Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126
I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends. Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God. It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge. We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us. We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.
So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it. If we can do that. If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.
Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent." They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm: that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.
From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up. They are ascending. The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built. The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem. They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120. As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.
Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors. The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in. It was all quite dramatic.
Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement. The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God. These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.
William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote: "They are not monuments but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.' While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"
Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause. At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade. They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.
A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California. And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.
We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move. Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college. What was I going to do? Where was I going? What shape would the ministry take for me in the future? I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.
So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that. I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose. Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future. To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice. It was a Psalm 126 time for me.
In just those three days I was able to do some assessment. I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places. I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.
And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time. To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace. All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been. I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my journey.
Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details. For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm. This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.
Verses 1-3 are in the past tense: God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang. This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm. In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians. Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Past and future of a culture seemed gone. Revenge seemed the only response.
But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves. The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home. God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.
So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction. Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through. And it is to God that the processing people give the glory: "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."
At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense: "we are glad." Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.
Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion. The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present. Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.
Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense: will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing. The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do. If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future? NO! As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."
The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful. Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel. A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape. I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures: 129 degrees! Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there. But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring. Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley. People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.
That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.
The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming. It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation. All the farmers I know plant in hope. Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different. The hope of a good harvest.
The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro. With a sense of aimlessness. Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway. Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.
Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future: from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.
The future of God is filled with laughter. Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us. Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."
God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace. God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried. When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair. God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be. God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.
We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter. We never know exactly where to look. In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find." I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives. If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.
One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."
The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress. She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.
Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes. They are standing in perfect choral formation.
In the background are the men, solemn and removed. Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance. Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.
The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like. The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?
All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled. That is, all except one. In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey. With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.
In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey. It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.
It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God. Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.
If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.
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