Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning.
Will you please pray with me?
Dear God, we come this morning with our eyes and ears and our hearts open to you.
Would you meet us and join us and help us learn from your word that we may live to be more and more like Jesus.
And it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Our reading today is Psalm 25, which if you're new on this rainy morning in your pew Bible, which you can find somewhere in front of you.
Psalm 25 is on page 436 if you'd like to read along.
To you O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust.
Do not let me be put to shame.
Do not let my enemies exult over me.
Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame. Let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
Make me know your ways, O Lord.
Teach me your paths.
Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation. For you I wait all day long.
Be mindful of your mercy, O Lord, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.
Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions according to your steadfast love. Remember me for your goodness sake, O Lord.
Good and upright is the Lord.
Therefore he instructs sinners in the way.
He leads the humble in what is right, and he teaches the humble his way.
All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness for those who keep his covenants and his decrees.
For your name's sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.
Who are they that fear the Lord?
He will teach them the way that they should choose.
They will abide in prosperity, and their children shall possess the land.
The friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him, and he makes his covenant known to them.
My eyes are ever toward the Lord, for he will pluck my feet out of the net.
Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart and bring me out of my distress.
Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.
Consider how many are my foes and with what violent hatred they hate me. Oh, guard my life and deliver me. Do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for you.
Redeem Israel, O God, out of all its troubles.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: So this past Thursday, one of the book groups from Knox met it's a group that reads works of fiction and discusses them together. Thank you, Angela and Aaron, for hosting that particular gathering. We met to discuss the novel Truss by Hernan Diaz. I had suggested the book, so of course it was fabulous.
What I loved about this particular novel was how it brought me as a reader on a journey. It's a kind of journey that I remembered going through seeing some movies like the Matrix where you think you know what's going on, you have a sense of things and then that all gets disrupted and you wonder what's true.
Then you get reoriented. It's like you discover your bearings again. I love when a story told in words or on film can do that.
This book Trust begins with a novel within a novel. That opening novel is entitled Bonds Bonds. It tells the supposedly fictional account of a Wall street tycoon, someone like a JP Morgan Chase. Only this financier is driven, not necessarily personal profit or financial gain. He's just fascinated with how the whole financial system works. And he loves how he can manipulate it from a safe distance and impact what's going on.
He eventually meets and marries an equally sort of self contained and somewhat detached, but also child prodigy. She had been a woman and she helps him engage in some of the social expectations of New York City life in the Roaring twenties. And with some of her husband wealth, she becomes a patron of the arts. Then comes the stock market crash of 1929. This tycoon profits tremendously, but then he's blamed for the crash. He and his wife are ostracized. And this story, this novel within the novel that begins trust ends with the wife of this financier descending into mental illness and then dying in a psychiatric hospital. That novel comes to a close.
Then a new story begins. And now it's not a novel within a novel, it's an autobiography. And it's written by Andrew Bevel, who says that this previous novel I just read, Bonds, was in fact about him and his wife and the author got it all wrong.
So he's gonna set the record straight in this autobiography called My Life.
And we then read of this financier giving supposedly his own account of events, saying how his wife didn't die of mental illness, she contracted cancer. And he argues again and again, you know, my personal profit and the public good, they are one and the same.
It's an absurd statement and makes us as a reader doubt that narrative. This guy sounds so pompous and self congratulatory, surely we can't believe him. But the story we'd heard before about this financier and his wife, what we later learn was a 1937 best seller. We don't feel we can trust that either. So I'm wondering, who can I trust? Can't trust the novel. Can't trust Andrew Bevel telling his own story. Is there a real story of this financier out there that I can trust?
Then the third section of the book begins. And this time it's not a novel. It's not an autobiography. It's a memoir. And it's a memoir written by Andrew Bevels secretary, Ida Portenza. She writes that she was not only the secretary for this financier, but this financier told her to write Ghostwrite, essentially his autobiography. And to do this, she had to make stuff up. She made up his voice. She made up things about his wife that he asked her to, that she loves to arrange flowers and love to quiet domestic life. But as Ida Portenza delves into the facts, the details, talks to witnesses, it's clear she was far more sophisticated, complex than that portrait that her own husband asked her, Ida Portenza, to paint.
And I wonder, as I hear Ida Portenza's account, now that I've been so disillusioned and disoriented by the first two accounts, will this bring me to truth?
As Ida Portenza memoir. And she discovers a diary of Andrew Bevel's wife, Mildred Bevel.
Now I wonder, maybe I'll get the real story.
Then the fourth section begins, and this time it is Mildred's diary.
And I learn that it was in fact, according to Mildred, her mind, her insight, her work that allowed this financier to be so wildly successful. She was the brains behind the operation. She could see connections in music and math and other aspects of life. And he was just the public face of her brilliant investing ideas.
By the end of that story, I had the sense, oh, okay, now I've got the voice I was looking for. Now I've got a story in which I can trust.
Trust built up, trust broken, trust then given in a new, surprising way. A voice that comes like the discovery of a diary.
That journey orientation, disorientation, reorientation. That's not just the stuff of novels and movies like the Matrix.
Walter Brueggemann, the biblical scholar, argues that is the core structure and framework for understanding the Psalms.
Orientation, disorientation and reorientation.
That's what it's about.
It presents the Psalms due the fullness of the human experience. You notice that in reading the Psalms, we're not Reading God's voice to us, we're reading a human voice to God. Yet in that, we can get a sense of the whole, whole of the human experiences as it's presented to God, as it's presented in relationship with God. And that experience is full of fear and disillusionment. But then finding a track, finding a path again, finding a sense of God's presence after that. Disorientation.
Well, this month, a number of students who have been part of Knox, like Gideon Schneider, eliza Shinn, Finn McFarland and Sarah Kanno, they're starting their freshman year college, and they're going through something that's the quintessential human experience. They are getting oriented, right? They're in orientation. But we know something that isn't advertised in the college schedule. We know that they're not only going to have orientation, they're going to have disorientation.
They're going to think, oh, I know what my major is going to be. And then that's going to be all things thrown apart. And they're going to take some class that maybe was in their major and they think, I don't want to do that. Or they'll take another class not in the subject. They thought they'd be interested, and they think, yes, that's it. They might try out for a sports team that had been such a big part of their college career, and they don't make the team. It changes what they thought they'd experience.
But with that. I remember a guy I sang with in a singing group in college. He had been a college football star. He was built like a tank. He served over the summers as a bouncer at bars. You wouldn't mess with this guy. But he had knee problems his freshman year of college, couldn't play football.
That whole sense that football would be a center of his college life, that fell apart.
So on a whim, he auditions for a singing group that I was a part of. And with his gorgeous high tenor, he becomes the most celebrated soloist at the college.
Disorientation, then reorientation. We know that it happens to students time and again. They will ask hard questions of themselves. Who am I? They'll ask questions about their identity and about what their passions are, and even questions about God. And we know there will be a reorientation, a sense of centering that happens after that journey that is the human experience. And it is all over the psalms.
Take Psalm 25, which is the focus of this particular service. As we go through a number of the psalms in this series Psalm 25, you might title trust.
You might give it that title, like the Hernan Diaz novel, because in part it begins with this statement, O my God, in you I trust.
The psalmist lifts up their soul to God and declares that in God they trust.
But then Psalm 25 takes you on a journey. You think you know, with the psalmist who and what you trust, but then you have that trust disrupted, disoriented. But then a new kind of trust emerges. It's given like a discovery, like finding a hidden diary, that gives a new kind of insight into the real story.
Psalm 25 is an acrostic Psalm. And that means the 22 verses that you read in Psalm 22 each corresponds to a letter in the Hebrew Alphabet. In our Alphabet, you go from A to Z. In the Hebrew Alphabet, it has Aleph to Tov. And this particular Psalm, each verse from 1 to 22 begins with a Hebrew letter all the way to verse 22 to tov, the final verse in that psalm. And that may be alerting us to the fact that this psalm is meant in some ways to comprise the whole of the human experience, that journey of trust, of then disorientation and reorientation, that it's telling the whole story from A to Z. Or, if you will, Aleph.
The psalm begins. To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, in you I trust this great affirmation. But did you notice you don't even get through the second half of verse two, I.e. verse B in this acrostic psalm, and already things are getting disoriented, discombobulated. The trust is called into question because we read this plea from the psalmist. Don't let me be put to shame. Don't let my enemies exult over me. Don't let those who wait for you be put to shame. Instead, let those be put to shame who are wantonly treacherous.
What is going on?
I thought this was a statement of trust. That's how it began. God, I trust in you. And then right after that, suddenly the psalmist seemed to wonder, God, can I trust in you? God, please don't let evil triumph. Don't let my enemies triumph over me. Don't let those who are wantonly treacherous prevail. It's like the psalmist began looking squarely at God, and then their glance kind of shifted and they started looking outside at the world, and they saw immense suffering, enough to engulf the world and them within it.
We look out today and see the devastating impact of flooding in Nepal and Earthquakes in Venezuela and Indonesia. We see the devastation of wars. War between Ukraine and Russia, war between the United States and Iran. On our drives to church, we've seen people, particularly in the rains, living on the streets. Poverty is with us. And in the news we read of people in power, whether in government, in business, or even non profit institutions like churches. And we read of too many people seeking their own wealth and benefiting themselves and their families at the expense of the broader good and then claiming, no, my personal profit and the public good are one and the same. And it's an absurd statement, but we hear it.
And that prayer of ours that began as a proclamation of trust becomes a plea too.
God, don't let those who wait on you, those who seek your will rather than their own profit and power, don't let them be put to shame. Let those who are wantonly treacherous be put to shame. Don't you hear the disorientation in that plea?
And then by verse 7 or verse f in the Alphabet, it's like the gaze of the psalmist that had been first focused on God and then gone out to the world thirdly turns inside.
Now the psalmist is looking at their own soul and they realize the sin, the wrong. It's not just out there, not just in them, it's here in me too.
And we hear the psalmist pleading, God, do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions. Pardon my guilt, for it is great. I am lonely and afflicted.
And now the disorientation is not just external with regard to the world, it's an internal disorientation, a sense that all is not right in me. And the plea is not just God, will you change the world? It's God, will you transform me? Will you save me from isolation and despair? This is the voice of one who's not only had a trust in God shaken, but had their own sense of strength shaken and their trust in human nature shaken.
And then it's like a new kind of trust is not earned by the psalmist, but arrives like a gift.
It's like a discovery made by the psalmist of a hidden treasure, a diary uncovered with a voice in it that finally speaks truth.
You are the God of my salvation, the psalmist proclaims, as if it were a new discovery, good and upright as the Lord. God leads the humble, the humble in what is right.
All the paths of the Lord, they are steadfast love and faithfulness.
These words, they're not pre suffering, they're post suffering. They're not pre disillusionment, they're post disillusionment. They're the gift of wisdom. Having been on the journey, struggled, suffered, questioned, and then finding God, the saving God showing up, they've made a discovery on that journey, they have learned. God may not have removed the suffering and sin from the world or from me just yet, but in this world of trials and temptations, a world with so much wrong, God is wondrously at work to save.
God is trustworthy and true, the psalmist proclaims. God is precisely what the psalmist discovers. They need to make their way in the world. It is God who saves me and the world, the psalmist discovers and articulates. It is God who leads me who leads us in paths of justice, mercy, love and peace. For God shows us that way. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, it is God who directs us to the needs of the orphan, the immigrant and the widow. And it is God's love that restores us and renews us. Psalm 25.
It's a story of trust declared disrupted and given anew.
And so I would entitle Psalm 25 Trust.
Well, as Christians, we believe the trustworthiness of God was revealed to us in a new way, in the one we call Savior and Lord.
You could say on the one hand, our Savior's ministry was all about disruption, disorientation.
He overturns tables, we read in the temple, he eats with tax collectors and sinners. He challenges religious leaders of the Jewish people in his time, the Pharisees, the chief priests, the scribes, the very people you would think were orienting people towards God's way and God's word. And Jesus Christ cast their teaching in to question.
And when he did that, it surely left people wondering, wait, if we can't trust them, who can we trust?
When Jesus said it was harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God, his own disciples asked him, who then can be saved? Who then can be saved?
Our Savior proclaimed a new world where the sinner was forgiven, the hungry were fed, the sick were healed, the poor were lifted up, and he brought that world, that kingdom near. And it disoriented and it reoriented.
You know, it showed God's care and trustworthy presence in a whole new way. You might say our Savior's ultimate act of disorientation and reorientation was the cross resurrection. That move that we believe invites us to die, to sin, and rise to all that is good. That with him we die to an old life and are given as a gift a new life centered in God and God's call and claim to love that God and love our neighbor.
It's like we're given trust as a gift in a God who will ultimately, in God's time, restore all things through Christ, in whom all things hold together. Life with Christ, life following that disorienting and reorienting Savior. It is a journey of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. Thanks be to God.
Now, I don't know what will disrupt, disorient or disillusion you next, but something I do know is that there will be something that does just that.
Maybe this afternoon, maybe this week, maybe this year ahead, something will happen and it will throw your world into chaos for a time. You'll lose somebody dear to you, someone who was a pillar of your life, some mentor who was such a powerful guide. You wonder, what is the world like without that person?
You lose a job you had counted on, you had a hope for a business, for your family, for the church, for your community. And that hope will be, in some way disappointed.
Something out in the world will break your heart and it will tempt you to lose hope.
A story you're told about the world, about yourself, or about those you love, you'll find is just not true.
And it will be disorienting. And you'll wonder, who then can I trust?
Well, not if, but when that happens. Hear the invitation of Psalm 25. Bring the whole of that experience, the whole of human experience to God. Bring your whole self to God, A, to Z, Aleph to Tov. And with the psalmist, you too may just find in the journey, as you bring it before God, as you bring yourself before God, you too. You hear a voice you had not heard before, not in the same way.
It's a voice you cling to, like a treasure buried that has been uncovered, and it tells you the real story. You may no longer trust that God will somehow keep us or the world safe from suffering and evil.
But you are given. Trust in a God who's with us in the suffering and sin with us to save, and you'll find yourself praying like the psalmist.
Lead me, O God, in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.
