First Baptist Church of Asheville Podcast
Sermon: God's Wonderful Works
The Psalmist's very first word is a shout. Hallelujah, which means praise God or let God shine. It's a cheerful, bright, riveting beginning to a masterful and fascinating song. The floodgates of praise open quickly and a rush of joy follows. I will give thanks to my God to the Lord with my whole heart and the company of the upright in the congregation. But just as soon as we're excited and dancing and lighting sparklers and having a blast, she throws in a real downer of a word. Turns the volume down a bit in the jubilence. See if you can catch the word. Greater the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. While the first verse and a half of the second are boisterous and celebratory, she just has to bring up the words studied. Are we studying now? We were just praising. We were just having fun and shouting and singing to the rafters. And now we've got a pen and a yellow legal pad in our lab. Is this what the song, why are we, how do we get here? You remember how much fun we were having 30 seconds ago? Well, now we're studying. The concepts of praising and studying feel less like yin and yang and more like oil and water. Oh, wonderful, greater the works of the Lord as long as you're willing to put in time with flashcards. At least one couple's already left the party. One of the hardest lessons many of us ever learned is learning how to learn. In many ways, the study is to suffer. A typical freshman is more interested in not suffering. The stronger temptation is for football games and basketball games, parties and skipping Friday classes for weekend trips with friends. I may or may not know something about this. But to discover a love of learning is to open ourselves to a lifetime filled with the joys of dreaming and remembering and pondering. Why does this psalmist have to go there though? In the space of a wink, we've gone from praising to studying. Why does she direct us from head, upturned and eyes and arms open to the sky to this new posture sitting in a desk or in about books and pens and pads and mugs holding the dregs of old cold coffee? Maybe it's because she knows something special that she wants to share with the rest of the world and with us. Maybe it's because she knows that praising rises up from the studying. It's the studying of God's works that reveals their power. It's the studying of God's wonderful works that teaches us how to discern them, how to see them, how to understand them. The psalmist knows that God's works aren't usually obvious. The Elishan Karl Barth would often say, God is so unassuming in the world. But to study, to remember, to investigate, analyze, review and all of a sudden, we discern there, there God is. The great preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor, tells of once running out of her house and into her yard yelling praises and shouts of relief. Why? Because she'd finally begun to understand a paragraph by the aforementioned theologian, Bart, that she had to read about a hundred times before it finally clicked. And her response was to run out. Her house couldn't contain the praise rising up within her from studying. Something the psalmist knows about this. Speaking from Israel's past to Israel's presence, she calls them to consider. Look what God's already done for us. And in so doing, she calls the hungry to remember that God provides manna. You will have enough. She calls the brokenhearted to remember that God is gracious and merciful. God remembers the covenant. She calls those in captivity to remember God's powerful works when chaos is closing in on you. That's when God's redemption is drawing near. The psalmist even gives us a steady aid with her poem. Psalm 111 is one of only eight psalms that are crafted, constructed with a technique called acrostic. That is, each verse begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So verse one of Psalm 111 begins with olive. Verse two begins with the letter bet. Verse three begins with the letter gimel and so on. So the invitation to study is built into the language of the psalm. It's practically saying to us, "If you want to see God's wonderful works, "this memory aid won't hurt." And to this direction, the psalmist adds Moses' memory tips for the Israelites. You may remember these. Keep these words I'm commanding you, Moses says. Keep them in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you're at home and when you're away, when you lie down and when you rise, bind them as a sign on your hand. Fix them as an emblem on your forehead. Write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates. You can't enter and leave the scriptures in other words without writing reminders on your palms that get smeared by the end of the day. Tying things, strings on your fingers to remember and sticking post-it notes on your forehead. For the praising rises up out of the studying, the discerning, the investigating. And finally the, oh, the ah-ha, the, wow. It's a prophetic thing to do to study. How did Martha King Jr. end his famous sermon at Riverside? His sums up perhaps his whole prophetic vision and the movement that he inspired. He said, I don't know about you quoting Isaiah 2-4. I don't know about you, but I'm not gonna study war anymore. He studied peace. We have one of the most glorious movements in all of human history and all the church's history because somebody decided to study something else. God had given them to study. I wonder if one of the great works the psalmist has in mind as she's crafting her song is the protection of Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego. Thrown into the furnace by Nebuchadnezzar the second, the temperature turned up seven times the heat as normal. And with the otherwise doomed men shut up in that furnace, one could see a fourth who looked like the son of man, delivering them, saving them, preserving their witness. I wonder if one of the great works of the psalmist has in mind as the parting of the sea, the deliverance of the Israelites, the stunning defeat of the world's most powerful army, the thunderous sound of the waves crashing in the white foam fizzing and the battle cries silenced and the rising and the chorus of God's people. I wonder if one of the great works the psalmist has in mind as Abram, thinking it was his responsibility to create and preserve the covenant, is his responsibility to do good, his responsibility to keep this thing together between God and God's people and then being put to sleep, falling asleep there under the stars and dreaming and seeing God's torch pass through the cut carcasses of the covenant, God carrying the fire, God accomplishing this promise, God establishing the covenant. How might the psalmist remember God's wonderful works? Memory aids, yes. Acrostics, help. Writing them on her forehead and on her door posts, always a helpful technique, but I also wonder if this might just be the voice of a young person who is delighting and spending time with the elder members of her own community, the one who knows a thing or two about life and maybe even about death, the ones who've suffered and endured more, the ones who've had more time to study and therefore more time to discern more chances to see and say there it is or there God is at work or there I've seen God doing something for us. Maybe this psalmist has written this psalm after reading a situation in her own life a thousand times and while nothing ever made sense until someone, her senior helped her see it and all she could do and her praise, her house couldn't contain the praise was to run outside and yell to the sky and thanksgiving. Finally, I see it. This is one of the great discoveries of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, before his doctrine became some of you are saved and some of you are not and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't believe that, I'm not sure John Calvin did either because his theory which became a doctrine of predestination had less to do with you're in and you're out and more to do with his looking back over his life and seeing all the times that God had been affected, all the times that God had shown up, all the times that God had provided for him and protected him and given him strength when he was weak and lifted him up when he couldn't stand on his own two feet he was reading back over his own life, his own history and seeing it finally. I can see where God was. Gonna read world history like that. We can read church history like that. We can read our own lives like that if we study. I remember being a student in a Bible study class and this was while I was a PhD student and these encounters stand out to me at least as much as the ones, the formal times of education for me. Sitting in a Bible study with people who were 50 years older than me, week in and week out and sometimes I would answer a question and offer my little offering but then John and Laura every now and then would speak up and I would get my pen and my pad and stand back like I was about to hear Gandalf open his mouth and wax eloquent. Some tidbits here from John and Laura about marriage, one of them. Marriage they said is rooted in close attention and deep affection for your partner. Okay, all right, I'm not gonna forget that. The 25 year old sitting beside me would not have been able to tell me that. You fall in love with God's story, Laura said and God's works. When you finally get tired of attempting to make up your own life story. Oh. And I remember John saying you have to love yourself. You have to learn how to love yourself because when you get my age, you're still gonna be you. Yes, you will have changed, you will have learned, you will have grown, your faith will have been formed and reformed but you're still gonna be you. You gotta love yourself. Wow. I'm just feeling like I'm getting to an age where I can confidently look back now, look back and see all the ways that God has stepped into our history and my history and give thanks and sometimes I wonder if my house with my eight foot ceilings is enough to contain the praise that I feel because I remember, I remember because I'm studying, I've gone to class, I'm learning from you and learning from people in my past and recalling the words of wisdom so I know, I know that when I can't hold up my end of the promise, I know God will because I know the story of God stepping like fire into the midst of the covenant when Abram was asleep. I know that when I'm brokenhearted, I know God will bind me up because he made Isaac laugh. I know when I can't live up to the promise. I know that when I fall short, I know that when I have been too clever and when I have overstepped my bounds, when I have squandered my blessings and my inheritance that God is still there for me and God will lift me up even though God may strike me on the hip because that's what God did with Jacob. I'm so happy that I know so much more than I did because of the grand and glorious works of God and my life and yours. And I have to say, even though I'm not, haven't always been the biggest fan of studying, I'm so happy that class is still in session. session.