Hope In The Lord

Sunday, May 25^th, 2008

Corpus Christi Sunday

Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA

Psalm 131: 1-3

Theme: A quiet, simple faith

 

 “¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

What a beautiful Psalm.  And one that I’d never stopped on before.  I don’t recall ever reading this one.

 

There are 150 of them, after all.  I hope it’s understood that, unless you are a scholar of the Psalms, or someone gifted with a photographic memory, you’re not going to be able to call to mind each and every Psalm.

 

But the images brought forth in these three short verses are like a deep breath drawn at the end of a hard day’s labor.  It is a mental pause to adjust an attitude, to refocus, to re-center – to regain perspective.  

 

And it couldn’t come at a better time. 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

These last few weeks, it seems, have been … full.  With some good things:  births, anniversaries, celebrations; as well as with sad things … deaths, illnesses, unexpected surprises, troubles, worries. 

 

We’ve heard it before, things come in threes.  I’m beginning to think that it is more a matter of perception and coincidence that they seem to do that – as well as a matter of position.  By that I mean that depending on where you are RELATIONALLY speaking – who you are close to, who you know, who you are aware of – impacts how you perceive how many of those various ‘things’ happen around you. 

 

There was a period in my life when it seemed like everything was crashing in – and I DO mean everything.  It seemed that for a period of weeks, if not months, at least one thing a week happened that figuratively “slammed into me”:  the death of a Grandparent or an Uncle; the death of a friend’s parent, a terrible illness claiming the life of another person. But it wasn’t only manifesting itself through loss of life – illnesses were as much a part of that time as well – diagnoses that had lifelong repercussions, issues of mental as well as physical stability being compromised; people losing their jobs, marriages breaking up, couples breaking up, people who were once friends acrimoniously going their separate ways; all that against a backdrop of events on a national as well as international scale that just seemed to prove once again that the world was going somewhere not very nice in a hand basket.

 

I wonder how knowing this Psalm then might have helped my perception of those times. 

 

Because there are times when we ARE able to dedicate time and attention to ‘lofty thoughts’ – things ‘too great and too marvelous’ as the Psalmist writes – things that touch our spirits, that engage our ability to dream, to wonder, to swirl our minds around the misty heights of thoughts, and ideas, and concepts.  We’ve had a touch of that over the last couple of weeks – in these celebrations of Pentecost and the Trinity.  We HAVE been able to ‘raise our eyes, and lift up our hearts’.  Even in our worship this morning, beginning with our initial greeting, and in the acts of raising our voices together, in praying together, even in observing our discipline of silence, we have, perhaps some, perhaps all, if only for a few minutes, felt our hearts and minds and eyes lifted up. 

 

But if we are honest with ourselves, I would venture to say that there are probably a few of us here this morning for whom that did NOT happen.  It is the nature of a congregation – of any group – that the experiences of this past week, or this past month, or the accumulated experiences of this past year have combined in such a way that that initial claim of the Psalmist resonates most strongly in a voice that is weak with exhaustion, thin with defeat, small and lost in the vastness of space.            

 

 

“¹O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

              

There is more than a hint of depletion in those words.  And it is in the honesty of that voice that I find the closeness of a connection with the Psalmist.  The person who wrote those words knew what it was like to be bone-weary.  To be so spent that even though they KNEW there WERE things ‘too great and too marvelous’, that there comes a point when you have to say ‘not now’. 

 

Traditionally, we ascribe the majority of the Psalms to King David.  There are those that are pretty clearly his, which have over the centuries preserved their Davidic authorship pretty much unquestionably.  There are others that bear the marks of different authorship.  And there are those that seem to indicate that they may have been written by women.  The imagery we find in the Psalms for God, or for an aspect of God, crosses the full spectrum of existence – from storms and earthquakes to Lions and Eagles, to a mother hen and her chicks … and here we come to a mother and child.  And it becomes personal.    

 

²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

 

This week one of our friends – a family with two young girls, aged 3 and 2, welcomed a son into their family.  I shared with you Wednesday night that Guillermo – “Memito” – was born that morning, weighing in at 6 lbs 3 oz, and measuring just 17 inches. 

 

On Thursday I took Guillermo – the father – and America and Casandra – the sisters – up to the hospital to meet their new brother.  The girls are still VERY young – and predictably, they were curious about everything and INTO everything – including wanting to get out the door of the room and head down the hall of the maternity wing at Mary Washington.  Felicitas, the mother, had gotten SOME sleep, but not a lot, what with getting used to Memito’s being in the room with her and beginning to breast feed him – it makes for some pretty exhausting time to face. 

 

This was not an expected pregnancy.  Though they were happy to welcome him to the family, Guillermo and Felicitas are well aware of the stresses that come with a newborn.  I watched the strain on her face build as the afternoon wore on and the girls became more agitated in wanting to explore and wanting to play and color and go somewhere and do something … and I realized that Felicitas is facing the prospect of handling a newborn and two toddlers alone for most of the day while Guillermo is at work.  And those first words of this Psalm seemed to sound out to me in her voice.

 

“²But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

There is a calm acceptance in that second verse.  It is a statement of accomplishment.  We’ve seen it happen – a child is upset and crying and fussy, and no one can seem to bring it any comfort, to quiet it, to settle it down … until it finds the arms, or the lap of its mother.  And it is a miracle to watch a child quiet when he draws close to his mother.  It is a beautiful thing to watch a little girl go from crying and wailing to sitting calmly and even begin to smile when she is back with her mother. 

 

The Psalmist is taking that image and making it a description of what happens to our souls when we draw near to God.  But what I love about it is that second part of the second phrase – “my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.”

 

I have a favorite picture of Leslie and the kids.  It was taken when Judson was just a few days old.  We inherited a recliner from Claude, our friend that I lived with before Leslie and I got married.  It was your basic brown, sort of corduroy type fabric-covered recliner; wide arms, pretty deep cushions.  Lots of room, almost big enough for two people to sit in.  Almost.  When Judson was born Hannah was a little more than a month from turning four and Caleb was 18 months old. 

 

In the picture, Leslie has Judson in her arms.  Hannah is sitting next to her on one side, and Caleb is perched on the other side, on the arm of the recliner, caught in the middle of either saying or doing something.  The expression on Leslie’s face is a tired smile.  You can definitely tell she’s been through childbirth recently.  Her hair is ‘all over her head’, and there are circles under her eyes.  She doesn’t have any makeup on.  And you know what?  She never looked more beautiful.                            

So I have this image of a mother with her child sitting next to her or sitting in her lap, writing this praise song to God, caught up in the immediacy of childrearing, the “daily-ness” of it, the “one foot in front of the other”-ness of it, the “what has to happen next”-ness of it.  And the result is a calmed and quieted child who knows she is safe, who knows he is cared for and loved so completely that they cannot imagine a world – regardless of WHAT happens – where it would be otherwise. 

 

Is it any wonder that the Psalmist would then turn and call her people to that same sense of security – that hope that God wants them to feel in relation to HIM? 

 

³O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.”

 

 

Let’s pray.