Download Lent 3 - Anglican Parish of St Stephen and St Mary

1
Copyright 2007 – The Anglican Parish of Stephen & St Mary, Mt Waverley
Not to be copied or republished without written permission
http://www.stephenandmary.org.au
11th March, 2007
Lent 3C.
Psalm 63:1-8; Luke 13:1-9
Robyn Boyd
Introduction
Our journey into Lent these last two Sundays have found us moving through the
wilderness, encountering struggle and resistance that would divert us from moving
forward into a greater depth of relationship with Christ. And like Abraham, in the
absence of our hopes being realized, we wait and trust in God’s promise for an abundant
future.
Yearning for God
Today we hear the psalmist crying out to God with great longing, thirsting for him. The
Psalm has a sub-title of “a Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah” this psalmist knows what it is like to be in a dry place – the physical desert or wilderness
as well as the wilderness or the dry places within, cut off from worship. It is also apparent
that he has known the experience of being filled to overflowing with God.
The psalmist is yearning – craving - for an intimate union or communion with God.
Something akin to our greatest desires in a love relationship, but yet above and beyond
anything we know to experience in human relationships.
In the Academy Award-winning film Amadeus there is a scene where the lesser
Viennese composer, Salieri, reflects on why Mozart's music was so powerful. Both
jealous and wistful, he said that what characterized Mozart's music was this sense of
longing and yearning, an unfulfilled desire that cried out through his music. It seemed as
Robyn Boyd, 11th March, 2007
2
if Mozart was hearing the very voice of God and was striving with every fiber of his
phenomenal genius to express musically what he had heard from God.
When we talk about our longing, our thirsting, for God, how is it for us? Does the sort of
yearning like Mozart’s and the psalmist’s only belong to those mystics and genius’s who
are super-ethereal; people whom we expect to be like that? We may need to edge past
the psalm’s passionate and evocative language, and remember that the psalms take our
inner-most and sometimes hidden feelings and desires, give them voice and so permit us
to connect with them and own them.
Vacillation
I suspect that the reality is that we do have those times of longing, but don’t have the
words, the confidence or permission to express this. We amass obstacles, and it can be
difficult and painful to bring feelings like that to the surface. As a society, we’re not well
practiced in expressing deep feelings for God. Our little voices of self-critique tell us it’s
not rational, and that we should be restrained. So we can vacillate between moments of
yearning, and glimpses and touches of God’s presence. And the moments and the
glimpses all too often pass by, unrealized and unexplored.
I think how it goes for us is that we’re drawn towards the desire – we acknowledge our
thirst, and we do want to experience more of God, and we try – we are faithful in
attending church, in partaking of the Eucharist, in following up opportunities to learn
more, we serve God in attending to the needs of others around us, we pray and read the
Bible and good Christian books.
But we seem too often to stop short of going further into this deep, whole-of-person
thirsting that the Psalmist talks about. And maybe, to be honest, we feel at times that to
be like that is going a bit –or a lot – over the top. Maybe, too, that to really open up our
feelings and our needs for God will mean giving over our control, and being taken
somewhere that might disrupt our carefully ordered lives. Or make us objects of criticism
or ridicule. And it may also mean disappointment, because deep inside we fear that in
Robyn Boyd, 11th March, 2007
3
this life we will have at best only moments of deep communion, that some sort of
sustained heavenly state won’t last - life will continue with its ups and downs. And then
there’s the little voice that says “is it worth it?”
Fear
If we gather all these obstacles together, we find that a large part of what stops us from
both allowing ourselves to be passionate about God and entering into a deeper
communion with him, is that we’re afraid.
It’s like the struggle in the wilderness – being drawn to, yet resisting, going further with
Christ. Knowing that there is more of God, wanting this, but feeling strangely hesitant;
fearful, ambivalent, unsure. It’s living somewhere between feeling the thirst and tug of
desire, and drinking our fill.
Where to? Learning from the Psalmist
So what do we do with all of this? The whole of Scripture, echoed in this little Psalm,
draws us towards a giving over of our lives to God, and promises an intimacy and the
quenching of a deep desire to be held by God. That promise is of course fulfilled in Jesus
- Jesus describes himself as the living water who will so satisfy us that we will never
thirst again. And not only this, there’s something in us – a “God-shaped space” as one
writer puts it – that does yearn for this communion with God. Yet there is all that
struggle on a number of fronts in getting there.
Let’s dig a little further into Psalm 63, because it not only gives voice to the longing, but
also gives guidance. Notice that the Psalmist anchors his desires to the character of God:
God is steadfast –rock-solid – trustworthy -in his love; God is the nourishment that gives
life – water and the richest of food; God has sacred power and glory; God is our help and
support and protection. God’s love is unchanging. And God is simply assumed to be the
centre of our lives – the core and context - the driving force and rationale for the whole of
our lives.(SE only – we hear the same thing in the Isaiah reading – God talks of his
everlasting covenant, and his steadfast and sure love for the people he calls his own)
Robyn Boyd, 11th March, 2007
4
What we’re seeing here is a calling into a mature relationship of love and trust with God:
we love him because of who he is , and he gives himself to us unconditionally. This is a
relationship that is not dependent on God delivering goods to us. It’s a relationship
formed around the grace and mercy and fidelity of God, that we see in Christ, that doesn’t
reduce God to being a judge who deals out favor or penalty according to our goodness or
badness, as the crowd around Jesus struggled with in the Gospel reading for today. Nor is
this mature relationship of trust in God dependent on our complete understanding.
Remember that faith is putting our trust in something we can’t see or can’t even quite
comprehend.
The psalmist also gives us some tools, or ways to assist us to encounter God more deeply
and move past the barriers and our fears: he reminds himself of the joy and satisfaction of
looking upon God in the sanctuary, beholding God’s power and glory – formal worship
and its trappings are important to him, a place where he encounters God; and he has
missed this in the wilderness. So, too, is participating in worship and partaking of the
Eucharist an important place of encountering God’s presence for us.
He prays reflectively and meditatively, and his prayers are personal cries to God (“O
God; you are my God”)- he believes God is concerned about him and wants to relate to
him, too. He opens himself wholeheartedly to God, trusting his very self and his life’s
security to God, freely admitting his dependence on God – giving over control to him.
He reminds himself of the help and support God has been. As Grant put it last week – he
has a library amassed of how good God has been. God is worth it! We won’t be
disappointed, despite the ups and downs.
And he sings for joy, with praises and blessings – he gives voice to what this relationship
means to him. He allows those feeling to well up over the surface to be expressed, with
no thoughts about how ridiculous or irrational that may seem to others. And he
perseveres, clinging to God.
Robyn Boyd, 11th March, 2007
5
Beneath the passionate cries of the Psalmist, we hear our needs and our voices. And we
hear the further invitation into a relationship of trust with the one who is entirely
trustworthy.
Robyn Boyd, 11th March, 2007