“Reclaiming First Things”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Text: Psalm 119:1-8
Just over a year ago, I visited a very eminent theologian in London, England. Part of the reason I went there was to find out about his research and to share with him mine, but more especially to find out what he was doing. We had a fascinating discussion over tea and scones. We talked about many things. I was intrigued by some of the titles and some of the issues that his doctoral students were addressing. For in many ways, in looking at what they were addressing, one gets a sense not only of what is currently in vogue, but what will be discussed in the months and the years to come.
He told me about some of the topics the students were doing and they were fascinating. There was one that really stood out for me. He said, “I have a doctoral student who is doing her work and her research on the theology of Johann Sebastian Bach. This is actually some ground-breaking work. It is not that others haven't done it before, but how she had become inspired to do this work.” You see, this doctoral student had done the research on the basis of an experience of a young woman.
The young woman had come to the United Kingdom in the late 1980s from Soviet Union. She had arrived in the country as a refugee. It was before the fall of the wall in Berlin. She arrived in the United Kingdom penniless and uncertain about her future. But she was now free! In this free world, for the first year that she was in London, she looked for a job, but her English skills were very few. She didn't possess any qualifications to bring with her from the Soviet Union and she floundered, but was supported by the State. After a while, that came to an end, and she knew she had to get a job.
Eventually the path of her life took her to Soho in London. She was hired as a dancer at a men's club. She entered into the seedy life of London but she was starting to make money. She was a lady of the night. Here she was in a free land and a free country! She made a lot of money. She became very successful. She became well known. She enjoyed the fruits of her labours. She enjoyed the pleasures that came from all the money that she made and things seemed fine in this new freedom she had.
She was the ultimate autonomous person, not constrained by anything. She didn't mind what she was doing, because she said once when being interviewed, “Well, I wasn't brought up with any knowledge of God or of the Bible. There was no religion to hold me back or to give me any sense of guilt. I had no constraints upon me.” The only constraint that would have been there would have been the presence of my parents, but they were in the Soviet Union and had no idea what I was doing.
She led a free, autonomous life that made money, until the laws of nature and time started to take its toll on her. Such was the case that the clubs no longer wanted her. Such was the situation that she was now penniless. Her vocation had finally come to an end. She had nowhere to go. One day, wandering in the streets of London, questioning whether she could find a vocation in life, she decided simply to go into the Church of St. Martins-in-the-Field. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, at one o'clock for more than 15 years that church has had organ recitals.
She decided at one o'clock on a Monday to go into the organ recital and she recognized one theme that was on one of the posters: the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. She went in and sat down, paid her three pounds, and listened to the marvellous music of Bach. The piece that was playing was These are the Holy Ten Commandments Famous music! As she sat and listened, the words of the music printed in a sheet were before her. She read them as the music played:
God, these commandments gave therein
to show the child of man thy sin
and make thee also well perceived
how man out of God should live
Have mercy O Lord! Have mercy O Lord!
The young woman from the Soviet Union realized she was in need of this very God. The doctoral student was writing about that woman's experience.
In many ways, that woman's experience, that sense of having been autonomous but now losing one's freedom, was an experience that the Psalmist would have understood completely when he said in this passage: “Blessed are those who walk in the law of the Lord. There is no shame for those who walk uprightly in the Lord, and joy comes from following the ways of the Lord.”
The Psalmist was writing to a people who had come out of exile. They had been scattered in Babylonia and in countries beyond. They had been a decimated people, but now they were returning to the Promised Land. They came home poor and bedraggled, maligned by their neighbours, disorganized, dishevelled, and having no sense of a future. They were a persecuted people, who had been so disparate that they had little or no unity.
Just like a beacon in the midst of their darkness, the Psalmist writes Psalm 119. The Psalm is a clarion call for the people that have returned from exile to think about first things. As a nation that is uncertain about itself, they should get back to first things. And, I say first things, because Psalm 119 is broken into sections that always begin with part of the Hebrew alphabet, and at the very beginning, we have the word Aleph, the first letter in Hebrew, and Aleph is the first thing. It is Aleph that is a symbol for God in many ways. You find that letter working its way through even into the Greek language and Alpha, the A, the beginning.
For the Psalmist then, the law of the Lord and faithfulness to the Lord is the first thing, the starting point for the new nation of Israel. It is the thing to which people should go if they want blessedness and if they want a future. Walter Bruggeman, the great biblical scholar, has suggested that this opening section from Psalm 119 established three things for the people of Israel. The more I read what he said about these three things the more I felt they are three things that are applicable to all believers in all time.
The first thing he says was that this passage from Psalm 119 sets the horizons for the people of Israel. In other words, if they want to look to the future, where do they go now as a broken and a dishevelled people? They need to look to the Torah, to the law of the Lord! Now, there is a broad view of Torah, of law, that is at work here in the Psalmist. It is not just the Ten Commandments. It is not just the first five books of the Old Testament; it includes the writings of the prophets and wisdom literature. He takes a broad view, but he understands Torah, which is the law, to be the starting point for the people.
In many ways, Psalm 119 is a prayer for Torah piety. It is a prayer for people to bond themselves to the grace and the love of God as they find it in the law. You see the same things echoed in the prayers of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. In the glorious beatitudes, Jesus says, does he not, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”
Jesus is affirming what the writer of the Psalm is saying that there is blessedness, that there is a joy, and yes, there is even a freedom that comes from obeying the law of God. It is not that this law can save, but that this law, according to Luther, is the means whereby humanity knows that its sin, and then knowing of its sin, understands its dependence on God. It is to be obedient to God and in that obedience there is great freedom.
Today if you speak like this in society they think you have been playing with toy dinosaurs too much. It sounds so outmoded and so unrealistic for a world that cannot have a conception often of such language about God. Surely, the blessedness of Torah, of the law, is something that is only restricted to the most devout and the most religious!
It is pooh-poohed as a way of acting and living and being. After all, we are free, autonomous creatures. We are those who seek self-aggrandizement. We seek our own path. This is too restrictive. After all, who sets these laws? Who enforces these laws? People are cynical and sceptical. They wonder where on earth such laws would ultimately lead. There is no going back they say. There is no path ahead that is based on the law, the Torah of God.
I saw this so clearly in a fascinating article in the National Post this week on God and Jean Paul Sartre. In it, Jean Paul Sartre is depicted as somebody who really empties many of the Catholic churches in Paris by virtue of his ideas that God was dead and there was no need for a God because there wasn't a God. Sartre wanted freedom for people away from the tyranny of God, away from the constraints of God. After all, he said, that the idea, the conception of God as having created us for his own self-will and purpose is a sign of a narcissistic God and we must liberate ourselves from that God.
Only once in his life Sartre acknowledged that he wrestled with this God. It quotes him as saying the following, and I think this is amazing:
Only once did I have the feeling that God existed. I had been playing with matches and burnt a small rug. I was in the process of covering up my crime, when suddenly, God saw me. I felt his gaze inside my head and on my hands. I rolled about in the bathroom, horribly visible, a live target, but indignation saved me. I flew into a rage against so crude an indiscretion. I blasphemed. I muttered like my grandfather, 'Sacre nom de Dieu! De nom de Dieu! (God damn it! God damn it!)', and he never looked at me again.
Just remove God! Never think of him again! Take him out of the reckoning! Sartre then felt there was freedom, and there was liberation from having the absence of God or the declaration that there is no God. Humanity had come of age, and was free to be itself. Boy, I would like to see Sartre and the writer of Psalm 119 in a room together, wouldn't you?
The writer of the Psalms would reply with the following: “Mr. Sartre, I think the world is not as benign as you think it is. The world is not, with all the freedom that might come from walking away from God, a pleasant place always. The laws that God has established - the Ten Commandments, the laws of nature, the laws of Torah are in place precisely because God wants people to live with freedom. There cannot be freedom if the law, the Torah, is removed.”
The purpose of the laws - to not covet, to not commit adultery, to not kill, to not steal, to not bear false witness - are established not for the punishment of humanity, but for its protection. The Psalmist would say, “Look, I know of what I speak because my people were disobedient. When they became disobedient, they became the subject and the object of the tyranny of others. Only now, after the exile, have we come home. Only now do we have freedom. We need to go back to first things.”
The debate between the Psalmist and Sartre, and I love Sartre in many ways, is the debate of our time. It is one of the great debates of our era. Are human beings freer with an absence of God and of the Torah and the law, or are we more restrained by the absence of God and the Torah? Notice the language that the Psalmist uses. He is very clear, just as Jesus is very clear in the Sermon on the Mount: blessedness, happiness, joy are found in the law. They are found in faithfulness. They are found in God's horizons.
Bruggeman also suggests that this passage sets the limits for the people of God and for Israel. Limits! What an outmoded idea that is today! Limits! Who wants to talk about limits? We want to talk about the limitless! Who wants to talk about constraints? We want to talk about freedom, liberation. Who wants to talk about constraints in a world where we want to be autonomous and free? Yet, for the Psalmist, he is writing out of love for his people. He knows there will be nothing but chaos for the newly returned exilic community if they don't adhere to first things. He knows that they will not be distinct amongst all the other nations that are around if they don't subscribe to first things. He knows that if there are no limits, then in fact tyranny can reign again.
I was reading something fascinating this week. I am not sure if you are aware of this, but there is a report on MSN, and a lot of blogging, about the ten worst cities in which to drive in the world. Toronto is #9 in the whole world! It talks about our 18-lane highway, the 401, and how still, with all those lanes, Canadians manage to have traffic jams, no movement in any one of the 18 lanes. It talks about the problems of congestion. Oh, we are not Rome, we are not Athens, we are not Seoul or Beijing - they are much worse - still we are #9!
It got me thinking, “You know, I am not sure that Toronto is as bad as people think it is.” I was thinking of a city where I drove in the late 1970s that was much, much worse, and that was Kinshasa in Zaire in the Congo. The reason it was so bad was not that there were a lot of cars going in strange directions; it was just that there were so many potholes in the road. Potholes which, I am pleased to say make Toronto potholes look like pimples! These were colossal, colossal holes!
But, here was the problem of driving in Kinshasa. If you hit one of those potholes, your suspension wasn't coming out again! So, what did people do? They drove around the potholes! But were there any laws governing which side of the pothole you should drive on? NO! Some went to the left; some went to the right; some went right over the middle of it and straight on. It was like bumper cars! You drove along one of the main streets, and cars were having head-on collisions, each avoiding a pothole on their own side of the road. Chaos. No law. No limits. Just drive and hope you don't get hit. It was like Russian roulette.
I thought about that and about Kinshasa many times and I believe the roads are better now. But I think that in so many ways the world operates like those roads. If you take away the limits, the constraints that are placed upon us, you do not actually have freedom; you have anarchy. You do not have liberation; you have problems.
Now, in no way misunderstand what I am saying here. I am not talking about Egypt today. I am not talking about a return to tyranny. All I am saying is simply this: that human freedom must operate within some form of constraint, and God knows that. One of the things that we contribute as believers to the world is a sense of the joy and the freedom that comes from God's Torah, from God's law.
The final thing that is said by Bruggeman is that Psalm 119 talks about the centre of things. By centre, what the Psalmist is trying to do is to bring the world back into the centre of the people of God's life. Now, as Christians, we do not practice Torah piety; we practice following in Jesus' footsteps. We see and we understand that Jesus is the embodiment of Torah. We understand that Torah is fulfilled in Jesus.
Jesus did not come to replace the law but to fulfill it. He did not come to restrict it but to expand it. He did not come to contradict it but to bring it into the heart. Jesus came not only as the embodiment of Torah but the embodiment of the forgiveness of those things that Torah points out. So Jesus is to use the words of the Psalmist, the Aleph, the A, the first thing. He is the Alpha, the first thing. And it is this first thing that determines how we live. Jesus renewed Torah.
I have been doing a lot of reading recently, in orthopaedics for some strange reason. One of the things that I have discovered is that the key to anyone's healing and being healed is proper posture. Posture is important because it aligns the rest of your muscles and skeletal system. Get your posture out of whack and other things get out of whack as well. I also found out that our heads, on average, weigh 20lbs. That is a lot of weight! I carried a 20 lb. bag of dog food and I didn't realize that my head was the equivalent of a 20 lb. bag of dog food. (Don't go anywhere with that!)
There are some people who have bigger heads, I mean Dr. Hunnisett and Reverend McMaster have immense brains and intellect and they probably have bigger brains, but on average it is 20 lbs, but if that 20 lbs isn't sitting properly on the body and isn't being held in a proper place, everything else gets out of whack. Getting your posture right is part of your healing. First things! First things! Get the head right, and the body falls into line. Get the Alpha straight, and the rest of the body conforms. Get Jesus as the first thing, and everything else falls into place: blessedness and joy.
The doctoral student that I saw at that university walking down the corridor towards the tea and coffee room was pointed out by the professor. This doctoral student was not only a doctoral student who had done research on Bach and theology, the doctoral student was the dancing girl from the Soviet Union. She was the one who was from Zhukovsky, forty miles southeast of Moscow, the great aviation centre of the Soviet Union. The doctoral student, who was now preparing to teach the doctrines of the Christian faith, and was the one who was moved in her soul by the music of Bach, she was the one who was grasped by the Aleph, the Alpha, by the first thing, and look what her life has become! Amen.