The Extravagance of God

They were deeply concerned about the impending disaster of war. They feared a bombing campaign would be coming, and they tried to respond in the most creative way possible, and so in 1939, a poster was made. Two and a half million copies of the poster were made, but few copies made it to the street. The posters are now very well-known by us. They simply had on the top of them a crown, and underneath it the words that we’ve seen many times recently, “Keep calm and carry on.” Few of these posters actually made it to the street. They were discovered in the early 2000s, when a woman from Alnwick, in Newcastle, found them in her basement, brought then to Antiques Road Show and they were shown to the world for the first time. “Keep calm and carry on” had been buried, in a sense, for all those years.

Now, of course, a whole industry has been built around it. “Keep calm and hug your drummer”, “Keep calm and have tea.” I even saw one, and I'm not advocating it, “Keep calm and smoke dope.” There is sorts of “Keep calm” posters out there, but keep calm and carry on was the original poster. The more I think about that, the more powerful I realize that poster was. The Tudor crown at the top of it links the past and the present and the future. The crown represents, of course, the monarchy, and there’s a sense in which the presence of that crown shows the immutability and the strength that is found in an institution. The Tudor crown wasn’t used very long in the logos and the symbols and the standards for the monarchy. It was Edward the Seventh who standardized it, and from 1902 to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, the Tudor crown was the standard crown of the monarchy. If you look at old telephone booths, the Tudor crown is on the top and even in the royal mailboxes.

The Tudor crown was present for those 51 years or so, representing the immutability of the monarchy and the past, but it also represented the present, for it was designed for people who were facing impending doom and death. The notion to keep calm, not to be frightened, to hold on to something that was good, and to be at peace was there in the present, but there’s a dynamism to it. It is to carry on. In other words, don’t be defeated. Don’t let things that are going to come your way that oppress you and force you down, hold you down. Keep going. Carry on. Do not be defeated. In this powerful symbol, I see images of Psalm 126. If I were to use a tag line in the Bible for Psalm 126, it would be “Keep calm and carry on.”

Why? Because it was written at a time when people were feeling uncertain about the world. Clearly, the Psalm was originally written about those who had returned after the exile in 538 BC. For those of you who have listened to the last two or three sermons, I’ve been mentioning the exile and the return of the people of Israel. After 70 years of being refugees and living in exile, they finally come home to Israel. But when they return, they’re uncertain. They’re not sure what they should do. After all, they haven’t lived on their land for 70 years. There are no crops. They haven’t been able to plant anything. They have been living in a foreign land, and they’re now back home and find themselves hungry, and poor, and disorganized, and destitute. It’s one thing to go home after you’ve lived in exile. It’s another to build a life that reflects what you had before you left.

So somebody decided, in this great psalm, to borrow from prior works, prior hymns that had been sung. One of the hymns that has been sung was the harvest song, the song of thanksgiving, the song of praise, the song recognizing what God had done. And so, in a sense, this psalm is about keeping calm, and carrying on. It’s about praise of God, but it’s also about being vigilant and moving forward. Isn’t it true that songs that we’ve sung in the past can give us a sense of joy in the present? I’ve been fascinated this last week by how many times I have heard the chant, “Okay Blue Jays, let’s play ball,” resounding off radio and television. In fact, I go to bed at night now with it in my mind just before I fall asleep. We’ve heard it so many times, memories of 1993, glory days of triumph, and I had this song in my heart, until a couple of days ago, and now it seems to have been replaced with, I don't know, the Funeral March, or something like that. But we hope, don’t we? We hope.

Isn’t it amazing how singing a song from 20 odd years ago gives you a sense of courage, and hope, and joy in the present. Well that’s exactly what Psalm 126 did for the people of Israel. Why? Because just like “keep calm and carry on” there is this relationship between the past and the present and the future. It is very much, though, a song of the past. It’s a song of memories and the psalmist puts it in beautiful language. To remember the days when we had this great dream, and the dream was that we would return home to our land. It was a wonderful and a glorious time. Remember when there was laughter and joy, and the word for laughter that is used in this psalm is the same word that was used in the Book of Genesis, in chapters 17 and 18, where Sarah and Abraham are told that even though Sarah was an old lady, they would have a child, and she would give birth. What does Sarah do? She laughs. She laughs at God. You must be crazy. The people of Israel laughed in this psalm because they couldn’t believe that God would ever bring them home from where they were, but just like Abraham and Sarah, God acted, and they have the memory of what God had done. The psalmist, then, is singing a song of memory, and how often it is the case that memory becomes the inspiration for great songs.

I was reading a wonderful article in the Huffington Post not long ago about the importance of memory for songwriters, and in this, Akira Kurosawa talks about, and I want to quote it, the power of memory that gives the rise to the power of imagination to sing in the present. It’s the power of memory that allows us to sing in the present. He uses Paul McCartney as an example, and he says, when Paul McCartney wrote that very famous song, “Penny Lane,” which was one of the most joyful Beatles songs, McCartney was thinking back to his childhood and youth. Kurosawa writes this. “McCartney’s ‘Penny Lane’ released as a single by the Beatles in ’67, is a sublime evocation of a world viewed through the tinted lens of memory.” The way the song begins this interpretation goes as follows, in Penny Lane, there is a barber showing photographs of every head he’s had the pleasure to know. McCartney’s barber tacks his memories, headshots of people whose hair he has cut, on the wall for all future customers to see. Thus, he shares his memories with everyone. Every person who enters the shop develops, then, a common experience with those who have gone before. It’s brilliant.

McCartney, in the interview, goes on to say that so many things from the past become inspiration for his songs. Adele, the songwriter of more recent vintage says the same thing, but hers are all about unrequited love and misery. Nevertheless, memory has power to affect the present. Why is this important? Because Thanksgiving is also about memories. It is about remembering what God has done for us. So often in our lives, we’re caught up in the challenges of the present, the emotions of the moment, and we forget. We forget what God has done. We forget to give thanks for the people in our lives, who have shaped us, and even if they’re no longer present with us in this life, they’ve had an influence on us in a profound way. It is a time for us to remember when we were in need and somebody was sent by God to come and help us and give us strength.

There are times to give deep thanks: when we have been sick and healed, when we’ve been hungry and fed, or when we’ve been disillusioned and needed restimulating. There are times when we look back on those memories of what God has done in the past to reignite the present. I thought about that this week, when finally after a long, long time, I decided to give up the phone that I have had for years. I don't know what it is about phones today, but we bond with them and I’d bonded with my Blackberry. People were making fun of me for having old technology, telling me how uncool I was, and that maybe it was time to let it go. Just, let it go.

I went into a store and I explained to this young woman that this thing was dying on me and that I needed a new phone. She brought out all this technology and new things, but she could see in my eyes the pain of letting go. As we reached over the counter and I handed it over to her for her to take out the SIM card, she recognized the agony of letting go. She said to me with excitement in her eyes, “Let it go and have this new one. You will be able to do amazing things. There’s Facebook. There’s better cameras. There’s wonderful photos, quicker responses, all these apps, music you can play. Your whole world will change.” She said, “You’ll be a new man when you use this thing. You will be transformed.” I'm thinking that I'm in a phone booth with a suit being put on me, and I'm going to come charging out into the world with all these new powers. Then she said, and this was the piece de resistance, “but the key is that this thing has more memory, and it will allow you to do more things.

Psalm 126 screams at us, we have memories of what God can do, therefore, now, you can go and do more things. What you can do now in the present. The psalmist borrowed from the great harvest tunes a Thanksgiving hymn. The people who have returned to Israel have gone into the south, in the Negev area, which is very dry, barren, and dusty. Hard to get anything to grow in Negev. It’s so hot. They’re not sure how they’re going to irrigate. They can plant seeds and sow them, but there seems to be no growth, and they’re depressed as a people because they cannot see how this will restore their lives. Then the psalmist uses incredible language, and it’s as if he’s suggesting that with their tears, (and this is a metaphor), there will be moisture for the growth, that God will transform their tears into songs of joy, and what is now a desert bed and seems barren, will in time bring in the sheaves. Don’t worry about your tears right now. Your tears can be a source of growth, you are uncertain, poor and hungry yet these are times when you experience God’s great love.

I read a wonderful story not long ago about leprosy, in the time when there were not drugs to cure it, but dating back to the time, particularly in the country of Trinidad and Tobago, there were actually islands where lepers would sent to live in isolation. In other words, they’d go to the island to die. They were kept away from everyone else, and only a few people had the courage to go onto these leprous islands. Usually it was Christians, who wanted to bring worship to them and bring nurses to bandage their wounds, and to try and bring about healing. I read the story about a Pastor Hinton who went to Tobago onto one of the islands on the western coast to try and help, but when he arrived there, he was shocked to find that people stayed away from him because of the disease. Nevertheless, bravely, on the first Sunday, he held a service of hymn singing.

He had a few words for the congregation that is gathered there, mainly made up of health care givers, and a few administrators, and patients, but the patients were not that disfigured. Then it came to the time he says to them, who would like to recommend a hymn? At that moment, a woman whose face had hitherto been turned downwards towards the pew all the time lifts her face and looks at him. Her face had been eaten away with leprosy. Her nose was gone. Her ears were going. Her face was disfigured severely. Her fingers had disappeared, but with one finger on one hand. She raised it up, and she said to Pastor Hinton, I would like to sing “Count our Blessings.” He was so upset by this that he got up and he left. He was so distressed by what he had seen, one of the nurses came to him and she said, “Pastor, I bet you’ll never sing that hymn again.”

He said, “No, I will. I’ll just never sing it in the same way.”

Sometimes tears of sorrow can still produce songs of thanksgiving, and what the psalmist is getting at for those who were in exile and had come home and had found their life barren is, don’t you give up hope, for God will do great things for you. Look at the way this psalm ends. Look at the wonderful conclusion of it, that God will bring in the sheaves, that there will be songs of joy, that there will be a return. We shall return, and our songs of sorrow will be turned into songs of joy. We’re going to be transformed. There’s hope. Don’t give up your hope. Hold on to your hope. But sometimes, I find, and I don't know if you’re like me, but I feel like the psalmist, that we do things ritually over and over again, and they lose their power, and we forget their importance in our lives. Sometimes just singing the hymn that those people sang when they had returned home was not only a reminder of what God had done, was not only a comfort in the present, but most of all, pointed the way forward to carry on and be persistent.

I’ve thought about Sundays like Thanksgiving with the beautiful cornucopias we’ve had and the great hymns like,” We Plough the Fields and Scatter,” “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” and why we do this over and over again. What is the power, of repeating something? Sure enough, the people of Israel read their psalms over and over again, as a constant reminder that God was not only with them, but God was also going to be with them. Our message of thanksgiving is not just about what we have now. It’s not just about what we’ve experienced in the past. It’s in the hope of all the things that God is going to do for us in the future. This is not a song about the past for us today. This is a song about tomorrow and how we’re going to be thankful no matter what, for everything that is out there.

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to an aid worker, who has been working among the northern Native communities on matters of water and housing, two of the great challenges, and you could hear the weariness in his voice. You could hear almost a sense of defeat. The problems before him were greater than his ability to solve them. It’s as if he had given up hope in the future. We talked about that, and I said to him, “For God’s sake, man, if you’ve given up hope and you’re the caregiver, you’re the support worker, you’re the one who’s standing side-by-side with the people in need, just think of what the people in need will feel like.” This is time for you to rise above what you see as defeat and to claim something in God’s name for the future.

It’s like that great movie, Chariots of Fire, where the great runner Harold Abramson, who was - Harold Abrahams, the world record holder, actually lost a race and felt defeated, and discouraged. He says to his girlfriend, “If I can’t win, I won’t run.”

She looked at him sternly and said, “And if you don’t run, you can’t win.”

Keep going. Carry on. Don’t lose faith. Be thankful. Look to the future. Believe. This Thanksgiving, may you do that. May you have memories and be thankful for them. In the present, may you have a sense of fortitude and strength and a song in your heart, and may you thank God, not only for now, but for what is to come. Keep calm, but carry on. Amen.