By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
September 9, 2012
Text: Psalm 125
I had a shocking experience this summer. It was unexpected, it was certainly unprecedented and it's one that left a lasting impression. I was attending an event to deal with missions and I was introduced for the first time to the problem of human trafficking in our world. I thought that the conversation would take place in an arena about lands far, far away and maybe we would be discussing Africa or maybe Asia. And yet, as the discussion progressed it became obvious that what we were talking about was in Scarborough, Ontario. I was taken to meet people who had been trafficked if there is such a term: Those who had been seized in another country, brought to Canada, exploited sexually and then often moved on to other countries by their owners. I was shocked at the reality on our own doorstep, right here in good old Toronto.
As I encountered this ministry and the Christians who tried to help predominantly young women who find themselves caught up in the vortex of this evil thing, I must say I felt both proud of what they were doing in helping them and profoundly sad that it occurs at all. I also felt, and I know we all feel it from time to time, just how vulnerable and fragile we human beings are. From the moment we are conceived to the moment that we die we are fragile, we are vulnerable, we live on a knife's edge. Eugene O'Neill in The Great God Brown had this great line, he says, “Man is born broken.” And I could see in the life of those young women who'd been moved around, brokenness at its very depth.
Indeed the Bible speaks in exactly the same way about the brokenness of humanity. Isaiah 40 declares and it's repeated in 1 Peter, all men, all people are like grass, we wither and we fall and we can be blown away. We are fragile creatures. I heard stories of the brokenness of the world in everywhere from southern Sudan where mothers pray that when they give birth to a child that child will be able to see its first birthday, because life is so fragile in an often war torn area and one that is plagued with violence and disease. I was shaken when I discovered that there are 42 million migrant refugees in the world in 2011. People who have no home or have been moved from their homes and been placed somewhere else. From the Middle East to Asia to the centre of Africa people are on the move. A nation larger in number than Canada is out there moving around with no place called home. It is staggering.
At the same conference, on a very personal level, I found out from one of my South African colleagues that a friend that I had known many years ago, an esteemed theologian, a young man who was at the top of his game in his 40s, who'd swum every day in the Indian Ocean in Kwazulu one day simply was swept away by a tide and drowned. I thought of the fragility of life and how vulnerable we are.
Yet, in all of this there were people who had what I call, “A rock solid faith. “ Those who have actually gone to the south of Sudan and helped the mothers bring up their children and help build schools and educate people. Help stand with those who find themselves in migrant camps not knowing where they are. I met people who move entire missions of people to help refugees all over the world. Even here at Eaton Memorial we have, to some small extent, helped a refugee but its scope of the problem is so great and yet these Christians are putting often their lives on the line to help these people who have no home and are vulnerable. Even the father of the young theologian who died, who himself is an esteemed theologian and one of my great mentors, in a letter back to me after I'd expressed my condolences said that he still has his hope in God and in Jesus Christ: Rock solid faith in a world that seems so vulnerable.
It is that rock solid faith that we find in our text from Psalm 125. The psalmist makes it abundantly clear. Those he said who” trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion.” The psalmist is writing, most scholars agree, after the exile, after the return of the people of Israel having been scattered throughout the near east. Having been crushed at the hands of the Babylonians they come home to Zion and the psalmist now looks at the hills around Zion. For Zion is but a smaller hill amongst bigger hills. He looks at Mount Scopus and he looks at the Mount of Olives and he says it is as if God is wrapping his arms around Zion with these hills. They were a simile for the sustaining power of God for the people of Israel and their return to Jerusalem. He believes that those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion for those hills represent the arms of God around the nation.
There was also a belief in the post-exilic era that Zion was the gathering place, the meeting place of the heavenly and the underworld. It was there that God in all God's grace was present. So for those who trust in the Lord they will be like Mount Zion, God will be there for them. This was not some flaccid optimism, this isn't the sort of pablum that we're offered and the psycho-babble today on television and elsewhere, everything will just be okay, no need to worry, everything's gonna be all right. How many times have you heard that, how many times have you said it? Everything will just be fine, it's all okay. The psalmist is not that kind of flaccid superficial believer. He is someone who recognizes that it is those who place their trust in the Lord who will find the security in a broken world.
Eugene O'Neill goes on in The Great God Brown and he says not only is man more broken but he lives to be mended. Then there's this incredible line, “The grace of God is the glue” that mends the broken world. Unfortunately O'Neill himself never believed this to be true for himself. The psalmist, believing that God is the mending glue is not just saying something nice and warm and cosy. There are reasons for the psalmist's conviction, there are things that the righteous, the believers, must do in response to the grace of the God who will protect Zion. He affirms once again, for example, that the wicked will not prevail. The psalmist knew that a lot of the vulnerability and fragility that we feel and that we experience is actually born out of the wickedness of others. People are removed from their hands and their homes and their lands by others. Whole nations have to move because of the wickedness of others. The psalmist has experienced that, the people have known that in the exile and they know that when they say that those who trust in the Lord will come to Zion. Know and understand that the wicked will not ultimately prevail. Even so the psalmist takes another tilt at this altogether. Quite radical really because in a very awkward way the psalmist is saying look, the very wickedness of the world lets us know not only our vulnerability but how much we need the sustaining and strengthening and the solidity of God. The psalmist knew that the wickedness of the world shows just how important the presence of God is and he wants the people of Zion not to forget that.
How easy it is for us to succumb to the belief that wickedness does prevail. We are very hard on one another as human beings. We're all vulnerable, we're all fragile and yet oftentimes we treat ourselves ruthlessly. One of the people who captured that was the great writer Elie Wiesel one of the great post-Holocaust writers. He says with almost a sense of no hope the following:
“Though temporary in nature, war seems to last forever. In the service of death it mocks the living. It allows men to do things that in normal time they have no right to do: to indulge in cruelty, a collective as well as an individual gratification of unconscious impulses. War may be too much a part of human behaviour to be eliminated ever. “
He's probably right but it's a sad declaration because through the ages the people of Israel have always felt uncertain and fragile, always. From the beginning of the alphabet almost to the end you can name those who have been historically a threat to the people of Israel, whether it's Amalek or the Babylonians or whether it is the Canaanites. All the way on from the Plain of Dura and Nebuchadnezzar right through to the Romans and the European pogroms there has been this sense in which everything is fragile and uncertain. It seems to me that when you deal with uncertain and fragile people, when you're dealing with people who are frightened because of the brokenness they experience you should handle them tenderly and lovingly. Even when they're wrong remind them of who their source is and to whom they're accountable. The psalmist does. Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion. But you have to trust in the Lord. We need to treat the people of Israel very gently and kindly but strongly.
He goes on, there is more. “The righteous must not put their hand,” he says, “to wickedness. “ It's no good just saying well God is our refuge, Zion is there forever, he will take care of us if we put our hand to the wrong and to evil. What did Paul say in Romans 12:17? “Do not repay evil for evil” - the righteous must not put their hands to the wrong or else they merely emulate the wickedness of others. There is a need for the people of God to be obedient to God, not just to say their place, their faith and their trust in God, but to live obediently to that very God who calls them.
One of the other things that I did throughout the summer, and I'm not sure if all of you know this, but I am the volunteer chaplain for the Toronto Indy motor race, it is my position to lead in the worship on a Sunday morning for the drivers and the crews, to say the prayers at the beginning of the races and to minister to the drivers and the crews and their families throughout the four days of racing. It is great, it really is. For someone like me, it's like my four days in heaven in the middle of the summer. I sit down with the drivers and their spouses. I get to know them. If something goes awfully wrong they can turn to me and seek my guidance. Then every now and again they take me out on the track and we go really, really fast and I love it. In that time there are sometimes very intimate conversations with the drivers. One of the drivers, who is a professed Christian and I sat down one day and I just asked him this question. “How on earth do you, after having spent the weekend going 200 miles an hour, get in your car and drive the next day on the streets. I don't how you do it. I went round the track four times and I was lethal on the road afterwards.” I cannot imagine. “Andrew,” he said, “I don't drive for three days after a race. I don't drive anything including the motor home because I know that I am going to be lethal if I'm out on the road. I am someone who respects the rules.” And this is what's interesting. He said , “I respect the rules on the track because I know if you don't there is danger. But I respect the roads and the rules of the roads because they are there to preserve life. “ He said, “but I gotta tell you, when some young buck in a car pulls alongside me on a street and realizes who I am and starts revving the car it is so difficult not to want to beat them., but you just have to remind yourself these are the rules and we're safe if we abide by them. If we don't abide by them we can die.” Then he looked at me knowing I'm a preacher said, “This is gonna be a in a sermon.”
I looked at him and I said, “That applies to the whole of life doesn't it?”
He said, “Exactly.”
“Do not turn your hand to wickedness” wrote the psalmist. Don't repay evil for evil. Don't respond to the wicked by doing wicked things. Be obedient to the word of the Lord. And that is why the psalmist knew that you can trust in the Lord and the mountains are there and God is there and God's arms are there but you need to be obedient to the ways of the Lord. There's one last thing he does and it's the last line of the psalm, which sums up everything that the psalmist believes and everything that I believe and everything that we should believe. “Peace” he said “be upon Israel.” What he's praying for is peace. He prays, “Do good, oh Lord, to those who have an upright heart, to those who seek righteousness and walk in the paths of righteousness. Do good to them and bless them.” That's what he wanted for his people and for himself.
Oh these days there is so much talk about blessedness. People win a bike race and say they're blessed, people win a lottery and say they are blessed. People have a good meal now and say they're blessed. People are blessed all over the place and it's great, I'm happy for them, but seldom is mentioned the source of the blessing. To say you're blessed is as flaccid as saying everything's gonna be okay, though to be blessed and to say that I recognize the one who is the source of blessing is another statement entirely. When I think of blessing I think of a young child that I read about who went into an elevator and he said “It's amazing the upstairs came down. “ Think about it. Isn't that what actually seems to happen? This child was convinced that something great from above had happened. Isn't that what blessing is about? Isn't that what the psalmist is saying? He's looking to the mountains, he's looking to Scopus, he's looking to Olivet. He's saying, “Look, the Lord wraps his arms around the righteous, the Lord protects those who are vulnerable and broken. The Lord redeems those who are lost. Those who trust in the Lord are just like Zion. Peace then be upon the land. Peace be upon the people.” It is for that peace, not only in Israel but also in Palestine for which we should pray thoughtfully, lovingly, gently, passionately. For those who are broken in the southern Sudan and whose mothers barely know how to keep their children alive we should pray that the grace of God may be the glue that holds their lives together. For those young women who are trafficked and brought in from China and elsewhere and abused and used by evil people we should pray that the grace of God will be the glue in their lives. For those who mourn and have lost loved ones we should pray that God is the glue in their lives. For those for whatever reason feel tempted by the power of wickedness we pray that the glue of God will be their grace. For all of us should recognize that those who trust in the Lord will be like Zion. They will have in a fragile world a rock solid faith. Amen.