The scriptural stories and prayers offer no spectators’ vista, no safe seats in the back from which we can quietly slip out just before the show wraps up. Instead, they immerse us in the drama of salvation, improvising with God and our neighbors the plot twists of being human. Our obsession with ourselves, in our modern western world, has sought to subdue story, to make it subservient to self—to self-help and self-actualization. But herein lies the genius of the library of the scriptures, stories that are true, resist our domesticating and dominating impulses. The individual psalms are not ahistorical prayers, each “applicable” or “relevant’ to every experience or feeling. Rather, are a call to receive the gift of salvation, renewal of our selves through recognizing and relinquishing our selves—that which the scriptures call repentance.

Because the stories in the Bible refuse to serve us, they refuse to valorize us as the hero and so we have to assume other roles—we play the villain, the victim, those who don’t see the whole picture. Psalm 41 is a good exercise in reading the Bible well. There will be times that call for us to read it at face value, to read it from the vantage point of the narrator, to echo his prayers, and to receive his word as witness. And there will be times, likely more frequent, that call for us to soberly acknowledge that we are the one’s who have done harm. We have looked on others in malice wishing ill upon them (v. 5). We have hearts that gather slander (v. 6) soaking it in so that we can gleefully spread gossip (v. 6, 8). We have hated those who have placed feasts before us (v. 9).

David ends with a plea for mercy so that he can enact vengeance (v. 10). But God is far too merciful for that. Instead of giving into our demands for retribution, God will send revelation. Jesus reveals both God and humanity fully. Jesus unveils God brimming with beauty and grace and how to be human in a light so fierce. And at the same time how readily we lift up our heels against the one who handed us the bread of his body, broken for us.

Jesus’ integrity upholds him in the crossfire of our treacheries because he draws from the everlasting well of God’s good pleasure (v. 11)—this is my son with whom I am well-pleased (Matthew 3v17). Jesus’ enemies cannot triumph over him (v.11) because he refuses to hate them—forgive them father for they know not what they do (Luke 23v34). Jesus will be kept in the presence of God forever (v. 12) because he is the eternal word of doxology—it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him (Acts 2v24).

To read the story well is to be honest about our part in it. Jesus assumes our role of brokenness and blasphemy so that we can assume his role of blessedness and blessing. This story will not serve us but it will set us free.

Photo by Serrah Galos.

Fearless Trust

Psalm 27 invites us to a glimpse of a well-worn, mature faith. These words are not those of one freshly afoot on the road of life with God. These words are the embodiment of the image of the tree in Psalm 1, a life firmly rooted in God, watered by past experiences of God’s salvation, by the promises and hope of what the Lord has said. David writes as one well-schooled in the art of trusting God.

Perhaps most striking about David’s assurance is that chaos seems to be the vantage point from which he prays. He describes his circumstances with images of vandal hordes descending and all hell breaking loose (vv.2-3). David’s increased depth of trust and hope in God has not resulted in a diminishing of the very real threats that plague him. But David’s trust has reframed everything. In the midst of this anarchy, David is “calm as a baby, collected and cool” (vv.2-3). 

There is something so radically this-worldly about the shape the hope Psalm 27 invites us into. The pain and the danger are real but so is the reality that God is inviting us into counter-rhythms that syncopate the cadences of chaos with order and beauty. Two important practices stand out within the context of the psalm. He writes in vv.4-5:

I’m asking God for one thing,
only one thing:
To live with him in his house
my whole life long.
I’ll contemplate his beauty;
I’ll study at his feet.

1. Contemplative Prayer

First, David invites us to the disciplines of contemplative prayer, silence and solitude. David’s world much, much like our own, moves at a frenzied pace. We are constantly being discipled by the antichrist rhythms of noise, notifications, news, and the normalization of violence. David knows that the only response is to retreat. A retreat not away from this world but a retreat into the refuge of God’s presence. Thomas Merton writes that when Christians forsake contemplation they substitute the “truth of life” for “fiction and mythology” bringing about the “alienation of the believer, so that his [sic] religious zeal becomes political fanaticism.”  David instead of leaning into the madness, embraces silence and solitude. He writes of the presence of God:

 That’s the only quiet, secure place
in a noisy world,
The perfect getaway,
far from the buzz of traffic.

2. Immersive Worship

Second, David immerses himself in worship both private and communal. Even on the way to church, he’s already singing his own songs:

I’m headed for his place to offer anthems
that will raise the roof!
Already I’m singing God-songs;
I’m making music to God.

Worship is the eruption of joy and gratitude, not a response fueled by emotivism, but a quiet resolve to contemplate what God has done and to voice heartfelt thanksgiving for it. Worship is the antidote to our own poisonous obsession with self, our propensity to live at the mercy of our circumstances and our ever-changing whims. Worship in the face of great trial is not a denial of our situation. Rather it is God’s invitation to to view the world from his own vantage point, to be with God and find that in all things he is drawing near to us.

This Exuberant Earth

David expresses one final plea, “You’ve always been right there for me; don’t turn your back on me now. Don’t throw me out, don’t abandon me; you’ve always kept the door open” (vv. 9-10). He asks for guidance, he needs God to show him the way. He writes:

Point me down your highway, God;
direct me along a well-lighted street;

And he ends his prayer in one final, resolved, steadfast, radically hopeful expression of trust. Again, what’s remarkable about this ending stanza is that this resolution is not reserved for another life. He finds hope right here in the midst of the confines of this world, this place, amongst these people and these circumstances. He knows that God won’t quit on him and so, grizzled veteran of faith and trust in God that he is, he won’t quit on God. He holds fast to the hope that God’s goodness will reveal itself again, right here in this “exuberant earth.” Don’t quit. God is faithful. In the beautiful translation of Eugene Peterson:

I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness
in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
Take heart. Don’t quit.
I’ll say it again:
Stay with God.

Read Psalm 25

Psalm 25 is an exercise in contrast. David is struggling, burdened by the consequences of his sin. The gravity of his guilt is like a millstone around his neck. He cries out :

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.^[1]vv. 16-18

The consequences of his decisions have laid a heavy burden upon him. Crushed under the weight of his guilt, unable to move, David remembers another way. He considers the ways of the Lord:

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.  Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O LORD!  Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.  He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.  All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.^[2]vv.6-10

Maybe you have been here. Stuck, heavy-laden by the accumulation of your own sin. It’s an impossible place to be in. Walking through the world feels like you are walking on the ocean floor with intense pressure compressing your very soul. And its here at the moment when our soul feels the heaviest that its actually the lightest. David says:

To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.

Lifting our souls to God from the depths is not like Atlas lifting the world. In lifting our souls to God we find that the Lord is not a pallbearer struggling to hoist our unwieldy, oaken casket.  Rather, his mercy makes our struggles as light as a feather. He does not downplay our rebellions or make them out to be somehow less than they are. Rather, he exhausts them by taking the weight upon his shoulders, thus emptying sin of all its weight. We can lift our souls to the Lord when we can’t even lift one foot in front of the other because he has made known to us his ways, and his way is easy and his burden is light.

Lift Your Soul

Are you weary? Are you heavy laden? Does each day feel like you carry the weight of the world? Lift your soul to the God of your salvation. Wait on him.

If you were to turn on the news, there is very little in the way of observable data that would suggest that an all-powerful, all-loving God currently presides over the world as its one true sovereign.  Leave the events that the news details aside, would a loving God really suffer the inanity that floods the airwaves of the 24/7 news programs?    If we were to accept the notion that there was some integrating force to the disparate, chaotic nonsense that saturates the front pages of every news website, it would seem any thoughtful person would conclude that this ruler is quite terrible at the business of actually governing the world.  And yet, in the biblical narrative, almost hidden between the astounding resurrection of Christ at the end of each gospel account and the birth of the church in Acts 2 is an event that gives clarity and shape to both events, an event largely ignored by the western Church:  the ascension of Jesus.

Yes, the biblical claim is that Jesus sits at the right hand of God almighty, enthroned as the world’s true Lord reigning right now.  So what on earth is he doing up there?  What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord in the here and now?  First, let’s examine some distortions of this claim.  The Epicureans were the descendants of the philosopher Epicurus.  Although this perspective later came to be associated with wanton pleasure-seeking, Epicurus did not promote this sort of behavior.  Epicurus merely taught that the gods, whomever they are, exist in eternal bliss and are unaffected and disinterested in the affairs of mortals.  His legacy found its most influential expression in the Enlightenment in what was referred to as deism, essentially that God was an eternal watchmaker that built the timepiece, put the battery in it and left it to function however it would.  Thomas Jefferson famously claimed to be an Epicurean.   In a letter written late in his life to William Short, he wrote:

Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. – Thomas Jefferson, October, 1819

Notice, for Jefferson it is Epicurus who tells us how to govern ourselves, Jesus is just a nice add-on.  Separation of church and state, if you will.  As NT Wright often points out this is the fundamental assumption of the Enlightenment that God is the ruler of heaven and he stays up there and leaves the governance of the earth to humans.  Jesus is Lord thus implies the dualism that Jesus is Lord of the heavenly realm but can hardly be bothered with intervention in the earthly sphere.

The second distortion of the claim Jesus is Lord touches less upon politics and more upon theodicy and providence.  The Stoics, a philosophical school which gained prominence in the early centuries of the common era Roman Empire, share a lot of similar convictions to Christians.  There are even apocryphal letters, fabrications of later history, between Seneca and Paul. For the Stoics, for women and men to allow their emotions and impulses to govern their behavior is the height of vice and results not in freedom but the debasement of what it means to be human.  The stoics believed that the world was initially constructed out of divine matter (Gk. pneuma meaning “spirit”) and that eventually the world would be dissolved by the deity into primeval fire.  For the stoics, all of existence was an expression of the divine will, they were pantheists for whom the divine operated in every occurrence of nature and human interaction, and thus everything truly happened “for a reason.”

For Jesus to be “Lord” in the biblical sense did not entail either of these trajectories.  He was neither the Lord of heaven alone and subsequent absent landlord of earth nor the micromanager of the cosmos.  Jesus’ lordship like, it seems, all of the most hallowed and beautiful Christian claims is a paradox.  A paradox of distance and nearness.  In the distortions of Epicureanism and Stoicism we see an overemphasis upon one element of the truth but the Gospel continually shows itself capable of holding seemingly disparate parts in concert together.  Jesus’ lordship is one of distance, transcendence.  His resurrection has affirmed him as the world’s true Lord, the king of kings to which all earthly authorities will give accounting for their stewardship over their peoples and resources.  Paul describes this present reality in Ephesians 1:

20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Jesus is enthroned, he is the one to whom all owe allegiance.  But he is not simply ruling elsewhere.  I think the temptation here is to think of Jesus’ reign in terms of some of our cultural stories like Tolkien’s Return of the King where the deposed sovereign works to reoccupy their rightful throne that is currently subsumed by dark forces.  For the biblical timeline, Jesus has already done the work of deposing evil on the cross, by absorbing the full weight of sin and death and exhausting their powers.  The ascension is Jesus’ sabbath rest after recreating the world, he sits down at the right hand of the Father and beckons the whole world to enter into his rest.  Jesus is risen and reigning, resting in the completion of his fulfillment of all righteousness.  Right now.

His Lordship means transcendence, but to be truly transcendent is to transcend every distance.  He is near.  He is God with us, the one who will never leave us or forsake us, in the heights of heaven or the depths of sheol, he is there.  There is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from his gracious presence.  Jesus’ reign is not that of an  austere demagogue signing executive orders from heaven but the loving shepherd leading and walking alongside his people, even in the valley of the shadow of death, even to the end of the age.

Distance and nearness.  Power and pathos.  As Christians we are called to live out this paradox, as witnesses to the Lordship of Christ, in the worlds that we walk in.  Jesus’ has exercised his sovereignty in emptying himself fully entrusting his life in the hands of the Father.  He has given us his divine Spirit to do the same.  It may seem a tautology but we can live out the Lordship of Jesus because Jesus is Lord.  We enact and embody his power whenever we, together as church communities, embody the alternative Kingdom, when we refuse the pragmatics of party politics and instead bear unique prophetic witness even at great cost to self.  We embody his power when our we receive the grace of his rule and our lives and words announce the resurrection and reign of King Jesus.   We incarnate the nearness of our God when we suffer on behalf of the world.  We find strength, hope, joy, and yes, even resurrection in those places because our God, King Jesus, is with us always.

The rest of Acts bears witness to the Lordship of Jesus.  The mysterious Spirit of God descends upon the people enabling them to live out this Lordship.  They respond not by grasping for power but rather by bearing witness:  praising God, delighting in the words of Scripture and the surprising and beautiful story they tell about Jesus, sharing their stuff, taking care of widows, healing the sick, proclaiming the reality of the resurrection, and bearing prophetic witness to the emissaries of the Roman governor that Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.

Envision the route that you travel to church each week. Maybe you drive past suburban strip malls and dozens of other churches. Perhaps you navigate the subways, hoping not to see a rat playing on the tracks and hurrying past homeless people who somehow managed to survive another night. Now think about the space you meet in to worship. Perhaps you meet in a sleek, refurbished warehouse, maybe you meet in a school cafeteria or someone’s home. Maybe you even meet in a building that was designed for the sole purpose of being a church. Whether you travel by foot, car, or train and whether you meet in a comedy club or a traditional church building there is a striking dissonance that confronts us all as we enter the doors to worship.

The earth is the Lord’s and and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.

This is the claim of Psalm 24. The worshipper, upon entering the temple of Solomon, hears this big opening chord resounding, inviting her to worship. But then she thinks about her journey, even to arrive at the temple. How could all of it, all of the things she has seen, all of the places she traversed, all of the people she crossed paths with—how could it all of it be the Lord’s? It doesn’t add up. Some of it seemed so mundane, some of it so painfully commercial, some of it just plain evil. And then the people. So many people going about their days, so many of them with no thought of God or existence. They belong to the Lord?

The world that we live in and the world of worship seem like two completely different worlds altogether. But there it is right there, the earth is the Lord’s, not some other place, not heaven, this place, this town, this neighborhood, these people.

So how do we begin to reconcile these two worlds? Psalm 24 presents us with a radical reorienting of our imagination and a subsequent way of walking in the world. First, we have to allow our imaginations to be recalibrated. The questions, presented in call-and-response fashion at the end of the psalm are not questions seeking an answer but rhetorical questions inviting remembrance. “Who is the King of glory?” Who is the king that can hold under his reign the world that we just walked through and the world of worship? Who is the king that doesn’t further separate them into secular and sacred but harmonizes them? The answer given is the same answer given to Moses when he asks the blazing bush, who should I say has sent me? The divine name—the Lord. To declare that the Lord is Lord of all of existence is not to exercise blind faith but to shape our imaginations to the mold of the kingdom. Worship is a discipline of seeing that changes the way we view everything.

Second, how do we live in a world such as this? When we walk out of the doors, squinting in the bright sunlight with our minds freshly challenged to see in a new way,does it change anything about how we actually live? The psalmist tell us that the ones who will stand in his holy place are those who “have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.” Many have thought clean hands and pure hearts required avoidance, like Pilate constantly washing his hands of the world. But Jesus shows us that the path towards purity of heart and hand is not avoidance, rather it is incarnation. Clean hands and pure hearts are not the product of avoiding stain from the world. They are hands that bear the scars of Jesus, the one who ascended the hill of the Lord, on behalf of the world. When we as Christians walk the world as he did, in love and in service, we live out of the overflow of the new imaginations shaped in corporate worship. We live out the declaration that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it when we see every corner of our lives “charged with the grandeur of the glory of God.”^[1]Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur. We live out that every person is beckoned by the freedom and love of God when we lift Jesus up and he draws all people to himself.^[2]John 12v32

The psalm invites us, lift up your head, that the King of Glory may come in. In worship we hear the call afresh, lift up your head, see the world as it really is. Stand in the holy place of God’s presence so that you might see all the world is infused with the glory of his Spirit.

Jesus Weeps

There are two times that Jesus is recorded weeping in the Scriptures. Once as he stands at the tomb of his good friend Lazarus, lamenting the loss of his friend and face to face with the specter of grave.^[1]I preached a sermon I am particularly proud of on this text here. The second time is found upon his entry to Jerusalem. The last week before he is crucified, Jesus enters the city riding on a colt. The people welcome him as a conquering hero. You see, in their minds the fact that he’s riding a colt is a minor detail. They all have heard about this Jesus, the miracle worker who may even be God’s Messiah, the anointed one who would finally bring about the judgment of God upon the Romans. The people want bloody revolution, they want a fight and here, finally, is one who might be God’s chosen instrument in bringing victory and vindication. Sure, they’d like their king to be on a stallion, standing tall above the crowds on a stately horse, but maybe, they ventured, all he could find was a a colt. For the writers of the gospels, however, Jesus’ chosen vehicle, the colt, is not an ancillary curiosity but expresses the very point of the story. The fact that he is not on a war horse tells us everything about what he says as he stands far off from the city crying over its coming fate:

⁴¹ As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, ⁴² saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.

The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans

Approximately 40 years from Jesus’ fateful ride into Jerusalem, the war horses will come. Except they won’t be carrying the Messiah, they will be mounted by Roman generals leading legions of Roman soldiers to march upon Jerusalem. The people of Israel will gear up for war thinking this is a battle like the days of old when their own generals went by the names of Joshua and David. In days of old God would speak to the leaders of Israel before the battle, commanding them to be faithful in order to ensure victory. The problem in this instance is that God has already spoken, in fact he came himself to speak, and he what he said to the people staring down the barrel of the Roman gladius is simple, “Run, don’t fight.” But as Jesus foretold, they missed that word and thus they fight. They fight because that’s the only way they can envision conquering. They fight because they think that’s what God wants them to do.

And they lose. They lose everything. Josephus, a Jewish historian on the Roman payroll, records the horrors visited upon the Jewish people because they try to resist the Romans. What he describes is a literal hell on earth. He describes the utter desperation of the city’s inhabitants, dying of starvation, the most chilling tale being that of Mary, a woman who kills, cooks, and eats her own son.^[2]See Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews Like, I said, hell.

Hell On Earth

Hell is the one place in all of the universe where God is absent. In hell, there is no love, hope, justice.  As humans, we have seen the sorts of hells on earth throughout our history due to human hatred. This hatred is fueled by a myopic will to power a completed inability to see the humanity or at least a ready willingness to dismiss it. Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.

The suggestion that we arm every corner of society to the teeth sounds, to me, like hell: a complete failure of the imagination. If all we can envision in a world fraught with violence is having more people equipped to return fire, we have lost both our minds and our way. For Christians, the notion is particularly absurd. Jesus showed us that the only way to undo violence is to exhaust its power in self-giving love. When Jesus gave his life on the cross, the devil actually thought he had won. The devil, caretaker of hell that he is, is bereft of imagination. The devil colluded with the powers of the world—human sin, religious systems, political empires—to crucify the son of God. But because he was unfamiliar with what C.S. Lewis called “the deep magic”, because he lacked imagination, he could not conceive that in giving his life completely, Jesus was making a show of these powers, disarming them, nailing them to a cross.^[3]Colossians 2v14

Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.

Imagining A New Day

The Scriptures envision a day where weapons of warfare will be melted down into tools for farming. ^[4]Isaiah 2:4What if every Christian responded like this guy, who though he loves to shoot his gun and would never use it to purposefully hurt anyone, decided to part with it?

Sure we would be more vulnerable in a sense, but well, isn’t that kind of the point of our faith? In embracing weakness, absorbing violence, turning the other cheek, and praying for those who persecute us we are not conquered but conquer through the love of God. As John writes to the church:

For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.^[5]1 John 5:4

We were in hell, dead in our sins, nothing new was possible until our Savior, in a profound act of imagination, liberated the world not by conquering, not by fighting, not by demanding but by laying down his life. Jesus showed us the only way to peace is a cross. He invites us to imagine our own lives completely shaped by his, carrying our crosses and following him. May we as the church imagine a new way way, grace and peace to you.

The 23rd psalm is so simple in its beauty, so evocative in its imagery. For generations, it has inspired artists and comforted mourners. I want to connect this psalm with my reflections on Psalm 21 and Psalm 22. Psalm 21 is triumphant, God will demonstrate his power. Psalm 22 is apoplectic, “My God why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22 screams the questions that Psalm 21 should rightfully raise, “Is God’s victory and hope certain even in the darkest moments of life?” In Psalm 23, the psalmist no longer has a voice to shout his objections in the assembly, rather he whispers them in sobs all alone in the dark. Psalm 23 takes the question, “How?”, to its fullest extent and in doing so gives us a glimpse into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: “How does God keep his promises in the valley of the shadow of death?”

You see, the promises of God always run the risk of disintegrating into platitudes. Quasi-spiritual assurances like, “everything happens for a reason” or “God works everything for the good of those who love him” are nice and all but don’t do us a lot of good when we are lost in the abyss, traversing treacherous terrain, surrounded by predators, exhausted from walking and fear. Ideas are nice, they are content of faith, but in the face of certain death, I need more.

Enter Psalm 23. The psalmist proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” He proclaims the tender care of the Lord in sustaining and guiding him. David expresses the innocent bliss of trusting in God to provide. But then, almost on a dime, he turns from the sunlight to the shadow. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley ^[1]I still like the feel of the  traditional translation “valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Did you catch that? The question of God-forsakenness in Psalm 22 is given its free expression to deconstruct any notions of simplistic faith. What about the valley of the shadow death? Am I forsaken there? How are you going to keep your promises there? According to Psalm 23, God will not merely decree his will from far off in Heaven, he will not leave us to rest on cliches while we wallow in the darkness, he won’t even miraculously light up that darkness in a demonstration of sheer power. No, none of this will do. How will God keep his promises? He himself will come to us. He is right there, walking in he valley of the shadow of death as he walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

Psalm 23 doesn’t just tell us we are not abandoned, that we will not be forgotten or forsaken. It shows us. The Lord is our shepherd, we don’t have to be afraid not simply because he is powerful, good, full of justice and mercy. He of course is all of those things and more. We don’t have to be afraid because he is here. His rod, his staff, his table. Even in the darkest hour, he comes to us.

What is in me that needs to die before I die?   Lent, for all its caricatures of giving up chocolate or not drinking so much red wine, is the seasonal embodiment of Jesus’ promise that those who wish to find their life must lose it.  Lent is a journey away from petty idolatries and distractions towards a life focused on the Jesus way—the way of sacrifice and meekness, the way that , incidentally, happens to lead to truth and life.  As Christians around the world receive the ashes tomorrow and we hear the sobering words, “Remember from dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” we are not engaging in an exercise of cynical fatalism or morbid asceticism.  Nor are we merely wallowing in self-righteous self-pity.  Rather, we are taking the first step, with Jesus, towards Jerusalem:  towards the upper room, towards Gethsemane and Golgotha, and ultimately, the empty tomb.

The ashen cross smudged on the foreheads of faithful children, women, and men declares with the psalmist that we are but a breath, a flower cut from the bush that dies as soon as it flourishes (Ps. 103).  Furthermore, we wear the dark marks of our humanity and our failure to live in proper relationship with God, one another, and creation.  We have sinned and sin leaving mangled relationships in every part of its scorched-earth wake needs more than just a simple, “sorry.”   Ash Wednesday, as the gateway to the lenten season, is a funeral for our idolatrous lives, the clear-eyed acknowledgment that we have sinned and we will die.  We clothe ourselves in ashes and sackcloth mourning our own shortcomings, repenting of our sins.  And yet underlying even this judgment is an indescribable current of hope that looks to a day when God himself will clothe our feeble mortal bodies with the imperishable garments of eternity (1 Cor. 15).

When I, as a pastor, impose the ashes, I look into the face of people I love and walk with everyday and tell them one of the two or three truest things I am capable of saying to them:  “You are going to die.”  When Christ talked to his disciples of his impending sacrifice he followed up with an equally cryptic statement:  “But in three days I will rise again” (Mark 8:31).  The Messiah, according to Peter and many of his contemporaries, was supposed to restore the Kingdom.  He couldn’t exactly manage those affairs from the grave.  But the disciples, as a microcosm for the world at large, fail to understand what Jesus is telling them.   When Jesus is telling his disciples, “I am going to die,” he is in the same breath saying, “I am going to live and you are too!”  We would have God form a bureaucracy and give us a cushy job.   Instead he offers us himself and his eternal kingdom.  God’s life offered to us is always better than the one we would dream up for ourselves.  Even our imaginations need resurrecting.

But first, the dying.  There is no get-rich-quick scheme in the kingdom of God, no life-hacks for eternity.  There is no way to resurrection except through death.  Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God, died everyday to his own wants and desires and submitted to the will of the Father.  Lent is a 40-day period where we practice the art of dying well—the art of dying like Jesus.   But just as Jesus’ death is not ultimately about death, we don’t die merely for the sake of dying.  We die so that we may live.  We fast so that we may feast.  We deny ourselves so that we might share.  We allow the Spirit to do meticulous surgery on our hearts so that those renewed hearts might beat for God and for others.  So the question of lent remains what needs to die in us before we die?  What needs to die in us so that we may live?  “The world is not conclusion,” Emily Dickinson wrote.  Death is not the end.  But the only way to resurrection is to come and die.

The juxtaposition between Psalm 21 and Psalm 22 could not be more striking. Look at the end of Ps. 21:

Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength! We will sing and praise your power.

Now read the beginning of Ps. 22:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? In many ways the bookends of these two psalms frame the Christian life.

Psalm 22 tests the integrity of the promises of Ps 21. It’s one thing to declare in the sanctuary that “your hand will find out all your enemies; your right hand will find out those who hate you” and another to be tortured mercilessly at the hands of those very same enemies. And the question the two psalms ask together, “Do these promises hold up in the darkest nights of the soul?” Psalm 22 moves us from the comfort of the congregation to the bloodthirsty chaos of a lynch mob. You can hear the thuggish mocking of the strong bulls ^[1]Psalm 22v12 and the ravenous lions ^[2]Psalm 22v13 surround our psalmist.

As the people who follow the crucified Jesus, we walk the line of trust and hope, resting in the promises of God and being literally God-abandoned, stretched to our breaking and pierced by this life.  If the promises of God are true, promises for life from barrenness, life from exile, life from death, then they have to be true in our moments of God-forsakenness.

This psalm contains such stunning poetry that finds its fullest manifestation in Jesus. As he is poured out like water, as his bones are jolted from their joints, and his heart melts like a candle that has been forgotten about, ultimately to be laid in the dust of death.^[3]Ps. 22vv14-18 is so hauntingly beautiful and bears witness to so much of the pain of life; Jesus holds on to the promise. He holds on to the promises of God that God will hear and save^[4]Ps. 22vv19-21, that the poor shall have their share ^[5]Ps. 22vv26, that the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the Lord like waters cover the seas ^[6]Ps. 22vv27-28, and that his arm is long enough to reach even to the grave ^[7]Ps. 22vv29-30.

The line between victory and utter defeat is  tear-soaked, blood-stained, anguish-ridden faith. Are the promises of God true? Ps. 21 says they are true in the congregation in the songs of the people of God. Ps. 22 says, yes, they are even true in the blackest night, in the curses of the enemies of God. The cross is simultaneously the place where all hope is lost and the only place that hope is possible. Jesus, holds onto the promises of God with nail-pierced hands, this is faith that proves God’s word true.

When you think about it, the claims of the covenant people of the Old Testament are not even slightly absurd. At no time in its history was Israel the dominant power in its region.  Rarely did the nation enjoy peace and autonomy.  Mostly, the nation was being squeezed like a vice by forces from Egypt (the south) and forces from Assyria, Babylon, or Persia (the north). And yet there is insistence that the children of Abraham lie at the center of the story of the world and that Zion, the City of David, is the geographic center of the world. The promise to Abraham was always a universal one, weaving the disparate strands of the tribes and nations of the world into one unified cord. If the God of Israel, YHWH, was trying distinguish the nation of Israel among the nations of the world he certainly had an interesting way of doing it. Surely, Israel, constantly fighting for its life, might suggest an alternative plan.

And yet the Lord will not short-circuit the process. He has called a people, a people to be a nation of priests, a people to be witnesses to his salvation and loving kindness, a people to be formed and shaped by his passion and words, a people which would form the very tabernacle of his presence. He knows this people will only be able to fulfill these tasks in fits and starts. He knows that there will be pain, confusion, betrayal, and injustice. If he wanted to accomplish a certain task, he should be fired for his severe lapse in judgment and inefficiency to execute his vision but the way the Lord goes about things suggest he may have something entirely different in mind.

Psalm 20 is a corporate psalm offered on behalf of the king of Israel. As we hinted at above, the king of Israel often entered battle with a smaller military budget, technological disadvantages, and troop shortages. And still the psalmist insists, “May we shout for joy over your victory, and in the name of our God set up our banners.” Is this just glib optimism from a self-deluded startup—on the modern geopolitical spectrum, this would be like Uzbekistan saying, “Hey Russia, hey China, let’s do this.” Or perhaps this confidence, this triumphalism is not vain nationalism but pointing us towards something larger.

“Now I know that the Lord will help his anointed; he will answer from his holy heaven with mighty victories by his right hand. Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is i the name of the Lord our God. They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright.”^[1]Ps. 20vv6-8

The people of Israel were a people who never washed the sand from the shore of the Red Sea off their feet. Everywhere they went that story followed them, defined them. On that day, outside of Egypt, the question of victory had nothing to do with the inventory of their weaponry or their strategic acumen. In fact, on that day they stood helplessly with their backs against the sea, waiting to be slaughtered by the Egyptians. But the Lord, “answered in the day of trouble.^[2]Ps. 20v1” He split the seas, he made a way. The people, in Psalm 20, sing the past into the present and the future because they know that the question of victory is not what’s in their hands but whose hands they are in. Over the long arc of the history of Israel, we are not simply receiving information about what happened to a certain people long ago. Rather, we are being formed as a people of promise witnessing what happens when we recognize that the story was never about us to begin with. The story is about God, God dwelling near, God promising, God saving, God sustaining. God is not undertaking a project, he is forming a people.