issumagijoujungnainermik

"issumagijoujungnainermik"
Psalm 19


I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I've spent some time in Benedictine monasteries.  I think I talked about the silent retreats I've been on.

I would spend time in conversation with the monks as well.  Asking them about their lives.  What life was like in the monastery.  The comparison to my own theological education as a pastor, and theirs as monks.

What I discovered was that there are two main qualities to a monk's training and my own as a Presbyterian pastor.  Those two differences are described by two words that came up in one of my conversations with one of the monks in Conception Abbey, a monastery up in northwest Missouri.

One word was meditatio.  It's a word that describes the practice of meditating slowly over the Biblical text in order to hold the text and be held by it.  When I was in seminary, we dissected the text.  We parsed the life out of it.  We translated the Hebrew and Greek.  We redacted the text, trying to find out if it was a gloss, an authentic saying, or whatnot.  We cut and pasted the text, especially the books of the law, into the J, E, P, and D traditions.  We used historical criticism, literary criticism, redaction criticism, and every other kind of criticism devised by theologians.  We read tomes upon tomes of what theologians thought about the text.

Are you understanding any of that?  Neither did I at the time.  And even though I did really well in seminary, I always felt like there was something missing.  Or that we were doing it wrong--the way we educate our pastors.

But I didn't know what it was, or how to put a finger on it until I had that conversation with the monk at Conception Abbey.  Meditatio.  We, unlike the monks, never came at the Biblical text with respect.  We never came at the Bible as if they were words that could hold us.  That they were words of power.  Words that deserved our lengthy contemplation.  That we weren't to just find out what others did with the words or thought about them.  But what we, caught up in the Spirit, as we respectfully held these words, could also find ourselves held by them.

The other word I learned was contemplatio.    Contemplatio is the soulful resting in the presence of the Divine Mystery.  What? I thought.  Mystery?  There are no mysteries in seminary.  If you just dissect things long enough, you can solve all mysteries.  For example, here's the mystery:  Who was Jesus of Nazareth?  Where and when I was at seminary, the mystery was solved.  When you dissect, and parse that question down, what you get is that the only thing we can know about Jesus is that he was an itinerant preacher who taught about the kingdom of God.  That's it.  Mystery solved.  Case closed.  Move along.

But after talking with the monk at Conception Abbey, I knew that was the other thing I missed in my theological and pastoral training.  Contemplatio, or contemplation.  Of not having to worry about my own theology of God, but simply resting in God's presence.  Of not worrying about solving the mystery of God, but just enjoying God.  Of learning how to prayerfully put my soul in God's hands and let go.

When I learned those two words, and the power of them, I was suddenly angry.  Angry at the way I had been educated to be a pastor.  Angry that we had it all wrong.  Angry that we are still cranking out ministers in a system that has lost touch with meditatio and contemplatio.  And thereby have lost touch with God.   I have been so thankful for that conversation with that monk over the years that have come and gone since having it.

Psalm 19, like my monk friend, is asking that we do the same thing.  Psalm 19 knows that we need to nurture our faith.  And that there are specific ways to nurture our faith that are helpful, rather than harmful.  Psalm 19 bids us enter the life of meditatio and contemplatio.

Psalm 19 is directing our meditatio and contemplatio in three different directions:  meditation of creation, meditation on the Law, or the Word of God, and meditation on our sin and God's forgiveness.  Let's take a look at all three.

First meditation on creation.  One of the first questions Psalm 19 forces us to ask is, What's the difference between pondering just creation vs. pondering God's  creation?

The great cello player, Pablo Casals, once wrote,
When I awake in the morning I go immediately to the sea, and everywhere I find God in the smallest and in the largest things.  I see Him in colors and designs and forms...The world is a miracle only God could make.  Think of how no two grains of sand are alike; how there is not one nose, one voice like another; how among billions and billions of living and non-living things in the Universe no two are exactly alike.  Who but God could do that?  God must be present all the time!  Nothing can take that from us!

There's the answer to that question.  We don't contemplate creation, says Psalm 19, just for creation's sake.  We aren't just trying to get in touch with the world around us--although that happens.  We are contemplating God.  We are trying to see God.  We are trying to touch the mystery behind creation.

You don't hear people say, "I feel closer to nature when I'm out in nature."  Instead, you hear them say, "I feel closer to God when I'm out in nature."  That's the difference.  It's a recognition of the silent God, says Psalm 19, who stands behind and within the beauty.  In nature, in all the vast beauty and magnificence of the universe, God is silently trying to woo us into attention of himself.

Some mice made their nest in a certain piano.  When they heard music, they decided to investigate.  One mouse came back to the nest and reported the music came from various lengths of wire.  Another mouse claimed the music came from the felted hammers that hit the wires.  The mice heard the music but they never saw the "invisible" pianist.  They weren't able to see the movement of the strings and hammers and deduce there was some one behind those movements.  Psalm 19 is bidding us see the artist behind the beauty of the world.  To contemplate not just that world, but the One who is the silent Aritist/Creator of it all.

Secondly, Psalm 19 bids us nurture our faith by meditating on the Law, or the Word of God.  One Bible commentator, D.T. Niles once said, "The Bible is a record of a conversation with God that has gone on for a long time and involved many different people.  When you read the Bible the right way, you'll find you are being drawn into that conversation."

That's the purpose of meditating on, or contemplating God's word.  It isn't so you can have knowledge about the Bible, or so you can understand the laws of God, or even gain an understanding of right and wrong.  Although all that will happen.  The purpose of meditating on the Word of God is to get pulled into that long line of conversation with God that has been going on since Day One.

A girl, just graduated from high school, was given a book as a gift.  One night, she skimmed through it, not really reading it, but trying to get a grasp of it to see if she wanted to read it or not.  The next morning she told her mother, "That's one of the dullest books I've ever tried to read."  So she left the unmemorable book on her book shelf.

Flash forward.  When in college she had a professor who ignited her imagination and curiosity.  Half way through the semester she alarmingly discovered this professor was the author of the "boring" book she had received when she graduated from high school.  She had her parents send her the book.  She read it carefully from cover to cover.  She told her professor that it was one of the best books she had ever read.

What was the difference in the first reading and the second?  She had come to know the author.  That's what made all the difference.

When you look at the words Psalm 19 uses to describe God's word--words like law, rules, precepts, commands, judgements--we recoil, thinking, "Ugh, who wants to think about all that?"   But knowing the Author makes all the difference.  That's what makes meditating on the Law, on God's Word, all worth it.  Our contemplations put us in touch with the God behind the precepts, commands, and rules.

And in those we come closer to God.  By coming closer to God we find out that they aren't just a bunch of boring rules, but signposts, life maps, directions and guidance for how God feels life is lived at it's best.  The Law of God only makes sense when you know God, have a relationship with God.  So meditating on the Word of God, as Psalm 19 suggests, is a way to find ourselves deeper and deeper into the mystery of the person of God, and direction for life in God.

Lastly, Psalm 19 is bidding us to meditate on our sin, the awareness of when we do sin, and asking God to take care of the times when we sin "without knowing it."  One of the main things to notice here is that David switches to personal pronouns:  I, me.  In the first two-thirds of Psalm 19, David is teaching the readers about what he feels  is important about God in creation, and God in the Law.  Then, here in the last third, in talking about sin, David doesn't use generalities.  He brings it home to himself.  Whenever we contemplate, or meditate upon sin, it always has to come back to our own self-awareness.

St. Ignatius Loyola started the Jesuit order of priests and monks.  It wasn't easy going at first.  There were a lot of people in the Catholic church at that time who were skeptical of Ignatius' new order.  There were false rumors that the Jesuits were nothing more than charlatans and magicians.  But a lot of Ignatius' rule has to do with fierce self-examination.

One of the officials who went to investigate the new order came back to report.  He was asked, "Did they not show you monsters or devils?"
"Worse than that," said the investigating official.  "They showed me myself."

Any contemplation of sin, no matter how general, must make us use pronouns as David did:  I, me.  But that's not where it ends as we meditate upon our sin.  Any consciousness of our personal sin must bring us into the wide arms of God's grace and forgiveness.  We don't meditate about sin and then beat ourselves up.  That's not God's intention, David says in his personal words about sin in this Psalm.

A hospice chaplain described one patient she was dealing with.  He asked the chaplain to call his family in, because he thought he was close to death.  When they were all together in the waiting room, the patient asked the chaplain to go out and ask them all to forgive him for something that happened 17 years previously.  She went out and passed the message on and the family burst into tears.

They went into the man's room, and they were all holding hands and crying when the chaplain left them.  She said, "The man died the next day, and I never knew what the secret was that kept him alive until he had his family's forgiveness.  No one wants to die until all the unfinished business of their lives is settled," she said.  "And usually it's a matter of forgiveness."

That's the reason Psalm 19 bids us contemplate our sin.  It's so we can then contemplate something even greater, which is the loving forgiveness of that sin.  What we desire most is to be finally, and ultimately free of it by the grace of God.  That beautiful release can only happen by the power and forgiveness of God

When missionaries first went to the Eskimo people, they couldn't find a word that meant "forgiveness" in the Eskimo language.  So they had to create a compound word.  That word turned out to be, "issumagijoujungnainermik" (the word on your bulletin).  Quite a word, eh?  I challenge anyone to pronounce it.  It's actually a combination of words that literally, in the Eskimo language, means, "Not being able to think about it anymore."

That's the great aspect of sin and forgiveness that Psalm 19 bids us contemplate.  We have to be conscious of our sin, yes.  But more importantly, once confessed it is even more important to be conscious of how God has not only forgiven that sin, but doesn't think about it anymore.  Our forgiven sin does not affect our ongoing relationship with God, because it's not even on God's mind.  So why is it on ours?  Let it go.  Contemplate that letting go forgiveness.


Meditation on creation, and the glory of God in that creation.  Contemplation on the guiding Word of God, and the sign posts and direction God gives in that Word.  Contemplation on our sin and the amazing Grace of God that remembers our sin no more.  We probably need to meditate on all three, but maybe not all at once.  At different times in our lives we need to concentrate on one over the others.  They all bring us back to God, which is the point of this great Psalm.

David's Pyramid of Needs

"David's Pyramid Of Needs"
Psalm 36:5-10


Maybe you’ve heard about the “hierarchy of needs.”  It’s an idea developed by a psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow.  It’s usually demonstrated in the shape of a pyramid.

Simply put, we need to be able to move from bottom to top if we are going to become, what Maslow called, a “self-actualized” human being.  It’s hard to reach the peak of your potential as a person if you haven’t met some of the lower needs--if you’re starving to death, for example.  It’s hard to have a sense of self-esteem if you have no friends or intimate relationships.

So we start at the bottom.  A person is at-risk, so-to-speak, if they don’t have the very basic necessities of life:  food, water, air.  Those are the things we need just to be able to exist.  No way to go any higher on the pyramid if you’re dying of thirst, or have absolutely nothing to eat.

Once you have those very basic needs met, then you need a sense of security.  You need shelter.  You need to be out of harm’s way.  You can be well fed, but if you’re homeless and have to sleep outside, that’s not going to help you move up the pyramid.

So you get the idea.  This has been used by missionary teams that I know of who have worked in places like the refugee camps in Uganda, Tanzania or Kenya.  Thousands upon thousands of people pour over these boarders, trying to get away from mass, tribal genocide in their own countries.  These refugees are just trying to get some place where they can get their most basic needs met.  Missionaries going into these refugee camps don’t immediately start preaching Jesus.  It’s hard to hear the gospel when the growling of your hungry stomach is so loud.

On one mission trip, I worked for an organization in the San Joaquin valley in California.  This organization went around and got all the excess fruit (peaches and nectarines when I was there), dried them, packed them into big white buckets, and shipped them to some of those refugee camps.

One batch was sent to Sierra Leone.  It’s predominantly a Muslim country.  Some of the fruit we packed, along with soup mix, and other food stuffs were sent to this refugee camp.  After a month of doing nothing but receiving food, these Muslim refugees came to the missionaries and said, “We want to hear about your Jesus Christ.  You Christians were the only ones who fed us when we were starving.  Not even our Muslim brethren did that.”

So there’s a lot to be said about a kind of evangelism that is aware of and takes care of people’s basic needs--those on the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid--before worrying about the needs on the upper tiers.



One of the things that caught my attention about this Psalm, and I don’t know if David intended it to be this way, is that his pyramid of needs is very different.  If we take verse 5, 6 and the first part of verse 7 as the bottom, most basic tier of the needs pyramid, what we have there is God’s immense love, loyalty, and purpose.  Without that as our base, nothing else works or makes sense.  Without that as our base, anything else we build on top of that will not hold.

Let’s take a look at this bottom tier, and then work our way up.  What we’re going to find is that David reverses what Maslow eventually came up with.  We’ll have to decide which pyramid of needs holds more validity.

God’s love, loyalty and purpose.  We know that God’s love is the basis for David’s pyramid, because he mentions it here in verse 5, 7 and 10.  Whenever you see something about God mentioned a number of times, you need to pay attention.  David is letting us know that God’s amazing and massively huge love is vital to all he’s saying in this Psalm.

God’s love is as far reaching as it is from earth to the heavens.  God’s loyalty is as boundless and boarderless as it is from the earth to the clouds.

The heavens, is the term David uses.  It’s not heaven, like we think of as Christians, that place where the Lord’s followers go after death.  It’s the heavens.  The heavens, for David was the great expanse of the universe.  It was what he would lay down in the grass at night time, when out with the sheep, looking up through clear, dark skies to the stars.  The Milky Way spread out like sugared butter on a piece of well-toasted bread.  From horizon to horizon, the wide open spaces of space.  That’s how David described the height and breadth of God’s love.

In classic, Hebrew poetic fashion, David layers image upon image, building a picture of God’s amazing character.  David takes God’s love which is spread out like the heavens, and layers that with God’s loyalty which is large enough to fit into the space between the earth and the clouds.  See how those two go together?  David will use that imagery scheme throughout this Psalm--each line progressing, building, complimenting the one before it until we are overwhelmed by God.

David further describes God’s love and faithfulness as steadfast or constant.  That is there is a persistent quality to God’s love.  It keeps coming at us.  It keeps following us.  It keeps trying to get our attention.

In Men’s Bible Study we are looking at Psalm 23.  This past Wednesday we were looking at the phrase, “...your goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life.”  There is this theme that David takes up so often, that our God is a persistent God who follows us, who keeps coming at us, who keep enveloping our lives with love and faithfulness.  We will never be able to get away from it, just as we will never be able to get away from the largeness of the universe we find ourselves in.

“Where can I run from your presence?” David asked God in Psalm 139.  Then David answers the question for God:
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the world of the dead, you are there.
If I rise with the sun in the east
and settle in the west beyond the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me.  (vs.. 7-10)
God’s persistent, all present love is as basic, or more necessary than the air we breathe.



Let’s move up to the next tier in David’s pyramid of needs in Psalm 36.  The next tier, up, is protection and refuge.  The image is that of a mother hen covering her chicks with her wings against harm.

As Jesus was making his way into Jerusalem, where he would be crucified, he stops on the Mount of Olives, looks across and says, “How many times I wanted to put my arms around all your people, just as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would not let me!” (Matthew 23:37).

God’s love for us, which is the first level of the pyramid, leads God to be a protective God.  A God whose love is a refuge of safety where we can go when life is hard, and cruel and mean.  We are kept in a safe place by God because His love is so strong, so settled, so secure.  There is no security like the security of being loved with a love like that--a love that we know for sure is not going anywhere, or become unsettled.

When I was out in Leoti, I worked with a junior high kid whose mother told him nearly every day that she wished he was someone else’s kid; that he wasn’t her son; that she wished he could just go away and live with someone else.

One of his teachers screamed at him every day because he never got his homework done.  She’d stand over him, yelling, “What’s wrong with you?  Why can’t you just get your assignments done?”  I finally took her aside and told her this boy is floundering, not because he can’t do his homework.  He can.  He’s able.  He’s just got an unsettled love he’s having to deal with at home.  He’s worrying about something much more basic--whether anyone in this world loves him.  Homework is the least of his worries.  He’s got to settle the love question before he’ll be able to do anything else.

God’s love is that refuge.  That place of security.  God’s love are those mother hen wings that are opened up over us that we always know will be there.  Once we have that love question settled, then we have that sense of security that, “Hey, I’m loved, and I can deal with all the other stuff in life.”

The third level of David’s pyramid of needs is the food and drink.  But for David, and especially for God, food is not just for keeping you alive.  Food and drink are for celebrating.  This phrase that David uses to describing “feasting on the abundant food you provide,” in the Hebrew literally means to “enjoy the fat.”  What David literally said was, “We ‘enjoy the fat’ the you provide.”  The fat was the best, the most flavorful part of the meat.  The best cuts of meat are marbled with fat.  The fat is the best.

As we look at David’s pyramid and move our way up it, we see how it all fits.  We are immersed in the expanse of God’s love and loyal faithfulness.  Because of that love we feel protected, secure and safe.  And because of God safe-place-love, we want to party.  We want to feast.  We want to celebrate what God has provided.  And when we feast we want to eat the best there is to eat.  We want to drink, not just plain water, but water that has been dipped from “the river of God’s goodness.”

When Jesus talked about what the Kingdom of God would be like, what image did he use most often?  A feast!  Look in Luke 15.  Several parables of things or people who were lost.  When the lost was found, how did they celebrate?  They had a feast!  Food isn’t, as Maslow had it, just for staying alive.  Food and drink are for celebrating all the goodness and love that comes from God.

At the top of David’s pyramid of needs is the Fountain of Life.  On Maslow’s pyramid of needs, what he calls “self-actualization” is at the top.  That is, reaching your fullest self-potential.  But for David, the top of the pyramid has nothing to do with the individual.  The top of David’s pyramid is God and being fully immersed in the person of God--what David calls the fountain of life.

Several times in the book of Jeremiah, God calls himself “the fountain of living waters.”  When Jesus has the conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, in John 4, Jesus tells her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (4:10).

To go through all the different levels that David laid out in this psalm is to reach life--life as God meant it to be lived:  in God’s love and faithfulness; safe and secure in a God who covers us when the world is throwing rocks of hate and meanness; life like a feast of fat.  Life, a fountain of life, because life is God.

The Voice Of The Lord

"The Voice Of The Lord"
Psalm 29


In 1992 I went with a tour group on a trip to the Holy Land and Egypt.  I’ve used one of my holy moment experiences in a previous sermon.

We spent a couple of days in Jerusalem, which were not enough.  I could have spent a whole month, just in Jerusalem.  I still probably wouldn’t have seen everything there is to see.

One night my best friend and I were trying to find an English speaking TV channel in our hotel room so we could catch some news.  While on a tour like that, we fell into an information void, unaware of anything that was happening in the world.

We finally got a fuzzy, English speaking channel with a guy doing the weather report.  We were used to TV weather reporters standing in front of a blue screen, showing maps of the jet stream, clever rain cloud graphics, and high and low pressure systems screaming or stalling across our nation.  Not this guy.  He was standing in front of a chalk board with the word Weather written across it.  His report looked like it was being filmed in his basement.

He said, “Well, we have some weather coming.  Big storm coming across the Mediterranean Sea.  Lots of clouds and whirly stuff.”  Then he made a swirling motion like he was stirring a big pot stew.  “Nasty stuff,” he continued.  The word “stuff” was used a lot; I had never heard that word used technically in a weather report like this guy was.  “Clouds, and rain, and whoosh; stuff like that,” he said.  “Could be some snow.  But not to worry!  It’s only weather!”  My friend Jay and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  “It’s only weather!” we said in unison.

“It’s only weather” turned out to be the worst snow storm Jerusalem had seen in 50 years.  About a foot of very wet snow shut down the city.  Over laden tree branches broke off pulling down power lines.  The sound of the popping branches was scary, since we had seen teenagers in Israeli army uniforms driving around all over the city in military jeeps with automatic rifles strapped to their shoulders.  The breaking branches sounded like gunfire.

The city was immobilized for the day.  What the PLO had tried to do on several occasions to Jerusalem, God did in a one night storm.  Brought all the mighty powers to their knees.  simply through moving air, and frozen water crystals.  “It’s only weather” became our catch phrase for that trip whenever anything bad or upsetting happened.

David, the writer of Psalm 29, must have seen a few of these kinds of storms blow through the country.  In the imagery of this Psalm, it isn’t a winter snow storm.  It’s a summer thunder storm.  A tornado kind of thunder storm.  A Greensburg kind of storm.  A storm like a gigantic vacuum cleaner that knocks everything down, then sucks it up, leaving a clean strip behind it.  Not even things tied down, anchored or rooted withstand that kind of storm.

What’s unsettling about David’s storm imagery is not just the imagery.  But what the imagery is describing:  God’s Voice.  God’s Voice is like that storm.  An F5 kind of Voice that is scary and pummeling, and that people get into shelters to hide from.  “It’s only weather,” becomes, “It’s only God’s Voice.”  And suddenly that which we laugh off becomes scary devastation.  We say we want to hear God’s Voice, but we have no idea that what we’re desiring will utterly blow us away if we were to hear it.

The book of Psalms has been called the church’s prayer book.  If these Psalms teach us to pray, we need to pay attention to what they teach us about the God to whom we pray.  We need to pay attention to what these Psalms teach us about prayer and worship.

What we learn about God from Psalm 29, the God to whom we pray, may be too much for most people.

First, we learn that God is a revealing God.  As opposed to the mystery religions and the fertility cults that other tribal people were involved with outside of Israel, the God of Israel wanted to be known.  God wants to be understood.  God wants relationship with the world and the people of the world.  God doesn’t want to stand aloof and apart, like the Greek gods up on Mount Olympus.  Our God reveals himself in direct ways.

Usually, God does that in the march of history.  When people needed a sense of connection with God in the present moment, they would first look back to times in history, when God revealed himself in some act of salvation.  “We remember when you did this, and this and this, O God...Do that again, now!” the people would pray.

In Psalm 29, God reveals himself, reveals his Voice, in acts of nature.  One of the characteristics of God that I’ve tried to emphasize in my messages is that God’s speaking is His main activity.  When God speaks, when God uses His Voice, things happen.  When we speak, a bunch of words come out, but not much happens.  Adlai Stevenson once said that the media are the people who separate the wheat from the chaff and then report the chaff.  That seems to be what happens most when we speak--a lot of chaff comes out.

Or there’s the story of Thomas Jefferson, who submitted his draft of the Declaration of Independence to some friends for editorial review.  Jefferson quickly was getting anxious about all the red marks they were making all over his draft.  Benjamin Franklin noticed Jefferson’s anxiety and told him a story.

When he was a young man, Franklin had a friend who had completed an apprenticeship as a hatter.  He was ready to open his own business.  He wanted a great signboard in front of the shop.  He had a design drawn up that showed a picture of a hat, and over the picture it read, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money.”  He showed some of his friends the design and asked them what they thought.

The first one remarked that “hatter” was unnecessary, since “makes and sells hats” already showed the nature of the business.  The second person pointed out that “makes” could be left off the sign, since customers were unlikely to be interested in who made the hats.  The third friend said that since it was not the custom to sell on credit, the words “for ready money” were unnecessary.  Finally, one of the friends said it seemed unnecessary to have the word “hats” on the sign, since there was the picture of a hat.  So the signboard eventually read, “John Thompson” with a picture of a hat under his name.

When Thomas Jefferson heard Franklin’s story, he smiled and let the editors continue their work on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.

As I mentioned in my message a couple of weeks ago, that’s what we do as human beings.  We spew out a lot of words, most of which are truly unnecessary and effect nothing.  But what we find out about God and God’s Voice is that God’s revelation of himself, through His Voice, always has an effect.  God is a God who reveals himself through a Voice, that every time that Voice sounds there is a startling impact.

What is amazing about God’s Voice in this Psalm, though, is that God speaks no words.  God’s Voice is just pure sound, like music, or a musical note.  God doesn’t utter any commands like in the creation story in Genesis.  There is just Voice.  Just sound.  And look at the results of that Voice:  echoes over the ocean roar, destruction of cedar trees, mountains skip and jump, lightning flashes, deserts tremble, forests are stripped bare of their leaves.

This revealing Voice of God, the sound of God, is pure, raw power, like a clear perfect note from a trumpet.  Our God is a God with a Voice--a voice of threatening, overwhelming power.

David tells how God’s Voice shatters the cedars.  Let’s get a proper picture of what David is saying.  You may have seen bunches of those pesky cedar trees growing in pastures as you drive along.  Most are Christmas tree sized.  If you are thinking that is the kind of cedar tree God is blowing over, you’d be wrong.  The cedars of Lebanon David is picturing are up to 130 feet tall.  They are 8 feet in diameter.  We are talking about mammoth trees that were used to build ships, palaces, and temples.  That is the unbelievable power of God’s revealing Voice that David is describing.

In the book, Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the children asks Mr. Beaver about Aslan the Lion, who is the Christ-figure in the book.  One of the children asks if Aslan is safe. The reply (p. 75-76) is well worth considering:
Mr. Beaver replied, “If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than me or else just silly.”
“Then he isn't safe?” asked Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

That’s what David is telling us about our God in Psalm 29.  Our God, and God’s Voice are not safe.  God is the King.  And as our King, who has a Voice that can shatter mammoth cedar trees, demands our ultimate respect.

That leads to the other thing we learn from this Psalm: authentic worship.  As the opening verses of the Psalm say, the best thing we can do is “Honor” and “Acclaim” the glory, power, and the name of the LORD.

God’s name is spoken in this Psalm 18 times in eleven verses.  That should tell us something about who this Psalm is about.  More importantly, it should give us a clue about what our relationship to the name of God is to be about.

To honor and acclaim someone else is to approach them as the superior.  It is to come before them in humility, recognizing there is a gulf between you and them.  That gulf in the psalm is called holiness and glory.  There is so much holiness emanating from God that our only response is to fall on our face and not look.

God told a number of people in the Old Testament that they could not look at Him and live.  The reason is that there is so much holiness and glory about God, that if we looked at God we would see how far from God we are, how tainted we are, how utterly human and unholy we really are.  Finally and utterly seeing the difference between ourselves and God would be too much for us.  It would kill us.  That’s the level of humility with which we need to enter the presence of God in worship.  Worship is a humbling experience.

Also, in this Psalm, notice all the energy that is generated by the presence of God.  That’s a huge part of what worship is about--putting ourselves in God’s overpowering presence, which then infects us in a positive way with an unbelievable passion and zeal for God.

Worship is not something we do on a horizontal level, from people to people.  It’s from God downward, and from us Godward.  It is coming into worship expecting something awesome to happen.  But not something that is superficial, or that we manufacture.  It is the scary tiptoeing into the presence of God who just might, with His Voice, blow…...you…...away.

In her book, Teaching a Stone To Talk, Annie Dillard wrote:
Why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Almighty?… Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?… It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. (page 40)

Worship is about tiptoeing into the presence of God, trembling for dear life, requesting to hear the Voice of God, while all the time realizing that if that request were granted, and a sound came out of the Voice of God there is the chance we would be shattered, moved like a mountain, or stripped bare of everything that we thought we were, all that we surrounded ourselves with for protection.

Worship is the act of falling on our faces, realizing our God is an awesome God, a fearful God, with a powerful sounding Voice.  And the best way to worship that God is to honor Him as God, and give God glory with everything we do and say.