A choir without borders (or, even I have something to sing in this one) Sermon from Sunday, Aug 26

Reading: Psalm 148

 Icarus's Sister Swallows the Sun by Eileen Romaker

Praise the Lord …

young men and women alike,

old and young together!

And might we add all “firm and infirm together, all who can leap and run, and who cannot”?

“I don’t mind talking about MS,” Eileen Romaker says.  “However, I don’t wish to be defined by a wheelchair.”

That’s how the story begins – the one titled “Breaking the Rules:  Art helps Eileen Romaker rise above multiple sclerosis” in the Go section of yesterday’s Spectator.

It goes on:

A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1980 forced Eileen Romaker to give up her nursing career.  She first focused on raising her family.  But then she took a painting course with the late Gordon Perrier, a well-established local artist.

“I was hooked,” she tells me.

That was 15 years ago.  Since then the Ancaster artist has been painting up a storm.  A member of the Women’s Art Association of Hamilton, she exhibits regularly … [and] her illness takes second place to her art-making.

“Art,” she says, “has allowed me [to focus] my energies on the positive things in my life.”

Her repertoire is varied and flexible.  Her style is wonderfully succinct and barely lifelike.

“Imagination is key,” she says.  “I can easily get excited by a colour and lose track of my composition, but breaking the rules of art keeps it original and fresh.”

Breaking the rules of art – like breaking the rules of life.  Like breaking the rules of how we measure life and evaluate what’s good and what’s bad in it.  The rules around how we count ability and worth, and whether anything has value and meaning, or not. 

Praise the Lord, Eileen Romaker,

with your paintbrush and imagination,

as you did years ago with your care for others as a nurse. 

In some mysterious way,

praise the Lord of beauty and grace

not in spite of, but with

your MS and your wheelchair as part of your story.

Praise the Lord, on each stage

of your very-human, very-mortal journey.

Ian Brown, a journalist with the CBC, a number of years ago wrote a book called “The Boy in the Moon” about his son who was born with a genetic defect that afflicts maybe only 100 people in the world.  His name is Walker, and it seems ironic because the defect rendered him unable to speak or control his movements, terribly delayed and stalled almost every aspect of his mental development, and made him prone to self-harm by hitting himself.  The book is about Walker, about Ian and his wife Joanna, and about the way in which their life with and for Walker led them into understandings of life and world and what it means to be truly human that most of us only read about in books written by people like them.

In an interview once about the book and the life behind it, Ian told the story of interviewing a bishop in England for a story he was working on.  In the course of the interview the bishop revealed he also had a severely disabled son.  Naturally Ian asked him how he dealt with that as a man of faith.  What did his son’s disability do to his view of God?  To his practice of prayer?  Did he ever pray for healing of his son?

To which the bishop replied no, he never did.  It was a conscious choice he made more than once not to take up the offers of others to come and pray over his son for his healing.  Because, he said, that would be to say his son was not loved by God as he was.  That he was not capable of being blessed and of being a blessing as he was.  That his life was not of great value and worth in the life of the world, as it was.  That loving and being loved – the ultimate meaning of all life, was not possible, as he was.

          Praise the Lord, Walker and Ian and Joanna Brown,

          just as you are,

          in the unfolding mystery

of God’s love at work in the world that is,

in and through your life as it is,

rather than in the world and in life

as we think it should be,

or wish it would be.

I think the psalmist understands this.  Maybe it’s the wisdom of an earlier age.  Or the fruit of deep faith in God who is, and is in all things.

It seems when we say “Praise the Lord” today, it’s often just to give thanks and credit to God for something having happened that we see as good.  “Praise the Lord!” we say for a prayer we offered that’s been answered, for a need or a want we felt that was met, for a request we made of God’s power that’s been granted. 

But I wonder if we short-change ourselves when we do that?  If it limits our openness to the real presence of God, and the possibility of praise to God in and to and through all things?

Because did you notice when the psalmist calls on all creation – all the cosmos, to praise God, it’s not just the nice bits he speaks to, and calls into the chorus? 

It begins with the psalmist’s call to the heavenly host.  In the ancient world the heavenly host were not just the good guardian angels and sweet little cherubs that we tend to populate heaven with – creatures that easily and by habit praise God.  The heavenly host were the great powers of life and death, of good and evil together and often in conflict.  They were fearsome and beyond human understanding and control, and the psalmist includes them all because all that is and all that comes, even if not caused directly by God, is lovingly embraced by God and woven into the fabric of what is.

And when attention shifts in the second half of the psalm to life on Earth, again it’s not just the nice stuff – not just the majestic mountains and beautiful flowers and nice, sunny days and good weather that are called forward to praise God.  It’s also and specifically the sea monsters and all deeps, fire and hail, snow and frost. 

Things that can kill us and make us suffer.  Things we fear and take shelter from.  Things that remind us all creation is mortally imperfect and in itself morally ambiguous.  Things that speak to us of our own imperfection and ambiguity.  For which of us, and what thing in all creation is ever free of what we call defects and faults, illnesses and weaknesses alongside and interwoven with all the good stuff. 

And yet this is the cosmos that God calls into being – the chaos he invites into order.  This is the body of imperfection that God the Creator inhabits.  And this is the ground from which God’s praise is sung by us and by all things, just as we are. 

Praise be to God!

Needed: director for the cosmic choir, and prompter for the universal drama (towards Sunday, Aug 26)

Reading: Psalm 148

Psalm 148 is only 14 verses, and the phrase "Praise the Lord" or some variation of it appears 12 times.  There are also clear, barely suppressed echoes of it another 11 times.


That's a lot of explicit and implicit praise-the-Lords, and it's one of those phrases that sounds so different depending on how it's said, by whom, and for what reason.  At the moment I can think of at least three different ways it gets said, and to me one of them feels tolerable, another seems deplorable, and a third sounds  ... well, I'll let you decide for yourself, once I work it out a bit more (hopefully by Sunday morning!).

Just wondering, though ... when did you last say "Praise the Lord"?  What prompted it?  And what did you mean by it?

And ... one little note. 

In this psalm the psalmist does not praise the Lord for the sun and moon, shining stars, sea monsters and deeps, mountains and fruit trees and cedars and creeping things and all birds and so on.  This is not a Thanksgiving-kind-of-poem about praising God for all that God has put into the world for us to see and be glad for.

Rather, the psalm is an act of reminding all these inanimate and animate things of the cosmos to be about their proper and truest business, which is to praise the Lord.  The psalmist is speaking to the cosmos, the Earth and all things in it.  Which makes me wonder: can a nebula or a mountain or an insect or a mulberry bush praise God?  And if so, how on Earth do we encourage them to do this?

When tears are the seed of new life (sermon from Sunday, Aug 19)

Reading: Psalm 126

When Japhia was in the hospital this last time, the first three or four days were so bad and genuinely fearful that our whole world shrank to the size of her hospital room.  Nothing existed beyond the bounds of those four walls.  Which is why I didn’t call, didn’t text, at first didn’t even think to get in touch with anyone beyond our kids – not people here at church, not her sisters or mine, not neighbours or friends.

The feeling of powerlessness was big.  The anxiety was debilitating.  And it was only as nurses and then specialists of all kinds came in to care, to explore, and to open up options for healing and recovery, and as our kids and others came in to visit and pray and keep us in touch that we were opened again to a reality bigger than just ourselves and our present need, that hope began to grow, we felt part of a bigger picture, and life became manageable – and quite possibly good, again.  

It’s kind of like what we hear these days in the wake of the cancellation of the Basic Income Project in Ontario – that the provision of a basic income to people in poverty from the general wealth of the social whole, far from being a disincentive to work, was what began to open a window and a door for them to do something creative and constructive – something previously unimaginable and hopeful for them to change their lives for the better. 

A study done recently with a group of farmers explored the effect of stress on a person’s basic ability to cope with life.  The farmers sat for an IQ test before harvest when they were feeling insecure, anxious and not in control of their fate, and then sat for a test again after harvest when they knew what they had and that it would be enough.  The result of before and after was an average difference of 14 points of IQ.  A rise of 14 points of native intelligence when they knew their needs were met.  A drop of 14 points from their normal ability to work at life when they were unsure about the future and trapped inside the anxieties of the present moment.

I wonder if this is part of the genius and the gift of Psalm 126.  Why Wesley White in his blog about reading the Bible suggests praying and singing this psalm at different times of the day at least seven days in a row – if not for the rest of your life.  Why the people of Israel used this psalm as one of 15 psalms of ascent that they would sing along the way on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then recite one by one as they walked 15 steps up into the Temple of God that awaited them there.

Because this psalm is about remembering the bigger picture.  About being drawn in to the larger story and being able to remember it is ultimately good.  About being re-connected beyond the anxiety of the present moment to the divine eternal, and beyond our own powerlessness to the Higher and ultimately Loving Power of all that is, has been and ever shall be.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, [the psalm begins,]
     we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,

     and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said among the nations,
     "The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us,
     and we rejoiced.

The journey from the prison of the present to the freedom of the eternal begins with memory.  Memory of the goodness of God, of the world, and of life and history within it known through story and scripture, through our own experience and the experience of others. 

It’s assumed that at the time this psalm was written, the restoration referred to is the return of the people from generations of exile in Babylon to the land of Israel.  That was huge in their history and in their experience of God. 

And it crystalized so many other experiences and stories – like their original birth-journey out of Egypt that led them from slavery to the freedom they had known long before as nomad children of Abraham.  Like when they almost died time and time again on the way through the wilderness and God kept renewing their life with bread and water, and a leader and a law.  Like when they were first building a kingdom, and the Philistines stole their ark of the covenant – their most powerful symbol of God’s presence with them, and God helped David get it back again.  And what a delightful restoration that was when David, wildly dancing, led the procession of the ark all the way back to Jerusalem.

The experiences, the memories, the stories and the testimony of God’s rescues and restorations and renewals are so important to recall, and to recite over and over again.  They are the foundation of faith, and the beginning of hope.

And then the next line, the next step that comes after “the Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced,” the second half of the life-journey of faith is:

Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
     like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow in tears
     reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go out weeping,
     bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
     carrying their sheaves.

For God is eternal.  The circumstances of life always change, and we delude ourselves when we think or hope they won’t.  But the will of God to be present in all things, and to restore, reconnect and renew regardless of what has happened – to lead through the present moment to a new and good future, is unchangeable and unfading.  And this is the fruit of faith – not the good will of God itself, but our ability to live in openness to that good will.

Just one note, though, about the content and meaning of this hope of restoration and hopeful leading into the future.  The language of being “restored” and the image of being led back are a little mis-leading. 

The immediate reference is to the return of the people of Israel to their home land, to the city and land they had lost.  In this sense, they were restored and back where they started from.

But in another sense nothing was the same.  The land was changed, and now there were also other people living in it that had not been there before.  The temple was gone, and despite their best intentions and what they thought were their holiest hopes, it would not really be rebuilt for centuries, and even then different than it had been, and only to be destroyed again. 

And the people themselves and their life as a people of God were also different.  In Babylon even as they lamented the destruction and loss of the Temple as the centre of their lives with God, they developed a new way of practicing their faith and being connected to God as a people – something they called the synagogue – a local, small-community-based way of gathering that began as a way of coping with exile but when exile was over, remained the more central part of their religious life. 

In Babylon the priestly class fell from importance and the rabbis took their place as the more important spiritual guides for the people. 

And the kingdom itself?  When the people returned to their home land they thought it was to be a strong kingdom again – a kingdom like other kingdoms of the world, but that never happened and they came to see that the godly thing the exile taught them – what God led them towards in and after the exile, was to be a strong people of faith even in diaspora, without all the trappings of power and domination, to be a kingdom unlike other kingdoms of this world, more in tune with the powerful powerlessness of God, and more opened to the way the divine good will is actually accomplished in the world.

Which means the experience of loss, dislocation, exile, extreme change, anxiety, grief and buckets of shed tears were all part of the journey.  These were themselves the ground and the seed of new life, not a barrier to it and not something to be wished or prayed away, as in “Oh, Lord, take this bad thing from us!”  The “bad stuff” was not something necessarily caused by God, but it was certainly taken up by God and woven into the total fabric, made an integral part of the ongoing, constantly-renewing wholeness and holiness of God’s people.

Which is not always easy to see and find your way into.  It wasn’t easy for Japhia and I to weave the bad stuff in, in the hospital at first.  It took a little time and a little help from our friends to get to that place, and someday I may get around to writing or telling you more about things we learned and ways we grew through the past weeks.  But for now, maybe enough to share something written by Anna Mow – a woman who served the Church of the Brethren as a missionary to India, author, speaker, eventually as an ordained minister, and who lived to be over 100:

God does not desire suffering as an end in itself, I am sure.  But all suffering is so expensive God will not let it be wasted.  God will use it for his children’s growth. The first purpose of our lives must be, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  This is never a passive statement of endurance or of mere agreement to submit to whatever happens.  It is a positive statement of the will to reach out for that which will bring glory to God in any thing.  I am also sure that the greatest prayer we can pray is, “Whatever brings the greatest glory to God, I want it, even if it involves and even brings suffering and loss to me.”

As the psalmist says, and those who follow the faith of the psalmist up to the temple of God, sing with him:

May those who sow in tears
     reap with shouts of joy.  
Those who go out weeping,
     bearing [precisely their tears

          as the] seed for sowing,
shall come home with shouts of joy,
     carrying their sheaves

[of the new life they shall be led into.]

May it be so.