Proper 7: Seeking God When Nothing is Going Right

TranscriptioN

And good morning again, my friends. It is good to be with you this morning. As I mentioned, if you're new here or visiting, we're so glad you're here. I'm Father Morgan Reed.

I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday. In Reverend Susan had a wonderful sermon on the Trinity. You can go back and listen to that. And then next Sunday is going to be the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul, two pillars of the early church. And we'll have a friend here to preach with us that morning.

Then in the month of July, I'll be finishing up in the first Sunday of July a passage from the gospel. And then we'll spend some time in Colossians, the epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians over the month of July. But today I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to have a psalm reflection, time to reflect on the psalm that we read this morning. We often don't preach on those, but it's interesting. Jesus, in our gospel passage, was with his disciples, and he asks the crowd, he asked them who the crowds say he is, and they start to give him answers. 

And then he says, who do you say that I am? And Peter makes this famous confessional, you are the Christ. And they're expecting an earthly ruler, a kingly Messiah, who's going to rule and reign. And what he does is he tells them to hold on, and don't tell anybody, because he will do that.

But first he has to go to the cross and suffer on behalf of humanity. And he encourages them not to seek power in greatness, because this is the thing that they're tempted to do. If your kingdom is earthly, then certainly we should join in the greatness of this kingdom. 

But what they don't realize is the cross is the way to the kingdom. And so he has this encouragement that feels a little bit mysterious or enigmatic about, take up your cross daily and follow me. And they're sort of teasing out what that could possibly mean, because they don't yet know about the fullness of what the cross is.

And it's true that when we think about abundant life in the kingdom of God, it often shows itself in really hard circumstances. Circumstances where there are difficult trials and challenges, but the kingdom of God will come. And it's often when we look back at those difficult seasons that we realize that there was a cross to bear, that God showed himself faithful, that his presence was there.

And so taking up our cross involves some level of humiliation each day as we learn to follow Jesus. It might look like not seeing the things that we hoped for materialize as we thought they would, apologizing for the wrongs that we've done to others, telling others what is just even when they don't want to hear it, loving God's image in somebody when it's popular to stoke hatred or verbal or physical violence against people, even doing the hard inner work of naming things instead of turning to escapist behaviors and avoiding naming things that are really difficult to name. Ultimately we should seek the experience of the love of God in Christ Jesus more than comfort, more than self-protection, more than self-preservation.

And so Psalm 63 that we read today can be brought into conversation with our gospel texts. Psalm 63 helps us to see what it means a little bit to take up our cross and to follow Jesus. We should seek to seek God's love so to fill us that we come to know the life that Jesus has promised.

We should seek God's love to fill us so that we learn the love of Jesus and come to know that life that Jesus has promised. Now to do this, the things that I want to look at from our psalm passage are our longings, our interior life, and our resolve. Our longings, our interior life, and our resolve.

 Our Longings

So first look at our longings. The psalm is attributed to David. We didn't read the subscription in our reading, but if you were to read this in your English Bible, Psalm 63, there's a little attribution to David when he's in the wilderness of Judah, which this pictures then David as he's escaping from King Saul in the Negev, which is in the southern part of Israel.

It's a dry, hot, arid desert that he finds himself in, and rather than spending his days strategizing on how to foster the contempt that's in his heart, or how to assassinate Saul, what he does is he finds shady spots to hide in, caves, takes out a writing utensil and a scroll, and he makes time to write poetry. He's rightly ordering his interior life. That is the thing that he is spending his time doing.

Rather than allowing contempt to help him strategize a way to seek vengeance, to take vengeance into his own hands, what he does is in the midst of these really troubling circumstances, is he focuses on rightly ordering his interior life and his longings. So he begins with a poem, this poem with this line, God, you are my God. I will search for you. 

I'm thirsting for you. My body is wasting away for you in a dry and in a weary land with no water. How many of you kids this morning enjoy camping or outdoor survival activities? Yeah? Yeah? Who likes to camp or do outdoor survival stuff like build fires and other fun things? Great.

A lot of you. Excellent. Now, I'm gonna ask you a question.

When you get out into the wilderness, what are some of the first things that you should do? What do you think, Kate? Find shelter. That's it. Yep.

Absolutely. What else? Misha? Yep. Build your camp.

Exactly. What else? And make a fire. Excellent.

Yes. What else? Shepherd? Find food and water. And which one of those is more important? Yes. 

I heard it a couple places. Water is more important than food. Absolutely.

So you can make it a long time without food, or at least very little food. You can't make it that long without water. Think about the next three days here.

You will experience thirst. Here, the psalmist is kind of like what Tuesday is gonna feel like, but in the desert, and he is longing in that hot, arid, dry place, and picturing himself being there, looking for a viable source of water. So he's out there, right? He's thinking about water, and what he compares it to is God's presence.

Nothing else matters. The circumstances are so bad, the thing that I want, Lord, is you. And this is the way he pictures his relationship with God.

Do we long for God's presence, like a body in a dry desert that is longing desperately for water? But the writer deeply longs to know God, and then what's interesting is he's longing to know God when everything outside is going wrong. When things haven't gone the way that he hoped for, you know, do we long that way for better circumstances, or do we long that way for God's presence? I would imagine that if we were put in the psalmist's shoes, we would spend our time, strategy, and resources figuring out how to get out of the mess, and possibly to take vengeance, but that's sort of a second tier, rather than spending all of our energy seeking the presence of God. But his focus is on rightly ordering his interior life.

Rightly Ordered Interior Life

So after rightly ordering his longings, the psalmist gives us these outward gestures of a rightly ordered interior life. He says, so I gazed at you in the sanctuary to see your power and your glory. There's a famous paradigm in the Psalms that you can think about all of them, some level of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.

I get that from the late Walter Brueggemann, but it's a really helpful way to think through the Psalms. Is the psalmist in a state of orientation, disorientation, or being reoriented? All three can happen in the same psalm. And there's a reorientation that happens here for the psalmist as he goes into the sanctuary, and he has this encounter with God in the midst of his disorientation, and searching, and longing for water in the desert.

The sanctuary is a really important place. Don't miss this. For Israel, the sanctuary was meant to refigure for people the Garden of God, the Garden of Eden, where people experienced God dwelling with them directly.

And so the sanctuary is the place where you meet God. It creates this place where heaven and earth meet on this earth. And what becomes new in the ministry of Jesus is that he becomes the temple.

Jesus is the place where heaven and earth meet. And then what's even more mysterious and wonderful, as we looked at in the book of Acts, is that ministry continues in Christ's body, which is the church, the body of Christ. So the church becomes the temple, the place where heaven and earth meet, where people come to discover an encounter with God.

So the corporate body of the church, when it gathers, is the location where heaven and earth meet. But also individually, each one of us is a temple of the Holy Spirit where heaven and earth meet. And why is that? It's because the Holy Spirit has been poured out in each one of our hearts.

That's what we celebrated a couple weeks ago at Pentecost, and it's really important. You and I have within us God's presence, the Holy Spirit, the one who can reorient us to what is true, good, and beautiful. And even when things around us are falling apart, he can still reorient us and rightly order our interior world.

So in our Anglican tradition, we have the Book of Common Prayer. It's got in it the daily office, prayer services that you can use throughout the day. That's a really helpful start.

Morning, midday, evening prayer, compline, something short. You can use the family prayer forms of those that are really short. These create a little sanctuary in time.

They're really helpful to sort of reframe and reorient the day. We also need other helpful practices to remind ourselves that we don't need to be subject to the tyranny of the urgent when things have blown up and become in disarray. I find myself rushing from thing to thing to thing, and I think I'm probably a product of the area that I live in, and I imagine that I'm probably not the only one here like this.

You know, find a few moments. It doesn't have to be long to stop and to pray for the Spirit to come and be present. So now I've actually put like a five-minute block between each meeting, so I can just stop and pray and ask, Lord, was there something that I needed to learn from the last thing? Is there something that you want to speak through the next thing? But figuring out for yourself, where are these blocks of time to create little sanctuaries of reorientation in your calendar? Are there Scripture passages that come to mind throughout the day, and are we creating rhythms of reading the Scripture so that we actually are able to draw on those things through the day? The psalmist then follows up his reorientation with several gestures.

He talks about his lips praising God, he blesses God, he lifts up his hands in God's name, the mouth praises God with joyful lips, and in verse 6, and some of you can relate with this, he's awake and he's restless in the middle of the night. And what does he do when he does this? He says he meditates on God in the night watches, which sounds poetic and beautiful, but picture somebody who's restlessly awake in the middle of the night, and how they use that time. He's using that time to meditate on God, and I would imagine the stress of his situation is probably what's keeping him up.

So finally, in verse 7, he sings with joy. All of these things are embodied. There are bodily postures that tell us what his heart is doing and how his heart is oriented, and how important it is to consider your body in your life with Christ.

Your body matters. If you think of David in the wilderness, he's not wasting his time trying to figure out how to draw up a peace treaty with Saul. He's not wasting his time trying to figure out how to assassinate Saul.

He's spending so that he can rightly order the circumstances that he's in. He's accepting those things that he can't change, and then he's taking it in and he's rightly ordering his own interior life. He's writing poetry in the shadows in a really hot day in the desert, and when we feel like our circumstances might have driven us into the wilderness, and we're at an impasse like nothing is going to change, this might just be the invitation that God has for us to draw deeply on that well of prayer where the Holy Spirit is residing, to sit in whatever momentary shade God's providing, and then to start writing some poetry.  Seriously, write some poetry. It's really helpful. Or at the very least, if you don't write poetry, journal.

Or at the very least, can we begin to ask God to reveal our desires that might be keeping us from desiring his presence more than our own surface-level comfort? What is keeping us from experiencing the love of God? So we've seen the psalmist, how he longs for God's presence, his longings, more than life itself. We've seen his outward gestures of the rightly ordered interior life, and finally now the psalm ends with confidence and resolve, even when things are not going well for him. So the psalmist's reorientation, it includes a resolve about people who are causing him harm.

Our Resolve

It's poetic, and what he says is that God will take vengeance on his enemies. He's poetically saying it, but that's the essence of what he's saying. And then in verse 11, there's a different sort of ending here, a different theme. He says, but the king will rejoice in God, talking about himself. All who swear allegiance to him will give praise, for the mouths of those speaking lies will be shut. The mouths of those speaking lies will be shut.

This is his hope, this is his resolve. In some ways it's depersonalized. It's not just that he's personally offended, it's that he's doing the very thing God's called him to do, and what these people are speaking is actually against the will of God.

And so his trust is not in God taking vengeance on his personal hurts, it's God taking vengeance on those things that are truly unjust. And so it's the slander, and if you think about this, what he's saying is God watches over the faithful, and I trust this. And in this final verse, if it gives any indication of the Psalmist circumstances, then it seems like the violence and the assault that he's experiencing is primarily verbal, which is actually harder than physical violence sometimes.

And while his friends slander him and betray him, the Psalmist is resolved to seek the God who watches over his faithful ones. Like the Psalmist, we can trust that God loves us, and that he wants to redeem those curses that people might have spoken over us, and return those things with a blessing. That's really important.

This Psalmist has been cursed by people who were probably close to him, and he's probably wondering if these parts of himself that others have cursed, there might be a back-and-forth about whether these things about him are truly good, whether God has made him this way or not, and so God wants to return these things with a blessing. And I'll give you an example from my own life that I was thinking about this week. In my mid-20s, I was, a coworker told me, you're really obnoxious when you talk

Alright, now, I'm trying not to be triggered even as I say this, right? Now, if I look back, what I think that she was saying was, when you articulate your to-do list out loud, it overwhelms me, and I can't hold that much information in my head, so can you not talk about those things so much, right? Now that I'm 20 years removed almost, I can talk about those things. So, but in that moment, when she said, you're obnoxious when you talk, my body kind of froze, and I noticed that I got this deep feeling of shame, and it was sort of a curse that got spoken over me, like, you are flawed. And, you know, that, and as I look back, there might be other times I can think of, no, there are other times I can think of, where somebody has probably told me, they definitely have told me, hey, get to the point, or why don't you just say what you mean, right? Or even in my writing, it was really hard to write a dissertation, because I, it took me 40 pages to get to the 20 I really meant, and truly, like, I have a lot of words, I know this, I process verbally, and not all of my words are equally important.

So I had to name how people have spoken that curse to me in the past, and then I had to ask God if there is any good in me, right? And I know this sounds extreme, but I think there is. I think there is some good in me there. Knowing that it takes me a while to get to where I'm going, just the knowledge of that has taught me there are certain people that I can bring in as conversation partners at various points, and certain people that I cannot, because they will find it exhausting.

That knowledge is powerful. Also, I love having coffee with you, or having a meal, and not having an agenda. I love seeing where the conversation might go, and not feeling like it needs to go anywhere.

That's actually quite lovely, and so I wonder, for you, as you sit here this morning, are there parts of your life and heart that other people have cursed that were close to you, that God might actually bless? How would searching for God's presence, and rightly ordering our interior world, begin to bless these minds and bodies where other people have spoken curses? We need to build up this resolve of trusting God, and blessing what others have cursed, by seeking God's covenant love for us, so that it becomes more important to us than our own self-protection. So we can leave the vengeance to God as we trust, and as we resolve the trust in this goodness of what God's called us into, and how he's made us to do this thing he's called us to do. So, back to the gospel.

Conclusion

Jesus called his disciples to take up their cross daily, and to follow him. Jesus would be the victorious kingly Messiah that everyone is hoping for, but not without the suffering, and the humiliation, and the pain of the cross. A type of desert where he needed to seek God's presence himself, more than self-preservation.

And while the circumstances that we are in may never fully line up with the things that we hoped for, or for what creates earthly material success and ease, we do know that being in God's presence, and being in God's will, are the ultimate places of rest that our hearts are longing for. So through our psalm today, we have this picture of taking up the cross. The heart of a man who's been exiled into the hot desert wasteland, writing poetry in the shadows, longing for God's presence, being reoriented by an encounter with God, and a resolve to trust God in the face of cursing.

So may we come to know this experience of the love of God so deeply, that we move past self-preservation and hardness of heart, to a desire, and to have our earthly material expectations met, that we really come to know the abundant love and life of Christ. Let me pray for us. Almighty God, you pour out on all who desire it the spirit of grace and supplication.

Would you deliver us when we draw near to you from coldness of heart and wanderings of mind, that with steadfast thoughts and kindled affections, we may worship you in spirit and in truth, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. you

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the author.