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.
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.
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.
