Grace and peace from God our Creator,
hope in our Redeemer, Jesus the Christ, and the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit are with you, always.
Full disclosure—in preparation for this
sermon, I believe, was the first time I ever read Psalm 2. I’ve nothing against
the psalter, don’t get me wrong. I’m hip to other psalms like 8, 13, 16, 23,
24, 34 and even some triple digit ones like 100, 105, 118, ultra-lengthy 119,
139, 142. (Shout out any numbers you love that I missed. I mean numbers of
psalms, not just like, numbers. Cool, a lot of psalm fans out there
today.)
Well, because the world is great, I’ve
figured out a way to, once again, tell the story of the Old Testament project
that Gretchen and Maria and I did, first year. It was an obviously amazing infomercial
that played off the Apple marketing campaign “there’s an app for that”—but,
rather, there was a psalm for that. There’s a psalm for your sorrow, your
revenge fantasy, for gentleness, for you the oppressed or you the oppressor,
for justice, for celebration, for anguish, for fear, for joy.
Sojourners contributor Kari Jo Verhulst
writes that “the poetry of the psalms preserves the immediacy of human
experience…void of the broader perspective that we get well after the moment
has passed….the psalms preserve the heart’s cries in language, images, and
movements spacious enough to find our own experiences.”
And John Calvin, guy I don’t usually
quote in sermons, called the Psalms “the anthology of all the parts of the
soul.” And he meant all parts.
David Tuesday Adamo, a religion
professor in Nigeria, classifies Psalm 2 as a therapeutic psalm—specifically
for stomach pain. I have to admit that yesterday, when I realized I was
preaching the day after Jim Lobdell, I had some stomach pain. The African Indigenous
Churches, Adamo explains, regard these words as “potent” when read as part of a
healing ritual, which includes the drinking of water made holy by these words.
While we wouldn’t classify our baptism
as cure for stomachache necessarily, we do know a little something about water
made holy by word. While you may be a better biblical scholar than I am and
have included Psalm 2 in your life before now, you may have just recognized the
words “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” as bearing a striking
resemblance to the words that thunder from heaven during Jesus’ baptism.
We as Christians have a specific
understanding of the term “God’s son” and we mean Jesus, the Christ, when we
say that. But we’ve also learned, probably from Steed Davidson, that earthly
kings often claimed to be the son of a particular god, in order to lend
themselves that god’s authority. Some interpreters say that this psalm could
have, liturgically, been used in royal rituals—and it makes perfect sense that
it would appear in the story of the baptism of Jesus, as told by Matthew’s and
Luke’s gospels. Matthew, greatly concerned with the establishment of Jesus’
authority, and Luke, greatly concerned with social location, would have called
upon this familiar, royal phrase to underscore the baptism of Jesus.
And Jesus has more power than any
earthly king—and he hasn’t amassed an army or oppressed a people. Rather, he
has emptied himself of that power through “suffering, humiliation, despair” and
death on the cross.
In Psalm 2, it’s written that God has
established a king to bring order to the world, but that all the other kings
are running away with it. God has established a rule of law, a coming kingdom,
and humans who would even claim the best of intentions are failing miserably to
fulfill it.
When we hear the words of this psalm in
our world—big and messy—we may wonder if God can really make order out of our
chaos. If you read or watched any news today, you’ve been long-distance
witnesses to the upheaval in Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Iran,
Afghanistan, Russia, Uganda, Mexico, the Central African Republic, Somalia…
There are death tolls in the dozens and
the capture of a drug kingpin and re-imprisonment of musicians and anti-gay
legislation and drone strikes and civil wars and disappearances and protests
and crackdowns and unchecked abuse of power.
And, in the midst of it all, there’s a
psalm for that.
I told a non-religious friend of mine I
was going to preach today, and he asked what I was planning to say, and so I,
sort of flippantly, said that I was going to talk about how everything is awful
and the only reason we don’t give up is because God has promised to make order
out of our chaos. He just sort of said, “oh” and we moved on to talking about
something else -- but isn’t that the thing? Isn’t it just that the world is
constantly in uproar—with earthly kings plotting against that which will
engender the kingdom of God—and yet somehow, here we are, week after week,
being read to about that chaos, and responding, “Thanks be to God.”
The last line of this psalm made me
laugh. Its contrast to the rest of the psalm is so typical. Wrath, fear,
trembling, wicked, perishing, warning—people are going to be dashed to pieces
like pottery, it says!—but happy are they who take refuge in him.
Mic drop.
As though that’s it. And as though all
the folks who are going to be broken with a rod of iron are simply unhappy. I
think they’re probably more than unhappy. I think they’re probably dead.
But the thing is, the people of God know
who has the last word. The people of God know that this king—earthly or
otherwise—is from God and will, therefore, lead them toward happiness.
And since I’m so fond of bringing my
horrible jokes full circle, there is, in fact, an app for your happiness! I
stumbled upon it earlier this week and am interested to see how I’m able to use
it, going forward. The app is called “happier” and basically is an electronic
journal of moments of happiness, gratitude, etc. So like, on Monday when I went
to Café Yesterday to read like a million pages for homework, Josh, the guy who
runs it, put my coffee in the giant Disney Princess mug, knowing without
knowing that that would make me happier. I posted a picture of it to the app,
and got notifications that it had made other users smile—the “happier” version
of the Facebook like.
What I like about “happier” is not just
that I post little positive things that occur in my life, but I peruse the
moments that have made strangers happy. For other folks, it’s a visit to their
horse’s stable, a great grade on an assignment, managing to be on time to yoga
class, noticing blooming trees on their way to work. Knowing that people out
there in the world are experiencing little bursts of happiness helps me know
that there’s a way out of our chaos. In the midst of the trauma and terror of
human life, there is also happiness. There is goodness, and there is love, and
there is life.
The words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu
have been made into a song that we’re going to sing in just a moment, because
their simplicity is built on the same confidence as Psalm 2:
“Goodness is stronger than evil, love is
stronger than hate. Light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than
death. Victory is ours, victory is ours, through God who loves us.”
Amen.