Sunday Morning Meds--Outrageous

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! 

You have set your glory above the heavens. 

From the lips of children and infants 

you have ordained praise 

because of your enemies, 

to silence the foe and the avenger. Psalm 8:1-2 

Something—don’t we wish we knew what?—inspires David the poet so deeply about God’s love that, in the words in Psalm 8, he literally reaches for the sky, farther than he can go. But then, honestly and truly, no words will reach where the height he wants to achieve--and he knows that too.

But in his reverie, he goes for whatever he can pull out of his humanly-limited imagination, and what he comes up with isn’t bad, really: first, majestic or excellent, and then this outrageous cosmic comparison. “You who have created nothing less than the heavens,” he says, “have also created magnificence in the humblest of humans—little babies. And thus, are your enemies forever stilled by the sheer power of your almighty hand.” 

Like a thousand poets before and after, David goes for the impossible; he's in love, this is a love poem, and like all love poets, he just can’t reach high enough to describe the joy that fills his soul at the thought of his love, his Lord.

One image that catches at least some of the intent here may well be the picture of that single Chinese protester looking up the barrel of a tank during the Tienanmen Square uprising of 1989. If you’ve ever seen that image, you’ve likely never forgotten the little man poised against tons of massive war machine. Fragility stymied all that power.

That protester was not a child, but an emblem of what David is after here, the idea that God Almighty, creator and sustainer of the universe, shows his powers in the most outrageously tiny things and thereby, impossible at it seems, shuts up the avenger—the Devil.

And there’s this, too, of course. There’s Bethlehem. A manger. Straw for bedding. Cows for a hospital staff. A No Vacancy light flashes through the only window in the barn. Meekness in majesty--there’s that divine, unforgettable picture too.

What David is saying is simply what cannot be humanly understood or communicated. Not by him, nor by any poet, nor by the long list of commentators who’ve tried to explicate—not me, not Matthew Henry or Charles Spurgeon or John Calvin.

No matter. We all keep on trying to fine tune our understanding and pipe our love songs. Me too. Because there’s so much joy that we can’t not sing, I guess. Even when we don’t rise to the occasion, we sing because, I suppose, that’s what we’re created to do.

Outrageous, isn’t it?

Sunday Morning Meds--Faith

Have mercy on me, my God, have mercy on me,
for in you I take refuge.

I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings

    until the disaster has passed.

I cry out to God Most High,

    to God, who vindicates me.

He sends from heaven and saves me,

    rebuking those who hotly pursue me--

    God sends forth his love and his faithfulness.

Psalm 57:1-3

 “He who, struggling with his own weakness, presses toward faith in his moments of anxiety is already in large part victorious.” 

Those words may not seem like John Calvin, at least the caricature John Calvin, but they're his—from Book III, chapter II of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a section in which he is discussing “Faith in the struggle against temptation.” 

I’m not sure there is a way of understanding the frenetic emotions David not only lives through but sings about and of in Psalm 57—and elsewhere—without understanding the character Calvin ascribes to believers in this section of the Institutes.

David has every reason to be deathly scared. It’s the King, King Saul, who’s hot on his trail, who has threatened his life, whose poison envy is more terrifying because it is so immeasurably beyond reason. David sits in a cave, surrounded by his closest friends and family, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. There he sits composing, singing, alone, maybe at the mouth of this dark hole, nothing to be seen before him but eerie shadows in the doubtful light of the moon.

Outside the cave is madness, but he knows he can’t stay inside forever. He has already given Saul grace by allowing him to live when he could have killed him. Instead, he took a shard of his robe. But David refuses to see the King as anything other than God’s own anointed, even though Saul won’t purge the envy that has poisoned his soul; instead, he gorges on it.

That’s why David cries the way he does: “Have mercy,” and then again, “have mercy.” There is nowhere to turn.

“And yet—and this is something marvelous,” says Calvin, “amidst all these assaults faith sustains the hearts of the godly, and truly in its effect resembles a palm tree: for it strives against every burden and raises itself upward.”

Verses two and three—amid the harrowing fear—is pure heart-felt testimony: you offer your wings as a refuge, Lord; you use me for your purposes, you hold back my enemies, you send love and faithfulness. David is still sitting where the moonlit landscape’s eerie outlines are  teeming with terror. No matter, he’s saying that he knows.

Maybe it’s a kind of mantra he’s offering, in part to God, in part to his own anguished soul. Maybe he’s remembering the chapters of his own story, when, not by his strength but by his God’s, deliverance was his blessing, his good fortune. Whatever the cause, faith, like that palm tree, is growing, even from the cold stone where he sits.

Faith, Calvin says, means a sure knowledge of God’s will, of his faithfulness. It arises from a knowledge and assurance of his Word and his will of love. “Unless you hold to be beyond doubt that whatever proceeds from him is sacred and inviolable truth,” Calvin says the terror of those shadows, like the Saul’s insane envy, will overwhelm.

Seems to me that David’s song—his fears and his testimony—at the mouth of a quiet, silent cave is itself the Word of the Lord.

Sunday Morning Meds--My people

"Gather to me my consecrated ones, 

who made a covenant with me by sacrifice." Psalm 50

One of my favorite people of all time, the Rev. Bernard J. Haan, founding president of the college where I’ve taught for thirty years, was a remarkable man, one of those folks who could fill a room just be walking in.

A decade ago, when he was dying, my wife and I went to the hospital to see him.  A book of mine had just come out, a book I’d dedicated to him, and I wanted to show him because I respected him greatly—in part, because he’d always respected me, even when a ton of folks didn’t.  But that’s another story.

That day, he seemed almost cadaverous, his long face thin and gaunt; but when we came close to his bed, he looked up and recognized us, greeted us warmly. 

His eyes blinked a bit when he looked up at the open book I held in front of him with my hands.  I don’t know whether he could read the dedication or not, but I read them to him—“To B. J. Haan, who understands.” 

“Oh, Jim,” he said, “that’s wonderful—that’s just wonderful.”  Then his head fell back to the pillow a bit, as if simply to read was a strain.  “You know,” he said, cutting a grin, “I’ll remember that as long as I live.”

And we laughed.  A thousand people have a thousand stories about B. J. Haan, but no one can tell that one but me.

It would be wrong to say that Haan never really sought power; he did.  He had his causes, chief among them a college two blocks from our house.  But he never sought wider power than what he might use, lovingly, for causes he believed righteous.  He was a mover and a shaker, but, chances are, very few people reading these words ever heard of him.  He was a leader of his people, of whom there really weren’t very many.

It’s an odd phrase in this age—“his people.”  But Haan himself used that phrase frequently in her sermons and his radio commentaries.  “Our people have to talk about this,” he’d say about some theological flare up.  “God’s people have to think about what the Sabbath means,” he’d say from the pulpit.

What B. J. meant by that phrase was a thin fraction of God’s people, the descendent generations of Dutch Calvinist immigrant stock in an area we call Siouxland—and members of a particular denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. 

Today, that phrase is almost meaningless, even here, where he used it most effectively.   No preacher in the county would use it.  Today, in our multi-cultural world, that phrase, no matter how biblical, sounds inherently discriminatory because it reminds us all that some people aren’t “God’s people” or even “our people.”

When I hear God’s first line in Psalm 50, I hear Haan.  “Gather to me my people,” it might read, or, even closer, “Gather our people together.”  That’s the command.

It seems worth noting that the sermon about to be delivered isn’t going to be proclaimed in a seeker-sensitive worship experience.  What God almighty is about to say isn’t aimed at unbelievers but disciples, “the consecrated ones,” which is not to say it isn’t meant to save souls.  It is.  Read on.

I wonder if old B. J. is smiling right now at my saying what I just have, nodding his own consecrated head as energetically he might have years and years ago.

I like to think so.

Sunday Morning Meds--"My"

“My help comes from the LORD, 

the Maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121

When the ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura was Governor of Minnesota, the state of Iowa took a well-deserved rest from the endless mockery tossed our way by supposedly more sophisticated Minnesotans. After all, for a few interesting years, they had enough to laugh about up north.

Ventura was buff, built like a steel nail. I remember spotting a t-shirt, like the one above, in the Twin Cities Airport: “My governor can beat up your governor.”

Funny. But if I read this verse with an emphasis on my, it’s not hard to hear a similar kind of bravado. “My help from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. You can’t say that. My god can beat up your god.”

Because this is holy scripture, I’ll ease up on the writer: “Maker of heaven and earth” is a classic appositive, nothing more than an adjectival phrase, a one-line vitae; the poet wants only to make totally sure that everyone knows his sacred trust is not invested foolishly. That's the glorious intent.

Fine. A decade before Donald Trump was anything more than a real estate mogul, Rev. Jerry Falwell, who back then had more problems with hoof-and-mouth than all the feedlots in Nebraska, told a group of “his people” that a Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign would mobilize Christians to get out and vote like no one else. “If Lucifer ran,” he said, “he wouldn’t.”

Rev. Falwell meant well and prayed hard, but it’s almost impossible not to see that a similar sentiment (“I meant it tongue-in-cheek,” he told folks later) has created divisiveness in this culture, a political and social world of “us vs. them.” To many of “his people,” Lucifer was more qualified.

It seems impossible not to see that a species of fundamentalism ("what I believe!) is fomenting terrorist horrors throughout the world, including this week at a baseball diamond in Arlington, Virginia, where a Bernie Sanders zealot lugged a semi-automatic on to the infield and started picking off Republicans. When people believe they have sole ownership of the truth—of whatever kind--the opposition suddenly grows horns, a pointed tail, and cloven feet. Madmen load carbines or don suicide vests.

When praying people read a verse like this with a swelling emphasis on my, things can get dangerous fast. “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. Where do you get yours, loser?”

That the line can be misread doesn’t make the Bible any less “the Word of God.” Holy Writ is full of paradox and preposterous notions, marvelous tales, bloody battlefields, beautiful poetry, and eternal wisdom. It’s as powerful as it is dangerous.

Psalm 121 is pure praise, a jaw-dropping testimony to an ever-vigilant God who neither slumbers nor sleeps, whose eye is on every last sparrow and humanoid, who is his people’s shepherd.

I need to remember that divine assurance needs to be bound tightly in my heart, not in my fist.      

Sunday Morning Meds--The withered grass

“. . .they are like the new grass of the morning—

though in the morning it springs up new, 

by evening it is dry and withered.”

“This is a harsh world,” she told me when I sat down for coffee. “It’s not a particularly nice environment.” She was talking about the place where she’d lived all of her life, south central South Dakota, on the Rosebud Reservation, north and west of Valentine, Nebraska.

Her family had come there by way of a famous government plan, the Dawes Act (1889), created by a man who believed in the near-redemptive power of private property. It was Henry Dawes’s idea that by giving Indian folks each their own chunk of reservation land, two objectives would be accomplished: first, Native people would gain pride from that ownership, despite the fact that the idea of owning land was mystifying, even irreligious, to many indigenous folks; second, Dawes (and others) felt that allotting reservation land to Native people—and giving them the freedom to do with it what they will—would undermine the tribal system, which was anathema to “civilizing” the Indian.

Most historians concede the Dawes Act was a miserable failure for a score of reasons, not the least of which was sheer corruption and graft. White folks took advantage of Native ways and took control of thousands of acres of land originally given to the tribes. Way out there on the dry as dust Great Plains, it’s difficult to know who was the sorriest victims were—the Brule Sioux who lost all that reservation land, or the idealist settlers, who figured all they needed to do was put up a sodhouse and plant some trees and they’d be well on their way to the American Dream.

It’s short-grass prairie country, and if the almost seasonal droughts don’t get you, the hoppers likely will. The woman I was talking to wasn’t at all wrong: the world she lived in was harsh and unforgiving.

One story she told me I’ll never forget. Some grand uncle and his family moved to a vacant farm out there, from Iowa, where he’d farmed before. He planted corn, just as he always had. The spring rains were a blessing, she said, and by July 4, the corn was promisingly close to knee-high. Life on what was then the frontier was promising and sweet.

But one afternoon a blast of hot wind rose from the south. The temperature had already reached 100 degrees, and that scorching wind—you can know its ravages only by having experienced it—flattened the entire crop. No tornado. No hail. Just a long wretched blast of hot wind and the entire crop was gone. That fast. In a flash.

“The very next day,” she told me, “my uncle put his kids and all his belongings in the wagon he’d rode in on, and left Todd County, South Dakota, gave the horses a snicker—and they were gone back east.” In the morning that crop was rich; by evening it was withered. Gone. So was he and the family.

Moses isn’t talking about the prairie here, or the harsh open spaces of the Great Plains. He’s talking about us—and our aspirations, our lives, about time and the cold hard fact of death, of crops, lush and green, flattened by a searing southern wind.

Our lives, he says—when you think about it—they’re like that corn: here today, gone tomorrow.

There’s little that’s sweet about such sentiment. But it’s the undeniable truth he’s admitting, as the psalms often do.

            

Sunday Morning Meds--All your works

“I will meditate on all your works 

and consider all your mighty deeds.” Psalm 77:12

Asaph is talking about himself in this verse, and I’m not sure he’s prescribing therapy. It is immensely difficult for those who suffer from depression to do the things Asaph demands of himself—to simply put away their troubles, sleeplessness and anxiety, and think on what God has done, to meditate on His mighty works.

I have no doubt that throwing one’s attention fully upon the Lord is the bromide for unease and fretfulness, but I know from experience that it sounds like so much hot air to those of us who are truly and deeply depressed.

But you don’t have to be clinically depressed to know how hard it is to meditate on God’s works. Most of the time it’s flat-out impossible for any of us to remove ourselves from the focus of the lens by which we see our worlds. And while I’ll grant you that I’m getting old, I honestly think it is becoming more and more difficult to put ourselves away, given the post-modern experience. Today an omniscient media offers all of us whatever we’d like, 24/7. I look at a vest, and voila!—it turns up at every website I visit, tailor-made marketing.

Everything is me. Traditional institutions like family, school, church—not to mention government, bowling leagues, museums, and the Great American Novel—all fade in a world in which the only thing that matters, really, is me and my needs.

I’m sounding like Chicken Little—or maybe Jeremiah.

On Black Sunday, that memorable Sabbath in 1935, a swarming black cloud obscured the horizon, then swallowed up whole states, pushing swirling topsoil into drifts that swarmed through the entire region. When that black curtain first appeared, people thought it held rain and hail, maybe tornados.

But once they were in it, they saw and felt that it was gritty topsoil from newly plowed acres of land from the southern Plains. Drought had turned that earth to dust, and wind pushed it north and east in a massive cloud of such volume that, in just a few moments, people couldn’t find their own homes, even if they were no more than a hundred feet away.

Just west of where I live, Black Sunday was the most memorable event in an era we still name “the Dust Bowl,” a time which turned the homesteading dreams of thousands to the very dust that did them in. People were thrown to their knees. They had no choice.

I know I should be thankful for affluence. I should praise God’s favor for the ease by which I live. On a whim, I can take off in any direction, get a motel, eat sumptuously, and stay an extra day or two if I feel like it. There are few blessed—if affluence is a blessing.

But when I consider how hard it is for me to follow Asaph’s advice, to put myself behind and meditate on the works of the Lord, I can’t help but consider how really easy it is to allow our blessed commodities, our wealth, to keep us from going to our knees. Who would want another Black Sunday to scour off our pride? Who would want four years’ of flag-draped caskets returning from Europe and the Pacific Theater of WW II to remind us of what’s important in life? No one.

What makes Asaph’s resolutions a joy to read but a burden to accomplish is what I can do in our affluent culture, a culture that insists that nothing on earth is more crucial than following our own whims and getting what we got coming.

I don’t need or mean to talk about other people. I need and mean only to regard myself and my needs—and what it is those needs really are. That’s a herculean task every day, isn’t it?

Renewal, like his, requires a death; something has to die, something in me.