Sermon: Evensong 16 Feb 2014

Preacher:

David Martin

Date:

Sunday 16th February 2014

Service:

Evensong

Readings:

Psalm 7:8

Ephesians 5:2

Listen:

Download Recording (MP3, 12M)

Texts: ‘Judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness, and according to my integrity that is within me’: Psalm 7 verse 8.

‘Walk in the way of love as Jesus Christ loved us and gave himself up for us’: The Epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 2.

I love Anglican chant even though it is a quite recent invention. It allows me to engage quietly with the poems and hymns of more than two and a half millennia ago. I know these poets and hymn writers intimately and enjoy the way they switch from trusting that God will punish the evil-doer if they remind him about his powers and his responsibilities to the righteous, and lamenting that he seems so indifferent to their urgent pleading. The psalmists switch within a couple of lines from exultation over God’s sovereignty and his rapid reproof of those who bear false witness or oppress the poor, and lament over the way the nations rage so furiously together and the wicked flourish like the green bay tree.

The verse from Psalm 7 that I chose for my first and main text lives dangerously by asking God to judge the suppliant according to his integrity and righteousness. I would be more inclined to begin with ‘Lord, have mercy’. But if we look more closely at Psalm 7 we see that its author starts off quite humbly by wondering whether he too is among the evil-doers who deserve reproof and correction. ‘If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me.... let the enemy persecute my soul and take it’. He gets his contrition in first before he allows himself to imagine what judgement God will surely execute upon the malefactors.

As we today listen to the psalmist’s words of confident expectation we ourselves start to wobble like most of the rest of the psalmists.  Basically we know that goodness has to be its own reward. We know that trust in a God who sees you alright though a thousand fall at your right hand and ten thousand at your left, is seriously misplaced. In the war my aunt constantly assured herself ‘it shall not come nigh thee’, showing considerable indifference towards her sister down the road who smoked and lacked divine insurance cover. She was deluded.

Yet we also know of very satisfying cases where the deeds of evil-doers boomerang and they are caught in their own net of deceit. From time to time people receive the due reward of their evil deeds and we briefly imagine ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’. As psalm 7 puts it ‘He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he hath made’.

The downfall of a tyranny seems to us to illustrate the action of a hidden hand or power that makes for righteousness so that acts of oppression carried out in secret eventually generate an open rebellion in which the mighty are thrown down from their seat. That at least is what we sometimes like to think. I was in Romania not long after the fall of the two evil megalomaniacs Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu. Suddenly in late December 1989 the whole preposterous pack of cards tumbled and they were summarily shot on Christmas Day. I stood in the main square of Timisoara where Nicolai Ceausescu had proposed building a monument so large than when he appeared before massed rallies on the balcony of the opera house it would blot out the sight of the Orthodox cathedral. It was precisely in this square that on Dec. 20th a protest rally faced the soldiers and tanks of the regime. Suddenly the tanks and soldiers withdrew, just as they did when faced by vast crowds issuing from the St. Nicholas Church, in Leipzig, a little while before the Berlin Wall came down. Timisoara was declared the first free city in Romani and a pastor on the balcony of Timisoara opera house shouted ‘God exists’. As the psalmist wrote, ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion then were we like unto them that dream’. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand much.

Actually the Romanian revolution was a confused, contested affair but there was a moment when it seemed the wicked got what they deserved and when gross defiance of human decency was punished there and then. Yet for every tyrant who falls from power to ignominy several others successfully evade the judgement of history. Something similar is true of the kind of financial malpractice that wrecked the global economy from 2008 on.  If you play the market like a casino the cost will be paid in an erosion of trust that can bring the whole edifice of finance tumbling down like a tower of Babel. There are costs to be paid that accelerate to the edge of the abyss. Yet those who pay the costs are usually not those who reaped the benefits of a financial wizardry that has degenerated into black magic.

What then do we really believe about the role of God in the moral government of the world? Some while ago a sociological questionnaire was administered in England asking ‘Do you believe in the kind of God who actively intervenes in human affairs?’ and it received the reply ‘No, just the ordinary one’. Listen to how my friend the poet Donald Davie responded to that reply in his own book of modern psalms To Scorch or to Freeze:

‘The ordinary kind

 of God is what one believes in so implicitly that

it is only with blushes or

bravado one can declare,

“I believe”, caught as one is

in the ambush of personal history, so

harried, so distraught.

The ordinary kind

of undeceived believer

expects no prompt reward

From an ultimately faithful

But meanwhile preoccupied landlord’.

I suspect you and I are for the most part believers in an ordinary God.

So is the language of the psalms ultimately deceptive and are the promises of faith delusory? Perhaps the first thing to notice is that the psalmists never allow themselves to let go of the human appeal to moral government and justice, nor do they lose faith in the difference between good and evil. We in our time may fear the self-righteousness of being judgemental or of missing the exculpations allowed by a myriad shades of grey, but because we are made in the image of God we have no choice but to choose to judge what is evil and what is good. From being an infant we quickly learn to say ‘It isn’t fair’. Judgement is the foundation of being human and of any moral universe. The psalmists are resolute in standing on those foundations.  

This is where Christian faith gives an answer so extraordinary it might just be true. ‘Walk in the way love as Jesus Christ loved us and gave himself up for us’ says the second verse of Ephesians chapter 5. Practise the costly reciprocities of loving-kindness, not the costly negativities of self-aggrandisement. Christianity claims that the love that moves the sun and all the stars is most fully revealed in a human face marred by sorrow and rejection and in a man who ‘when reviled, reviled not again’. It says that when the landlord sent his son to visit his vineyard the labourers said, ‘This is the heir: let us kill him and seize his inheritance’. The son of God took upon himself the cost, not to deflect the anger of a righteous God but because God himself takes the terrible exactions of evil into himself to enter them in the account of good. We do not have a God safely ensconced beyond the stars but one who has taken our humanity into himself. The Christian answer to the question ‘Where is now thy God?’ is that he is bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, realised in the most intimate hopes and fears of our humanity.

Amen.