For those who want a change from the Gospel

Advent Sunday – Psalm 80:1-8, 18-20

In my experience of churches I would say that it is even more rare to use a Psalm at the Eucharist than it is to hear an OT reading (maybe I’ve just been at the wrong churches). In fact the Psalter is one of the most neglected parts of the Bible, particularly in evangelical and charismatic churches. We might sing a worship song or two based loosely on a Psalm, although only ever on one of the nice ones, but the liturgical reading or singing of Psalms has almost completely dropped out of the repertoire of many churches. (Personally I blame Anglican Chant, but don’t get me going on that!) So having been round the three year cycle of OT readings, I thought it might be fun to spend the next three years (God willing) to look more deeply into the Psalms.

As usual I’ll be taking a ‘critical’ look at the texts rather then merely a devotional one. In other words I’ll be seeking to place the Psalm in its original context, rather than trying to find Jesus in it all the time. The study of the Psalms has a long and distinguished history, which we don’t need to go into here, but it will be worth you knowing that the Psalter has been categorised into several different types, which we’ll talk about each week. The pioneer was Hermann Gunkel, who wrote in 1926, but of course many scholars have since refined his work. All the Psalms follow the structure of Hebrew poetry, which works not by rhyming, but by ‘parallelism’, the repeating of a line with slightly different wording. So for example in today’s Psalm:

⁵You have fed them with the bread of tears;
    you have made them drink tears by the bowlful.
⁶You have made us an object of derision to our neighbours,
    and our enemies mock us.

Anyway, enough background – let’s get on with Psalm 80.

The stuff here about ‘The Lilies of the Covenant’ you can ignore. We don’t really know what it means, but the suggestion is that directions like this might be the tunes to which the Psalm would have been sung, as we might say today Love Divine to Blaenwern. The Psalm is a Psalm of National Lament, which cries out to God, with a repeated refrain:

Restore us, O God;
    make your face shine on us,
    that we may be saved.

The people are conscious of God’s rejection of their prayers, and the perilous state which their rebellion has brought the nation into, so they cry out for him to restore their fortunes, and promise that when he does so they will not turn away from him again. The mention of three Northern tribes in v.2 might mean that the Psalm was composed in the Northern Kingdom, with no mention of Judah or Jerusalem in the South, or it might be from the South but showing either sympathy for the Northern tribes who were being conquered by Assyria, or indeed fear that the Assyrian threat would continue southwards and consume them too. The dating, therefore, depends on which way you read this question, but the point is that the people had seen a threat and were crying on God to help them, and promising that if he did they would not be naughty again.

It’s easy to see why this Psalm has been chosen for Advent Sunday, when we turn from the celebration of Christ as King and focus on our need for salvation and rescue, a salvation, Christians believe, which will come in its fulness when Jesus returns to reign and conquers once for all everything which is evil and destructive. The season of Advent is marked liturgically and emotionally by this sense of both helpless desperation and hopeful anticipation. But the historical setting of the Psalm raises for us an important question about the genuineness of this national outcry. History shows us that restoration did not come for Judah for another 150 years or more, and that Israel in the North was pretty well obliterated. Just because the liturgy says something and we all join in heartily, that might not be where our hearts actually are. However this Psalm was used liturgically by the nation, the fact is that the OT repeatedly depicts repentance as shallow and temporary. So the challenge for us this Advent season is quite simple: will we mean what we say and sing?

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Christ the King – Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24

Christ the King is my very fave Sunday of the year. The idea of Jesus Christ reigning over all the universe is one which I find profoundly exciting and hopeful. But the first commentary I read on todays passage was from America, and the writer admitted that this Sunday meant nothing to him, and that the idea of kindship was a completely alien idea, which encapsulated a patriarchal power figure, which seems odd in our modern lives. He goes on to ask ‘When was the last time you saw a King in real life?’ Last night on the telly, mate.

Here in the UK we love our Royal Family, or at least most of us do. And now, for the first time in most of our lifetimes, we have an actual King, difficult though it still is to remember to sing the National Anthem right. But of course to project from Charles III onto God is never going to work, any more than we can get an accurate picture of God as Father by thinking about our human fathers. It’s meant to work the other way round. Fathers, and Kings, are meant to understand their roles by looking at God, and how he handles it, and then try to perform like that. So what does today’s passage tell us about God as King, and how does Jesus fulfil that role?

First of all, let’s set this passage in context. Judah is in exile in Babylon, and the people are far from home, both physically, culturally and theologically. There are huge questions in the air. How did we get into this mess? How can we spirit God without a Temple? Has God given up on us? Will we ever get home again? These were the sorts of questions and anxieties which people were trying to make sense of. It seems that there was a felt crisis of leadership. The leaders, or shepherds, had failed to protect or nurture their people. Therefore, says Ezekiel, God himself is going to step in and do the job properly. Human leadership had failed, so there was only one option: for God to take over. So how would he act as their leader? I think three points come strongly from this text and beyond.

The first doesn’t really come from this passage, to be honest, but I love it so you’re getting it anyway. The first characteristic of Jesus’ Kingship will be majesty. I once heard Jack Heyford speak, and he told us the story of his famous worship-song Majesty. He happened to be in Britain in 1977 when the nation was preparing to celebrate our late Queen’s silver Jubilee, and he was struck by the British sense of majesty. Unlike my commentator he was deeply moved by the way Brits celebrated majesty and royalty, the reverence we had for our monarchy, and how as a nation our ‘redemptive gift’ to the rest of the world was an awareness of God’s splendour. His song was written out of that experience. We’ve seen it again recently with the two events of the Queen’s funeral and the King’s Coronation, and I can’t be alone in feeling an all too rare tear of pride come to my eye as I reflected that nobody does these occasions better than Britain (and the C of E specifically).  In an age when Church is becoming increasingly informal and all about me and how I feel, Christ the King is a good reminder that as well as being my chum, he is also the splendid King of Kings and Lord of Lords, ruler of the universe and ‘potentate of time’. It’s a good week to remember that in our oh-so-trendy worship.

But now let’s go back to the text, and the first thing we see is this great and mighty king as a shepherd. This is such a nurturing, healing view of leadership, particularly when previous leaders have been abusive and self-serving. See how bang up to date this is? The hope of our coming King is one of healing from what other human leaders have done to us, or allowed to happen to us. How we need that hope!

But alongside that picture of a loving, caring King is the more familiar one of the King as Judge. We’re actually not used to this either, since our monarchy doesn’t actually have that much real power, can be lied to deliberately by politicians, and have to sit and read a speech much of which must have been said through gritted teeth. Not so Jesus our King. He is more than just a puppet or figurehead, and when he comes those who have treated his people harshly will be called to account. And of course as with any pictures of judgement, we need to think first about ourselves before gloating over the fate of others.

In a world where leaders have lost the trust of their people, and where conflict and suffering are the result of the decisions of evil leaders, I can’t think of any Sunday which inspires as much hope as Christ the King. Enjoy, and pray for that King to take up his reign soon, as we will next week. And pray too for those shouting ‘Not my King!’

This post completes three years of OT Lectionary blogs (which remain archived on this site), and I feel it’s time to move on, having gone round the three-year cycle. I decided to look at a part of Scripture even more neglected, in my experience, than the OT, so from Advent Sunday next week I’ll be beginning a series on the Lectionary Psalms. See you next year!

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Kingdom 3/2 before Advent – Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18

Last week our lectionary sent us to Amos chapter 5, where the prophet turned on its head the people’s understanding of the ‘Day of the Lord’. They expected it would be a wonderful occasion when God would come to judge all the other nations and leave Israel as top dog. Instead, said Amos, they would be at the front of the queue for judgement. What Amos said to the Northern Kingdom, Zephaniah said in the South to Judah 100 or so years later. We never learn!

But Zephaniah’s teaching goes deeper than that of Amos. I particularly like him, because he is talking about liturgy. Amos mentions worship, but his main point is that injustice and corruption are rife, and there is no concern in the land for the poor and disadvantaged by the rich and privileged. Their worship is almost beside the point, but for Zephaniah it is central. His key idea comes in the strange idea in v.7-8; that God is about to offer a sacrifice, and that sacrifice will be the corrupt nation of Judah.

So what does that actually mean, and what crime had the nation committed to demand such a punitive sacrifice? Our filleted passage doesn’t tell us, but v.4-6 do. It’s all about the worship of false gods. And, v.12-13 add, the complacency and accumulation of wealth which that false worship has engendered.

There is a strand of OT theology which suggests that the Temple was seen as a microcosm of the whole creation. Solomon knew that no earthly house could contain or limit God (2 Chron 6:18), but the Temple was the place where God was, as it were, available to his people. Israelite worship both re-enacted the mighty acts done by God for his people and celebrated them. But it also actualised God’s presence among them. He was present, and available to his people, in and through their worship. All creation is present in their liturgy. So what happens when that liturgy goes horribly wrong? All creation suffers. The terrifying postscript to Zephaniah’s pronouncement of judgement on Judah is that actually the whole earth is going to be punished. False worship will not just harm you: it will affect the whole created order, because that’s what liturgy does.

So in a terrifying twist, God is about to offer his own sacrifice. To purify the nation from their own corruption a sin offering has to be made – the whole of creation has to be consumed. The next couple of chapters are a Cook’s tour of the nations around Judah, and all of them are held to account. Particularly poignant at the moment is the fate of Gaza, which will be left in ruins 2:4). God calls the people to silence (v.7) with the onomatopoeic word ‘hassa’, like our word ‘hush’, a common call to worship in the OT. Then he announces his words of judgement.

Recently at our home group we have been studying evangelism, but last night we spent a period in intercession for the war going on in Israel and Gaza, most of us admitting that we really had no idea how to pray into that tragic situation. But I quickly made the link between evangelism and the terrible state of the world. Jesus called his followers to be salt and light, and the function of salt in his time was twofold: as a preservative and as a fertiliser. Christians are sprinkled in society to stop bad things from growing and to help good things to grow. Jesus warned against being so polluted with other chemicals that we lose our distinctive saltiness and become useless. But the other thing which would make salt ineffective would be if there simply wasn’t enough of it to make any difference. As our world has neglected both God and godliness, there are truly cosmic effects. We don’t engage in evangelism to get our church numbers up so that we can have help to pay the bills. We desperately need in our world more godly people who worship and live righteously.

It sounds a strange idea to suggest that if we don’t get our liturgy right war will break out in our world, but Zephaniah certainly suggests that what we do or don’t do in worship really does have cosmic effects. Perhaps we are beginning to see them now.

Coming soon – a new series on revjohnleachblog from Advent Sunday. Stay tuned!

For those who want a change from the Gospel

Kingdom 2/3 before Advent/Remembrance Sunday – Amos 5:18-24

For a brief moment my eyes lit up when I saw that today’s OT reading was from Amos, but my joy was short-lived as I realised that it was the wrong chapter! I have often preached on Amos 4 on Remembrance Sunday, and especially on v.10 – ‘I killed your young men with the sword … yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.’ Oh well, I’m sure I’ll get that in somewhere before this post ends.

Instead we have chapter 5, which is far more often used to teach that God doesn’t like charismatic worship, especially if it isn’t matched by social action. So why this particular text today? In this chapter Amos is drawing together three different themes, and exploring the relationship between them. In doing so he is deliberately subverting the expectations of his hearers, something which he does repeatedly throughout his book. He is a master of rhetoric.

The first idea is that of the ‘Day of the Lord’. We might call this day ‘Comeuppance Day’, as Israel believed that God would show up in power, defeat all his enemies and make the nation top dog again. This is a nice thought, which accounts for its persistence into the time of Jesus and the political expectations on the Messiah. But don’t get too excited, says Amos. If you’re looking forward to that day, you need to remember that if God is going to do away with evil nations, you’ll be top of his hit list. That day for which you long so much will be darkness, not light.

But then Amos turns to Israel’s worship. Surely God enjoys what we get up to in the Temple, the people no doubt thought. Surely our faithful religious observances will impress him enough to get us off the hook? No, says Amos, he hates it all, actually. Why so? Not because he doesn’t like worship songs (although with some songs I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe he doesn’t). Let’s take a step back – what are we doing when we worship, especially at the festivals which Amos specifically mentions? Israel’s annual cycle of worship, like the Church Calendar today, is based around events from history at which God acted decisively for the salvation of his people. The Jewish festivals recall the rescue from slavery in Egypt, the giving of the Law, God’s faithful provision of the harvest, and so on, as do ours, although they have become Jesus-flavoured and celebrate an even greater redemption. God had been good to them in so many ways, but their gratefulness did not mean that they had stopped living in the ways from which they needed God to rescue them in the first place. They thanked God, but they weren’t listening. They went round and round the cycles, but mindlessly kept living in the same ways which had got them into trouble before.

So what’s the answer? Listen to your own worship, says Amos. Let it remind you of what God did, and why he needed to do it. Live with justice, so that his anger will be turned away from you. Care for those you are oppressing, don’t simply sing your songs and carry on.

And that, I think, is where Remembrance Day can be so dangerous. We have moved on from the kind of jingoistic ways in which we celebrated when I was very young, fresh from our victory over those nasty foreigners in the Second World War. With Viet Nam, the Gulf, Iraq, Ukraine and now Gaza behind us we do now regard war with a greater sense of horror, fuelled, of course, by all those ‘scenes which some may find distressing’ which are pumped into our lives on a daily basis. Yes, war is awful, and we really are grateful for those who fight so that we don’t have to, and so yes, it is good to wear our poppies for them and give them a respectful nod once a year. But like Israel of old, it is easy to go through the ceremonies without learning the lessons. ‘I killed your young men with the sword … yet you have not returned to me.’ Unless our world does that, and starts living out of love and respect rather than hatred and greed, we will not escape the judgement of God when Jesus returns. Not many of us probably are responsible for foreign policy, and certainly not for that of other nations, but as the old worship songs says, ‘Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.’ And let there be a massive turning to God in prayer and repentance for the seeds of violence which are planted deep in human hearts, and which only the grace of God can prevent from growing.

Coming soon to revjohnleachblog: a brand new series! Watch this space …