Love Songs

Sunday, May 20th, 2007
Seventh of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 97

1The Lord is king! Let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad! 2Clouds and thick darkness are all around him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne. 3Fire goes before him, and consumes his adversaries on every side. 4His lightnings light up the world; the earth sees and trembles. 5The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. 6The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory. 7All worshipers of images are put to shame, those who make their boast in worthless idols; all gods bow down before him. 8Zion hears and is glad, and the towns of Judah rejoice, because of your judgments, O God. 9For you, O Lord, are most high over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods. 10The Lord loves those who hate evil; he guards the lives of his faithful; he rescues them from the hand of the wicked. 11 Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart. 12Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name!

In the movie ‘Music & Lyrics’, Hugh Grant plays a self-professed has-been music star from the 80’s. While he is an excellent musician, he is not nearly so confident when it comes to writing lyrics, and so ends up hiring Drew Barrymore, who waters plants for a living, but has a knack for putting words together, to help him write a song he’s been hired to complete in 48 hours. Long story short, by the end of the movie, he and she are in love, he finally writes his song for her from his heart, sings it to her in front of a massive crowd, and wins her over for good, and they live happily ever after.

It’s a typical Hollywood romantic comedy. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and neither do the actors, which was nice.

But this isn’t a time for movie reviews, is it?

What connected the theme of the movie with our passage this morning, this enthronement psalm, technically speaking, is that in its own way, it is a love song to God.

How many of you, as young people, wrote or received notes or letters, poems, or love songs, or songs dedicated to you by the one who loved you?

Leslie will tell you I don’t write the love poems I used to write her NEARLY as often as I used to. But it is true, believe it or not, I DID write them.

Expressing our love for someone in words or songs is nothing new. And it was not new in ancient Israel either. They are what have become for us today our hymns and praise songs that we sing in our services, or in meetings, or on our own driving down the road with a CD or cassette or radio station playing over the speakers. Sometimes we’ve even been heard to be singing them on our own with no music playing at ALL!

What is it about songs and singing that reaches down deep inside us and touches our emotions so? What is it about words set in a pattern, a tempo, that reach through our intellect and wrap themselves around our hearts?

The cabin where Leslie and I spent our honeymoon is nestled in the hills by a small lake outside of London Kentucky, and the owner had been given a calligraphy print of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, entitled God’s World – here it is:

O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag to crush!
To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is as stretcheth me apart.
Lord, I do fear thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me,
—let fall no burning leaf;
prithee, let no bird call.

I took a picture of the print and have it framed still to this day.

There is power in words, and that power lies in how they can evoke in us both thoughts and emotions that in turn allow US to express how WE feel or THINK about someONE or someTHING.

Last Sunday morning, in the wake of the deaths we experienced within this family called Jerusalem, we still gathered, and the first song we sang, at the beginning of the opening assembly for Sunday School, was ‘Because He Lives’ – and speaking for myself, I can tell you that even before we began to sing, the emotions were pouring out. That song has a deep resonance with me as I suspect it does with many of you on many levels. Not the least of which is found in the beauty of the lyrics themselves – affirming a faith and a hope in a risen Christ no matter what circumstances we happen to be facing on any given day.

We find that same sentiment as we read through – or sing through – the Psalms.

There were days while Leslie and I were still courting on which I was overwhelmed at the beauty of her – inward AND outward – and sometimes the only way I COULD express to her how I felt was through verse in some form. I don’t think I ever actually wrote a SONG for her, but that was due mainly to my insecurity in my musical talents than in my inability to put words together.

It happens today, sometimes on a regular basis, when we turn to God. We want to express our love for God, and while some of us are able to express it through the spoken word, others of us find the purest expression of our love for God through the singing of those hymns that we’ve known since … well, forever. We don’t remember not knowing them. They have always been part of the way we express our worship. ‘It is Well With My Soul’, ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘Great Is Thy Faithfulness’ … ‘In The Garden’, as well as ‘To God Be The Glory’ and ‘Love Lifted Me.’

Ultimately, I think that is what the psalms are. Yes, there are ‘types’ of psalms, imprecatory, enthronement, whatever you want to call them, and they DO have a historical setting that we do well to take into account when we read and especially when we study them – this one actually intentionally uses light and dark imagery – the lightning and the dark cloud, the flame going before God – that would at the time have normally been used in the worship of or the description of Baal – using that same imagery on purpose wasn’t a case of the writer saying “oh, that’s a good way to put it, I’ll use it when I speak of Yahweh!” it is a way for the psalmist to say ‘The true God is more than you Baal worshippers believe your god to be and more!”.

The psalms DO bring the full range of human emotion to bear on the worship of God, but when all is said and done, they are putting into verse form what is coming from our hearts in response to what God has done for us – whether God has delivered us FROM the enemy, or seems to be delivering us TO the enemy; whether we are feeling like we could take on the WORLD with one hand tied behind our back and STILL win or whether we are at the weakest, lowest, most vulnerable point of our existence.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we can feel free to bring whatever it is we are feeling to the worship of God. We already know, perhaps even on an unacknowledged level, that God KNOWS us and knows what we are going through, as our responsive reading spoke of earlier (from Psalm 139). It means that, just as in a normal, healthy human relationship, we can feel free to express ALL the range of emotions that we CAN feel TOWARDS God and have the full confidence that God will be able to handle it. And if the God that we have in our heads can’t, then as Dave McNeely shared with us during our revival, that God should die, and the God who is INDEED author and creator of the Universe, as well as of our salvation, WILL remain – and will remain worthy of our love and our praise.

Let’s pray.

Cause For Praise

Sunday, May 13th, 2007
Sixth of Easter
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 67

1May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us, Selah 2that your way may be known upon earth, your saving power among all nations. 3Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. 4Let the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Selah 5Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you. 6The earth has yielded its increase; God, our God, has blessed us. 7May God continue to bless us; let all the ends of the earth revere him.

Given any other Sunday, after these last couple of days, it would seem to be an appropriate time to read a Psalm of sorrow rather than a call to worship as our text.

There are times when it simply doesn’t seem to be in us to be able to lift our voices in song and praise God. But I think that comes from a misperception of what we’ve come to exclusively equate praise and worship with – and that is Joy.

Yes, of COURSE, when we are feeling joyful we praise God. It’s easy to do that at THOSE times.

Especially on days like today, when our surrounding culture celebrates motherhood, it comes easy to our lips to thank God and Praise God for God’s gift of mothers.

There’s no way to overstate the importance of them in our lives – whether they be our actual mothers, our adoptive mothers, those women in our lives who have stepped into that role for us in the absence of our biological mothers, or even those women who for even a short time became mothers to us.

But what of those who might be in our midst who were NOT blessed with a mother like Diane, or like Gladys? What of those whose mothers were abusive, or emotionally or even physically absent, those mothers for whom the day a child turned 18 and could be ushered out the door could not come soon enough? How will THOSE people find a way to worship on a day like this, when we read this particular call to worship, extolling God’s blessing on not only the nation of Israel, but by association, on the individuals who make UP that nation?

There is a subtle yet persistent falsity that we, as part of the church, have allowed to infuse our understanding of the way God works, and that is that God is primarily out to make us feel good and be happy. Having said that, we DO stand on the passage in Jeremiah 29 where God tells us,

11For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.

but what we are faced with is a world where children – young or not so young – lose their mothers just before mother’s day. Where husbands lose their wives and where grandchildren lose their grandmothers, where women who more than anything WANT to BE mothers yet are unable to do so, and where young women choose to stop a life within because the father has moved out of their lives, where husbands beat their wives and send them to the hospital with a concussion, and still we are being asked to praise God and to thank God for all the blessings we’ve received from God.

How do we reconcile the two? CAN we reconcile the two realities?

To be honest, I’m not sure we are supposed to, at least not on THIS side of the grave. Someone may be able to. I cannot. I believe God HAS our best interests at heart. I also believe God and God’s … movements … are not something we are going to be able to understand 100 % of the time. We’re going to be talking about that as we move through the book of Habakkuk on Wednesday evenings, by the way. In case you might be interested in joining us.

As I mentioned last week, the truthfulness of the Psalms with regard to the human condition is deeply comforting to me. The fact that if we look for it, we can find a Psalm coming from just about any emotional place we can name and ending up somehow, someway at the same place – worshipping and praising God.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?

It means that we begin to learn that we worship God through our singing and our laughter, yes, but that we also worship God through our tears – not ‘in spite of’, not ‘regardless of’, not ‘ignoring’ our tears, but THROUGH our tears. It is the song coming from a heart so overwrought with grief and sorrow that the words are barely able to form on emotion-tightened lips telling of the majesty, the holiness, the goodness and the blessings of God that speak and sing the truest psalms from our purest, most honest selves.

What will mark us as followers of Christ is not ONLY that we laugh and celebrate life’s blessings with each other, but that we ALSO acknowledge, that we also support and love one another through the darkest times of our lives – that we stand together – for mutual support, but also to bear witness to a God who knows and understands our sorrow and our pain because God incarnate – God in the person of Jesus Christ – came and walked this world beside us, and taught us about being our most pure and honest selves.

So if there is an invitation this morning it is to find THAT in us – the purest, most honest expression and let our voices ring out and proclaim that God is a good and loving and holy – and wholly – completely – other.

Let’s pray.

Songs in the Midst of all the Rest

Sunday, May 6th, 2007
Fifth of Easter,
A Service of Worship under a brush arbor on the site of the old sanctuary.
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Psalm 148

1Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights! 2Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host! 3Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars! 4Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! 5Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. 6He established them forever and ever; he fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed. 7Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, 8fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command! 9Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! 10Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds! 11Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth! 12Young men and women alike, old and young together! 13Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven. 14He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to him. Praise the Lord!

What is it about the Psalms that stands out to you? What is it that you LIKE about the Psalms? What is it that you DON’T like about the Psalms, if anything? It’s okay, by the way, to not like some parts of scripture – AND to admit it. That tells me something very important. It tells me that first, you READ scripture, and second, it tells me that you THINK about scripture. The ‘not liking it’ part is secondary. Important yes, in the sense that it indicates that you are not simply skimming the words, but that you are actively applying yourself to the task of working out what the scriptures mean for your life, and sometimes, FREQUENTLY, that can be hard. We wrestle with scripture like Jacob wrestled with God. We may spend all night doing it, and we may walk with a limp thereafter, but at least we have engaged the divine word.

So we have this Psalm, and it seems to be a fairly … standard Psalm. It is a Psalm of Exhortation – that means it is a song to encourage others … if you read through it, it actually calls on not only PEOPLE, but animals, and plants, and mountains, and hills, and trees, and even the weather to Praise the Lord God almighty.

The call to praise and worship is a call directed towards creation – towards the EARTHLY creation – as well as to the heavenly beings – it is a call that covers the entire spectrum of existence – from what we can see – THIS creation – that is all around us, and that part of creation that we cannot see – the hosts of heaven and beyond.

If you flip through the psalms, you’ll find that they are not all this loftily themed. There are psalms that urge God to kill the enemies of David, or the enemies of Israel. There are psalms that express some of the deepest remorse and sorrow that can be expressed in human terms. There are psalms that express anger – some would even say hatred – towards something or someone. There are even psalms that call for the killing of women and babies in very graphic terms. Remember what I said about there being parts of scripture that you don’t like? That’s one of them for me.

But before I go off and throw the baby out with the bathwater, claiming that if there’s room in scripture for THAT, then I’m not sure I WANT to engage scripture at ALL, I HAVE to examine what role the psalm plays in the bigger picture – what part it has in telling me more of who God is, and what God has done.

So we’re starting today with a psalm that is much like the psalms that surround it—psalms of praise and worship. In that sense it isn’t terribly unusual. After all, when we think of the book of Psalms, we think primarily of just THAT – psalms of praise and worship, and not the other kinds of psalms.

And it is just that countering action that I’d like to discuss today – why it IS that we DO find those OTHER psalms – the ‘down and dirty’ ones, mixed in with the ‘high and holy’ psalms.

Think about it. Our call is to worship the Lord – in all we do – word, deed, whatever. Do we? Or maybe I should ask that: do WE? See? We may get on a streak, and go for, what? Five, six, seven? Eight? Maybe even nine or ten … what? Years? Months? Weeks? Days? Minutes? Where we are more or less doing that, but then comes that hammer to the thumb, or that especially annoying person that you run into on the ball field, or that neighbor that just doesn’t seem to understand what you’ve been trying to politely tell them for lo these many years … and your praise and worship psalm suddenly turns into one of those ‘other’ psalms.

It’s not necessarily a GOOD thing, but it is a TRUE thing – insofar as it is true to the human condition on THIS plane of existence. It comes from us because it is a product of our fallen nature, our frail humanity, and our weakness.

And to see those qualities reflected in scripture is a sign of hope. It tells us that in spite of that, God still worked in and through this man, or that woman, or that people, and continues to do so.

I think it can even be read as a … journal. If you’ve ever kept a journal for any length of time, and then after an extended period have gone back and read over entries that you’ve made long before, you immediately gain a sense of perspective. You understand where you WERE and realize where you ARE.

We are surrounded by the graves of some of those original 143 people that formed Royal Oaks Baptist Church with Elder Thomas Braxton. Some are marked, and some are not. We are not standing on the spot where the original structure stood, that is just across Mulberry from here, but we ARE standing on the place where the longest-lasting building that housed Jerusalem Baptist Church stood – from the early 1840’s until 1978 – almost 140 years – that wooden building built by hand by the members of Jerusalem provided a place for instruction, for prayer, for fellowship, and for gatherings to celebrate weddings and funerals – and I’m sure, other family events. Over the years it was surrounded by the graves of those who moved from this existence into the heavenly existence. Those whose psalms were peppered here and there with the less-than-pristine calls to worship HERE, graduated to the place where their songs of worship joined the rest of the heavenly hosts in pure and uninterrupted singing.

And so we have chosen to honor them today. By naming their names, by placing a flower on their graves, we are simply expressing our gratitude for the way they have gone on before us, for the way they taught those who taught those who taught US what it means to live lives of sacrifice and of service.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church now, today?

This last week I’ve had a couple of opportunities to speak to my mother on the phone, and each time we do, she tells me how much she’s looking forward to our visit with them that is coming up. There are actually two visits in the works – THEY may be coming to see US towards the end of June HERE, and WE are planning on seeing them during the second full week of July.

When she first mentioned it to me, it caught me by surprise, to speak so eagerly of something that in my mind is still pretty far off. But in thinking about it, I realized that the anticipation is purely an expression of the love she feels for us.

Can we speak in those same terms of our anticipation of being a part of a heavenly choir? Can we see ourselves being in the presence of God God’s self and being known completely, find ourselves loved and accepted to a degree that we can only imagine – and even then, only partially?

Do we look forward in eager anticipation to the day when our mortal shells will be laid to rest here, and we will become part of the legacy of Jerusalem Baptist Church, and have those who come after us speak of us with thankfulness in their hearts?

May it, through the grace of God, be so.

Lets pray.