“Let Your Face Shine” (Psalm 80)

 

 

One of the great strengths of our Anglican worship is the continuous repetition of the psalms. If you turn to the Daily Office Lectionary in the Book of Alternative Services, you will see that there is a provision there to recite at least one psalm every morning and every evening of the year.

That is a practice that has always lain at the heart of Anglican worship, right back to the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Of course that book was only carrying on a tradition dating back to the earliest Christian liturgies. And they in turn were borrowing from Jewish practice that had gone on for a thousand years before that. So when we recite the psalms, we are not only joining with our fellow believers around the world. We are engaging in the continuous worship of three thousand years!

For quite some time now, one of the habits I have engaged in my own personal devotions is to read from the psalms every day—and I almost invariably find myself enriched by the practice.

The marvellous quality about the psalms is that they give voice to the whole range of human experience. There is joyful praise. Think, for example, of Psalm 95—what we call the Venite, with which we open Morning Prayer: “Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation…” Or the Jubilate Deo, Psalm 100: “Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song.”

At the other end of the spectrum there are psalms like Psalm 55, so magnificently set to music by the composer Mendelssohn: “Hear my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my petition… Fear and trembling have come over me and horror overwhelms me. And I said, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest…’” Or the chilling opening lines of the psalm that Jesus quoted from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Like those two psalms that I have just quoted, the psalm that we have read together this morning, Psalm 80, is one of what are known as “psalms of lament”. Each of these psalms in one way or another expresses sorrow, pain and discouragement—we might even say disappointment with God. In all, there are over fifty of them, more than any other category of psalms in the Bible.

So for the next few minutes I want us to take a look at the psalm we have just read this morning—and I hope that you may find it speaking to you in a new way.

He looks around

The psalm was likely composed some time after the year 722 BC. That was the year when the powerful armies of the Assyrian Empire finally crushed the northern Israelite kingdom centred in Samaria. The Assyrians had gradually been gaining control of Israelite territory for a dozen years. And it was after a three-year siege that the northern capital of Samaria itself eventually fell. As was the practice in those days, the city was leveled to the ground and its citizens deported to serve as slaves.

As I read this psalm, I imagine the psalmist having made the journey back to Samaria. He wanders through familiar streets and alleyways where houses and shops and the king’s palace once had proudly stood, now reduced to piles of rubble. Perhaps it is a herd of sheep grazing on the tufts of vegetation growing up through the tumbled stones that prompts him to cry out, “Hear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock…” Or maybe it is the familiar words penned centuries before by Israel’s greatest king: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

In the silence of the deserted city he cries out, “Stir up your strength and come to help us!” And then for the first time we hear the sorrowful refrain that is repeated three times in the course of the psalm: “Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” Behind those words we can detect the faint echo of the blessing that Moses’ brother Aaron had given to his sons and the priests that would follow them:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
     and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
     and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26)

Whatever the case, the psalmist is not afraid to vocalize his disappointment with God:

How long will you be angered,
despite the prayers of your people?
You have fed them with the bread of tears…
and our enemies laugh us to scorn.

A hundred and thirty-five years later, following the destruction of Jerusalem, it would be another psalmist who wailed,

By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion…
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?

Kate Bowler is a Canadian author and blogger. As a young mother in her mid-thirties and having just completed her PhD thesis, she was met with the devastating news that she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Almost immediately well-meaning friends and acquaintances began to attempt to comfort her with thoughts like, “This is a test and it will make you stronger,” and, “At least you have your son. At least you’ve had an amazing marriage.” But what she really needed was time to grieve, time to be angry, time to be depressed, as she faced the terrible reality of her situation.[1]

I believe that this is exactly what we find happening in the early verses of this psalm. The poet makes no attempt to gloss things over or to look to a brighter future. He is bluntly realistic with God. And I believe this can act as a model for us today when we stand in the face of disappointment or tragedy. We need make no attempt to hide it or disguise it. Instead we can be open about it. We can be honest. Because we have a God who invites us to cast all our anxieties on him, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).

He looks back

So the psalmist looks around. He is bluntly realistic about the situation he is facing. But then in the second part of the psalm (in verses 8 to 11) he looks back. He remembers God’s faithfulness to his people Israel—all the way back to their escape from centuries of slavery in Egypt, to the settling of the Promised Land:

You have brought a vine out of Egypt;
you cast out the nations and planted it…
You stretched out its tendrils to the Sea
and its branches to the River.

He thinks back to Israel’s establishment as a prosperous kingdom under David and Solomon—the envy even of the Queen of the faraway kingdom of Sheba!

At the same time there was a problem, and the problem was this: the people had invested their hope in the wrong place. They had been blinded by the false pleasures of wealth and prosperity and of military might. And it was not as though they had not been warned by prophets like Amos:

Alas for those who are at ease in Zion,
    and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria,
the notables of the first of the nations,
    to whom the house of Israel resorts! …

Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
    and lounge on their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock,
    and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,
    and like David improvise on instruments of music;
who drink wine from bowls,
    and anoint themselves with the finest oils,
    but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
    and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away. (Amos 6:1,4-7)

When things seem to have turned against us, we can sometimes be inclined to look back to the “good old days”, when everything was so much better! Of course we know that that is a mirage, that the prosperity that so many of us became accustomed to came at a tremendous cost—a cost to people who were often ignored or trodden under foot and the destruction of much of our natural environment, which it is unlikely that we will ever be able to rectify.

At the same time, the Bible calls us to look back—not to the good old days, not to some imagined golden era, but to one specific day: to the day when darkness covered the whole land, to the day when the sun’s light failed, the earth shook, and the thick curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

In a few moments’ time we will take the bread in our hands, we will bring the cup to our lips, in obedience to the one who said to his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” As we go through those familiar actions once again, we remember. We remember the ultimate example of self-giving love. We remember the one who took all the ugliness and cruelty of our sin upon himself. We remember the one who suffered defeat, so that we might share in his victory over evil and death. “Do this,” he commands us, “in remembrance of me.”

He looks ahead

It is only once he has looked back and recalled God’s faithfulness in the past, that the psalmist is able to look forward—and to look forward in hope. And so, as the psalm draws to a close, he prays,

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand,
 the one whom you made so strong for yourself.
And so we will never turn away from you;
give us life, that we may call on your name.

As he sets his sights on the future, he recognizes that, while Samaria and his life of the past may lie in ruins, he is not alone. There is a strong hand that is grasping his.

Centuries before, as the people of Israel stood on the edge of the Promised Land and were preparing to enter it, their leader Moses encouraged them with these words: “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8). And our Lord Jesus says the same to us as he promised his followers as the time of his ascension, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who vehemently opposed Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. Just before his works were banned from publication, he wrote a little book about the Psalms. Here is what he had to say about the psalms of lament:

[These] psalms have to do with that complete fellowship with God which is justification and love. But not only is Jesus Christ the goal of our prayer; he himself also accompanies us in our prayer. He who suffered every want and has brought it before God, has prayed for our sake in God’s name… For our sake he cried on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ will not be with us, suffering with us and praying with us—Christ the only helper.[2]

The psalms are intended not just to be read, but to be prayed. And as you learn to pray those psalms, may you know the presence of Jesus, our Great Shepherd, praying alongside you, and the light of his countenance shining upon you.

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[1]     Bowler, Kate. Everything Happens for a Reason (2018)

[2]     Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, 49

“Desiring the Day” (Amos 5:18-24)

We easily grow accustomed to our environments. Sometimes it requires a different set of eyes to see things as they really are, to start asking the important question, “Why?” Two centuries ago that was true of William Wiberforce in England and a generation later of John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in this country. They dared to question the rightness of something that many people either assumed to be acceptable or at least were willing to tolerate: the ownership of other people as slaves.

This morning in our Old Testament reading we also meet with an individual who dared to question the status quo. His name was Amos. Challenging the status quo was something that Amos had in common with all the prophets. After all, that is what being a prophet is about. Yet there were ways in which Amos was different. For one thing, Amos prophesied for only a very short period of his life—two years at most, perhaps only for a matter of weeks. For another, Amos never saw himself as a prophet. When Amaziah the priest addressed him as a seer, Amos flatly denied the title. “I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet. I am a herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.”

Elsewhere Amos tells us that he was from Tekoa, an area of the southern kingdom of Judah on the edge of the dry and barren slopes that led downwards to the Dead Sea. On these marginal lands Amos was able to engage in mixed farming and at some point—perhaps to sell his produce—Amos found himself in the northern kingdom of Israel.

Now Judah and Israel were sister states. They had gone their separate ways two centuries before, but they still shared a common language and culture. Yet what Amos saw when he journeyed through Israel stunned him. On the surface the northern kingdom appeared to be a nation that was prospering. But Amos did not have his eyes on the surface, and beneath he saw a nation that was seriously ill. The poor were being victimized by the rich and powerful; there was no regard for sexual mores; religious vows were scorned and those who spoke the truth were silenced.

None of this apparently caused any consternation among the people of Israel. What did concern them, however, was a growing threat from outside. The neighboring Assyrian empire, which had been in decline for some time, was beginning to flex its muscles again. Annual military campaigns were bringing its armies closer and closer to the borders of Israel. How was this tiny kingdom going to withstand this military tidal wave that was approaching?

The Calamity

There were some in Israel who took comfort in their belief that God himself would mightily intervene on their behalf and rescue them from their powerful enemies. They placed their hopes the day of the Lord. They believed that God would scatter their foes, just as he had overthrown other powerful nations before them.

Amos, however, saw what was developing from an entirely opposite perspective. The threat of the Assyrian armies was not something that God opposed. Quite the contrary, it was a sign of God’s judgment on a nation that had given itself over to evil and had become rotten from within. Consequently, the day of the Lord was something that the Israelites should anticipate not with hope but with dread. It would be a day not of vindication but of condemnation. “It is darkness,” he warned them, “not light.”

In verse 19 Amos gives us a picture that might easily be comical if the situation were not so serious. Many translations of this verse, including the one in our pew Bibles, miss some of the irony contained in this verse, when they translate the Hebrew word for “and” right in the middle of the verse as “or”. Amos is not offering two alternative pictures. Rather, it is a single scene that goes from bad to worse to even worse. Here is a more colloquial rendering based on New Living Bible: “In that day you will be like a man who runs from a lion—
only to meet a bear. Escaping from the bear, he goes into his house and leans his hand against a wall—
and he’s bitten by a snake.” The point was that for the nation of Israel their doom was sealed. Run where they might, there was no escaping the judgment that was about to fall upon them.

There were others in Israel who thought that they could buy God off. When the northern kingdom of Israel separated itself from Judah, it needed an alternative place of worship from the Temple in Jerusalem. So King Jeroboam had two new temples constructed, one in Bethel and one in Dan. He also had a golden calf placed in front of each and proclaimed, “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings 12:27-29)—words eerily reminiscent of those of Aaron at the foot of Mount Sinai centuries before.

I have no doubt that the worship that took place in those two temples, and around the many other high altars that were set up across the land, was lavish, magnificent. The sight of the smoke billowing into the sky from the animal sacrifices, the fragrance of the incense, and the melodious sounds of the musical instruments and choirs, would have combined to overwhelm even the most hard-bitten with awe. Yet it was all false worship offered out of false motives to a false god. To the true and living God they were an offense.

As we read all of this, we must realize that Amos spoke as he did, not with any sense of pride or glee, but as a man who could barely hold back his tears. What he witnessed before him in Israel was a tragedy and its people were rushing headlong into it.

The Connection

We have seen so far what the people of Israel were doing wrong: placing their hope in the day of the Lord and thinking they could win God’s favor through their extravagant worship. Yet all the while the poor were being trodden under foot and people were living lives of moral abandon. Amos had identified the problem for them. And in the last verse of this morning’s reading he also identifies the solution: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

What Amos was saying is that there needs to be a connection between our spiritual lives and our social realities. The two cannot be compartmentalized—or, if they are, it will be to our peril. As Old Testament scholar David Hubbard has written, “Our worship must motivate and inform our acts of righteousness and justice towards all humanity, especially the poor, afflicted and oppressed.”[1]

Let us pause for a moment to ask ourselves, what if a modern-day Amos were to come into our midst today? What would he see? I think it is quite possible to recognize the counterparts of ancient Israel in the church and nation of our own day. The people of Israel were spending their time awaiting the day of the Lord, and there are many in the church who do the same today. It is easy for us in the mainline Protestant tradition to wag an accusing finger at those who debate over exactly when Jesus will come again or whether we are pre-mil, post-mil or a-mil, because that is just not a part of our heritage. Yet I believe that for us who count ourselves as conservative or evangelical there is still the danger of using up our energies arguing the fine points of doctrine to the point where we fail to see the people and the needs around us.

A greater concern, however, lies in Amos’ second criticism of Israel, which had to do with their worship. Their services were lavish. They spared no resources on their music and their sacrifices. Yet it had no impact on their lives outside their temples. Today too we run into the danger of separating our what happens here on Sunday morning from who we are and what we do through the rest of the week. We are uplifted by the music, nourished in the sacrament, upheld in the prayers, instructed through the word. More than once I have said that some of the most important words in the liturgy are the last ones, “Let us go forth in the name of Christ.” Yet so easily worship that is intended to strengthen and equip us to be Christ’s servants in the world can become an escape from the world, an esoteric experience unconnected with reality.

The Challenge

I remember chatting before the last presidential election with a Christian friend whose wisdom I greatly respect. When I asked him which party he was favoring, he answered, “I always want to think about who might most benefit the poor.” I think his advice was profoundly biblical and his words have stuck with me ever since. So often I am inclined to vote on the basis of what would be of the greatest benefit to me, to lower my taxes or offer me greater services. Yet again and again the focus of the Scriptures is on the poor. Think of verses like these:

•  When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and for the alien: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 23:22)

•  Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’ (Deuteronomy 15:11)

•  [The Lord] raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap… (1 Samuel 2:8)

•  The needy shall not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever. (Psalm 9:18)

•  Happy are those who consider the poor; the Lord delivers them in the day of trouble. (Psalm 41:1)

•  I know that the Lord maintains the cause of the needy, and executes justice for the poor. (Psalm 140:12)

•  Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, 
but those who are kind to the needy honor him. (Proverbs 14:31)

•  Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and will be repaid in full. (Proverbs 19:17)

•  If you close your ear to the cry of the poor, you will cry out and not be heard. (Proverbs 21:13)

And we haven’t even reached the prophets yet! By far the most arresting call, however, comes to us from our Lord himself, in the Gospel that we will be reading two weeks from today. There Jesus commends those who seemingly without even being aware of it have fed the hungry, given drink to the thirsty, cared for the sick and visited the prisoners. Then he tells them, “Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.”

Like the Israelites of old who felt so threatened by the advances of the Assyrian army, we see the church threatened today by so many things—whether it is secularism, declining morality, Islam, or whatever. If Amos were here, might he be warning us that this is a judgment call—that you and I need to heed the challenge to make that vital connection between theology and justice, worship and action, to “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”?

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[1]     Joel & Amos (Tyndale Old Testament Commentary), 88