Sunday Morning Meds -- When?

“What right have you to recite my laws

 or take my covenant on your lips?

You hate my instruction 

and cast my words behind you.” Psalm 50:16

Not that many years ago, a student of mine who liked to haunt my office was talking about her church, one of the new ones, full of raised hands and happy faces. “You’d like it,” she told me. “You really would—you ought to try it sometime.”

Like a new flavor cappuccino.

She shrugged her shoulders. “But every once in a while—when I get all up or something—then I need to go back to Bethel,” she said, referring to a church offering a far more traditional worship style. "I just to get my nerves settled down—you know?”

That was my introduction to a phenomenon this morning’s New York Times* uses on the front page of their on-line edition: “Church to Church—Teenagers Seek Church That Fits.” What the article explains is the kind of church-shopping—church-hopping, really—being done, reportedly, by hundreds of thousands of evangelical Christian teenagers, including my own students.

Their parents approve, the Times reported. Believing parents long for nothing on this earth more than their kid’s growing relationship with Jesus Christ. One mother, whose Netherlandic name suggests she was born in the same Calvinist order I was, is quoted this way: “’I saw that my parents' relationship to Christ and my relationship to Jesus Christ were different, and my kids aren't going to relate to Jesus Christ the same way we do,’ said Emily's mother, Tracy Hoogenboom, 49. ‘And that's to be expected because Jesus Christ is your own personal lord and savior.’"

Makes sense. But sometimes I wonder how people like that Mom read passages like Psalm 50. Oh, forget the vituperation and the lines in the sand God Almighty draws so succinctly. Forget false recitation and the bogus covenant-making. Forget vanity, and snake oil.

I wonder, simply, what some fine believers do, simply, with the tone of voice of the God Almighty of Psalm 50. Does she ever think about the snarling God of Psalm 50 as her daughter’s “personal lord and savior”? Or is that just Jesus?

“All that’s left is ego,” a friend of mine, a preacher, told me recently. In the withering of established institutions (church, school, family, and bowling team) created by our myopic affluence, all that’s left is ego, is self—almighty “choice.” It’s the only real commodity. We all got to get our needs met.

When Christ himself describes moving human beings to his left and right, he explains his actions on their behavior toward the needy. Interestingly, neither sheep nor goats have a clue why they’re being sent to heaven or hell. “When did we see you hungry or lame or in prison?”—that’s what they both say, bewildered.

What strikes terror in my soul about Psalm 50’s vision of an irate God is that it seems virtually impossible for me to see myself as the recipient of his rage in these verses. After all, when did I falsely recite God’s laws? When did I not treasure his covenant? When did I not take him seriously, for pity sake? When did I slough off his words?

I just don’t remember any such thing. Perhaps I need to think a bit.