Isaiah 50:4-9
Psalm 116
James 2:1-18
The Holy Spirit has, for some reason, seen it fit for me to open and close our interim period. In November, the Spirit commissioned us to not take care but to take kingdom risks.
In our season of stewardship
- We’ve cared for one another, in sickness and in health. We enjoy each other’s company. Isn’t it good to again be breaking cookies with one another at coffee hour?
- We have offered spiritual hospitality by welcoming visitors in person and through our live stream.
- We have continued to sup with Jesus and grow in our trust in him through this global trial.
Jesus declared to us that we were up to the challenge of an interim period. We have persevered.
Now, 10 months later, the Spirit has asked me to speak the Word as we close our interim period. How wonderfully the Spirit, though the lectionary, has chosen Psalm 116.
A note before we continue. I will be referencing the verse numbers from the standard biblical text, not the leaflet, which uses the verse numbers from the Book of Common Prayer. I know why they’ve renumbered, for when we chant the Psalms, but it gives preachers fits. You can use the black pew Bible if you wish to follow along.
1 I love the Lord, because he has heard
2 Because he inclined his ear to me,
therefore I will call on him as long as I live.
I found this psalm so perfect in how it leads us to praise God for sending us a pastor, for sustaining us through the pandemic and the ups and downs of life. God has heard our prayer, he has inclined his ear to us.
The beauty of the Psalms is that they speak into each of our situations and simultaneously speak of the Messiah of Israel. They teach us to pray and show us God’s answer to our prayers – the redeeming Son of David, Jesus of Nazareth.
Psalm 116 is part of the collection known as the Hallel or the Egyptian Hallel – Egyptian because the collection, Psalms 113-118, is part of the Passover liturgy, which recalls Israel’s freedom from Egyptian slavery. They are called Hallel psalms because they all contain the word “Hallelujah,” the call to praise the LORD. Psalm 116 ends with “Hallelujah!”
In the Gospels, after Jesus’ last Passover meal, Matthew says, “And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives” (Matt 26:30). Maybe it’s better rendered, “And singing, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” I can see them taking that walk out of the city walls, down into the Kidron Valley, and over into the garden. The city would have been overflowing with pilgrims. Families would have been camped out all around the city. Jesus and the disciples wouldn’t have been the only ones singing and talking. The valley would have been full of life; maybe others would join their song as they passed by.
What were they singing? The Hallel Psalms. They were singing Psalm 116 and Psalm 118 and the others in the collection.
As I read through the psalm again on Friday, I saw Jesus very clearly.
Next Lent or Holy Week, or next time you’re looking for a personal study, read through the Psalms 113-118 as if you’re Jesus before the crucifixion? What was Jesus meditating on as he was arrested, beaten, nailed on the cross? He would have had these songs in his head.
Y’all know the concept of an earworm, a song you can’t get out of your head? I believe God wired us that way. He made us susceptible to music so it would call us to worship him, so we would meditate on his goodness. That’s why we need to be discerning in what we listen to. Songs burrow inside us and echo their melody and lyrics into our minds.
In the movie Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne is wrongfully imprisoned but tries to make the best of his time, including lifting up his fellow prisoners by introducing them to escapist literature and the beauty and freedom of music. In one scene, he locks himself in the warden’s office and plays Mozart over the prison loudspeaker. Andy gets two weeks of solitary confinement for this stunt, but he tells his friend Red that it was easy time because he had Mozart – in his head – to keep him going.
The last thing Jesus sang before his arrest were these psalms. What a grace from the Holy Spirit to give him music to sustain him all the way to the cross. Jesus was trusting the Father to show his goodness and faithfulness as recorded in these psalms.
3 The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
We’ve had a year and a half of varying degrees of distress and anguish – a global pandemic that took away our normalcy, our freedom of movement, a questioning of our safety and security. These masks have taken our faces from us. Some of us have lost friendships, jobs, income, others have lost loved ones to death. The nation and the church have suffered disunity in the wake of the pandemic and political tension.
4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
“O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!”
5 Gracious is the Lord, and righteous;
our God is merciful.
6 The Lord preserves the simple;
when I was brought low, he saved me.
God is God and we are not. That is the lesson of adversity. God is God and we are not. When we humble ourselves to this fact, God saves us.
Living in the garden was meant to be simple… God cares, we receive. But the temptation to not be simple was too great for both Adam and Eve. The serpent said, “You can be like God.” And we all fell.
But when we remember that we are the creature, the Creator saves us from ourselves and cares for us, provides for our every need, as he always intended.
7 Return, O my soul, to your rest;
for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you.
8 For you have delivered my soul from death,
my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling;
In talking to some of you, I know this has been a tough season. Many of us have endured tears. But the LORD has been faithful to preserve us.
Even though the pandemic is ongoing as is our political and social tension, we here at Grace are gaining a pastor, a family, a return to “normalcy” even if it is a new normal. I pray we all find rest as Grace’s new season begins.
12 What shall [we] render to the Lord for all his benefits to [us]?
As we wait for the end of the pandemic, for a new bishop, for health, for work, for provision, for answers to those prayers nobody else knows about, the Lord has answered one prayer. He has sent us a pastor. Let us acknowledge the Lord’s faithfulness. When we see he is faithful in filling one need, we can be sure he will supply for the others. He may not answer us the way we imagine, because his thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. But he answers. He is faithful. We need to remember he is faithful.
We have poor memories. The most repeated command in the Bible is to remember. Every time the Lord answers us, we must remember he is faithful and trust him.
Besides remembering, how do we pay God back for his goodness to us?
13 I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord
15 I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving
and will call upon the Name of the Lord.
One way we bless God is by calling on his name, by reaching out to him when we need help (always) and also when we’re not in crisis.
In Psalm 50, God makes clear that he does not need anything from us. He is the Creator and owns the cattle on all the hills of all the world. There is nothing materially we can give God to enrich him. Yet, he does desire something from us.
Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and perform your vows to the Most High,
and call upon me in the day of trouble;
I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me. (Ps 50:14-15)
What is this sacrifice of thanksgiving? The animal sacrifice that was offered in thanksgiving in ancient Israel is described in Leviticus 3 and 7. It was an animal shared with God. Leviticus tells us which parts were given to God as a burnt offering and the rest came back to the worshiper to eat with his family and friends.1 In the Tabernacle days, you would picnic with God on the hills or fields surrounding the Tabernacle.
Today, how do we offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving? Let’s go back to Psalm 116, verse 13: “I will lift up the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the LORD.”
Remember that these Psalms were, by Jesus’ time, sung during Passover (and still are by the Jewish people today). In Passover, there are four sips or four cups of wine, depending on how you run your seder. The cups all have names, but the third cup, the one after the meal, is called the cup of blessing or the cup of salvation.
In Luke 22:20, Jesus took the cup after they had eaten and said, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”
Let see two things happening here. First, I see Jesus, the faithful Jew, acting out Psalm 116. He is offering thanks to the Father for the deliverance, vindication, resurrection he will experience in three days.
It’s one thing for the psalmist and even us to celebrate God’s victory with wine after the fact. Yet, Jesus does it before his suffering. Jesus lifts up the cup of salvation to praise God before his suffering and before his rescue and to minister salvation to us through his body and blood. Where does Jesus’ trust come from? He and the Father and the Spirit had ordained how this would go. The Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world. Jesus knew how this would end, with death vanquished and himself alive again.
Secondly, Jesus is inviting his disciples into the coming salvation, the coming resurrection, and vindication of the humble and oppressed, the lifting up of all who humble themselves before God.
So how do we thank God for the good things he has done through this time of pandemic and the things he will continue to do in our lives?
We come to the table and break bread with him. We picnic with God here in church. He’s provided bread and wine. We only need to bring ourselves.
We also thank God by following through in obeying God, in doing those things we told God we would do for him. Our good works are an important way we show gratitude and how we show we trust him, we have faith in him. As we heard from the Letter of James in our lessons: “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works” (Jas 2:18).
Now that the LORD has sustained us through this interim period, now is the time to turn our faces out to our neighbors and share the LORD’s goodness with them.
Yesterday, I shared lunch with other deacons in the diocese. It was good to meet more colleagues in the faith. As we were discussing how all our churches have weathered the stop-and-start of meeting during the pandemic, one of them said, “We are all church replants.” All churches are starting over in this period, not just us. Let us be praying about how we here at Grace can restart our outreach.
It is fitting that we have restarted the collection for Center for Hope. It is the first fruit of our reboot, of our coming out of stasis.
God has been faithful to us, and our first response is to love him. As Mark Futato says, “Love naturally flows from the heart of someone whose every groan the Lord has pitied. Love naturally flows from the heart of someone who has experienced being ‘precious in the sight of the Lord,’ so precious that the Lord bent down and listened to the groaning prayers of someone with childlike faith—he listened and delivered.”2
We love God by calling on him whether we’re in trouble or not. We love God by eating from his table, by offering him this sacrifice of thanksgiving. We also drink of this cup in anticipation of the salvation God is still working in our lives: the healings, the provision, the answers, the redeeming of loved ones, and ultimately to our resurrection and the return of Jesus Messiah to visibly rule and reign on earth from David’s throne in Jerusalem.
Our next response is to proclaim God’s goodness to our neighbors and to welcome them into the family of God and invite them to the Passover feast.
“I love the Lord, because he heard the voice of my prayer. Because he inclined his ear to me; therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.”
Let us close in praise, by saying together four verses from Psalm 116. Now, using the numbers from your sheets, we’ll do 11, 12, 15, and 16, in unison.
11 What shall I give unto the Lord*
for all the benefits that he has done unto me?
12 I will lift up the cup of salvation*
and call upon the Name of the Lord.
15 I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving*
and will call upon the Name of the Lord.
16 I will pay my vows unto the Lord in the sight of all his people,*
in the courts of the Lord’s house, even in the midst of you, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord.
Hallelujah! Amen.
[1] Geoffrey W. Grogan, Psalms, The Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 192.
[2] Mark D. Futato, “The Book of Psalms,” in Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol 7: The Book of Psalms, The Book of Proverbs (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2009), 362–363.
Photo by Tim Sackton via Flickr (cc)