(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.