Psalm 22
Psalm 22 begins with words that are burned into the
Christian psyche, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew records
Jesus’ anguished cry, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46; see also
Mark 15:35) – quoting this verse in the Aramaic language. The Psalm itself continues
for 21 verses of something close to despair: “I am poured out like water, and all my
bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my
mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you
lay me in the dust of death.”
Have
you ever felt this kind of pressure? Have you ever been forced to go so deep
within yourself that you wonder if there is any hope for relief? Keep the
memory of such times in your mind as you hear the verses that we read from
verse 22 on. The Psalmist continues:
- I will praise God when I stand in the congregation of God’s people.
- All of God’s people should praise God.
- When I was in trouble, God heard me and helped me.
- God hears and helps all who are in trouble. That’s the kind of God we serve.
- All the families of the earth should also praise God, for God saves all of them.
- Even those who die bow down to God. Future generations also will serve God forever.
A regular
recitation of praise! A complete contrast to the pressure and despair of the
first 21 verses. We can assume that in some fashion beyond our ability to
understand, God brings joy and safety to people who have given up all hope. If
you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else
other than God squeezed out of the marrow of your bones.
Mark 8
The Gospel
reading moves in an opposite trajectory from the Psalm. Psalm 22 moves from
despair to hope; Mark 8 begins with the feeding of the four thousand, continues
with the healing of a blind man, and comes to a climax with Peter’s great
confession, “You are the Messiah!” The public response to God’s presence in
Jesus’ ministry is growing, and an observer might think that “the best is yet
to be”. What happens next?
- Jesus tells the disciples about his coming death and resurrection.
- Peter responds to his words by saying, “Don’t talk like that!” Jesus rebukes Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”
- Jesus gives the crucial teaching: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”
- Jesus adds that God will embrace those who embrace this teaching, and that God will reject those who reject this teaching.
The same truth
emerges as from Psalm 22: If you want to know God in the depths of your being,
you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow.
This Lenten
Season
Last week, our
theme called us into the depths of the seas, a call to deep relationships. This
week, our theme calls us into the depths of the woods, a call to deep
commitment. I have a personal feeling about both of these themes.
Thirteen years
ago, I experienced something like a depression that almost crippled me – a bout
with acedia, a kind of spiritual lethargy. Healing for that time came to me in
a series of dreams. In the last dream, I was floating in the sea, an image that
makes little sense, because I don’t swim and I’m afraid of the water. As I
floated there, I realised that the sea was the sea of God’s love and that I was
completely safe, no matter how the waves might toss and swirl about me.
Fifty-two years
ago, I went out into the woods with my sophomore class in college. We planned
to spend the night at a cabin owned by our faculty advisor. The rest of the
group did so, but I got separated from the others during a walk through the
woods just before dark. I spent the night lost in the woods and walked out the
next morning through a cathedral-like setting of the trees in the light of dawn. Being afloat in the sea and being lost in the woods are both
experiences that lie deep within my memory.
In both cases, a time of distress led to a time of joy and delight. How do we bring
these images – deep in the water and deep in the woods – together with the
Scripture passages we have just read to reflect on our commitment to God and to
each other?
A Synthesis
Consider again
the common theme that emerges from the Scripture readings: If you want to know
God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God
squeezed out of your marrow. We are by nature self-centred. We are by our
natures inclined to think of everything that others do in terms of how it
affects us. “What’s in it for me?” is the essential question that we ask
constantly, even if we do not ask it aloud. I have wondered, for example, why
the Lord’s Prayer includes the line, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those
who sin against us.” I think that part of the answer is that by nature we
evaluate everything in terms that place ourselves at the centre.
When we nurture
this self-centredness, Christian theology defines it as pride. It is the
essential sin, mimicking the way that Adam and Eve chose to be “like God” and
replace God at the centre of their own lives. If pride is the essential sin,
then a reorientation of our lives, placing God at the centre, is the essence of
salvation. We use terms like “dying to self” and “living for Christ” for
describe this reorientation of our lives.
Apply this
insight, then, to our overarching theme of developing deep commitments to God
and to each other. Any relationship that exists primarily at the level of a
self-centredness can only be a shallow relationship. Deep commitments require
investment in the other: God invested God’s self in us by sending Jesus to die
and rise for us. In response, our deepest commitment to Christ and the other comes
when we are joined in Christ. We can use an image for this joining – “the body
of Christ”, in which Christ is the head and we are the body itself. Or in a
non-biblical and mechanical image, we are joined to each other the way that the
spokes of a bicycle wheel are joined to each other – through the axle at the
centre (the person of Jesus) and held in place by the hub of the wheel (the
Holy Spirit).
If we want deep
commitments, we begin by recentering our lives in Christ. This truth brings us
back to the insight from the Scriptures: If you want to know God in the depths
of your being (or recentre on Christ), you must have everything else other than
God squeezed out of your marrow.
How Does this
Happen?
For the past
several months, I have been struggling with high blood pressure. When my blood
pressure rises too much, I feel pretty miserable. By listening to my body, I
have learned to recognise when I am internalizing stress and tensing up. I have
also learned to relax intentionally, and when I succeed in relaxing, I can feel
my high blood pressure subside. Relaxing feels so good that I wonder why I
haven’t relaxed intentionally all my life! I think I can tell you why.
Relaxing means
letting go, letting go of my need to control what is happening and letting go
of my need to fix everything. In the terms we have been using, relaxing means
not needing to be at the centre of everything, not being in charge. Such
letting go is so hard that it has taken a real physical problem to force me to
do it, and even now I can do it only imperfectly. As we have said, if you want
to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other
than God squeezed out of your marrow.
A Cautionary
Tail
You may have heard
recently in the news of the situation with Ravi Zacharias. After his death, it
became clear that his public ministry, however successful, concealed a long
period of time in which he abused his power and position to take advantage of a
number of different women. One source (Patheos.com) describes the situation like this:
Like most people following the
Ravi Zacharias scandal, I knew the full report of his misconduct would be bad
when it came. The only question was how bad. Now that it’s dropped, we have the
whole ugly picture. Calculated side deals, manipulation, Inception-like
layers of deception. A man who publicly preached the vital importance of
private virtue, yet ostracized anyone who dared to scratch the facade. For
those on the outside of the scandal looking in, the story may not seem
particularly shocking. Why should anyone be shocked that a powerful,
charismatic religious figure gamed the system for sexual perks? But within the
evangelical and apologetics communities, the shock-waves are going to be
felt for a long time to come.
There are many hard lessons to be
learned from this, including lessons about the culture that enabled Ravi to get
away with his crimes for so long. It is now emerging that multiple people
failed to act on what should have been clear warning signs, simply because they
were blinded by loyalty. Ravi’s two-faced act made it beyond unthinkable to
them that he might be concealing sin of this magnitude. And so it continued to
lie concealed, right up to the day of his death.
The writer
(Esther O’Reilly) observes that a basic problem undergirding the scandal was
the extent to which Ravi Zacharias was in control of the whole organization
that bears his name. He did much good in his ministry, but the fatal flaw at
the heart of the whole was his control of every aspect of the ministry. Like
the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, this level of control consumed him. “All
power corrupts …”
O’Reilly
continues with a comparison to another prominent Christian of the last century:
As I was reflecting on all this
recently, my mind went back to another figure who was a “celebrity Christian”
in his own way, …. This figure also had a magnetic appeal, also had a lucrative
and popular ministry, and also used his platform to address the challenges of
the Christian walk. …. I’m speaking about Christian singer-songwriter Rich
Mullins…
He had first entered the business
as a callow, troubled twenty-something, full of demons and wholly unprepared
for the Nashville machine. After one of his tapes landed in the hands of a
young Amy Grant, he went overnight from eccentric Bible college alum to CCM
star. …. Where most artists feared failure, Mullins found himself terrified of
his own success. The story of how he worked through that terror is instructive,
inspiring even, though not conventionally so …. One can glean elsewhere that
Rich was chronically depressed and battled a complex of addictive tendencies,
including a lifelong struggle with alcohol abuse. …
In spite of all this, Rich was
able to take enough initiative to set up a strong accountability network for
himself. … He cut himself off from the bulk of his wealth, entrusting it to a
board of local church elders who paid him an average working man’s salary and
distributed the rest to charity. Recalling this decision …, his brother David
reflects “I don’t know if it was the strength to do it or the utter terror of
not doing it. I don’t know. Probably both.” …
Rich also spoke openly,
though tastefully, about his struggles with lust as a lonely single man. … He
tells an embarrassing story on himself about an incident in a German train
station where he and his best friend were having a highly explicit
accountability “talk,” unaware that the only other man in the station was
listening with understanding. At one point, the man leaned over and asked,
“Excuse me, are you Rich Mullins?” As Rich puts it … , “I had to think back
over our conversation to decide whether I was or not. But then I decided that I
must be.” …
O’Reilly concludes her analysis with a quote from Rick
Mullins himself,
Maybe when God calls us, it feels
like a pain. And for years in my own life, I tried to drown that pain. I tried
to avoid that pain. I tried to fill that ache with all kinds of what I can now
look back on and see was a lot of stuff that was destroying me, corrupting me.
And to listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness that we
have in our own lives. And rather than always trying to drown out that feeling
of emptiness, instead of always trying to fill it with a lot of junk, to allow
that to be a door through which we go to meet God.
If you want to
know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than
God squeezed out of your marrow. If you want deep commitments to God’s people and
the people around us, you will make them only as you enter into their pain and
hurt and find God there. Sometimes we name this openness “vulnerability”. Today
we have named it as releasing control of our own lives and opening ourselves to
God and to each other. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all
your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the Lord directs his love, at
night his song is with me – a prayer to the God of my life.”
Steinbach Mennonite Church
28 February 2021
Focus statement: We are transformed by God as we
follow God’s voice along the path of life, a voice calling us to deep
commitment. Even when our path leads deep into unfamiliar woods, as we lose
ourselves, we are found.
Going Deeper Questions:
1) I said that developing a deep commitment to God
and others require openness about our own struggles. What are the dangers of
such openness? Can we be “too vulnerable”?
2) How can we live the kind of de-centred life
(re-centred on God and others) if we have not fallen into radically selfish
ways in the first place? What if you were brought up to think of God and others
naturally? Do we still need to be saved from our selfishness?
3) What do you think is the basic reason that so
many television pastors and evangelists have fallen into addictive habits of
sex or drugs or some other failure?
4) How are we different from them?
Psalm 22:23-31
23 You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring
of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! 24 For
he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide
his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. 25 From
you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those
who fear him.
26 The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek
him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!
27 All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to
the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall
worship before him. 28 For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the
nations.
29 To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth
bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live
for him. 30 Posterity will serve him; future generations
will be told about the Lord, 31 and proclaim his
deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.
Mark 8:31-38
Jesus predicts his death
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law,
and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. 32 He
spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
33 But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked
Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind
the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
The way of the cross
34 Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and
said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up
their cross and follow me. 35 For whoever wants to
save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for
the gospel will save it. 36 What good is it for
someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? 37 Or
what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? 38 If
anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation,
the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with
the holy angels.”
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