“The Dark Side of Christmas” (Matthew 2:1-18)

 It’s going back quite a few years now, but I suspect there are some in the congregation who can recall the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding. One of its more memorable characters is Gus Portokalos, the father of the bride. At one point in the story Gus makes the claim, “Give me any word, any word, and I show you how the root of that word is Greek.” “OK,” someone pipes up from the back of the car, “how about the word ‘kimono’?” “Kimono, kimono, kimono,” Gus mutters to himself. You begin to wonder if he hasn’t been stumped. Then he triumphantly shouts, “Ha! Of course! Kimono is come from the Greek word cheimónos, is mean winter. So, what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe! You see: robe, kimono. There you go!”

Well, perhaps unbeknownst to many of us, today we enter the season of Epiphany—and unlike “kimono”, “epiphany” really is a Greek word. It has to do with showing forth or making an appearance. By and large the only time we hear the word nowadays is on those rare occasions when someone might say, “I just had an epiphany,”—by which we might understand they had something like an “Aha!” moment, a flash of insight when suddenly something became clear.

That actually comes pretty close to the meaning of the church’s season of Epiphany. It begins with today’s reading about the journey of the wise men and how Jesus was made known to people from outside the Jewish nation for the first time. It will continue next Sunday with the account of Jesus’ baptism and of God the Father’s pronouncement that Jesus was his beloved Son. And so it continues, until we come to the mount of the transfiguration, where Jesus is revealed to Peter, James and John in all his heavenly splendour.

Yet to observe the season of Epiphany in that way is really to recount only half the story. Running side by side with the account of Jesus’ glory there is another narrative: the context of the dark world into which that light shone. If we take a moment to examine them closely, we find that surrounding those charming scenes on our Christmas cards of angels and shepherds and the wise men presenting their gifts there was a sinister world of hardship, shame and squalour.

The Darkness of Bethlehem

Those of us who watched the “Walking the Road to Bethlehem” video series during Advent were given a different perspective on the events surrounding Jesus’ coming. Let’s begin with Mary and Joseph. Nazareth, where they lived, was a village of fewer than five hundred people and news of Mary’s premarital pregnancy would have spread like wildfire. Although they had both been visited by angels, there was no one in Nazareth who would have believed that Mary was a virgin. In the eyes of the townsfolk her condition would have been a scandal, the subject of endless rumour and chitchat, bringing shame to her and embarrassment to Joseph.

And months later, when they came to Bethlehem, what about the manger where Jesus was laid? It is easy to forget that what we are talking about is a feeding trough for animals. It could not have been the least bit sanitary. Yet it was the only thing available. I wonder what was going through Mary’s mind as she laid her tiny baby down in it. Did she and Joseph have to shoo the animals away as they came in search of food?

Then there were the shepherds. They were not clean-cut farm boys, as we might like to imagine. Rather, as Adam Hamilton pointed out,

They were typically uneducated, usually poor, and, since they lived among animals in the elements, sometimes smelled of dirty sheep… Shepherds were tolerated but not always esteemed by their neighbours.[1]

In fact, Hamilton was being kind. First-century rabbis classed shepherds with thieves and cheats. Their roving life gave them the opportunity to steal from the flocks and they were known to take advantage of it. They had what one commentator has described as an “unfortunate habit of confusing ‘mine’ with ‘thine’ ”.[2] For that reason, to buy milk, wool or kids from a shepherd was forbidden, because more than likely you would be receiving stolen goods.[3]

This morning we read of the visit of the magi. Behind that story there lies the evil shadow of King Herod, sitting on his throne in Jerusalem, less than ten kilometers away. History records Herod as an insanely jealous, paranoid, ambitious and despotic ruler. He maintained a personal bodyguard of two thousand soldiers and employed secret police to keep a watchful eye on the common people. He banned anything that smacked of opposition and would have it put down by brute force. His insatiable thirst for power led him to a series of ruthless acts, including the execution of his wife, his brother-in-law (who also happened to be the high priest), three of his sons, three hundred military leaders, and many others.

So it is that this morning’s reading concludes with a horrific act of violence. It is a scene not depicted on any Christmas cards that I know of. It is not re-enacted in children’s Christmas pageants. Yet it is part of the real world into which Jesus was born. And as a result Mary and Joseph are forced to take another journey, this time to flee with their infant child as refugees to Egypt.

Thus before he reaches the age of two, we find Jesus already the subject of rumour and innuendo, homeless, in the company of the lowest of the low, threatened, persecuted, and a refugee. As we follow the gospel story, we find him hungry, thirsty, tempted, caught in a violent storm at sea, grieving over the death of a friend, in such intensity of anguish that his sweat becomes like drops of blood falling to the ground… So it is that the author of the Letter to the Hebrews can claim that in Jesus, “We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all” (Hebrews 4:15, The Message). “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Darkness Today

The apostle Paul summarizes it in his famous hymn in Philippians, chapter 2:

Although in very nature God,
     he did not consider equality with God something to grasp;
rather, he emptied himself
     by taking the very nature of a slave,
     being made in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
     he humbled himself
     by becoming obedient to the point of death—
              and nothing less than death on a cross!

Jesus knows what it is to be poor, oppressed, homeless, a refugee… And so he stands beside such people; he stands beside you and me today. He is with us, not just for the good times, but in our moments of weakness and need, in our moments of doubt and sorrow, in our moments of anguish and grief. As we pondered in the sermon a couple of weeks ago, Jesus is Immanuel—God with us.

In the church where last served I had my eyes opened to what that means in extreme terms. One Christmas Eve we had the privilege of being “invaded” by the first of what became more than a hundred refugees. They were Karen people from Burma and they are among the most persecuted minorities in the world.

This past Friday Burma marked the seventy-first anniversary of its independence as a nation. Not one of those years has passed when the Karen people, along with other ethnic minorities, they have not been hunted, tortured, forced out of their homes and villages, and slaughtered by the Burmese army. They have been subjected to bombings, sniper shots, machine gun fire, torture, germ warfare and chemical attacks.[4]  Some of my parishioners had seen their relatives shot down in front of them. Others bore machete scars and bullet wounds. Still others had found escape only by risking their lives to walk through minefields. And when they reached the supposed safety of refugee camps in neighbouring Thailand, the Burmese army continued to shell them.

Yet through all of this they never lost their love for Jesus—and, more importantly, their confidence in Jesus’ love for them, Jesus’ presence with them. To hear them sing some of the old favourite hymns like “Take my life and let it be” or “O Jesus, I have promised to serve thee to the end”, and to see them come humbly and faithfully to the Lord’s table, for me was a deeply moving experience. They had known what it was for Jesus to dwell with them in the darkness.

Never Alone

It’s my sincere hope that 2019 will be a year of blessing for all of us. Yet inevitably there will be times of darkness. My prayer is that, as Jesus stepped into the darkness of Bethlehem twenty centuries and more ago, so you may know his presence with you both in the good times and in those moments when darkness seems to be closing in your life.

So allow me to conclude with a story:

At the end of time, billions of people were scattered on a great plain before God’s throne. Most shrank back from the brilliant light before them. But some groups near the front talked heatedly—not with cringing shame but with belligerence.

“Can God judge us? How can God know about suffering?” snapped a pert young brunette. She ripped open a sleeve to reveal a tattooed number from a Nazi concentration camp. “We endured terror, beatings, torture, death!” In another group a man lowered his collar. “What about this?” he demanded, showing an ugly rope burn. “Lynched for no crime but being black! We have suffocated in slave ships, been wrenched from loved ones, toiled till only death gave release.”

Far out across the plain were hundreds of such groups. Each had a complaint against God for the evil and suffering he permitted in his world. How lucky God was to live in heaven where all was sweetness and light, where there was no weeping or fear, no hunger or hatred. What did God know of all that people had been forced to endure in this world? “God leads a pretty sheltered life,” they said. 



So each of these groups sent forth their leader, chosen because he or she had suffered the most. A Jew, a slave, an untouchable from India, a 
person from Hiroshima, a prisoner from a Siberian gulag, a horribly deformed arthritic, a thalidomide child. In the centre of the plain they consulted with each other. At last they were ready to present their case. It was rather simple: before God could be qualified to be their judge, he must endure what they had endured. Their verdict was that God should be sentenced to live on earth—as a human being!

“Let him be born a Jew. Let the legitimacy of his birth be doubted. Let him champion a cause so just, but so radical, that it brings down upon him the hate, condemnation and efforts of every major traditional and established religious authority to eliminate him. Let him try to describe 
what no-one has ever seen, felt, tasted, heard, or smelled: let him try to communicate God to human beings. At the last, let him see what it means to be terribly alone. Let him be betrayed by his closest friends. Let him be indicted on false charges, tried before a prejudiced jury and convicted by a cowardly judge. Let him be tortured and let him die! Let him die the most humiliating death—with common thieves.”

As each leader announced a portion of the sentence, loud murmurs of
 approval went up from the assembled throng. When the last had finished pronouncing sentence, there was a long silence. No one uttered another word. No one moved. Suddenly all knew that God had already served his sentence.[5]

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[1]     Adam Hamilton, The Journey, 113

[2]     Leon Morris, The Gospel According to St Luke, 84

[3]     Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 902

[4]    See Andrew Boyd, Baroness Cox, A Voice for the Voiceless, 215-257

[5]     Author unknown

“What Isaiah Saw” (Isaiah 2:1-5)

For the past ten weeks we have been making our way through what is called the “Narrative Lectionary”. It is a scheme that has been designed to take us through the whole broad sweep of God’s revelation in Scripture over a four-year period. And so far it has been quite literally a whirlwind tour. Just as a whirlwinds sweep across the countryside, touching down at this point and that, so we have touched down on the story of Noah and the flood; the call of Abraham; the roller coaster fortunes of Joseph; the escape of the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt; the giving of the Ten Commandments; the renewal of Israel’s covenant with God under Joshua; the long reign of King Solomon; the prophet Elisha’s cleansing of the leprous Syrian general Naaman; and then last week the prophet Micah’s call “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”. Today we come to Isaiah.

Micah and Isaiah were both what we call prophets. Their words are recorded in the last one-third of the books of the Old Testament. They wrote in different places under a variety of circumstances. And their writings comprise a wide diversity of styles—from lofty poetry to heartbreaking lament, from strange visions to biting satire.

Here is what Eugene Peterson had to say about the prophets:

These men and women woke people up to the sovereign presence of God… They used words with power and imagination… The prophets purge our imaginations of this world’s assumptions… Over and over again God the Holy Spirit uses these prophets … to put [his people] back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. Prophets train us in … keeping present to the presence of God… They contend that everything, absolutely everything, takes place on sacred ground… Nothing escapes the purposes of God.[1]

There are seventeen books in the Old Testament that are ascribed to the prophets. But the one that seems to rise above them all is Isaiah. It is from Isaiah that we will soon read at Christmastime: “To us a child is born, to us a son is given…” (9:6). It was from Isaiah that Jesus quoted at the outset of his mission: “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (61:1-2). It is to Isaiah that we look when we want to make sense of Jesus’ crucifixion: “He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; by his wounds we are healed” (53:5). And thirteen out of the thirty-four biblical texts in Handel’s Messiah are taken from Isaiah.

Again Eugene Peterson has written,

Isaiah is a large presence in the lives of people who … are on the lookout for the holy… Isaiah is the supreme poet-prophet to come out of the Hebrew people… Isaiah does not merely convey information. He creates visions, delivers revelation, arouses belief. He is a poet in the most fundamental sense—a maker, making God present and that presence urgent.[2]

A Vision

In our passage this morning Isaiah opens with the words, “This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw…” This is the second of four times that Isaiah will say this about himself. The first is in the opening verse of the book and it more or less summarizes all that he is going to put into writing in the chapters that follow.

The third comes in chapter 6 as Isaiah stood worshipping in the Temple. I suspect that for everybody else who was present that day there was nothing out of the ordinary, just the usual psalms and prayers and sacrifices. But to Isaiah there was revealed the ineffable mystery that stood behind it all: the presence of the Lord of heaven and earth. Even the vastness of Solomon’s Temple could contain no more than the train of his robe, as six-winged seraphs sang aloud, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory” (6:1-3).

I can imagine the other worshippers glibly walking away from the Temple that day. Had there been a fellowship hall they might have gone for a cup of coffee and a few minutes of chitchat—and then back to their usual routines. But for Isaiah things could never be the same. His eyes had been opened to hidden realities. He had seen the Lord.

If we had read further on from the story of Naaman a few weeks ago, we would have come to another incident in the story of Elisha. It was dawn and his servant had gotten up to prepare for the day, when he saw a sight that terrified him to the bone. As he looked around, he could see that all the hills surrounding the city were filled with the chariots and horses of an enemy army. All he could think to do was to run to his master and shake him. “What are we going to do now?” he asked in fear and desperation. I can’t imagine it helped when Elisha responded, “Don’t be afraid. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” With that he stood up and prayed, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” And this time when the servant looked around he could see an even greater army arrayed in protection around the city, with horses and chariots of fire (2 Kings 6:15-17).

Much the same was true of those two followers of Jesus as they were making their way back to their home in Emmaus a couple of days after the crucifixion. Why didn’t they recognize the stranger who so convincingly opened the Scriptures to them? Luke tells us that it was only as he broke the bread at the table with them that their eyes were opened and they recognized that they were in the presence of Jesus.

Now I am not suggesting that we should all be dreaming dreams and seeing visions. That is the privilege of the few. But what I do want to say is that a large part of following Jesus is learning to see the world, to see our lives, from a radically different perspective. “Do not be conformed to this world,” wrote the apostle Paul to the Romans, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is” (Romans 12:2).

I recall a member of my church years ago sharing with me how important it was for her to be there Sunday by Sunday. Because it was in that weekly encounter with God and his word that she was renewed in a vision and an approach to the world that was often diametrically opposite from what she was being told through the rest of the week. As we follow Jesus we will inevitably begin to see ourselves and our world from a new perspective. So what was it that Isaiah saw in our passage this morning?

A Mountain

I have never been to Jerusalem or to the Holy Land, but I understand that Mount Zion, the hill on which Jerusalem stands, is not especially impressive. There were much more imposing sites in the mountains to the north and to the south. Mount Lebanon, Mount Hermon, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal all have higher elevations, to name only a few peaks in the region. And even the Mount of Olives, just a short distance away, stands taller than Jerusalem itself. Yet in Isaiah’s vision Mount Zion towers above all other mountains. And as we look more closely, what do we find but people from every land and nation streaming towards it.

Now under normal circumstances, that would be something not to be welcomed but to be feared. The tiny kingdom of Israel (or Judah as it was known in Isaiah’s time) was precariously situated on a crossroads between powerful empires—Assyria to the north, the Medes and the Persians to the east, and Egypt to the south. As a result, except for brief historical intervals, Jerusalem was under almost constant threat of assault from one direction or another.

Later on, in chapters 36 and 37, Isaiah gives his own eyewitness account of exactly this kind of scenario. Sennacherib, the king of the vast Assyrian empire, after sweeping through the little kingdom of Judah and conquering all its fortified cities, sent his field commander to Jerusalem to negotiate terms of surrender. Isaiah tells how in desperation King Hezekiah tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and sent a delegation to seek his advice. Isaiah’s words to the king were the same as those of Elisha’s to his servant a century before: “Do not be afraid.” So Hezekiah went into the Temple and prayed for deliverance for his people. And that was exactly what happened. We aren’t given the details, but Isaiah tells us that the angel of the Lord put to death 185,000 of Sennacherib’s men.

The scene that Isaiah puts before us this morning, however, is entirely different. This vast, numberless horde of people, streaming in from every corner of the globe, is coming not to invade or to conquer but to learn and to be reconciled. The promise made to Abraham centuries before is at last coming to fruition: “I will make you into a great nation … and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3).

All of this stands in marked contrast to another scene in the Bible: the tower of Babel. Babel was the product of human arrogance and pride. It was founded on the assumption that there is no height that we cannot scale, nothing that ought to lie outside the reach of our grasp. On the other hand, what lies at the core of the passage before us is a deep and genuine humility in the presence of God, a willingness to learn from him—to put down the weapons of human conflict and striving and to surrender to his pure and peaceable rule.

An Invitation

As we look at this amazing scene we are offered an invitation: “Come …, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Now my natural inclination is to interpret those words as saying, “Let us learn to live according to God’s truth.” (I have no doubt I’ve been influenced at this point by that old gospel hymn that begins, “When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word…”) But Old Testament scholar John Goldingay points us to Psalm 44:3. There we find what I think is a better interpretation. Here is what it says: “It was not by their sword that [our ancestors] won the land, nor did their arm bring them victory; it was by your right hand, your arm, and the light of your face, for you loved them.”[3]

We find the same idea embedded in the blessing that we so often hear at the conclusion of our worship: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). So the invitation that we are being given here is to live in the recognition that behind everything in the universe there is a God who looks upon us and loves us. And it would be on Isaiah’s mountain that that love was most clearly and powerfully demonstrated.

Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). Years later the apostle Paul would write, “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Colossians 3:19-20).

The first believers were privileged to see the beginning of the fulfilment of that promise, as men and women and children from all over the known world responded to Peter’s message at Pentecost. And I suspect that they would be amazed to see how far the good news of God’s love in Christ has spread today, reaching out to peoples and nations they could never have dreamed of.

Yet we still await the day when Isaiah’s vision comes in its fullness: when people from every nation will gather around the throne of God, their swords beaten into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, with the Lord as their everlasting light. In the meantime, it is so fitting that this church should choose to call itself “All Nations”. May that name impel us to live out the vision that God gave to Isaiah. And may we be unceasing in sharing the light of his love with people of every background and colour, tribe, language and nation.

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[1]     Eugene Peterson, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, 115-117

[2]     Introduction to Isaiah in The Message.

[3]     Isaiah, New International Biblical Commentary, 44

“When will we ever learn?” (Psalm 78)

Late last month the city of Halifax announced the membership of a new committee. Its assigned task is to advise City Council on “proposed changes to the commemoration of Edward Cornwallis” and on “recognizing and commemorating the indigenous history in the lands now known as Halifax”[1]. It was not long ago that Cornwallis was hailed as a great military leader, the first Governor of Nova Scotia and founder of the city of Halifax. In my year 2000 copy of the Canadian Encyclopedia no mention is made of Cornwallis’s infamous “Scalping Proclamation” or of his later being brought twice before courts martial in 1756 and 57. (To do him justice, he was exonerated in both cases).

It has been said that history is written by the winners.[2] And in many cases that may be so, which means that its authors often try very hard to present a sanitized—and in some cases glorified—version of the past. So we need to be careful to examine what goes under the title of “history” with a critical eye.

On the other hand, one of the refreshing features that I find about the Bible is that it can be disarmingly candid about the past. Moses’ violent temper; Samson’s uncontrollable lust; King David’s adulterous affair and his murderous attempt to cover it up; Jonah’s unwillingness to preach to the people of Nineveh; the disciples’ arguments over who should sit at Jesus’ right hand; Peter’s thrice-over denial of Jesus… No doubt if we had the time you could give me numerous other examples as well.

This morning I want us to look together at the first eight verses of Psalm 78. It is one of a dozen psalms composed by a songwriter named Asaph. Asaph was a member of the priestly tribe of Levi. He played the cymbals and he and his brothers were also singers. After King David established Jerusalem as the centre of the government and worship of Israel, he appointed Asaph in charge of the men who led the music of the tabernacle. Their task was to minister before the Ark of the Covenant by giving constant praise and thanks to God and asking for his blessings upon his people (1 Chronicles 16:4). King David’s charge to Asaph and his fellow musicians was as follows:

Give praise to the Lord, proclaim his name;
     make known among the nations what he has done…
     tell of all his wonderful acts.
Glory in his holy name…
Remember the wonders he has done,
     his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced…
(1 Chronicles 16:8-12)

And that is exactly what Asaph does in the psalm before us this morning.

If you turn to it in your Bible, you will notice that Psalm 78 is seventy-two verses long. But we’re just going to look at the first eight. Those verses form a prologue to the following sixty-four, but in many ways they also follow from them.

Overall the psalm is a long lament over the people of Israel’s sorry inability again and again over the course of four and a half centuries to take in the lessons that God was seeking to teach them—from the time of Moses to the time of King David. They had hardly crossed over the Red Sea before they were yearning to go back to Egypt. God gave them water from a rock and nourished them with manna but it was not good enough for them. He drove out nations before them but they turned away from him to worship idols.

Now at the time of writing King David is on the throne and prosperity has returned to the land. It is a time for new opportunities, new beginnings. But the question remains: Will the people take the opportunity that God is giving them?

God’s Deeds (1-4)

So it is that the psalmist begins what he has to say with a plea: “My people, hear my teaching; open your ears wide to what I have to say.” He is bringing them a message of urgency, a warning of the utmost importance. It reminds me of what I found myself doing on September 11^th, 2001. I was rector of St Paul’s Church on the Grand Parade at the time. I had just heard about the passenger jet striking the first of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. It was still tourist season and I knew that there would be many American visitors passing through the building. I also suspected that most of them would not have heard the news. So I stood at the door and when I encountered someone from the U.S. I would ask them to sit down before I told them what was happening in their country.

Unlike my experience, Asaph was not going to inform the congregation of anything new. Quite the contrary: what he was about to tell them was long known and familiar to all. “I will utter … things from of old,” he sings, “things we have heard and known, things our ancestors have told us.” All of it was a story that everyone in Israel had been familiar with since childhood. Every year at the annual celebration of the Passover, God’s rescue of the nation from their slavery in Egypt was recited in both word and action. Centuries before, Moses had warned the people, “Be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

So once again Asaph recites God’s deeds on behalf of his people: dividing the Red Sea so that they could cross over into safety while their enemies were engulfed; guiding them step by step along their journey with a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; providing them with fresh water to drink from a rock; feeding them with manna and quail, more than they could eat; driving out the nations before them so that they could settle in the land he had promised…

These were all stupendous acts. Yet in verse 32 Asaph is forced to lament, “In spite of all this, they kept on sinning; in spite of his wonders, they did not believe.” (32)

God’s Decrees (5-6)

From reminding them of God’s amazing deeds among his people in verses 3 and 4, Asaph shifts his focus in verses 5 and 6 to God’s decrees. Aside from his miraculous interventions in the life of his people, the Lord also gave them a second gift: what the Bible calls God’s law—his torah. The word torah in Hebrew means something much broader than is suggested by our word “law”. While it includes individual rules and regulations, for the most part it has much more to do with teaching or instruction. “Listen my son, to your father’s instructions,” says the father in Proverbs, “do not forsake your mother’s torah” (1:8).

The latter half of Psalm 19 is an eloquent hymn to the glories of God’s torah:

The torah of the Lord is perfect,
     refreshing the soul.
The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,
     making wise the simple.
The precepts of the Lord are right,
     giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the Lord are radiant,
     giving light to the eyes…
The decrees of the Lord are firm,
     and all of them are righteous.
They are more precious than gold,
     than much pure gold;
they are sweeter than honey,
     than honey from the honeycomb.
By them your servant is warned;
     in keeping them there is great reward.

It’s more than likely that Asaph had even sung that psalm himself, as it was composed by King David for his director of music (presumably Asaph).

But the torah was not only to be praised. Its teachings were to be passed down from generation to generation. “Impress them on your children,” we read in Deuteronomy (6:7). “Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” More significantly still, in fact all-importantly, the torah was to be lived on a daily basis.

Right in the middle of downtown Boston there is an old historic church called King’s Chapel. If you look beyond the pulpit, there on the far wall you will see four large tablets displaying the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. The irony is that King’s Chapel is a Unitarian church and they rejected the tenets of the Apostles’ Creed more than two hundred years ago. But there it stands today, nothing more than a monument to the past.

Sadly, that was the same kind of thing that happened to Israel. The torah, God’s gracious teachings were ignored, pushed aside, relegated to the past and left to gather dust. “But they did not keep his statutes.” Asaph laments,

Like their ancestors they were disloyal and faithless,
     as unreliable as a faulty bow. (56-57)

Jesus warned about this in his parable of the soils. Do you remember the seed that fell among the thorns? It stood for those for whom their daily preoccupations and their longing for greater prosperity took the place of God’s word in their lives.

God’s Desire (7-8)

The picture Asaph paints is a tragic one of a lost and wayward people, as he mourns over how they have failed again and again to respond either to God’s miraculous deeds or to his wise decrees. Yet none of this leaves him without hope. He looks forward to a day when God’s people would not just know about him, but actually know him. And that is what makes all the difference.

Generations later the prophet Jeremiah expressed that same hope in these words:

 “The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
     “when I will make a new covenant
         with the people of Israel
     and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
     I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
     to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
     though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make
with the people of Israel
     after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
     and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
     and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbour,
     or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
     from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 31:31-34a)

This was the hope that ignited a fire in the heart of Asaph. It was the hope that the day would come when God’s people would not just know about the Lord either through his deeds or through his decrees, but that each one would know God and his daily, living presence.

Asaph’s dream was also the prayer of our Lord Jesus. On the night before he went to the cross John’s gospel tells us that he looked toward heaven and prayed for his followers, “that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).

Recently we’ve been looking at the letter to the Philippians. There, in chapter 3, Paul tells of his own experience of moving from knowing about God to actually knowing him. He had done everything right—here’s how he put it:

Circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. (Philippians 3:5-6)

But then he goes on:

Whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him… (Philippians 3:7-8,10)

Someone has said that the church is always one generation away from extinction. And that will surely be the case if we see our task as simply carrying on as we’ve done in the past. But we are not here to maintain an institution. We are not here to preserve a tradition. We are here to carry forward a mission—to help women and men and children come to know the Lord our God and their lives become a day-by-day walk with him. And we have his promise, “I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”

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[1]     Administrative Order Number 2017-012-GOV

[2]     The saying is attributed to George Orwell in a column written on 4 February 1944.

“The Way of Folly” (Psalm 14)

On my bookshelves I have a little volume entitled The Darwin Awards. In case you’ve never heard of the Darwin Awards, here is how its author Wendy Northcutt describes them:

Darwin Awards commemorate those individuals who ensure the long-term survival of our species by removing themselves from the gene pool in a sublimely idiotic fashion… To qualify, nominees must improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race using astonishingly stupid means.”[1]

Here is one example from 2005:

One fateful afternoon, 55-year-old Marko retreated to his workshop to make himself a tool for chimney cleaning. The chimney was too high for a simple broom to work, but if he could attach a brush to a chain and then weigh it down with something, that would do the trick. But what could he use as a weight? He happened to have the perfect object. It was heavy, yet compact. And best of all, it was made of metal, so he could weld it to the chain. He must have somehow overlooked the fact that it was also a hand grenade…[2]

I will spare you the gruesome details.

In this morning’s reading from the psalms we meet with a character who makes not infrequent appearances on the pages of the Bible. And while they do not strictly qualify for a Darwin Award, they surely fall into a related category. I am referring to the fool.

In our New International Version Bibles, the word “fool” occurs 182 times—and seventy-two of those occasions are found in the book of Proverbs, where we encounter them in little aphorisms such as these:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. (1:7)

The waywardness of the simple will kill them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. (1:32)

The wise inherit honour, but fools get only shame. (3:35)

The wise in heart accept commands, but a chattering fool comes to ruin. (10:8)

We meet with fools in the New Testament as well, particularly in the teachings of Jesus. Perhaps you remember the story of the two house builders—the wise man who built his house on bedrock and his foolish counterpart who went ahead and built his on the sand. Or how about Jesus’ dramatic parable of the rich landowner who spent all his time building more and bigger barns to store his crops? God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you.” And the apostle Paul counsels us, “Do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is” (Ephesians 5:17).

But of all the references to fools in the Bible, it is surely the opening verse of the psalm we have read this morning, Psalm 14:1, that has to be the best known: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”

A definition

Author and preacher Eugene Peterson suggests that there are three kinds of atheists in the world. The first are what he describes as subscribing to an atheism that develops out of protest.

Angry about what is wrong with the world, they are roused to passionate defiance. That a good God permits the birth of crippled children, that a loving God allows rape and torture, that a sovereign God stands aside while the murderous régime of a Genghis Khan or an Adolf Hitler runs its course—such outrageous paradoxes cannot be countenanced. So God is eliminated.[3]

A second brand of atheism can often be the result of a quest for intellectual honesty. It is the atheism of the person who has rejected the childish distortions of God that New Testament translator J.B. Phillips described in his little book Your God is Too Small: the celestial killjoy, the parental hangover, the grand old man with a beard, the heavenly bellhop… And on the list goes. But of course as Christians we reject all those false notions as well.

These kinds of atheism [writes Peterson] can be treated with appreciation and respect. The passionately protesting atheist, sensitive to suffering, can be welcomed as a partner in the spiritual and moral struggle against evil… The intellectually discriminating atheist can be accepted as an ally in skeptically rejecting all the popular, half-baked stupidities named “god” that abound in our time…[4]

However, the Bible is not launching a diatribe against atheists of either of those two varieties. For one thing, that kind of unbelief didn’t exist in the ancient Middle East 1000 years BC when David was writing. Atheism, at least as we know it today and represented by writers like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens (who have been dubbed the four horsemen of atheism!), is a relatively recent phenomenon.

So who is this psalm about? A more literal rendering of the Hebrew text might help us to understand. Word-for-word the original text runs like this: “The fool says in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” The words “there is” are not there in the Hebrew. They have been supplied by our English translators in the interests of rendering the verse into more fluent English. So what the psalm is referring to is not someone who doesn’t believe in God, but a person who has chosen to ignore God—someone who has decided either that God does not matter or that God has no particular interest in what they do, whether good or bad.

More than that, notice that the fool does not utter this decision aloud. It is a denial that lies hidden deep within the confines of his heart. To quote Peterson once again,

This is a quiet, unobtrusive atheism … These people do not say with their mouths, “There is no God.” To the contrary, they say with their mouths what everyone else says about God. They recite the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer along with the best of them. With their mouths they articulate impressive arguments for God’s existence. With their mouths they demand public prayers and official religion. But in their hearts they say, “There is no God.”[5]

Thus it becomes clear that the word “fool” in the Bible has nothing to do with intelligence or brains. Rather, it is a moral category. A fool is someone who has chosen to live life without reference to God. And as a consequence they have no sense of moral responsibility. We hear more about this sort of individual in Psalm 10:

     He blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;
     in all his thoughts there is no room for God…
     Your laws are rejected by him …
He says to himself, “Nothing will ever shake me.”
     He swears, “No one will ever do me harm.” (Psalm 10:4-6)

The apostle Paul offers a stinging criticism of the same kind of person in the opening chapter of his letter to the Romans:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them… Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools… (Romans 1:18-19,21-22)

A denunciation

I can imagine that if you had heard only the first verse of this psalm, you might be tempted to mentally gaze around your workplace or among your relatives and maybe come up with some suitable candidates—and you probably wouldn’t need much time! Without wishing to be too political, I suspect there are not a few among us who might be tempted point to certain politicians—I’ll leave it to you to choose your favourite.

But before we become too smug, we need to look at the second half of the verse. And what do we find there? The focus shifts, first from the singular (“The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God’ ”) to the plural (“They are corrupt, their deeds are vile”), and then it becomes universal: “There is no one who does good.” And to make his point perfectly clear, the psalmist continues,

The Lord looks down from heaven on the human race
to see if there are any who understand,
     any who seek God.
All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
     there is no one who does good,
     not even one.

We begin to realize that if a finger is pointing anywhere, it is pointing at us all. It is pointing at you. It is pointing at me. There are no exceptions.

Jesus made the point dramatically in the course of that famous incident of the woman caught in adultery. The men had already made a public spectacle of her and were ready to stone her. But then Jesus challenged them, “Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone.” And the silence that followed was deafening.

Could this be why Jesus warned his followers, “Anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell”? Because folly is the universal human condition. Because there are times in our lives—in my own case, I know there are times every day—when we live without reference to God, when we put God on the back burner, when we choose to travel the road that is broad, because things are so much easier, so much more convenient, without him. We read those early chapters of Genesis thinking they are about someone else, when in reality they are about us. We miss the point that I am Adam; I am Eve.

A deliverance

After all of this, is it any wonder that the psalmist should cry aloud in verse 7, “Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion”? The deliverance we need is as much from our own foolishness as the foolishness of others. And God has chosen to do it through what the Bible calls the foolishness of the cross.

A crown of thorns was shoved mockingly on his head, a purple robe on his back, as the soldiers slapped his face and spat on him and ridiculed him with the words, “Hail, king of the Jews.” A notice was placed above his head in derision: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” The passers-by laughingly shouted, “You who were going to destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” The religious leaders sneered, “He saved others, but he can’t save himself!” For all who witnessed the cross on that fateful day, the man who hung there was a fool. What they did not know was that in his suffering and death Jesus was taking into himself the consequences of their folly—and of yours and mine.

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? … Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:18,20,22-25)

That the creator of heaven and earth should take upon himself our mortal flesh… That the one who rides upon the heavens should be born as a helpless baby in a broken and persecuted nation… That the hands that formed the dry land and spread out the stars in the sky should be fastened to a cross… It all seems like foolishness. It contradicts every tenet of human logic. But it is the way in which our gracious God has chosen in the lavishness and mystery of his grace.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” cried the apostle Paul. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33-34). “The fool has said in his heart, ‘No God.’ ” We may abandon God. Thank God that he has not abandoned us!

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[1]     The Darwin Awards II: Unnatural Selection, 2,3

[2]     http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2005-09.html

[3]     Earth & Altar, 107

[4]    Earth & Altar, 109

[5]     Earth & Altar, 109