A Sermon by Pastor Tom Lacey . . .

LORD OF FAITH

Psalm 111, Preached at Congregational Church of Boca Raton, August 16, 2009

Two old friends bump into one another on the street one day. One of them looked forlorn, almost on the verge of tears. His friend asked, "What has the world done to you, my old friend?" The sad fellow said, "Let me tell you. Three weeks ago, an uncle died and left me forty thousand dollars." "That's a lot of money." "But you see, two weeks ago, a cousin I never even knew died, and left me eighty-five thousand free and clear." "Sounds like you've been blessed." "You don't understand!" he interrupted. "Last week my great-aunt passed away. I inherited almost a quarter of a million." Now he was really confused. "Then, why do you look so glum?" "This week . . . nothing!"

It's been said that the world can be divided into two groups, those who say "Thank You" and those who don't. An elderly New England clergyman who touched upon the various degrees of gratitude in his prayer: "Oh Lord, as you know very well, here we are again. We are here to do one of the hardest things any mortal can do—to give thanks and really mean it."

We do not know who wrote Psalm 111. We call him the psalmist. This particular psalm, and the next one Psalm 112, are acrostic psalms. That means that the first sentence begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The second sentence begins with the second letter, and so on. This and the subsequent psalms, to the 119th, are supposed to have been sung by Jews at the celebration of the Passover; and their subject-matter was peculiarly adapted to such a purpose. Most Biblical scholars contend that this psalm was written sometime after the Jews returned from their exile in Babylon, which occurred when Jerusalem was sacked, the first Temple was burned, the elites of Israel and most of its people were taken to Babylonia. We should imagine a scribe writing this psalm, extolling how God once again redeemed his people from slavery, brought them back to their land, and supplied their every need—always good reasons to praise the Lord.

Psalm 111 is a praise of the works of the Lord; it begins with an introductory declaration of thankful praise: “Hallelujah, I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart...,” and then continues by singing that for which the Lord is to be praised. The context of Psalm 111 is God’s great deeds in redeeming Israel from Egypt. When God commissioned Moses to lead his people out of Egypt, he told Moses, “I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all the wonders that I will do in it.” After they were delivered from Egypt, they sang, “Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” Because God is glorious and majestic, his work is also described as glorious and majestic—“Great are the works of the Lord…full of honor and majesty is his work.”

David Needham remembers when he was a boy. Our family often went camping in the High Sierras in California. Traveling along the eastern slopes of those 10- to 14-thousand-foot peaks involved several steep grades and dry, desert-like heat. Steaming radiators and canvas water bags slung over car bumpers were standard equipment. One mountain grade I will never forget. It had a funny name: the "O" grade. "Why?" I asked my father, "Why is it called that way? Is the next grade after it the 'P' grade?" Mom and Dad simply smiled and said, "Just wait. You'll see." Up and up we would climb on the twisting switchback road through scrub pine and sage. And then, when it seemed we would never get to the top of the ridge, we did! Spontaneously I cried out, "Oh!" There in front of us, beyond a diamond-studded lake and framed with quaking aspen, was the jagged, snowy Sierra Crest ... higher, more massive, more beautiful, more alive with color than I had dreamed. “Oh.” That’s why they call it the O grade; I was now in on the family joke.

Who is your God? Some people don’t have one, no matter what happens. Others say they go to the beach Sunday morning and find a holy moment there. Others might go into the mountain, or where have you. Where is your God? When is God God?

I watched a movie with Marit the other week: “When Did You Last See Father.” Really good movie, if you like the kind of movies Marit and I like,  about how a son who idolized his dad as a young boy grows up to have a complicated love-hate relationship. As his father dies, his son goes home and tries to figure out what happened, and whether he can love his dad. The title refers obviously to some moment before his father became ill, when he “saw” his father, when his father acted like his dad, the last time his dad was dad. How are you going to know when God is God, when God acts like the Lord? When was the last time you saw the Father?

Our psalm is trying to tell us the answer to this, in the terms of his religion, which reflects our faith as well. The answer comes at verse 2: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” If you want to see God, look at what God has done; if you want to know when God acts like God, study God’s works. When the psalmist talks about these works, and tells us to study them, he means two things: The first is God’s work that freed Israel from Egypt, fed them in the desert and established them as a nation among the nations. The second work is God establishing the precepts, laws, and statutes, the covenant of commandments, that make up Israel’s life with the Lord. The first is the God of Israel’s history, the Lord over all history. If you want to know when and where God is, you have to look at the big picture sometimes.

Peter Kuzmic, President of Evangelical Theological College in Osijek, Yugoslavia, spoke at the World Congress on Evangelization in Manila in the summer of 1989. His theme was what could be done to educate religious leaders who would be ready to lead the church "if and when" the Iron Curtain crumbled in Eastern Europe. Within four months of his speech, the doors for the gospel were opened as the wall of Eastern bloc communist countries came tumbling down. In January 199O, Peter Kuzmic spoke again, this time to the Fellowship of Evangelical Seminary Presidents in the United States. When asked about the unpredicted, cataclysmic happenings in Eastern Europe, Peter answered, “Never put a period where God puts a comma!” David L. McKenna
           “I will be what I will be,” as the Lord told Moses concerning his name, has the final say. God will decide what will be: The one, holy and righteous, compassionate and merciful, providential and omnipotent, eternal and everlasting Lord above all lords, God above all Gods, the one who was and is and shall be: the subject of our faith, the object of hope, the direction of our destiny, the purpose, power, and presence behind, in, and through all of us, all of creation, and all time. What does the psalmist want us to do with God’s mighty acts in history? He says that they are worthy to be to be studied with care, to be meditated upon, and to be pondered. God’s works are a memorial by which we are to see the Lord, remember the Lord, and have faith in the Lord.

 For those who call themselves Christians, we might ask the question a little bit differently. When was the last time you saw Jesus? For us it is God’s mighty acts in Christ that are the memorial by which we see, remember, and have faith in the Lord our God. Scripture tells us that when Jesus heard what happened to John (the Baptist, how Herod had killed him), he left in a boat. He went alone to a place where there were no people, or so he thought. But the people heard that Jesus had left, and they went after him. They went by land to the same place Jesus had gone. When Jesus came there, he saw many, many people there. Jesus felt sorry for them, and he healed the ones that were sick. Mt. 14:13-14 We see God in this. We also see God in the mighty work of the cross. The cross stands at the heart of our faith because we believe that we cannot save ourselves. We believe that sin separated all of us from God. And we believe that God sent Christ into the world to do what we could not do. Without the cross, there would be no salvation. And without the cross, there would be no hope for eternal life. To the unbelieving eye, the cross appears to be nothing more than a foolish exercise in suffering. But to those who believe, the cross is nothing less than the very “power of God” for our lives. 1 Cor 1:18 This is power that comes from the Lord, the courage to do what’s right, the strength to struggle for truth, the heart to care for the abandoned. To many this would be foolish; to many this would be to sacrifice ease and convenience for those who are lazy, illegal or not like us. In such compassion, we give witness to Christ’s passion, God’s work in the Cross.

We can not see God; it’s God’s works that speak to us, remind us, and inspire us. The Surgeon General Everett Koop is a man of medicine and science, yet also a man of faith in what can’t be seen or captured in our grasp.  "I don't know how many operations I actually performed in my surgical career. I know I performed 17,000 of one particular type; 7,000 of another. I practiced surgery for 39 years, so perhaps I performed at least 50,000 operations. I was successful, and I had a reputation for success. Patients were coming to me from all over the world. And one of the things that endeared me to the parents of my patients was the way my incisions healed. Now, no one likes a big scar, but they are especially upsetting to mothers when they appear on their children. So I set out early to make my scars small, as short and as thin as possible. These 'invisible' scars became my trademark. The secret of thin scars is to make the incision precise - no feathered edges - and in the closing, get the edges of the skin in exact apposition. I would do this by sewing the stitches inside the skin, but not through it, and the knots were tied on the bottom. And you have to figure out how I crawled out after doing that. I was the one who sewed the edges together, but it was God who coagulated the serum. It was God who sent the fiberblasts out across the skin edges. It was God who had the fiberblasts make collagen, and there were probably about 50 other complicated processes involved about which you and I will never know."

We don’t need to know. We need to have faith, faith in the Lord of our faith, faith in the power of our Lord, faith in the cross of Christ, the mighty work of God for our salvation and eternal hope.

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