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.
Author Archives: Rob Harrison
Defense Against Miracle
(Psalm 110; Matthew 27:62-28:15)
You have to feel a little sorry for Pontius Pilate. He’s trying to work his way up the career ladder, and he’s been handed the most fractious, intractable province in the entire Empire to try to govern. He’s on notice, because he’s already mishandled one incident and provoked an official complaint from the local leaders; that means he’s under their thumb to some degree, because they could easily wreck his career. He brought it on himself (I only said a little sorry), but still—here he’s trying to do his job, and all of a sudden those local leaders come to him and demand he put some poor schmuck on trial because they don’t like his theology. Rome didn’t care a whit about Jewish religious disputes, and neither did Pilate, but Rome did care if those disputes disturbed the peace, and here these infuriating old men were insisting he had to do what they wanted or else they were going to get him fired.
And was that the end of it? No! He’s washed his hands of the matter—literally (Mt. 27:24)—but no sooner does he think he’s done with it then they’re back in his office. They got the execution, but that’s not enough for them. Now they want him to guard the tomb! Guard the tomb! You might as well guard a manhole cover. But he has to deal with them somehow, and he has to keep them happy. Now, there are a couple different takes on what exactly he does, because if you translate the Greek as literally as possible, Pilate says to them, “Have a guard.” This could mean “You have a guard” —in other words, “You have the temple guard, go take care of it yourselves”—and that’s how the ESV interprets it. However, we could also read this as Pilate saying, “Fine—have a guard”; thus, for instance, the NIV translates this “Take a guard.” From the context, I think the second reading is the correct one. I think it’s clear Pilate gives the Jewish leaders what they want: a squad of Roman soldiers to seal and guard the tomb.
In other words, he gives them sixteen members of the greatest fighting force on the planet. That’s four watches of four men each to secure the area through the night. To give you an idea what that means, a single Roman squad was supposed to be able to form a square, if cut off, and hold their ground against any opposing force indefinitely; guarding a two-ton stone would be child’s play by comparison. They were well-trained, well-equipped, well-disciplined, well-seasoned, and ruthless. This was far more than necessary to deal with anything Jesus’ disciples might try. It was overkill, plain and simple.
And why? What are the Jewish leaders afraid of? They claim they want to prevent a hoax, but really? Read more
Save Us!
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.
Follow the Shepherd
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.
Of the Longing for Home
(Psalm 2)
This is a valediction of sorts, a farewell address; I plan to be here next Sunday, but this is the last time I’m scheduled to preach here before God calls me on. At the same time, this is also a beginning—and I’m not talking about myself here, I’m talking about this psalm. Believe it or not, the fact that this is the second psalm in the book is important. We tend to think of Psalms as a random collection of texts, but there is actually a structure to the book. Among other things, there is a five-part conclusion to the book—the Hallel psalms, 146-150—and there is an introduction. Some ancient manuscripts combine it into one psalm, but most leave it in two parts, and our English versions follow suit. Psalm 1 is a beatitude describing the life of the faithful individual among the wicked people of this world; Psalm 2 widens the scope to consider the life of the community of faith among the godless nations.
Deliver Me!
(Psalm 40)
NB: the primary translation I worked with here, which was read in the service, was Robert Alter’s.
If you were here last week, I hope you remember Emily’s message, because I want to pick up roughly where she left off. If you weren’t (or if you don’t), I encourage you to take time later to listen to it, but you don’t have to go do that right this moment. (In fact, I would appreciate it if you don’t.) Here’s our point of departure this morning: as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called into the wild. That might be a surprising thing to say, but as Emily pointed out last week, we serve an undomesticated God. If that reality does surprise us, it’s because it disturbs our comfort, and so it tends to be something the church conveniently forgets, leaving it buried behind a pile of things like “Fifty Biblical Principles for Better Home Repair.”
To leave us without excuse, God keeps sending people to remind us. In the modern era, for instance, we have C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in Mr. Beaver’s description of Aslan: “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you”; and again, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.” The other Inklings understood this as well, though J. R. R. Tolkien expressed it indirectly and parabolically in his fiction, and Charles Williams is little read these days; and before the Inklings came G. K. Chesterton, most profoundly and unsettlingly in The Man Who Was Thursday. God is good, but he is not safe. In fact, he isn’t safe because he is good, for true goodness cannot be broken to harness by the mechanisms and techniques of this world. Not all wildness is good, to be sure—not by a long chalk—but if the one we serve is truly God, and truly good, we should not expect following such a God to lead us into our comfort zone.
Fix My Compass, Point It North
When Emily spoke last week about not wanting to spend a season preaching on desire, I was right there with her. In other churches, that might not have been true; I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing on desire over the past decade-plus, in relation to modern culture and in relation to the Sermon on the Mount, and you’ll get a bit of that in a few minutes. As a matter of intellectual engagement, I’m comfortable with the subject area, and I think we have to be if we want our community and our culture to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ as good news. But the pesky little thing about this congregation is the long-ingrained expectation and understanding that merely intellectual engagement isn’t enough. No, if you’re going to preach here, you have to be willing to lay your soul on the line. A lot has changed in VSF over the decade we’ve been here, and the seven years or so I’ve been preaching here with some frequency, but that expectation hasn’t changed—in some small part because Tim Poyner ground it into me so thoroughly that I bring it with me into the pulpit whenever I open the Word with you of a Sunday.
And in the light of that expectation . . . yeah, when Emily was singing the melody, I was harmonizing right along on the bass line. I told Phil Whisler after the service last week my “truth about God,” as Jamie Winship would put it, is that God has spent most of a decade trolling me. God would trail opportunities in front of me until I couldn’t help myself but ask for them—and as soon as I started asking, he would slam the door. Maybe you think I’m making it up, or I’m being overdramatic, but here’s two things.
One, that pattern repeated over and over and over—I lost count of how many times.
Two, God sort of confirmed to me that that was what he was doing. There was an opening in a church in southern Oregon in 2017—I hadn’t even been through that cycle many times yet—which I knew immediately would never give me even a first look. I decided to ignore it to protect my heart. I heard God tell me to send them my stuff and pursue the opportunity. I told him no, I wouldn’t, it would be pointless, I was never going to be taken seriously there. God didn’t disagree, he just commanded me to open my heart to hope even knowing that hope would be quickly crushed. And so I did, and I was right: I never even received an acknowledgement of my e-mail. For some reason, I needed to make the deliberate, intentional choice to expose my heart in that way, to open myself wide to the hurt of being rejected unseen instead of avoiding it and protecting myself from it. I still don’t understand why . . . but that wasn’t the last time.
The Kingdom of the Resurrection
For much of the Gospel of Luke, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to cancel Jesus. For anyone who might need a quick refresher, the Pharisees were the reform movement in Judaism at that time. Their goal was to teach Israel to obey God’s word well enough that God would bless his people and make them an independent nation again with an heir of David on the throne in Jerusalem. As part of this, they created the institution of the synagogue, which is the model for church as we know it, to teach the word of God to the people of God. They were held in high esteem by most Jews for their knowledge of Scripture and their personal holiness, even though most Jews weren’t interested in matching the Pharisaic standard of personal holiness. The scribes, meanwhile, were the religious scholars of the day; modern translations often refer to them as “teachers of the Law” or “lawyers.” The reason they’re always mentioned in tandem with the Pharisees is that most of them, understandably enough, were Pharisees.
So, for maybe fifteen chapters now, the scribes and the Pharisees have been trying to trip Jesus up. You might say they’ve been playing a long-running game of “Jesus Jeopardy” . . . and they’re riding an unbroken losing streak. They are the anti-Ken Jennings. Here in Luke 20, their great rivals the Sadducees decide to try to take advantage of their ongoing failure.
Don’t Expect a Medal
Two weeks ago, I preached a sermon in which I spent a fair bit of time talking about all the connections between the gospel reading for that morning and the preceding two chapters. This is not that sermon. Luke gathered a fair number of sayings and brief scenes which he wanted to use that didn’t belong to any larger collection of stories and sayings; he dealt with them by inserting them between the main sections of his narrative. Luke 17:1-10 is one such insertion, comprised of four brief scenes of Jesus teaching his disciples; the compilers of the lectionary, for whatever reason, have given us two of the four.
I thought at first about just doing one of those two. It’s easy, if a biblical text seems to lack unity and coherence, to chop it up like a butcher into chunks of disconnected meat. Several major commentators on Matthew, for instance, take this approach to the Sermon on the Mount. One of the things Regent taught me was to resist that easy assumption and look for connections and structure; so I decided to see if I could find a common thread between the two parts of our passage this morning. Spoiler alert: I think I found one, as you’ll see in a little bit.
Risking All, Risking Nothing
The great problem in preaching many Scripture passages is that we think we already know what they mean—usually an interpretation we find easy and comfortable—so we don’t need to listen to them. That is not the problem this morning. Luke 16:1-8 is a problem parable, and our problems begin with the way our Bibles present it to us. The chapter break at 15:32 leads us to separate this parable from the one immediately before it and connect it instead with the poem that follows. We fail to see the deep connections between it and chapter 15 because, hey, it’s a different chapter! We take 16:9-13 as an interpretive key to our parable this morning—see the lectionary, which actually assigns all thirteen verses for this Sunday—when it’s actually transition and introduction to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. As a consequence, we read verses 1-8 as a parable about money, which completely jams us up, because on that basis it seems clear Jesus is praising the crook for being a good crook. That is not what’s going on.