
was resurrected, so will we be. As his
disciples, we have resurrection and eternal life ahead of us. It’s all promised in this Psalm: all the good
in our lives, all our needs met, and rescue from death. “In God’s presence, there truly is fullness of
joy.”
So, we unite in God. Plenty of ideas and movements, forces of evil
afoot and on the move, are jockeying to divide us and destroy us. The Holy Spirit is drawing us together in Christ
because that’s what God does. We’ve
talked about how God is big and relational.
We’ve talked about how God goes out His way for poor and downtrodden
people. We’ve talked about God loves
riches and powerful people and they can see that when they see their own
brokenness. Today we see that God is a
maker of worlds. God prepare us for life
in a world where love what drives relationships. We can be active in this world, helping
people, participating in causes, and raising our voices. But whatever we do, our eyes are on God and
we step out at God’s prompting, as God clears the path ahead.
AMEN
[i] W.
Brueggemann (1991), Abiding Astonishment:
Psalms, Modernity, and the Making of History, Westminster/John Knox Press
(Louisville), p.26.
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