(Psalm 139; John 20:30-31, 21:20-25)

The genesis of this sermon was in a social media post I saw briefly weeks ago and have never been able to find again.  I think it was on Threads, since that app does this to people routinely, but it doesn’t really matter.  Whoever the poster was, they told a story about a physicist who gave a presentation on Christianity and science and how their scientific work supported and enriched their faith in Jesus and the Bible as historically understood by the Christian church.  In the question-and-answer session after the talk, someone in the audience went up to the mic and asked, “How can you believe a God who’s that big could possibly even notice individual people?”  The scientist quietly answered, “My God is bigger than you think.”

I wish I could find the source, if only to give credit wherever it may be due, because that’s absolutely brilliant, and absolutely spot-on.  If for some reason you needed to summarize Psalm 139 in a sentence, that would do.  As Derek Kidner, whom I’ve referenced a few times in recent weeks, puts it, “Any small thoughts that we may have of God are magnificently transcended by this psalm; yet for all its height and depth it remains intensely personal from first to last.”  In that spirit, though it would be easy to dive deep into this psalm—there’s a lot here—I want to take the 30,000-foot view and look at the ways Psalm 139 shows us that God is bigger, with some echoes from the end of the Gospel of John.

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(Psalm 51; John 21:1-19)

It has been asserted that Psalm 51 has been read or recited or sung, in whole or in part, more often in public and private worship and devotions than any other Scripture.  I don’t know how you would prove that, but I suspect it’s either this one or Psalm 23.  This is one of the seven penitential psalms, and the greatest of the seven.  The superscription tells us it was written by David at one of the unhappiest hinge points in the history of God’s people.

To really understand this psalm, we need to understand that context; let’s begin with a quick recap.  The story begins—I’m paraphrasing a little here—“In the spring of the year when kings go out to war, David stayed home.”  In other words, it begins with David shirking his responsibility—to his troops and their leaders, to his nation, and to his calling and anointing from God.  In the ancient world, one of the main responsibilities of a king was to be the warleader for his people; this was in part because they figured that’s what they had a king for, in part because success on the battlefield was how you showed you deserved to be king, and in part because, even now, successful generals who aren’t kings often try to change that situation.

So, David is home, and he shouldn’t be.  As is often the case when you’re playing hooky, it leaves him in a spirit of restless self-indulgence.  He takes an afternoon nap, then goes up on the roof, pacing and prowling around like a tiger in a zoo.  It’s a position unbecoming to a king, and he uses it to do something even more unbecoming—since he’s standing on the highest point in the city, he can look down into the homes of his people.  He’s a peeping Tom with a crown.  And yes, I said into—the houses were rectangular structures with rooms around a central, unroofed courtyard which offered privacy . . . but not from the king on the roof of the palace.

In one home nearby, he sees a woman bathing.  She’s just finished her period and is purifying herself as the Scriptures required.  She’s in the courtyard of her own home, where it ought to be safe for her to be naked, but it isn’t.  She’s beautiful, so he wants her, so he takes her.  Let’s not call a spade a bloody shovel here:  this is adulterous rape.  David has a wife (more than one, in fact), and she, as he will learn, has a husband.  He doesn’t care.  He sends his minions to take her and bring her to him, and then he takes what he wants.  The text doesn’t tell us what she wants because David doesn’t care what she wants.  God does, but David doesn’t.  The power differential here is extreme; the coercion is absolute.  Whatever peace she may have made with it, she had no choice in the matter.  Whether she cooperated or fought, what was going to happen was going to happen regardless.

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(Psalm 88; Luke 24:36-49, John 20:24-29)

Doubt is an odd thing.  It’s a grey area between belief and unbelief—between two different kinds of certainty.  It can be paralyzing, leaving us unable to act, or it can be liberating, freeing us to let go a false certainty to seek a true one.  It can be unhealthy, and even obsessive; it can also be healthy for us, reminding us we don’t know quite as much as we think.  It can be dishonest, a pretense disguising a determination not to believe something—sometimes, disguising it even from ourselves—but there is also such a thing as honest doubt.  Doubt which is truly open to belief and truly seeking understanding can be an important prelude to true faith.

The problem is, true doubt is uncomfortable, like doing ballet on a waterbed.  We want a solid place to stand.  That’s why some churches treat doubt as a sin, as if believing in Jesus and following him are supposed to be easy—which they aren’t.  I think that’s also why, when kids who grow up in the church have their faith challenged hard for the first time, they so often slide into disbelief like Jell-O off a steep metal roof.  Doubt is uncomfortable, so our instinctive reaction is not to engage with it but to protect ourselves against it.

I suspect that’s why Thomas has gotten such a raw deal over the centuries.  The Western church knows him not as an apostle of stubborn faith and the man who first preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to India, but as “Doubting Thomas.”  Google told me once it found over 880,000 results for the phrase, including such definitions as “a habitually doubtful person.”  You’d think he was the sort of guy who wouldn’t believe you if you told him the sky was blue.  Thomas doesn’t deserve that, and when we read John’s account as if he does, it says more about us than about either Thomas or John.  “Doubting Thomas” makes as much sense as “the patience of Job.”  These are men who suffered agonizing loss and refused to sit down, shut up, and act churchy about it.  They spoke the truth as they saw it, and their earthly reward for that has been to have their lives and characters misrepresented so others can avoid doing the same.  If the church can externalize its issues with doubt by dumping them all on Thomas—which makes no sense logically, but tell that to the subconscious—it can excuse itself from facing them honestly.

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(Psalm 146; Luke 24:13-35)

Psalm 146 is a bit of an unusual psalm, or at least an unexpected psalm.  It’s structured as a song of praise, beginning and ending with “Hallelujah!” which we translate into English as “Praise the Lord!”—but the heart of the psalm is instruction.  That’s out of the ordinary, but what makes it particularly unexpected is where it’s placed in the psalter.  I said a few weeks ago that the book of Psalms has a five-part conclusion, a sequence of five psalms which all both begin and end with “Hallelujah!”  This is the first of those five, and it’s not what you might think the psalm in that position would be.  You might expect the conclusion of the book to begin with a comprehensive catalog of reasons to praise God, like Psalm 145, or a sweeping invitation to all creation to praise him, like Psalm 148, but that’s not what the editor who assembled this book gave us.  Instead, we get this psalm, which is more a teaching psalm than anything else, in which praise to God critiques our tendency to misplace our trust and then godly teaching inspires praise.  Biblically, if something is unexpected it’s probably significant, and I think that’s the case here.  I also argued a few weeks ago that the placement of Psalm 1 as the opening to the book calls us to understand our worship as God’s torah, his instruction; Psalm 146 begins the book’s conclusion with an explicit example of exactly that.

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(Psalm 118; Mark 11:1-11)

Psalm 118 is a psalm of triumph.  We have a number of voices speaking in this psalm, but the central voice is the king, and he and the people with him are praising God for victory in battle.  What king?  What battle?  Victory over what nation or coalition?  We don’t know.  In  typical fashion, the author of the psalm has left all that bit out so the psalm can be used as widely as possible.  We do know the truly important details, however.  It was a victory against overwhelming odds, in defiance of all human expectation; as far as the folks on the other side were concerned, the only thing left to do was run up the score.  There’s an indication that the enemies the king faced were domestic as well as foreign, and we’ll talk about that in a few minutes.  The main point is that this is not a victory won by the king, this is God’s victory, and so the king is leading a triumphal procession through the streets of Jerusalem to the temple, bringing a rich thanks offering to lay on God’s altar.

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(Psalm 23; John 10:1-18)

NB:  this is the third sermon in this series, not the first.  For a variety of reasons, not every sermon in this series will be posted.

It has been said of the Gospel of John that it is a pool in which an elephant can swim and a child can wade; the same can be said of Psalm 23.  At first glance, it’s a simple poem, easy to understand and easy for us to claim for ourselves; the water is clear enough to see the bottom with no blurring or distortion.  The deeper we look, however, the deeper it gets; if we dive in, not only will we not hit the bottom and hurt ourselves, the bottom will grow further away the deeper we dive.  This simple poem is also an exceptionally complex poem which is working on multiple levels at once, casting meaning in multiple directions at the same time.  What I have to say about it this morning will be true, to the best of my ability to discern; it will not be exhaustive.

I need to begin by acknowledging my great debt to one of my heroes of the faith, one of my two or three greatest intellectual influences, the late Rev. Dr. Kenneth E. Bailey.  Dr. Bailey was a Presbyterian missionary, teacher, and scholar who could say of himself, “For sixty years, from 1935-1995, my home was in the Middle East.”  He lived for decades among what he once called “the last generation of Jesus’ day,” and drew on that experience and two millennia of Middle Eastern biblical translations and scholarship in teaching and interpreting the Scriptures, particularly the New Testament, and especially the parables of Jesus.  He was an amazing man, humble and full of grace, with an equally amazing life story.  My understanding of God’s word is much deeper and richer because of his work and example, and I am profoundly thankful.  Hang around me, and you will hear his name—often.

Dr. Bailey’s last book, of which I also have yet to reach the bottom, was this one, The Good Shepherd; not long before his death, he told a friend of mine, “It only took me forty years to write,” as he saw it as the culmination and completion of his life’s work.  I’ll quote this book a few times this morning, but my debt to him runs through every paragraph of this sermon, as does my gratitude.

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