Riders on the Storm

Scripture: Psalm 29

Sermon: Riders on the Storm

Topics: storm, Beethoven, thunder, lightning, chaos, shalom

Preached: June 2, 2006

Rev. Mike Abma

Psalm 29

A Psalm of David.

¹Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings,

   ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

²Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name;

   worship the Lord in holy splendour.

³The voice of the Lord is over the waters;

   the God of glory thunders,

   the Lord, over mighty waters.

⁴The voice of the Lord is powerful;

   the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.

⁵The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars;

   the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.

⁶He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,

   and Sirion like a young wild ox.

⁷The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.

⁸The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness;

   the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

⁹The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl,

   and strips the forest bare;

   and in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’

¹⁰The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;

   the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever.

¹¹May the Lord give strength to his people!

   May the Lord bless his people with peace!

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

The composer Ludwig von Beethoven apparently once remarked that he liked trees much better than people. Beethoven liked nothing more than a stroll through the countryside. It was while on a stroll that he experienced a gathering storm.

This inspired the 4rth movement of his 6^th Symphony.

This movement starts with the orchestra making the sound of falling rain drops.

Then the timpani announces the rolling thunder.

The thunder gets louder and louder.

Soon there is wave after wave of sweeping violins, sounding like waves of pelting rain.

Then there are crashing cymbals.

This movement really does sound like a storm.

But perhaps even more, it evokes all the feelings a storm evokes – feelings of awe, feelings of fear.

I’m sure you have all found yourself caught in a storm at one time or another. Perhaps some of you have even seem the dramatic blaze of a bolt of. Recently my three children and I were watching a storm rage outside an upstairs window. Suddenly a bolt of lightning blazed through the night, striking a tree right next to our house. It is enough to make us all JUMP – first in fear, then in amazement.

Poets and musicians through the centuries have tried to capture these feelings of fear and awe that a storm evokes.

PSALM 29

Scholars believe that psalm 29, possibly one of the oldest psalms in the Psalter, has its origins in a Canaanite song that was an ode to the power of the storm. This Canaanite song was co-opted by the Israelites and made into a hymn of praise in sort of the same way Martin Luther used to take drinking songs and bar songs at the time of the Reformation and make them into hymns.

A. Verses 1-2

Psalm 29 is a hymn of praise that begins with a Call to Worship.

All the heavenly beings, that is, all those who live on high, are called upon to give God glory.

“Ascribe to the Lord glory, O you heavenly beings”

That glory doesn’t come right away.

First there is the “storm.”

First there is a display of God’s power.

B. Verses 3-4 the Sea

The next three sections of this psalm show that the Israelites really knew their weather.

The voice of the Lord is compared to a storm that starts out over the Mediterranean Sea then moves inland, first over the forests, then over the wilderness.

We are going to be Storm-trackers this evening.

We are going to be “riders on the storm” in Psalm 29.

The storm starts over the water, the deep water.

Just like our hurricanes develop in the Gulf of Mexico, and our Michigan thunderstorms pick up moisture over Lake Michigan, so too, the big storms in this region developed out over the Mediterranean Sea. The Israelites were farmers, not sea-farers. For them, big bodies of water were always scary places – they were places of chaos and darkness.

It only made sense to them that these big bodies of water, these scary places, were the birthplace of these ferocious storms.

But the thing about the voice of the Lord is that it is over these waters.

Much like the voice of the Lord that hovered over the deep in Genesis 1,

here the voice of the Lord hovers over the deep waters.

The voice of the Lord is above the chaos.

The voice of the Lord is greater than the mighty waters.

The Lord is not subject to the storms

but it is the storms that are subject to the voice of the Lord.

The voice of the Lord has no equal.

That is the first section.

C. Verses 5-6 — the Land

Then we, riders of the storm, move with the storm from the deep waters to land.

This happens in verses 5-6.

This storm seems to be moving from the northwest to the southeast.

The winds are pushing this storm first into Lebanon, north of Israel.

When the storm hits land, even the great cedars of Lebanon bend and break.

When the storm hits, even the ground trembles.

I remember Pentecost of 1998.

We had just moved to Grand Rapids.

The Saturday night before Pentecost there was a terrific storm.

I knew it had rained that night, but I didn’t know how big the storm had been.

So in the Pentecost service prayer, I thanked the Lord for the rain and the refreshing breeze.

Little did I realize that it was no “refreshing breeze” — it was a huge storm that had flattened hundreds, maybe even thousands of trees. A whole swath of Spring Lake, Michigan, was left treeless. When we visited Hofmaster Park a few days later, we saw 100 foot oak trees toppled over like dominoes.

The sight of it left us speechless.

Only a power, a mighty power, could have done that.

In his book on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis writes that it was just this sort of power that people were tempted to worship. People could see in Nature a power beyond any earthly king.

What Lewis notes is that the Israelites were different in that they didn’t worship Nature directly, but they worshipped the One who brought Nature into being.

They didn’t worship Creation, but the Creator.

Lewis writes that people who are tempted to worship Creation are like children who are so impressed by the uniform of the postman that they never notice the letters he is carrying. ^[1]

For Lewis, nature carries God’s greatness.

Nature can convey and communicate God’s greatness.

But nature itself does not contain that greatness.

Therefore, in this psalm, the storm is not the same as the voice of the Lord.

The storm can convey some of God’s greatness, his power, his majesty.

But the voice of the Lord is always above the storm.

The same can be said about any part of Creation.

Creation can convey some of God’s greatness, his power, his majesty.

But the Lord is always above Creation, for he is the Creator, the King.

D. VERSES 7-8 the wilderness

As riders on the storm,

as storm-trackers in psalm 29,

we now move farther south,

into the desert, into the wilderness of Kadesh.

There is something about a storm in a wilderness that is a double-whamy – if the storm doesn’t get you, the wilderness might.

In reflecting on this whole psalm, the storm seems to pass through 3 types of chaos:

There is the primal chaos of the deep waters – the chaos of the

unknown;

Then there is the chaos of Nature itself;

Then there is the chaos we create – the chaos of culture.

How many times don’t we use the word “storm” to describe military

conflicts.

How many times don’t we use the word “storm” to describe many different

kinds of violence or upheaval or rebellion.

We started by referring to Beethoven’s Storm in his 6^th symphony.

People from my generation probably remember another piece of storm music by the Doors. The last song on the last album (vinyl record) the Doors produced before Jim Morrison’s mysterious and untimely death in Paris at age 27, was the song Riders on the Storm (1971).

Here is an eerie and haunting piece of what I call 3-D music:

I call it 3 D because it is about the chaos of the big 3 D’s of

drugs,

drinking, and

death.

This song, “Riders on the Storm” is about living in this wasteland,

this 3-D wilderness, where people are often left battered, beaten and broken.

In one of her essays, Frederica Matthewes Greene says that culture is like the weather.

And a lot of times the weather is nasty, leaving people harassed and helpless.^[2]

But again, the voice of the Lord that flames forth,

the voice of the Lord that shakes the wilderness,

is above culture, greater than the miseries we cause ourselves.

VERSE 9 and the MAKING OF SHALOM

Finally, at the end of verse 9, all the heavenly hosts –

who were invited to give God glory at the beginning of this psalm —

finally they and everyone else in the temple say:

“Glory! Glory to God in the Highest.”

We may think that this psalm puts the Lord so very far above us:

far above chaos;

far above the chaos of creation;

far above the chaos of culture.

But there is something we need to remember.

We need to remember that the king who sits enthroned above it all in Psalm 29, is the same king who came down.

He came down into our chaos.

He came down into the chaos of creation,

and as he hung on the cross,

the earth literally trembled and the world went dark.

He came down into the chaos of culture,

and culture, in the name of peace and justice,

cried, “Crucify Him, Crucify Him!”

He came down and entered into the chaos of death itself.

And why?

Because in the end,

this Lord of lords and King of kings

is not about storms.

He is not about chaos.

In the end, he is about peace.

He is about shalom.

Shalom is the last word of psalm 29.

And this is the last word of the risen Lord gave us: “Peace, shalom, be with you.”

But you may be thinking, “But there are still storms!”

Yes, there are.

For now we remain riders on the storm,

but soon, very soon,

dawn will break forth

our king will return

and shalom will break forth in all its beauty.

One day soon,

all storms will be over

and calm will descend.

Then everything will be the way it is supposed to be,

then God, and creation and all people,

will flourish, and be fruitful, and live in peace –

then there will be true shalom.

One day soon,

what all the Old Testament prophets dreamed about

and what Jesus has made possible

will come.

So give glory to God all you heavenly and all you earthly creatures.

Give glory to Jesus, the King of kings.

Give glory.

For chaos has been overcome,

and the king is coming in the power of his shalom.

Amen

1. C.S. Lewis, “Nature” in Reflections on the Psalms. ↑

2. Frederica Mathewes-Greene “Loving the Storm-Drenched” in Christianity Today March 3, 2006. ↑