Our Authentic Soul
Rev. Dr. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
October 18, 2009
Psalm 12
We continue in our sermon series on the Psalms today with Psalm 12. The Psalms come in a variety of different types as we’ve discussed. Psalms of thanksgiving. Psalms of Zion, which trumpet the joy of being in Jerusalem. Psalms of praise. This morning we read another type – a Psalm of Lament.
Laments are songs or poems that express grief or mourning. Laments are present in classic literature like the Iliad, Odyssey and Beowulf. They are certainly present in the Bible. In fact there is a whole book of Lamentations in the Old Testament. And there are many in the Psalms. Laments are about being real, honest and authentic. For the Psalmist and for us, laments are about being connected to our emotions and having the confidence to express feelings towards God. Laments are about caring enough to include our faith in our lives, all through the week. Reading now a lament from Psalm 12.
On Friday, the Gray family moved to Bethesda. We “packed up the car with the kids and dog,” left the district, crossed over the line, and I woke up yesterday a resident of Montgomery County. We are excited to be closer to the church and nursery school and living in this great area. Much of our week was spent packing boxes and bubble wrapping glasses and the like so that we could make our way to the new home.
Moving is hard. There is no way around it. Especially so in the rain. This week was a lot of moving and a lot of rain. But most all our stuff arrived relatively dry so all is well.
I have found that any time I move, it gives me an opportunity to weed through a lot of stuff. I do not need my college term papers or my 1980’s rugby shirts. It’s unlikely we’ll be playing my tape collection from the early 90’s anytime soon. I threw out, recycled or gave away a lot of the paper, and items large and small, that I had sitting around our house that I had forgotten about or that I hadn’t looked at for awhile.
In so doing, it gave me an opportunity to read through some of my old journals. Whenever I read through old journals, I am reminded of thoughts, values, and aspirations of my past. I find that the stuff we put in old letters and journals tends to capture some of our deepest thoughts and aspirations. I know that in them I express some of my deepest values.
So I thought a lot this week about whether I am living today in a way that is consistent with my deeper values.
Perhaps we all should move every few years just so we can have an excuse to read through and connect with those our oldest and deepest thoughts. Just not in the rain.
How often do we take the time to examine our actions in light of those ideas we claim are most important to us? To look at whether the actions and decisions we are making are consistent with our values.
The writer of Psalm 12 saw a world where people had moved far away from their values and the ideas God had placed in the world. He described a world of hypocrites who spoke with “flattering lips.” People who “uttered lies” and had “double hearts.” People who said one thing and did another. People who claimed to be faithful and kind and who acted differently.
The Psalmist lamented a world where the church and those in it were so busy that God was no longer their master. Theologian Henri Nouwen once said that the noise of our lives can make us deaf, unable to hear God’s voice, God’s call or the spirit inside ourselves. If we do not take time, we become strangers to our true selves. Because like my house, our souls become cluttered during the week.
When Jesus talked about being in the world but not being of the world, he was highlighting the importance of our staying rooted in the values of God. About living consistently despite the influences around us. If we do not think about it and work at it, we can loose touch with our deeper values.
John Ortberg writes in his book, "Faith and Doubt," that humans have three different kinds of convictions. First, there are "Public Convictions," or what we want other people to think we believe. Ortberg uses the example of King Herod saying to the wise men, "When you find the child (the messiah) come tell me so I can go worship Him." Herod wanted to find the Christ child for another reason, but he wanted the wise men to believe that he would worship him. It was a public conviction. He wanted people to think he believed it.
The second kind of conviction is a "Private Conviction." That's where we think we believe something, but that may or may not be the case. So, for example, in the New Testament, Peter says to Jesus, "I will never deny you.” “Even if everybody else leaves you, I will never leave you." Was he sincere? Yes. Did he believe it? Most likely. Was it true? No. Peter denied Jesus three times.
And then Ortberg says there's a third kind of conviction, a core conviction, which is revealed by what we do. It's part of our mental map about the way things are. He says if we believe that fire will burn us if we touch it, we will pull our hand away from the stove instinctively. If we believe in the law of gravity, we won’t walk off a cliff.
We don’t often contradict our ideas about the way things are. We don’t contradict our core convictions.
Ortberg writes that “What God is most interested in is our core convictions.” The things that really matter to us. The values that stay with us over time.
Wherever we go and whatever we face, we instinctively return to our core convictions. So if our core convictions are rooted in faith in God, then that is what we will instinctively rely on when things get tough. When we are under pressure at work. When things aren’t working at home. Or when things are working out so well in life that we start to believe we are responsible for all our good fortune.
The Psalmist might summarize Ortberg’s ideas as saying; there can be a difference between what we say we believe, what we think we believe and what our actions reveal about what we really believe.
The psalmist hoped that the promises and the word of God would become the guideposts of humanity, and that faith would be its anchor.
The way our faith becomes one of our core convictions is if we practice living out our faith throughout the week.
What are our core convictions and where is God included in those convictions?
Keith Miller warns in his book, “The Taste of New Wine,” about the danger of “Performance Christianity.” A tendency to play our roles in church without opening up honestly and emotionally to God and each other. So gaps grow between our actions and core convictions.
In Psalm 12, the psalmist contrasted the duplicity of the world with the honestly and consistency of God and God’s word. He says that the world lies, but God’s promises are as pure “as silver refined seven times.” Seven is the Biblical number of completeness so his point is that God’s promises are completely pure. Now God can be frustratingly quiet at times. But God is consistent. My lament is that I can’t always hear when God is speaking. But in my heart of hearts, I know that has more to do with my issues than with God’s. For when I do finally pay attention I usually discover that God has been speaking all along. And that the messages I hear from God today are consistent with my experiences with God from the past.
And so my challenge, and yours, is to think about our core convictions, and then ask if our lives are reflecting those convictions. If you believe in God’s mission, how are you engaging in social justice? If you believe in God’s salvation, what spiritual risks are you taking? If you believe God is present not just on Sunday but each day, how are you living out your faith all week?
We will talk about stewardship in the next few weeks as we prepare for 2010 budget. How we steward our time, talents and gifts says a lot about our core convictions.
This morning our evangelism lay ministry is hosting our post church fellowship hour in the gathering space. Evangelism is our theme. Evangelism is about our life story reflecting a core conviction of faith. It’s about allowing the spirit of Christ to permeate our beings and then sharing that spirit. It’s about how we do our work and how we are involved in living out our faith.
At our evangelism lay ministry meeting earlier this month, chair Doug Adamson shared a statement from emerging church leader Brian McLaren about living out our faith with conviction in the world. I want to share it with you today.
McLaren writes,
“I went to my doctor this morning. It was a routine checkup. I need to see him every quarter to make sure that the medications that are supposed to help my blood pressure and cholesterol aren’t damaging my liver. Our visits are usually very brief—you know, blood test results, blood pressure, temperature, pulse, followed by, “How are you feeling? Any problems?” to which I answer, “I feel fantastic. No worries at all,” and he tells me to come back in three months. But today was different. My doctor knows that I am a Christian, because it came up in an earlier conversation, maybe a year ago. So today he comes in and says, right off the bat, “I have a question for you. You know, I’m getting older, and that makes any sane person think about their mortality, their spirit… You know what I mean. But any time I begin to feel closer to God, I hear someone on TV say something absolutely outrageous in the name of God or religion, and it just smothers my interest. It pushes me in the totally opposite direction.”
He said he had a question, but it was left unexpressed. It didn’t matter, because with or without a specific question to get us started, we ended up having a good conversation. Three things are still kind of vibrating inside of me from that conversation.
First, people like my doctor—intelligent people, thoughtful, honest people—really want to talk about God and the spiritual life….. Everywhere I go I find people like my doctor who are thinking about life, its meaning, its destiny, their souls, their purpose, God. And they want to talk. They need to talk. And they need a conversation partner.
Second, there are plenty of religious folks around who talk about God a lot. Whatever the religion, there are people who abuse it and say “absolutely outrageous” things “in the name of God or religion,” as my doctor said.
And third, there are plenty of sincere and generous people of faith around, too, who would be great conversation partners for people like my doctor. But here’s the problem: so many of them are so afraid of sounding like the wackos that they keep their faith to themselves.
Their silence, of course, makes the strident and outrageous voices seem all the louder, and so their silence ends up being complicit in smothering the interest of the spiritual seekers.
On my way home from the doctor’s office, I turned on the radio and caught the news. More violence. More bad news about global warming. More political division and rancorous name-calling. More stories of people abusing people sexually, kids with guns, crooked politicians, corrupt business executives.
I thought to myself, “What can change this cycle of viciousness?” I switched the radio off as I drove along in silence. I remembered the famous quote from the 19th-century British statesman, Edmund Burke: “All that the forces of evil need to win in this world is for enough good people to do nothing.”
I thought, “Somebody should start an organization that would mobilize people—recruit them, train them, support them—so they could be good people who do something so that the forces of evil don’t win in this world. This organization would need to accept people just as they are, infuse them with hope, give them a vision of a better world, give them a vision for themselves becoming agents of making that better world a reality. It would need to both practice and preach. Why hasn’t somebody started an organization like that?”
And, of course, about a quarter mile down the road, I realized that somebody had done just that. In fact, it had cost him everything to do so.
But that organization can become so preoccupied with lesser things—including its own institutional survival—that it forgets why it’s really here: to recruit people to switch sides and opt out of the vicious cycle and join a cycle of healing, to infuse them with vision, to send them out as change agents, to help them experience transformation and sustain them so they can be lifelong catalysts of transformation, to give them good news to share to counter the bad news that is being reported every hour on the hour.”
At our meeting last week, Doug had the conviction to share some ideas and a story. This morning I share the story with you. Maybe you’ll do something with it. Of course, this is what evangelism is all about.
I agree with McLaren that people do want to talk about their faith. They are hungry to do so. They are hungry for people to meet their need with hope. And yes, there are those in our time, like in the Psalmist’s time, who will say almost anything, even anything in the name of God. But that shouldn’t stop us from speaking clearly and sharing the truth we experience through the Holy Spirit.
In your bulletin each week, we list our staff. It includes me and several others. But our church staff list also includes you. By the word, “ministers,” it lists, “all members of the Church.” You are a minister of the church.
If our core convictions are rooted in our faith, then our tongues must not be silent. There is too much Good News from God in Jesus Christ for faith not to be one of our core convictions.
There are too many people who need hope for us to fail in acting on our conviction that we are called to help. There are too many problems in the world that need addressing during the week for us to leave our passion for God in the pews when we exit at the end of this service.
For no matter what changes we make or challenges we face in our lives, where we move or live, or what we do for a living, our authentic soul longs to serve God.
And fortunately, God longs to be in relationship with us, so that when the story of our lives is written, we can say with conviction that we have done our best to share God’s love with the world.
To God be all glory and honor, Amen.
