Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Please pray with me.
Prepare our hearts, O God, to accept your word. Silence in us any voice but your own, that hearing we may also obey your will through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Today's reading is from Psalm 74.
O God, why do you cast us off forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture?
Remember your congregation, which you acquired long ago.
Remember what you redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell. Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins.
The enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary.
Your foes have roared within your holy palace. They set up their emblems there.
At the upper entrance they hacked with wooden trellises with axes, and then with hatchets and hammers, they smashed all its carved work.
They set your sanctuary on fire.
They desecrated the dwelling place of your name, bringing it to the ground. They said to themselves, we will utterly subdue them.
They burned all the meeting places of God in the land.
We do not see our emblems. There is no longer any prophet. And there is no one among us who knows how long.
How long, O God, is the foe to scoff is the enemy to revile in your name forever.
Why do you hold back your hand? Why do you keep your hand in your bosom? Yet God, my king, is from of old, working salvation in the earth.
You divided the sea by your might. You broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan, and you gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness.
You cut openings for springs and torrents. You dried up ever flowing streams. Yours is the day, yours is also the night.
You establish the luminaries and the sun. You have fixed all the bounds of the earth. You made summer and winter.
Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs and an impious people reviles your name.
Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild animals. Do not forget the life of your poor forever.
Have regard for your covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence.
Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame. Let the poor and needy praise your name. Rise up, O God. Plead your cause. Remember how the impious scoff at you all day long. Do not forget the clamor of your foes, the uproar of your adversaries that goes up continually.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Be well. Being here last night for fun and food and fellowship and song, and then gathering here again this morning reminds us that we're a community.
And we're on a journey.
And like every faithful community down through the ages, one of the things that we do is we pray.
And so we're in the middle of this series of reflections on the prayers of God's people, the Psalms.
We began with Psalm 126, a Psalm that does double duty. It's a psalm that actually was sung as the people would make their way from their villages to Jerusalem to go and worship at one of the festivals. It's called a sense song because no matter where you are in the land, you have to walk up to Jerusalem to its elevated height, an ascent psalm, a going up song, a psalm of song. But Psalm 126 does double duty.
It's also a lament song.
May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy.
Last week, Matt preached on Psalm 25, which ends with the appeal, Redeem Israel, O God, out of all our troubles.
Tears and trouble, trouble and tears.
The technical term for these kinds of prayers are called lament psalms. I like to call them trouble prayers. And it turns out that in our collection, the collection of the prayer book called the Psalms, 73 out of the 150 prayers are trouble prayers.
Lament psalms, which means that about half of our life, we're in trouble.
Long ago in ancient history, the Beatles sang this familiar reflection.
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Of course, the Beatles were singing about the pain of rejected love, but their insight, it feels like the troubles are here to stay.
That's what the trouble prayers are about in the Psalms.
So to get us in touch with these trouble prayers, I just want you to take one minute silent inventory and see if you can create a mental list of all the ways that trouble comes in your life, in our world, in your experience with people you love. Go ahead and create that mental list in your mind for about a minute.
Let me see if I can provide some kind of a summary.
Individually, some of you thought about physical illness, either both, either acute or chronic.
Some may have thought about mental, emotional and psychological distress and addiction.
You may have thought about loneliness and feelings of isolation relationally. You may have thought about troubled relationships within family or the pain of when relationships with people you love disintegrate.
You might have thought about the pressure to cover up the sins of the past, carrying the constant fear of being discovered.
You may have thought about betrayal or the denying of the reality of harm that's been caused by deceit in society. You may have thought about systems of injustice or economic imbalance or blaming one group of people to justify treating them so cruelly nationally and religiously. You may have thought about the suffering that comes about as a result of harm caused by one nation upon another, usually by means of violence and tragically, often in the name of God.
The lingering question in all these forms of trouble, where is God in the midst of all the pain, loss and grief?
That's the through line of the trouble prayers.
Where is God?
That question looms over Psalm 74, our text for today, doesn't it? In the midst of trouble we will find good news for and discover why the trouble prayers are so important in our prayer book.
Listen to the opening lines of this prayer and we know that we are in the midst of a national crisis of cataclysmic prayer proportions.
Verses 3 to 8 described a devastation.
The enemies destroyed everything in the sanctuary.
The upper entrance was hacked with axes, hatchets and hammers.
They set your sanctuary on fire. They desecrated your dwelling place, burning it to the ground.
They burned all the meeting places of God in the land.
These lines are describing the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587, 586.
The unthinkable has happened.
The unimaginable has become reality.
The temple is gone.
Jerusalem is destroyed. Everything that held this nation together lies in ruins.
And the people are left to wonder what all of this means.
How can they go on from here?
Feels like there's no future for them.
The place where God, they believe God dwelt in the holy of holy in the temple has been ransacked by the enemy.
The Babylonians have cut them off from God.
Now what this trouble prayer, this psalm of lament, gives voice to that desperation.
So of course, the psalmist asks the obvious question.
Where is God in the face of all this devastation?
Listen to the theological and emotional honesty expressed in this psalm.
Why does your anger, O God, smoke against the sheep of your pasture?
How long O God is the enemy? To scoff, the psalmist uses the metaphor of the smoke rising from the rubble of the destroyed temple as an expression. Is your anger like that smoke still smoldering in the ruins?
Is that what you're like, God?
Now we know what this image of smoke looks like, smells like, feels like, tastes like.
We've just commemorated the 25th anniversary of 9 11.
Two planes flying in the Twin Towers in New York City.
Third plane crashing into the Pentagon, fourth plane crashing into a field in Pennsylvania.
We can summon in our memory the image of smoke rising from the rubble and closer to home, we know the sight and smell of the smoke from the night of January 7th this past year, when the flames of the Eaton fire tore through our community.
Days later, the ruins still smoldered.
Lament Psalms Truth Prayers are ruthlessly honored, honest about how the loss caused by trouble, no matter what its source, how does that loss feel?
And these prayers invite us better yet, they encourage us to speak out our pain, to cry out our loss, to express our disappointment, and to ask this vital question, God, where are you?
That is this psalmist question to the destruction of Jerusalem and the impending exile to Babylon some 600 miles away, the psalmist gives voice to the despair of the people.
Now what? And then this appeal. Do something, God, do something.
Our psychology experts here in this congregation have told us clearly that when we experience loss, we need to express our pain and our discouragement and our grief.
We can't rush through those feelings.
We need to sit with those things. We need to pray those things. We need to speak out what our hearts are feeling and what our minds are questioning.
And we have to take time to remember what has been lost.
But most of the lament psalms, most of the trouble prayers don't end with now what?
The question or the demand. Do something.
Often the laments can turn to resilience through memory, memory of who God has been in the past and what that means for the future.
And so, in the middle part of The Psalm, verses 12 to 17, the Psalmist looks back to the creation brought into existence by God, carved out of night sky and turbulent waters, superintending the seemingly uncontrollable power of sea monsters and dragons.
Psalmist prays God has set the bounds of the earth, the seasons of summer and winter, the rhythm of of day and night.
Oh, the power of Babylon may feel impervious, insurmountable of its military might, capable of inflicting overwhelming harm and suffering through the implementation of military violence. Who can stand against that?
And yet, right in the middle of this lament, this trouble psalm, the psalmist declares, yet my God, my King is from of old.
God predates the Babylonians, and God will remain sovereign long after the Babylonians have passed from the ranks of power.
Psalmist can declare that assurance because he looks at the way God has put the world together in creation, an important reminder for us in our troubled times as well.
Wendell Berry, the farmer, theologian, poet, writer and prophet, died last week at the age of 92.
Listen to his insight about the resilience from our observation of the created order during Times of Trouble from his poem entitled the Peace of Wild Things.
When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's life might be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day blind stars waiting for their light.
For a time I rest the grace of the world, and I am free.
The turning from fear to freedom that Wendell Berry describes in this poem is the same move that we find in Psalm 74.
After considering the majesty and grandeur of God's power on display in creation, the one who's praying changes tone in relationship to God.
No longer why do you cast us off forever.
No longer why does your anger smoke. God now becomes a source of resilient courage because the psalmist finds security and refuge in God's faithfulness.
Remember this, O Lord, the psalmist declares in verses 18 and 19.
Do not forget the life of the poor forever.
Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame. Let the poor and the needy praise your name. Rise up, O God.
Do you feel the difference now in tone and substance?
We've come a long way since from the feelings of abandonment expressed at the beginning of this troubled prayer.
Nothing in the circumstances have changed. The temple is still smoldering.
The Babylonians are intent on marching their Jewish captives into exile.
But what has changed is the psalmist's outlook.
Each prayer in the Psalms is like a single picture in our photo library on our cell phones. Now, most of the time we're telling you to silent these things. I want you to get them out.
Get out your phones, turn to your photo library and choose any picture, just any one picture.
Just go ahead and do that for a moment. Take a look at it.
You have one now. Each picture simply captures a moment in time.
Where we were when we took the photo, who we were with, what we were looking at.
The photo can invoke different feelings depending on its content.
Could be joy right now for you. Or it could be sadness. Could be hope, could be despair.
Could be confusion. Could be clarity. Could be a sense of tranquility and peace.
But we need the entire collection in our photo library in order to understand the journey of our lives.
No one photo can capture the entire story.
Years and years of photos are in each of our libraries. Many with the people that we're closest to.
Prayer helps us see the bigger picture of our lives beyond Psalm 74. Let's look at a few more photos of the Jewish people as they experience the horror of the Babylonian exile.
The prophet Jeremiah pours out his heart concerning the destruction of Jerusalem in the book of Lamentations.
If you think Psalm 74 is filled with emotional language, immerse yourself in those five chapters, some of the most profound poetry describing loss that has ever been written.
Jeremiah knows all about the anguish of suffering people, and he's one of them.
That same prophet, though, also speaks to the exiles in Babylon after they've experienced the horrors described in Psalm 74.
And he helps the exiles answer this question, well, how now shall we live in the light of this loss?
Now we can find false prophets in the story that are trying to minimize the grief, telling the people that they will soon return to Jerusalem.
Babylon is just a temporary stop. Or in contemporary language that we've heard in the past few weeks, small potatoes.
Prophet Shemaiah actually says, we're going back in two or three years.
This is no big deal.
But Jeremiah knows that this is folly.
Most of the time. Trouble doesn't disappear overnight, as much as we wish it would.
The Babylonians don't play with dominance.
They aim to keep these Jewish exiles there in Babylon for a long time. And Jeremiah will even say in his writing, it's going to be 70 years, so you'd better figure out how to live a different way now.
And so here is what Jeremiah says in Jeremiah chapter 29.
Build houses and settle down.
Plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Marry and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage so that they also may have sons and daughters.
Increase in number there and do not decrease.
Also seek the peace, the shalom, and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.
Pray for Babylon, because if it prospers, you will prosper as well.
For I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you.
Plans to give you a future and a hope.
What a difference between why do you cast us off forever?
And the experience of shalom in Babylon.
The same prophet who wrote Lamentations can also see a future and a hope for God's people.
And the big surprise is that future and hope is in Babylon.
Now. History tells us that the exiles who were there in Babylon, who received Jeremiah's vision, they listened.
They indeed settled down and re established themselves and they became a thriving society. In Babylon.
So much so that 650 years later. Listen to that. 650 years later, when the Romans once again destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
many of those exiles fled to this Jewish community in Babylon.
Babylon with exiles became Babylon the refuge, and they found the shalom which had been violently taken away from them by the ruthlessness of Rome.
Jeremiah is describing the process that our beloved city here in Pasadena and Altadena is right in the middle of in this moment, the early stages of rebuilding individuals and families, lives and businesses, the rebuilding of places of worship and schools, the renovation of public spaces for community, connection and play. Like those who received Jeremiah's prophetic vision, we move in our own ways from lament to resilience, carried by the reality that the January 7 fire did not and will not have the final word on the quality of our lives.
Shalom is springing forth now that the smoldering smoke is extinguished.
In May, my wife Suzette and I traveled with 36 friends and colleagues of Whitworth University Presbyterian School in Spokane, Washington, where we lived and served for 27 years. We began our journey in Cappadocia.
Region in the center of Turkey has a unique geography. The region is built upon porous rock, soft and carvable.
During the period of Roman dominance that lasted over 400 years, Christians in the entire empire fled to Cappadocia because they heard that it would be a refuge against the ravages of Roman violence.
They fled to do this.
They saw the rock formations as an opportunity to literally carve out dwellings while they created a way of life that could withstand the daily pressure of Roman threats.
Some of those refugees climbed the sheer cliffs and dug sanctuaries, homes for themselves and their families, too steep and too dangerous for Roman soldiers to attack.
Others took another way.
Rather than going up, they went down, literally establishing underground cities.
This is the entrance to one of those 118 of these underground cities that have been found. These are some of our fellow travelers.
This particular one that we went to had 20 stories and went down 420ft.
They estimated that about 2,500 people lived here, generation after generation, for hundreds of years to escape the threat of Rome.
Now, each level in this underground city had a different function. Some were dwelling places for families, some for food and water storage, some for cooking and eating, others for worship.
Scattered throughout this underground maze were chapels where small groups of people would gather to hear the scriptures being read, meditation, prayer and singing.
And perhaps in a place like this, far underground, they heard Psalm 74 read and could relate to the psalmist's feelings, Where's God in the middle of all this?
And maybe there, in these small underground chapels, they also heard Jeremiah 29 read, and they would envision biblical hope and live for the day when they would no longer need to live underground.
That day did come, but not until after, about 300 years after the public ministry of Jesus, when the Emperor Constantine put a halt to the Roman practice of the ruthless persecution of Christians. When he said, no more, what kind of blending of lament and resilience sustained multiple generations of Jesus followers under this kind of pressure?
What kind of tenacity did they develop during all those long months and years and decades and centuries?
Today, as we sit here at Knox Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, California, we are the beneficiaries of their courage as they kept the Christian faith alive during these most perilous times.
One of the people that you saw in that photo is a woman named Christy Lupton.
She almost didn't make the journey because Christy's been battling cancer, and the effects of chemotherapy made it very tenuous whether or not she was going to be able to go at the last minute. There she was, in her own way, living out her path from lament to resilience.
The last day of our journey. Christy provided the daily devotional.
I'd like to finish with you this morning by listening to the words of our brave and dear friend, Susette's and mine, Christy, and what she wrote.
This is what has struck me most on this trip.
The temples have fallen, statues are broken, the empires are gone.
But the gospel that was proclaimed here is still changing lives.
Cancer did not teach me that life is fragile.
Scripture had already taught me that.
What cancer has taught me more deeply is that God's faithfulness is not fragile.
When strength is limited, God is still faithful. When plans change, God is still faithful. When the future feels uncertain, God is still faithful.
Standing among these ruins, I'm reminded that Christianity has survived the rise and fall of kingdoms, political powers, economic systems, countless hardships, not because Christians are strong, but because Christ is faithful.
The stones around us have been telling us the story of things that once appeared permanent but were not.
The gospel tells the story of the one who truly is permanent.
As we finish our journey together, perhaps the greatest lesson these ancient places offer is not about what has been lost, but about what still remains long after the achievements of the ancient world have faded.
Jesus Christ, quoting Hebrews 13:8, is still the same yesterday, today, and forever.
And for me, a year of cancer treatment, that truth feels less like a theological statement and more like a truth than ever before.
Let us pray. This is Christy's Prayer.
Lord Jesus, thank you for your faithfulness through every season of life.
Remind us that while much of what we build and depend upon is temporary, you remain unchanged.
Thank you for your presence in times of health and in times of illness, in seasons of uncertainty, in seasons of great fear.
Thank you for walking with us through every trial and for giving us a hope that outlasts every earthly kingdom.
Strengthen our faith.
Help us trust you more deeply.
May we leave these ruins with a renewed confidence that while many things pass away, your love, your promises, and your kingdom endure forever.
Amen.
