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.