Church on Morgan
June 21, 2015 | 2 Samuel 22:1-4, 32-36, 47-50
So reading from 2 Samuel 22, 1 through 4, 32 through 36, and 47 to 50. David spoke to the Lord, the words of this song, "On the day when the Lord delivered him from the hands of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul, he said, 'The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold and my refuge, my Savior, you save me from violence, I call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised and I am saved from my enemies. For who is God but the Lord, and who is a rock except our God? The God who girded me with his strength has opened wide my path. He made my feet like the feet of a deer. He set me secure on the heights. He trains my hands for war so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. You have given me the shield of your salvation and your help has made me great. The Lord lives, blessed be my rock and exalted be my God, the rock of my salvation. The God who gave me vengeance and brought down peoples under me, who brought me out from my enemies and exalted me above my adversaries. You delivered me from the violence. For this I will extol you, O Lord, among the nations and sing praises to your name, the word of the Lord. Good morning, everybody. So the last couple of weeks, as soon as the scripture is read, the HVAC unit like kicks on. Do you hear that hum? I like to think of it as the Holy Spirit. So, this morning, I want to talk to you for just a few minutes. Here's my clicker. I'm good. I want to talk to you a little bit about this idea of hiding, of hiding. I've got two kids. Many of you guys know that. Three-year-old and a five-year-old. Both of them are professional hiders. One of them is really good. I don't know if I've ever told you this story before, but this was the day that my daughter first almost killed me, but it was just about a year ago. We were at home. We're sitting in the living room. We hear the door in our house kind of clack to immediately my wife and I look at each other and think, "Great, our kids just went outside." So we run out the front door to grab them, to remind them they're not allowed outside without us. Look out the front door, and I don't see my daughter outside anywhere. It was like 30 seconds, and I spotted my son in the house, and so I knew it had to be her. Come back in, and I stayed with my wife. You heard that door? Yes, I heard the door. Yes, I looked out front. I don't see her out front. We'll look out back. Maybe she went out back. We'll look out back. Don't see her out back. We start looking in our house. We can't sort of frantically looking quickly, but don't see her. Then we run back outside, but this time it's that thing where you don't know where to go or what to do, but you just run in circles and act like crazy, and neighbors and people driving by in our neighborhood saw us and said, "What's going on?" We said, "We just heard the door open. My daughter's gone. We can't find her." It couldn't have been too far. She's only three years old, two years old. Now we've got sort of the women of our block are running the streets. Of course, they're wise, so they run to all the houses that have pools, which turns out it's like every house about mine. I don't know how I never got that invite, but they're checking all the pools to make sure that's clear. They don't see her anywhere. Eventually, that moment comes about 10 minutes in where you're like, "I've got to make an adult decision and quit being emotional," and I stop, and I call 911. Within two minutes, police cars just fly in around our neighborhood and stop, and they start looking, and about this time, my son comes out and tells me, "Hey, I found Stella. She's in the basement." What had happened was she had opened the basement door and went into the basement and closed it. The look in the basement is like, "I'm scared to go in the basement. It is not a place anybody wants to hang out." It's unfinished. It's sort of like when it rains, it gets a little wet under there, and we have tons and tons of boxes and storage and junk like that. For whatever reason, she thought it would be a great idea to go in the basement to hide in the pitch black behind a bunch of storage bins for over 20 minutes. That was the day I kind of thought I just might die, and I'm still not sure if we're allowed to talk to our neighbors after that experience. Then just a couple weeks ago, kind of a different sort of hiding, but my son, who I guess he's a preacher's kid, which Lord help him, and it's already begun, but we have many Sunday afternoons where we have to talk about appropriate behavior in Sunday school, and that this all reflects on me, and please keep it together at least for an hour. That conversation has started, but I think I had just sort of wound him so tight that a couple weeks back, he's in Sunday school, they're working on a little group project, they're building something, Levi bumps it, and the whole thing falls down. He immediately reads that as, "I'm in trouble, not only in this room, but I'm going to be in trouble with Dad," and so he runs and he hides under a table in the Sunday school room. Obviously, it's a little bit ridiculous, like I'm not sure what that's going to protect him from, but he's hiding under the table, and his teacher tells us that he went and he hid. Then this week for the last three or four days, we've had these great storms at night, which I've really enjoyed just laying in bed, yeah, I'm in bed at 8.30, that's okay. Laying in bed, watching out the windows, the storms settle in, and my dog, Panics, and hides, right? I just reminded that, basically from Genesis chapter two or three, the very beginning of our story, as soon as sin has entered the equation, we've been a people who've been hiding, and it's not just children and dogs who hide, but us adults, we hide too. I want to ask you this morning, the question, really the only question I have for you and the one that I hope you'll entertain seriously over the next 15 minutes, is where do you hide? When trouble comes, when you're overwhelmed, when you're scared, when you feel completely misunderstood, when life is brought about a sense of just being disoriented, can't tell which way is up anymore. When the dream dies, when you feel all alone, when you're stuck in your job, when depression is set in, where do you hide? Where do you hide? It's not just children and dogs who hide, but we all hide. And I think as I've thought about it, some of us, when we're scared, when we're overwhelmed, when we're troubled, when we run and hide, some of us, we cling to a crowd. We run to our friends. We'll even run to people who aren't our friends, right? Some of us, we just, when we're scared, we run towards the nearest crowd. Others of us, we run towards our work. We think, we'll just hustle our way out of this. We'll just bury our nose, is scared and overwhelmed and terrified and troubled as we are, but we will hide in our work. Others of us will hide in bed when sort of this moment sets in. We start going to bed earlier and we start waking up later. And others of us will hide in a bottle. We'll find something to drink or to numb the pain or some pill that can make it sort of go away, but we all, we all hide. And in this week, I was reading a commentary on the passage that was read this morning. And just to give you a sense, since that's probably not what most of you do on your Wednesday mornings, is read commentaries. They're typically about as exciting as you would imagine, which is why you don't read them. But every once in a while, I'll be reading something in this phrase that will pop off the page. And I won't even believe I found it in this book, right? And this week, this is the phrase that sort of grabbed me, let's see if we got here. The commentator said this, he says, we live in a time enamored with our own human capacities. When these capacities fail to deliver us from the crises in our life, we often discover, and this is what's so important, I want you to hear this, we often discover that we have lost touch with a sense of divine power that is capable of driving back the darkness and restoring order in the midst of chaos. He says that we live in such a time that we're all so self-sufficient, we're all so enamored with our own capacities to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We all so much believe the lie that none of us needs a place to hide, that there comes these moments in our lives where it's just too, too much, and in those moments we realize our hideouts that can't hang, they don't hold up under this kind of storm, right? There's these moments, I don't know if you've ever been there, if you've ever had that moment where the place you usually run and hide, your friends doesn't hold up to this storm, where your work can't get you out of this moment, where there's not enough naps to bring you on the other side of this. When I read that, I felt like somebody could see my life. They knew what it felt like to be in that moment where our typical hiding places are exposed and can't stand up to the storm. And so it's with that in the backdrop this morning that we continue this sermon series called Beautiful Things. We've been at it for two weeks. We're taking our cue from the psalmist who says that the God's creation, the heavens declare the handy work of God, essentially that when we look at all the created things in the world, we're being told a story about who God is. Last week, Hope Ledbetter, an incredibly gifted young woman, stood here before us and talked about what the oceans might say to those of us who'd be willing to listen. That when we look at the oceans, this thing that God has created, we are reminded that the God is mighty, God is powerful, and we are right in one sense to be afraid. And yet this same God that created the oceans has created the oceans to remind us that this God is a God of peace, right? She sort of contrasted what it's like to be in the middle of an ocean that's storming, so overwhelmed by its power, and yet at the same time, the great serenity and peace that comes from sitting on a beach and looking at this thing. The God is a God of peace, and God is incredibly powerful. This morning, I got sort of what felt like the short straw all week, but I had to talk about what do the rocks declare about the glory of God? I was like, "Well, the oceans sure, right? I can give you the oceans, but rocks." I mean, it seems like the most underwhelming subject you can imagine, and maybe part of that is because when I think about rocks right now, I think about, I don't know why. I can't get my head around it. Maybe this is how children should lead us, but my kids, they're obsessed with collecting rocks. It's like the worst thing to collect. So in our yard, they'll find just handfuls of rocks, and they can't open the door because they're going to lose one of the rocks, and you look at them and it's gravel, you're like, "I don't want that in the house, but they're so attached. These are my rocks. Look at these rocks." And of course, Levi starts this to now steal his copy. So I got two rocks all over the house, and there's nothing inspiring to me about them. I look at his dresser covered in rocks, and all I see is sort of disorder and filth. There's nothing there. There's no story. For a week, I knew this was coming, and I kept going, "What inspires him about these rocks?" There's nothing inspiring about the rocks. The other thing is that when I think about that God was often referred to as a rock. In fact, the saints, when we read the Scriptures, the saints were more inspired by rocks than by oceans. It's crazy. In fact, God's referred to as the rock over 50 times in the Psalms. Nobody calls God the ocean, right? And part of it is that when I think about the rock, this is in my mind, right? Wayne Johnson, which I didn't know, he's a rapper, I found some old stuff this week anyway. I'm like, "The rock, that's kind of cheesy, and it also, I just, where's the inspiration? How is God a rock?" But as I sat with it a little bit longer and I started paying attention to what the great saints in the church have said and why they refer to God as a rock, I realized that more often than not, they weren't talking about a handful of gravel that they were talking about. In fact, the Hebrew word that's used again and again and again to describe God as a rock is the word that we would use to describe a crag or a cliff or a cave. It's this that they were thinking about. They were thinking about the God who is this kind of rock, the kind of rock that can stand up to any storm, the kind of rock who's permanent, who's timeless, who's more stable than anything you've ever seen or experienced in this life, the God who brings security, the God who is a hiding place for us, the God who got them through the storm. I love that in the message, well, that passage that was read from 2 Samuel, in the Old Testament there's two books of 1 and 2 Samuel that both sort of recount the life of David. 1 Samuel, chapter 22 is the end of that story, what was read to us earlier and it's basically an appendix to the story. David's told us the whole story of his life and then he says, now see the appendix for the soundtrack and in 2 Samuel 22 we get the song of his life. He says, looking back on my life and what it was like, this is the song that got me through it. And again and again and again, he refers over and over to God as this rock and I love the way the message translates the second verse. This captures the spirit of what I think David is saying in that song. He says, my God, the high crag where I run for dear life, hiding behind the boulders, faith in the granite hideout. What's fascinating about this is that David wrote this song from a very personal place. In fact, at the very beginning of this passage it says, this is what this is the song that David wrote when he was fleeing Saul who was trying to take his life. Quick little Old Testament lesson, God tells David you're going to be king over Israel. There's actually a king already at the time, it's a guy named Saul who's like twice the size of David and on a number of occasions Saul tries to kill David. It's this sort of insanity that David must be feeling every day of like, I swear that God told me I'm supposed to be king and yet there is a king and this king keeps trying to kill me, right? And it's in the middle of that kind of confusion, disorientation, trouble, storm, that David writes this song and it's a very personal song for him. But what is so profound is that the people of God get access to the song that David's written and they say, we need that song too. We need that song too. We need to be singing that song and so they take it out of David's story and it gets put into the Psalter. It's one of the few places where this happens, but word for word, the same song that's in 2 Samuel 22, you can check this out this afternoon, Psalm 18, the songbook of God's people. They say that one we all need. We all need that song. We all need to be reminded that God is our hiding place, the one we run to when we're scared and so we're going to put it out there in front of the whole church. And so in Psalm 18, one of the things that's just fascinating is that you read historians and they talk about the ways that these Psalms were used and the way that Psalm 18 was employed was this. It was the song that the people of God sang to state that God reigns even when it doesn't seem like God is reigning. It's the song we sing to proclaim that God is in control even when it doesn't look like God is in control. It's the song that David sings to say God is king even when my whole life sure doesn't feel like it. It's the song, friends, that I think we need on a week like this when you really, I mean I can't really think of another setting that would more call into question the idea that God reigns than people gathered in God's house praying, welcoming strangers who's clearly not from the community, who enters in after an hour, tells them I'm here to kill you. I actually reconsidered halfway through this Bible study because you've been so darn sweet to me but I got to do this and I'm going to leave one of you alive to walk out and tell the story. I mean what song do you sing to proclaim that God reigns in a world like that? And this has been a treasured piece of scripture throughout the centuries and in it is this powerful image that God is a rock that we can run to and hide and cling to. And that's why I don't think it was any accident that this week as I was listening to the news I heard representative James Clyburn from South Carolina say as he stood out in front of that church on the microphone. And this church friends is built on a rock. This church is built on a rock. It's been here for over 100 years and it will continue to be here because it's built on a rock. We know where to go. We've got something that will stand up to any storm. And it's why this Sunday morning as we gather here they're worshiping in their church and having Sunday school in the rest. And I think in moments like that you kind of Moses, not only David but Moses often referred to God as a rock as a hiding place, as a place to weather out the storm. And I love what he says and Moses says this in Deuteronomy 32. He says that in the face of trouble and persecution Moses says indeed their rock is not like our rock and even our enemies know that. Indeed their rock is not like our rock and even our enemies know that. I saw this tweet this week by a guy and it's 140 characters I was going to put it up but he just said I'm an atheist but when I see the forgiveness that these people are able to offer in spite of the tragedy they've undergone I have to admit it's a compelling testimony for religion, right? Indeed their rock is not like our rock. The places that you run to hide to your friends they are not like this rock. Your work it is not like this rock. That bed, that drink it is not like this rock. We have a rock that is unlike any other and so as I've been struggling and wrestling with this idea of rocks and what they might have to tell us about who God is. I've been on this journey and I think that God is using even rocks to remind me of this very powerful truth and I hope that I will and that you will in the days to come look at rocks differently. Maybe even have his emotional response to rocks as we often do to oceans, right? We get around to oceans and we can get emotional just looking at them but the saints got emotional just looking at rocks and I get maybe this is why Israel the people of God that when God would show up to them and be faithful they had this weird habit where they would just gather up rocks and make piles, right? We call them Ebeneasers if you're ever saying that song it talks about an Ebeneasers. This is a little altar we build out of rocks. It's a way to ensure that the next time they come across this stack of pebbles or they walk by a cliff that they'll remember the one who got them through it so that the next time the storm comes because it's going to come they'll know where to run to. So my hope for you this morning is that you really would. You would take a second if not already in this moment this afternoon to think about the places you run and you hide when the storm comes and you would seriously consider the alternative or the option of running to the rock that is unlike any other rock finding the safety and security and stability and permanence of a God who says come graciously hide over here I'll weather this out with you. Let me offer a prayer this morning as we continue. God we thank you that even though it's our own sin that has made us into people who have to hide you graciously offer a secure and stable place for us. You invite us to come and to hide in you. We so often even though we've experienced your grace we've seen incredible things. We when trouble hits when the hard times arrive we often run to anything but you but we pray this morning that you would build on us a confidence that you're the only one who can truly save us that we would even use the good times to build up the habits that would lead us to make the right decisions in the hard times that we would turn to your word and to your presence and to your people before we would turn to any other thing. God we we love you that you have preserved us you have sheltered us and we pray that we would see your world differently because of that that we would notice every rock and every pebble whether it be in our driveway or at the beach of the mountains and be reminded of just what great care you take of us and that you are always there ready for us it's in your name that we pray amen.