The God who Is

A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

3rd October 2021

Exodus 2.23-25; 3.1-15; 4.10-17

There is a wonderful scene in the TV show The Big Bang Theory
            where the lead character Sheldon is showing his girlfriend Amy
            one of his all-time favourite movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark,
only to have it spoiled by her analysis of what she’s just seen.
 
According to Amy, the movie has, what she rather dismissively calls,
            a ‘glaring story problem.’
 
She tells Sheldon, in no uncertain terms,
            that : ‘Indiana Jones plays no role in the outcome of the story.’
 
When he looks at her in horror, she explains:
            ‘If Indiana Jones weren’t in the film, it would turn out exactly the same…’
 
And then to prove it, she goes on,
            ‘If he weren’t in the movie, the Nazis would still have found the Ark,
                        taken it to the island, opened it up, and all died, just like they did.’
 
The end.
 
And the question I want to pose for us this morning,
            is similar to the challenge from Amy to Sheldon.:
 
What role does God play in the outcome of the story of your life?
 
Does God’s presence in my story, in your story, actually make any difference?
            Does it improve things?
            Does it make them worse???
 
This is a genuine question, as they say on Twitter,
            because one of the accusations often levelled at people of faith
            is that the world would be a much better place
            if we could just rid it of the idea of God.
 
So let’s journey back to ancient Egypt,
            and to the story of Moses in the wilderness,
to see if we can get some insight
            into the significance or otherwise of God’s presence in the story of humanity.
 
Liz and I recently went to see the Show, ‘Prince of Egypt,
            which is showing just round the corner from here at the Dominion Theatre.
 
First things first, I love the Dreamworks movie.
            But the stage show certainly isn’t the movie.
 
Sure - the great songs from the movie are all there,
            and are performed beautifully.
 
The dancing is energetic, sexy, and creative:
            I thought the chariot chase was a particularly clever scene,
            with actors playing both tumbling chariots and racing horses.
 
And then there are the additional songs,
            written by Stephen Schwartz of Godspell fame,
            who also wrote the songs for the original Prince of Egypt movie.
 
Some of these new songs are great:
            ‘Footprints on the Sand’, and ‘Always on your Side’
                        both add to the relationship between the two princes
                        and are worthy additions to the book.
 
But the most interesting addition
            was Moses' song, ‘For the Rest of My Life’,
where he rails at God
            for making him the instrument
            of God’s vengeance against the Egyptians:
 
For the rest of my life
            I will have to live with this
For the rest of my life
            I’ll have to face the part I played
 
These faces filled with grief and with despair
            Every morning when I wake up they’ll be there
            Seared into my memory
            With a cruel burning knife
 
For the rest of my life
            there’s a weight on my soul
            Like a pyramid of stone
There’s a weight on my soul
            A ransom never to be paid
 
The crimes I do, I do them in your name
            I feel just as guilty, all the same
Like a brutal soldier
            Who does anything he’s told
There’s a weight on my soul
            For the rest of my life
 
When you know you’re in the right
            It’s so easy to be wrong
You have to win the fight
            So you close your mind and heart up tight
            And go along
            Tell yourself you’re staying strong
 
You ramp up your ferocity
            Excuse any atrocity
But once you’ve won
            You have to live with what you've done
 
And for the rest of my life
            I will have to live with this
For the rest of my life
            These questions haunting me like ghosts
 
Does a noble end mean any means will do?
            Is your power the only reason to follow You?
 
And one final question I see no answer to
            For the rest of my life
            How will I get through?
Unlike so many of our victims
            I have the rest of my life
            To get through
 
For me, this exploration of Moses' guilt and anger
            is not only the high point of the musical,
            but also the gateway to where I think it falls down.
 
Because it reveals the underlying theology of the show,
            which is that The only baddies in this story are the deities.
 
Moses is an ‘innocent puppet’
            (to quote Pontius Pilate from Jesus Christ Superstar)
            and we see exactly the same thing happening with Pharaoh.
 
Possibly the most bizarre twist of the musical
            is the revisionist retelling of the character Rameses,
                        who comes across as a thoroughly nice, if slightly naïve, ruler,
            who wants to do nothing more than give Moses everything he is asking for,
                        but is constrained by the ghost of his father
                        and the demands of the high priest.
 
Several times in the musical Rameses releases the Israelites,
            only for a word from the gods to countermand his decision
            and send in the army to oppress the Israelites instead. 
 
This is, in the end, playing to a zeitgeist
            that sees all the evils of human warfare and violence
                        as the end result of religious belief;
and the subtext is clear:
            if only Moses and Rameses had been left alone by their gods
            to become the mature, fully-integrated humans they were longing to be,
                        without divine interference,
            then everyone would have lived happily ever after. 
 
They’d have got away with it, if it hadn’t been for those pesky gods.
 
And this feels like a betrayal of the story -
            it sanitises the complexities of the Passover,
                        it excuses the excesses of the empire,
            and ultimately it silences God as a player within human drama.
 
From the point of view of this show’s version of the Moses story,
            the answer to my question is clear:
            God’s presence makes things considerably worse.
 
But I’m not convinced that this does justice to the text,
            so rather than coming at it through the lens of West End Glitzy Theology,
let’s go back into the biblical story, to see what we can find,
            that might help us answer the question of whether God’s presence
            makes any meaningful difference to the human experience of life.
 
Last week, you will remember,
            we were with Jacob, on the run in the wilderness,
            receiving his vision of a stairway to heaven.
 
Well, with Moses, we’re back in the wilderness,
            with another anti-hero of the faith
            also on the run from the consequences of his actions.
 
And as with Jacob,
            the Moses we meet here isn’t all that likeable as a character.
 
He’s murdered an Egyptian,
            left his people in slavery, and turned his back on his family.
 
We meet him as he find himself in conversation with God,
            who has rather strangely appeared to him
            in the form of a burning bush.
 
Just as an aside here, Liz and I visited Mount Sinai a few years ago,
            and at St Catherine’s Monastery we were shown a bush
            that the guides claim to be the very bush where Moses met God.
 
In fact, our guide broke a couple of twigs off,
            and gave them to us - so we have some of the burning bush at home!
 
And also, I couldn’t help noticing, just alongside this tourist attraction of a bush,
            sits a rather prominent fire extinguisher.
Clearly, if there are any further fiery theophanies in that place,
            God’s presence will be quickly extinguished.
 
But back to Moses, who we meet arguing the toss
            with God about God’s call on his life.
He’s making all the excuses he can
            to avoid having to take responsibility.
 
From his protestations about his lack of public speaking ability,
            to his straightforward cry, ‘O Lord, please send someone else’,
Moses doesn’t want to listen to the voice
            that is telling him to grow up, suck it up, and get stuck into making amends.
 
What’s interesting, though, is that God allows Moses agency here,
            God doesn’t just say ‘Do it, or else’.
Rather, God appoints Aaron, God works with Moses’ flaws;
            it’s more like a dialogue, a dance, or an improvisation,
            than it is a clear-cut-call with detailed instructions.
 
And there’s something comforting in this, I think:
            God works through us, not in spite of us.
God’s will is done, but God’s methods are not fixed.
 
The Moses from the musical,
            who feels God has forced him against his will
            into an impossible situation
is not quite the Moses of the book of Exodus,
            who is called to reluctantly play his part
            in God’s great work of freedom and liberation.
 
And crucial to all of this
            is the doctrine of continuous revelation.
This is the idea that
            not everything that can be known about God
            has already been made known.
 
Abraham had heard God’s call,
            but it was Moses who heard God’s name.
 
There is more to know about God,
            as God is progressively revealed
            through God’s ongoing relationship with humans.
 
So when Moses asks for God’s name,
            the response he receives is both fascinating and revealing,
            but also rather mysterious.
 
‘I am who I am’, says God;
            ‘I am the one who is’, might be another way of putting it,
            or possibly just, ‘I’m me!’
 
The point is clear, which is that God is known, not by a personal name,
            as you and I are known,
but by the simple fact of being there.
 
The starting point for understanding who God is,
            is the conviction that ‘God is’.
 
I was listening to a Radio 4 science programme recently
            and Jim Al-Khalili was interviewing Prof David Eagleman
            about his research into human perception.
 
David Eagleman’s point was that everything we see, taste, smell, touch and hear,
            is created by a set of electro-chemical impulses
            in the dark recesses of our brain,
and that what we call consciousness is our brain’s attempt
            to identify patterns in these signals and attach meaning to them.
 
From a purely subjective point of view,
            the world does not exist outside of our brains,
because our entire perception of the world
            takes place within the darkness of the inside of our skulls.
 
And yet, we might choose to say, ‘God is…’
 
This deceptively simple statement of naming God’s existence
            is a statement of faith that there is something in this world
                        that is definitively beyond ourselves,
            something other than ‘me’ and my own perception of reality.
 
The statement that ‘God is’,
            the great ‘I am’ statement of God’s existence,
is a statement that God is ... the one
            who is truly other to, and external from, ourselves.
 
The next question, then,
            and it’s a question predicated on the existence of the divine other,
            is what is this God who is, like?
 
Is God loving, hateful, angry, forgiving, or indifferent?
            These are the questions of theology,
                        and they are secondary and subsidiary questions
            to the primary question of whether God is.
 
Because if God is, then I am not all that there is,
            and everything else follows on from that.
 
And so Moses, asking God’s name,
            and hearing the answer ‘I am’,
is invited into a world
            where he is no longer the subjective master of his own universe.
 
In the story, God is not encountered in the abstract,
            as a kind of philosophical transcendent idea of existence.
 
Rather, God is known and made known through relationships with humans.    
            God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
            God is the God of Moses’ ancestors,
            God is encountered through a community of faith.
 
And there’s a profound truth for us here,
            which is that we do not encounter God alone.
 
Even when, like Moses, we are alone on the mountain in the wilderness,
            we are part of a longer story of God’s revelation.
 
And we always therefore encounter God
            in the context of God’s ongoing self-revelation,
            through our own communities of faith.
 
Sometimes I hear people wondering why we should bother with church,
            after all, if God is everywhere,
            we don’t need to go to church.
 
But I think Moses’ encounter of God in the context of his faith community
            speaks of a truth that God is made known
            through the relationships that God forms.
 
God is discovered in and through others,
            and God’s self-revelation occurs in the context
            of God’s people crying out for justice.
 
It is in relationships with people
            that God’s action in human affairs becomes manifest,
because God is revealed as a relational being,
            who is known in the effects of calling and claiming people
                        to become people of faith in a faithless world,
            making real in and through their lives,
                        the conviction that God is.
 
So how should we respond?
            What can we discover from Moses story
            that might help us understand our own lives before God?
 
Well - if we’re looking for God’s action in human history,
            we find it through Moses’ response to the call of God on his life.
 
Without the voice from the burning bush,
            without the revelation of God breaking into his world,
Moses would have stayed as a shepherd in Midian,
            and the Israelites would have died in slavery in Egypt.
 
But as God forms relationship,
            and calls into being communities of faith;
as God is made known in and through people,
            so lives are transformed,
            and the world is changed.
 
We, like Moses, are enlisted to the task
            of bringing God’s freedom to those enslaved,
as God’s promised, covenant faithfulness,
            is enacted in and through human relationships.
 
Sometimes we long for God to act,
            for God to intervene.
And those who would question God’s existence
            rightly point to the fact that the evidence for God’s direct intervention
            is conspicuous by its absence.
 
Well, I do not believe in an interventionist God,
            because that is not the God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai.
 
The God of the burning bush
            is a God who works in and through flawed and fallible humans,
whispering to them from the flames of revelation
            that there is more to this world than they can see on their own,
            and calling them to action that brings liberation to others.
 
This is how God changes the world,
            through people like Moses, and Jacob, and you, and me…
 
When God speaks salvation,
            God’s work is made known through people.
 
John’s Gospel grasps this most clearly
            in the language it uses to speak of Jesus.
 
Those of you who have been joining me on Monday nights
            for my Biblical Studies masterclasses,
will know that in John’s Gospel, Jesus is described as being the ‘word’ of God,
            and that seven times in the gospel Jesus describes himself
                        using the words, ‘I am’,
            a deliberate echo of the revealed name of God to Moses on mount Sinai.
 
The God who is encountered by Moses
            as the God of community and relationship,
is the God of Jesus, God’s word spoken in human flesh.
 
This underscores that God is known in a person, through relationship,
            as God encounters people personally.
The God of the burning bush
            is known in Jesus as word incarnate, as word embodied.
 
And Jesus calls people into relationship with himself
            and through him into relationship with God.
 
As John’s gospel puts it in chapter 15:
 
As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,
just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.
(Jn. 15:9-10 NRS)
 
And so God is revealed,
            in community, in people, in relationship,
            in Christ, in the fire on the mountain.
 
But the revelation of God has to go somewhere,
            if it is to be transformatory of human lives.
 
Otherwise, what’s the point?
 
Does God’s presence in the story of human existence
            make any difference?
Does it improve things, or does it make them worse?
 
We’re back to the question I started with,
            and the answer is there, staring us in the face in the story of Moses.
 
The story of the Exodus is the foundational story
            of God’s deliverance of those enslaved to sin and oppression.
 
What happens next for Moses
            as he hears God’s call to look beyond his own world
            and to consider the world and needs of others,
is the same thing that happens in our lives,
            as we learn to listen to the divine voice that calls to us, too.
 
People are delivered from their enslavement to sin and oppression.
 
There’s something significant to note here, though,
            which is that the Israelites in Egypt were not enslaved by their own sin,
            but rather by the sinful actions of the Egyptians against them.
 
Not all sin is to do with personal morality,
            there can be structural and systemic sins in our world
            that oppress, and demean, and distort, and destroy;
and God’s intent for freedom and liberation
            is every bit as much focused on these
as it is on the sins of omission or commission
            that occur at the scale of our personal lives.
 
But of course there is a relationship between the personal and the communal,
            both in terms of sin but also in terms of liberation.
 
Just as our personal actions of sinful disregard for others
            can be the cause or continuation of their oppression,
            as Pharaoh discovers to his cost in the story of the Exodus,
so personal actions of turning towards those in suffering
            can become the method of God’s will for liberation
            taking shape in our world and in the lives of others.
 
The movement from death to resurrection
            is written through the story of the Exodus,
just as it is made known in and through the life of Christ.
 
The God who is made known in the wilderness
            as the divine other,
who is encountered in relationship
            through the community of faith,
who calls us to become
            agents of liberation,
is the God at work in our world
            by the Spirit of Christ,
drawing us to life from death,
            and inviting others to hear that call and respond.
 
The God who is known in the wilderness
            is the God of the cross, who knows suffering,
            and who takes action to deliver those who live in suffering.
 
What difference does God make to the story of humanity?
            All the difference in the world.
 
And we are an intrinsic part of that story,
            as we, like Moses, are called to play our part
            in the salvation of the world, the liberation of the oppressed,
            and the coming of God’s kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.

Where is God, and where is God not?

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

26 September 2021

Genesis 27.1-4, 15-23; 28.10-17

John 1.45-51

I wonder where you go to meet with God? 

Where is your spiritual, holy place? 

Maybe you’re there now: 

worshipping with the saints in the Sanctuary at Bloomsbury, 

singing the great hymns of faith to the accompaniment of our wonderful pipe organ, 

revelling in the word of God read and expounded, 

upheld by the prayers of the faithful? 

Or maybe you were there earlier this morning, 

as you sat in quiet stillness bringing your life before God 

in dialogue with the scriptures through prayer? 

Or maybe for you it’s somewhere else? 

Maybe you go to meet with God 

as you walk together in the garden of God’s creation, 

finding God in the beauty of nature, on the mountain top, 

along the coast path, at the lakeside or riverside as the sun sets in glory? 

Or maybe you meet God in your family and friends, 

encountering the face of the divine 

in the faces of those you love and who love you? 

Where do you go to meet with God? 

And what does it mean for you when you get there? 

What does the transcendent moment, 

the realisation that there is more to this life 

than just you and your immediate concerns, 

what does that mean for you? 

What does it do to you?

In our evening services, in the before-times, 

we used to pause each week, 

at the end of the day which was also the end of week, 

and ask ourselves this very question: 

Where have you encountered God today? 

And we would also ask ourselves the correlating question: 

Where have you been but have not found God? 

And as we asked ourselves these questions, 

we framed them using two key portions of scripture, 

one from the Psalms 

and the other from our reading today from the book of Genesis. 

Let me share these questions with you now, 

and as I do so, I invite you to try and answer them 

as you reflect back on your life over this last week:

• Where, in your experience this week, 

have you wanted to say with Jacob, 

‘Surely the Lord is in this place’?...

• Where, in your experience this week, 

have you wanted to say with the Psalmist, 

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’?...

And as you hold these places of connection and disconnection in your mind, 

I invite you to hear, with whatever faith you have, 

the great assertion of the apostle Paul:

• For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

Well, if you didn’t already know this, 

what we have just done together is known as an exercise of Ignatian spirituality, 

as developed by Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth century Spanish priest. 

What Ignatius taught was a way of discerning 

what he called good and evil ‘spirits’. 

These aren’t conceived of as angels and demons 

external to a person and acting on them, 

but more as moods or aspects of the human soul. 

Sometimes we are drawn towards love, joy and peace, 

and sometimes we are drawn towards confusion and doubt. 

The purpose of intentional reflection on our daily lives, Ignatius said, 

was to learn to pay attention to the goodness 

that God has planted in our souls, 

and to recognise and draw away from the sinfulness 

that would mar God’s goodness within us. 

So a frank recognition of sin is the starting point for godliness; 

and acknowledging where God is not, 

is the beginning of the journey towards discovering where God is.

Where is God? Where is God not? 

These are the Ignatian questions, and I commend them to you.

But there is one more piece of wisdom from Ignatius, 

and it takes us to our reading this morning, 

of Jacob’s vision of God in the wilderness. 

Because Ignatius said that a bad spirit might whisper 

that you deserve to be comfortable and contented, 

to discourage change; 

whilst a good spirit, a godly voice whispering into our lives, 

might take us to the place of desolation, to the moment of crisis, 

to the point of re-examination of all that we hold dear 

and have built our life upon. 

Sometimes, paying attention to the voice of God 

is not all about love, joy and peace. 

Sometimes, it’s about confronting our deepest self in all its unvarnished state. 

That, too, can be the outcome of discernment before God.

And so we come to Jacob in the wilderness.

I think it’s fair to say that Jacob isn’t a particularly likeable person. 

He’s confrontational, conniving, deceptive, and manipulative. 

In everything we are told about him in the book of Genesis, 

from his emergence from the womb 

grasping at the heel of his twin brother Esau (25.23),

he is presented as someone trying to make his way in the world 

whatever the cost to others. 

Maybe we should blame the parents 

as they played favourites with their children, 

with Isaac favouring Esau and Rebecca favouring Jacob (25.28). 

Maybe it’s all an allegorical outworking 

of the tension between nomadic hunter-gatherers represented by Esau 

and the settled agrarian landowners represented by Jacob (25.27). 

Or maybe it’s just that Jacob was one of those people 

who always wanted what he didn’t have, 

which led to him manipulating Esau out of his birthright (25.33). 

Scholars will tell us that the saga of Jacob and Esau, 

which runs over several chapters in the book of Genesis, 

and of which we only got a snapshot today, 

is what is known as an ‘endangered ancestor’ narrative. 

We get these quite a lot through the books of Genesis and Exodus, 

and they are the kind of stories you can imagine people telling 

of an evening, gathered around the fire, once the children are asleep. 

These ‘endangered ancestor’ stories take their tension 

by exploring how things nearly didn’t work out the way that they did. 

So, if your definition of yourself as an ancient Israelite 

is that you are descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, 

a story of how Jacob so-nearly wasn’t the chosen vehicle of the covenant 

is a gripping narrative. 

What’s interesting about these stories 

is that they also explore how the revered ancestors of the faith 

were fallible, flawed people. 

There’s no hero-worship here of Jacob, 

if anything is an archetypical anti-hero, 

someone you love to hate. 

We’ve all met people like Jacob, 

who will take what they want by whatever means necessary, 

and we’ve all got aspects of Jacob within ourselves 

if only we can stop, reflect, and recognise them.

The story of Jacob, along with the other ancestors of the faith, 

is in essence a story of what it means to be human. 

Jacob is us, and we are Jacob. 

Jacob messes up his life in a catastrophic way, 

deceiving his father to cheat his brother. 

He is on the run for his life, 

and has abandoned his dysfunctional family for the wilderness. 

He’s taken nothing with him, no tent, no provisions, 

and when he finally lies down to sleep in exhaustion at the end of the day, 

he simply uses a stone as a pillow. 

This is a person at rock bottom. 

Like his grandfather Abraham before him, 

Jacob has become a sojourner, 

a person who exists in isolation from the family systems 

that sustained ancient societies (Gen 15.13; 23.4). 

It’s all gone wrong, and it’s all Jacob’s fault. 

Finally his life has caught up with him, 

and all his questing for birthright and inheritance 

and status and value 

have led him to isolation and dispossession. 

He’s gone to the wilderness to die alone.

And then he has this dream. Listen to those verses again:

[Jacob] dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, 

the top of it reaching to heaven; 

and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

 13 And the LORD stood beside him and said, 

"I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; 

the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring;

 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, 

and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east 

and to the north and to the south; 

and all the families of the earth 

shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.

Jacob’s journey away from the spirit of comfortable contentment, 

towards the spirit of desolation and crisis, 

has led him straight into the faithful arms 

of the God who will not let him go. 

At the place of Jacob’s deepest suffering, God has shown up. 

And at that moment, Jacob is challenged 

to re-evaluate his entire worldview. 

He had been seeking a birthright for himself. 

His efforts to manipulate and deceive Esau and Isaac 

were all focussed on him securing his own place in God’s covenant promises. 

But what he found was that, at the very moment he gave up 

on all his dreams and aspirations, 

God came to him, to give him the very thing 

he had been trying all those years to take for himself. 

But there is a twist. 

Jacob wanted an inheritance for himself, 

but God is very clear that the covenant promises 

are for the blessing not just of Jacob and his descendants, 

but of all the families of the earth (28.14). 

So imagine now with me 

that you’re sat around a camp fire in ancient Israel. 

Imagine that you are one of those 

who sees yourself as the descendant of Jacob, 

the heir to the promises of God given through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

What do you hear? 

This story is a challenge to nationalism, 

it is a challenge to exceptionalism. 

If we are Jacob, and Jacob is us, 

then we too need to learn that God’s promises, God’s blessing, 

is far wider, far more expansive, than we had previously realised.

The invitation here, is for all those who encounter this story, 

whether in ancient Israel or contemporary London 

or anywhere in between, 

to realise that God’s covenant cannot be controlled, 

God cannot be contained, 

and none of us deserve the love of God 

that God nonetheless extends to us 

in our moments of deepest need.

Jacob had gone to the wilderness to die, 

he had run from everything 

he thought represented his status as the heir to God’s promises. 

And yet he encountered God in the very place 

he had thought God would be absent. 

And so he woke from his sleep and said, 

"Surely the LORD is in this place-- and I did not know it!" (28.16).

So I ask again: 

Where for you is God? 

And where for you is God not?

John’s gospel picks up on the story of Jacob’s dream 

to describe what it understands of the significance of Jesus. 

It says that those who, like Nathaniel, seek a revelation of God, 

will discover that Jesus is for them Jacob’s ladder, 

the point of connection between heaven and earth, 

with the angels ascending and descending upon him. 

Those who daily take up their cross, 

and follow the costly path of Christian discipleship, 

will discover that God is a God who shows up in suffering, 

that God’s redemptive work of new life is revealed in death. 

Those who follow Jesus into the wilderness of temptation 

and confront their unvarnished selves 

will find that God is revealed 

in the moment of deepest self-knowledge. 

Those who leave their security to become sojourners in this world 

will meet God in the loss 

and discover an inheritance that goes beyond all human containment.

Because God is not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

God is not just the God of Israel, any more than God is an Englishman. 

God is not just the God of Bloomsbury or the Baptists. 

God is not owned by those who call themselves Christian.

God is the God of all, 

and those whom God calls are called not for their own sake, 

but for the blessing of all nations and all peoples.

Which brings me to my challenge to us, this morning.

If we had read on a couple of verses further in our reading, 

we would have heard what Jacob did next:

And Jacob was afraid, and said, "How awesome is this place! 

This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 

So Jacob rose early in the morning, 

and he took the stone that he had put under his head 

and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 

He called that place Bethel [which means, ‘house of God’]. (Gen. 28:17-19)

And so Bethel became a shrine, a sanctuary, 

a dwelling place for God. 

It was where later pilgrims went to meet with God, 

in the hope that they too would encounter there 

an echo of the glory of Jacob’s vision.

God was revealed to Jacob in the wilderness, 

the place with no walls, no boundaries, 

no security, no stability. 

And Jacob’s response was to build walls, 

define the boundaries, establish security, and seek stability. 

Jacob sought to once again contain God, 

to control the blessings of the covenant.

And Jacob is us, and we are Jacob.

Too easily we too seek to contain God. 

What does it mean for us to discover in our lives, in our community of faith, 

that God’s blessing and promises 

are only ever given for the blessing of all. 

Can we, once again, make the journey to the wilderness of God’s absence, 

to discover that God is unexpectedly present, 

coming to us by grace at the point of our deepest need. 

And can we resist the temptation 

to then try and keep that blessing for ourselves?

As we come towards our time of reflection together on what we have heard, 

I’d like to share a photo with you that I took a few years ago 

at the Marc Chagall gallery in Nice. 

Chagall was Russian-French artist of Jewish origin, 

and his interpretation of Jacob’s dream was painted in 1963. 

It’s huge - nearly 2 metres by 3 metres - 

and you can see on the left side the image of a sleeping man 

seated next to a ladder held by two supernatural beings with wings, 

and on the right side another supernatural being 

with a bigger body and larger wings. 

As we spend a couple of minutes with this picture now, 

I’d like to invite you to think what it means for you to encounter God.

Sing a New Song

 A sermon given at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
5th September 2021
 
Psalm 40.1-10
Hebrews 10.1-10 

A couple of weeks ago I started my sermon on Psalm 49
            by referencing both Coldplay and Queen.
 
Well, this week I’m going to start
            with my favourite band of all time, the amazing U2.
 
Their third album War, released in 1983,
            opened with a song titled, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’,
            which is one of the band’s most overtly political songs.
 
Its lyrics describe their horror at the Troubles in Northern Ireland,
            and it focusses in on the 1972 Bloody Sunday incident in Derry,
            where British troops shot and killed unarmed civil rights protesters.
 
Here are a few lines from it:
 
            I can't believe the news today.
            I can't close my eyes and make it go away.
            Broken bottles under children's feet
            Bodies strewn across the dead-end street.
 
            And the battle's just begun
            There's many lost, but tell me who has won?
            The trenches dug within our hearts
            And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart
 
            Sunday, Bloody Sunday
            How long, how long must we sing this song?
 
This bleak cry of despair in the face of violence is deeply resonant
            of much that we have encountered in the Psalms over the last few weeks,
            as we’ve been journeying with them on Sunday mornings.
 
The line from the song that I think is particularly significant, is the repeated question:
            ‘How long, how long must we sing this song?’,
which echoes the cry of the Israelites in exile in Babylon,
            who lament in Psalm 137:
 
            Here our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth,
            saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"
            How could we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?
 
The band are biblically literate,
             and such resonances with the words of scripture
            are never accidental with them.
 
They know that singing and spirituality are deeply intertwined at an emotional level,
            as songs both ancient and contemporary can evoke both joy and sadness,
            both hope and futility.
 
Songs ask deep questions of our souls
            about what it is that we really long for,
and then they invite us to sing that new world into being.
 
It is not insignificant then, that the final song on the album War
            is a direct paraphrase of a Psalm,
with the lead singer Bono ending the album on a note of faith.
 
It is, of course, the song ‘40’, based on our Psalm for today.
 
Allegedly recorded and mixed in about half an hour,
            at the end of a recording session,
this song became the anthem
            with which the band concluded their live shows for many years,
sending the audience out on a note of hope, in a world of despair.
 
Let’s listen to it together now:
 
https://youtu.be/3z_LBNF_-xI
 
            I waited patiently for the Lord
            He inclined and heard my cry
            He lift me up out of the pits
            Out of the miry clay
 
            I will sing, sing a new song
            How long to sing this song?
            How long, how long, how long
 
            He set my feet upon a rock
            And made my footsteps firm
            Many will see
            Many will see and hear
 
            I will sing, sing a new song
            How long to sing this song?
            How long, how long, how long
            How long to sing this song?
 
I don’t know what this song does for you at an emotional level?
 
Maybe it’s not your kind of music at all, and if so that’s fine.
 
But for me, I imagine myself as part of a stadium crowd,
            with 80,000 people singing along in unison with the band
                        of their hope for a new song, a new world,
                        a new way of being;
and I hear the crowd carrying on singing,
            as the band leave the stage one by one,
until the audience are left to carry the new song out into their lives,
            to make it their song.
 
And so we come to Psalm 40:
 
            I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
            He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog,
            and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.
            He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.
 
This “new song” that the psalm talks of
            is most likely a technical Hebrew term
            for what psalms scholars usually describe as the “song of thanksgiving”,
a song that is sung after the psalmist has been delivered by the Lord
            from the jaws of some crisis.
 
And through the Psalms you can trace a repeating pattern,
            which we’ve been looking at already
            as we’ve gone through our selection over the last few weeks.
 
There are the psalms of orientation,
            which assert that everything is well with the world,
            that God is in the heavens,
            and that people are where they should be.
 
These are the great psalms of praise,
            but we have seen that they can also tend
                        towards becoming a justification of the status quo,
            and even a mechanism for social control,
                        as people are encouraged to see their place in life as preordained by God,
                        whether they are wealthy and powerful, or poor and powerless.
 
Psalms of orientation can become a bit like
            a certain kind of contemporary Christian worship song,
which allows no room for the complexities of life,
            for sadness, injustice, or disappointment,
because they are focussed entirely and singly on proclaiming the goodness of God.
 
But then there are the psalms of disorientation,
            and these are the psalms that are sung
            when the songs of orientation no longer hold true.
 
These disorientation psalms reflect the reality
            that sometimes life is just awful, unfair, and intolerable.
 
Whether it’s illness, enemies, or bereavement,
            the psalms of disorientation speak to God
                        of the dark underbelly of existence,
            articulating the truth that sometimes things are just not as they should be,
                        and that sometimes there’s no justice.
 
And then we get the third kind of psalm, which we meet today in Psalm 40,
            and the great scholar of the Psalms Walter Brueggemann
                        says these are the psalms of new orientation, or reorientation.
 
He says that these psalms “bear witness
            to the surprising gift of new life,
            just when none had been expected.”
 
Psalms of new orientation recognize that the ship has sailed through the storm,
            and that a new shore has been reached.
 
But having sailed through the flood and the hurricane,
            there is no going back to the harbour of childlike “orientation.”
 
This isn’t some naïve Pollyanna-ish assertion of optimism
            in the face of disorientation.
 
This isn’t the spiritual equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears
            and singing a happy song
to drown out the true reality of life’s trials.
            Far from it.
 
Rather, these psalms speak for those
            who have been brought through a deep crisis.
 
Those who have made this journey into darkness
            will have experienced a faith that speaks the truth,
                        a faith that can never again pretend that all will always be well,
                        and that all is as it should be.
 
And yet, Psalm 40 speaks of a new experience,
            of new life and grace,
of coming to know that despair is not all powerful,
            and that evil does not have the last word.
 
Those who learn to sing Psalms of new orientation
            are those who have stared life in the face,
            who have experienced the disappointments
                        and injustices and sadnesses of being,
            yet who nonetheless find themselves still yearning for God.
 
The words of praise and trust they articulate
            are not bold assertions of goodness in denial of evil,
but are rather hopeful expressions of faith
            found in the midst of the reality of life’s trials.
 
So let’s journey with Psalm 40,
            to see where it takes us,
as we come toward the end of our own journey
            through the raw emotions of the Psalms.
 
In verses 1-3 the psalmist recalls a past petition
            and the lord’s gracious response.
 
The testimony, “I waited patiently for the Lord,”
            indicates that our psalmist has done
                        what numerous psalms have encouraged him to do,
            which is to wait for God. (Psalms 25:3, 21; 27:14; 37:34; 39:7)
 
“Waiting” here is an expression of trust and reliance on God.
 
For our psalmist, only faithful waiting leads to God’s salvation,
            because such blessings are not available quickly.
 
Unlike those who seek easy and swift access to God’s presence
            through the bold words of the Psalms of orientation,
Psalm 40 knows the wisdom of waiting,
            of journeying through, rather than shortcutting around.
 
And it is this experience of salvation,
            long awaited and longed for,
that puts a “new song” in the psalmist’s mouth,
            a song of praise that testifies to the lord’s goodness.
 
It is an astonishing thing to say that God is good
            in the face of human suffering;
but like our psalmist, many who journey through difficulty
            have attested at the end of it to the goodness of God.
 
By singing this song,
            the psalmist leads others to trust in God’s salvation (verse 3).
And so the next two verses contain a beatitude (verse. 4-5)
            that encourages people to trust in God,
            as the way to live that yields blessing and contentment.
 
We may not get answers to our questions,
            nor will we be granted all the desires of our hearts,
            and any faith that promises such will ultimately be proved lacking.
 
The path to contentment is not found in what we get from God,
            but rather from simple trust in God,
            in the midst of life’s complexities and complications.
 
It is not for nothing that Jesus promises blessings
            on those who receive the kingdom of heaven like a child.
 
But verses 6-8 then raise a question about appropriate worship.
            What does it mean to sing songs to God in the face of difficulty?
            What does it mean to even praise God in a world of injustice?
 
The psalm rejects easy offerings of worship,
            such as might accompany the quick and swiftly trodden path to God
            offered by the psalms of orientation.
 
“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire” says the psalmist (verse 6).
 
And I think here of those contemporary expressions of easy worship,
            where the words of the songs pound into the congregation
                        an expectation of God’s immediacy in all circumstances,
            and then the preacher asks the congregation
                        to contribute generously to the offering in response.
 
“Sacrifice and offering you do not desire” says the psalmist.
 
Worship is not some quid pro quo arrangement
            where God’s presence is purchased by our offerings of money or time.
We do not power through our doubts into God’s presence
            by dint of our own efforts.
 
Rather, God comes to us by grace, in the midst of life’s troubles,
            drawing us into the holy presence
            as unexpectedly as encountering sunshine on a stormy day.
 
Any offering we make, any sacrifice we offer,
            is always and only in response to what God has already done for us.
 
So then we come to verses 7-8,
            which present an alternative to the sacrifice,
            namely, the psalmist’s own written testimony in gratitude for deliverance:
 
            “in the scroll of the book it is written of me.
            I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is in my heart.”
 
The “scroll of the book” reference here is somewhat obscure,
            but it may refer to the psalmist’s testimony in written form,
            presented in the temple.
 
The psalmist essentially presents himself as a “living sacrifice”,
            and of course this is precisely the language that Paul uses in Romans 12:1-2,
where those who follow Christ
            are encouraged to offer their own bodies as living sacrifices to God
            as an offering of true spiritual worship.
 
Worship, it seems, is not something we do,
            it is rather who we are.
And the Psalmist knows this,
            having experienced the grace of God in his own life,
            which becomes in its totality an offering of worship back to God.
 
But then we get a shift in verse 11,
            where the Psalmist starts to petition God,
            to not withhold God’s mercy from him.
 
And we should note that this kind of rhetorical development
            appears in numerous other psalms as well (see Psalms 9-10; 27; 44; 74; 89).
 
But this move from thanksgiving to petition
            is a reminder of the context of suffering that shaped the Psalter.
 
Clinton McCann says it well:
            “whether individually or corporately, we always pray out of need,
            at least in the sense that no deliverance is final in this mortal life.”
 
The journey from orientation, through disorientation, to new orientation
            is not a journey we make only once in our lives.
The first time we face disorientation may be the most devastating,
            as the certainties that had previously sustained us come crumbling down,
and the path through to new orientation may be hardest
            the first time we make our weary way
                        through the valley of the shadow of death
                        to the soul-restoring pastures that await us on the other side.
 
But we will go there again, and again;
            and we will need to keep discovering what the psalmist of old discovered,
which is that is always a new song to be learned,
            a new world to be sung into being.
 
Those of us who learn to sing the psalms and songs of new orientation
            discover as we do so that these songs of praise take their deepest meaning
            when sung by those who have walked the darkest valleys,
                        stood in the midst of the shaking mountains,
                        and experienced life when the bottom drops out.
 
Life will never be the same.
            But God meets all who suffer in the depths of their sufferings.
 
So as we gather in worship today,
            to offer our own songs of praise to God,
            what new song will we learn to sing in our lives?
 
What note of grace can we hear today,
            in spoken word, or enacted sacrament,
            that will continue to sound in our lives as we leave this place?
 
Will we see in the bread and wine the broken body and shed blood of Christ,
            who suffers as we suffer, who dies as we all must die,
but who nonetheless continues to speak to us
            words of hope and new life
            that death and evil can never defeat?
 
If we as God’s people can discover our own songs of new orientation,
            as we patiently journey through the complexities of life,
then we will find that we are learning to sing into being the gospel of Christ,
            sharing with others the good news
            that God is love, and that God is good.
 
            I waited patiently for the Lord
            He inclined and heard my cry
            He lift me up out of the pits
            Out of the miry clay
 
            I will sing, sing a new song
            How long to sing this song?
 
            He set my feet upon a rock
            And made my footsteps firm
            Many will see
            Many will see and hear
 
            I will sing, sing a new song
            How long to sing this song?
            I will sing, sing a new song