from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and Congregational and Ministry Studies at Calvin College

Posts Tagged ‘Psalm 73’

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Glorify the Lord with Me

Friday, September 17th, 2010

The story goes that one afternoon Sir Winston Churchill met his portly colleague, Haldane, in a hallway of the House of Lords, poked his finger into Haldane’s fat belly, and with a wink asked him: “Is it a boy in there, Haldane, or is it a girl?” Lord Haldane, no less quick-witted than Churchill, came with swift retort: “I’m not sure. If it’s a boy, I’ll name him George, after the king. If it’s a girl, she’ll be Elizabeth, after the queen. But if it’s only air, the name will be Winston, after the old windbag himself!”

The Hebrew biblical word for “glory” (kabod) literally means “weight, heaviness, thickness, significance, distinction.” That is, the opposite of lightness, transiency, triviality—mere windiness. Accordingly, they who obey Scripture’s call to “ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name” (cf. Ps. 34:1ff) set their sights on acknowledging God for his “heaviness.” They create space in their minds and hearts to recognize the thick reality of who he is and what he does.

Many modern people—post-moderns, too—do quite the opposite, however. Modernity has a kind of airy weightlessness, a lack of seriousness and significance. So, when it comes to the matter of “setting their minds on things eternal”—that is, of paying any heed to the world beyond sight and sound—most contemporary people are pretty breezy and airy.

They are light— “unheavy.” God, if he comes to their minds at all, is something of an on-the-sidelines deity—elderly, feeble, and (pitiably) wimpy. He’s a “Sunday school God,” as J.B. Philips puts it in his little classic Your God is Too Small, far “too small to command [contemporary] adult loyalty.” Take your pick of any of Philips’ depictions of the tiny gods to whom modern people on occasion politely tip their hats: “Pale Galilean,” “Second-Hand God,” “Heavenly Bosom,” “Meek and Mild One,” “Grand Old Man,” “Parental Hangover,” “God-in-a-Box.” Whatever he is, he’s certainly not the heavy God revealed in the Bible, the lionic Aslan whose presence towers over all and demands to be taken with gigantic seriousness.

Recently The Onion, a weekly newspaper which offers satirical, sometimes side-splittingly funny (and naughty) comment on almost anything and everything, led off with this front-page headline: “God Hinting at Retirement.” The accompanying article reported that the Eternal One, after millennia and eons of creating and ruling, had become somewhat tired of it all and was looking to vacate his post as divine sovereign and master of all things. “‘This place pretty much runs itself by now,’ the Lord said. ‘And besides, how many people notice I’m still around? To be frank, I’m not even sure I’m much more than a beloved figurehead at this point.’”

My first response to reading the piece was sheer anger. Oh, the naughtiness—the brazen irreverence—of spoofing the bigness of God. But the more I thought about the article, the more I discovered large chunks of my own self within it. Far too often, and in ways too many and shameful to mention, I too slight God by what I allow to indwell my mind and heart, and by how I choose to direct my life. Too often I discover myself among that crowd who fail to acknowledge God’s “weightiness”—who fail to “make him big.”

And that’s yet another reason why I stay in the habit of going to Sunday worship. Congregating with others there—”in the sanctuary” (cf. Ps. 73:17) helps me to remember the greatness and reality of God—for me. For there, on Sunday morning, I hear my fellow worshippers urgently and with deep-down joy calling me to “Glorify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his holy name together.” They’re bidding me to make God weighty, so to speak.

And when I join my fellow worshippers in doing that, I find my own heart becoming freshly tuned, my life’s course getting set straight again.

Prayer

Not to us, O Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness.

Psalm 115:1

There I Have Pledged to Set My Foot, Too

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Psalm 73:17, Hebrews 11:6

‘Being alive is very difficult. Human beings are very complicated. I know. I’ve spent my whole life being one, and I still can’t totally figure it out.”

So commented one elderly gentleman as he looked back over the seemingly haphazard trajectory of his life’s course of events. Did (his) life have meaning at all? Yes, he was willing to declare that it did. But he was crushingly honest, too, and quick to add that there were so many puzzling detours and dead ends—deep mysteries all—that at times he feared he’d never find his way home.

Nor be able to find hope and joy in God again.

The writer of Psalm 73 was an honest man. Never could he settle for easy answers to life’s complex questions. Never would he be willing to brush away its torturous challenges with a blithe, cheery confession: “God is in the heavens, and everything’s OK with my soul.” Rather, he had some cheeky questions for the God in heaven himself: “What’s going on here? Is God out to lunch? Nobody’s tending the store. The wicked get by with everything; they have it made, piling up riches. I’ve been stupid to play by the rules” (73:12-13, The Message).

At a summer Bible conference some years ago, a woman told me a sad, sad story. Her husband, intending to bicycle his way home after a pleasant afternoon of picking strawberries with her near their children’s home, lost his sense of direction. She watched him go straight where he should have turned. Frantically she shouted at him, but he was too far away to hear her. She grabbed her own bike and pedaled furiously to catch up with him, but could not. “They found my dear man—six months later—in a ditch. He had Alzheimer’s Disease.”

The woman’s words stunned me. As I was reflecting upon them later, they reminded me, too, how easy it is for us to slip into a kind of spiritual Alzheimer’s Disease. We become disoriented, lose our sense of memory and anticipation, and eventually slide into a kind of mindless apathy. Spiritual amnesia overtakes us, a forgetfulness of soul.

How, then, to stay alert and keep our lives headed in the right direction? The writer of Psalm 73 claimed he got his bearings again only when he gathered with God’s people “in the sanctuary.” He needed to be with others who had come together there to worship God and to renew their purpose for living. When he had tried to figure things out all by himself, “All I got was a splitting headache.” But, “when I entered the sanctuary of God,” he confesses, “then I saw the whole picture” (73:17). In other words, when he joined the congregation of God’s people and became one with that company of people who were living the Grand Adventure as God intends, then he learned how to live well and to die well. He regained his bearings. Perhaps not all his questions were answered. But at least he was headed in the right direction again. He found strength for his next step.

In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Mr. Standfast, nearing death, records what was his life’s single aim:

I see myself now at the end of my journey, my toilsome days are ended. I am going now to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon for me. I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith; but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself. I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of; and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot, too.

“There I have coveted to set my foot, too.” It’s every Christian’s aim in life. And it’s the very purpose of Christian corporate worship, too: to rehearse what it means to follow Jesus by the power of his Spirit, and thus to bring the Triune God glory.

So that, with Standfast, we too shall forthrightly be willing to declare: “There have I pledged to set my foot, too.”

Prayer

O Lord, grant us heavenly wisdom, that we above all things may seek You  and find You;  may above all things cherish You and love You;  and may understand all other things are they are, according to the order of your wisdom.

Thomas a KempisImitation of Christ13th century
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