Scripture: Psalm 65
Sermon: God the Farmer
Topics: silence, praise, love, pain, presence, prayer
Preached August 6, 2017
Rev. Mike Abma
Psalm 65 My Own Translation
(thanks to Ellen F. Davis for pointing out some translation matters.)
To You, O God of Zion, silence is praise,
To You vows are paid.
To You the prayers of all flesh come.
Our misdeeds are too much for us,
and our misery too;
But you…you forgive.
Blessed are those whom You choose,
And blessed are those you draw near to dwell in Your courts.
May we be satisfied
with the goodness of Your house,
and the holiness of Your temple.
You answer us with awesome deeds of deliverance,
O God of our salvation,
the Hope of all the ends of the earth,
and the furthest reaches of the sea.
You set firm the mountains in your strength;
You Lord are girded with might.
You silence the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves,
and the din of the nations.
Those who inhabit the ends of the earth
are awed by your signs;
the break of each morning and setting each evening —
You make them ring with joy.
You visit the earth and water it;
You abundantly enrich it—
God’s stream is full of water.
You set their grain—yes, You set it just so.
Drenching its furrows, soaking its mounds,
You soften it with showers; its growth You bless.
You have crowned the year with Your goodness,
and Your wagon-tracks overflow with abundance.
The pastures of the wilderness are dripping,
and the hills are girdled with rejoicing.
The meadows are clothed with the flocks,
and the valleys are robed with grain.
They all shout out and sing for joy.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey owns a 21 acre farm. One of the assignments students receive is to go to that farm and simply spend a good hour wandering around observing, looking, listening. Then they are asked to write a reflection paper on whatever they happened to notice.
What they write about is not really the point of the exercise.
The point of the exercise is simply
to get their butts out of their chairs,
to get their eyes off their screens,
and to get their ears away from their cellphones.
That is the whole point of the exercise.
To leave their noise-saturated world
and their visually distracting toys behind
and simply walk through the farm in silence,
with open ears
and open eyes
and open minds
and open hearts.[1]
SILENCE, MISERY, DELIVERANCE
Silence.
That is the missing word in the NRSV translation of Psalm 65:1.
To you, O God in Zion, silence is praise.
Silence is praise – that is a rather profound thought that should not be lost in
translation.
Silence has two dimensions:
It is quieting the noise coming in;
But it is also silencing the talking coming out.
To you, O God in Zion, silence is praise.
Silence is praise
because silence put us in a posture
to look, to listen, to notice.
And what do we hear when we truly listen – when we listen to silence?
In Chaim Potok’s classic novel, The Chosen,
Danny Saunders is a young man who knows how to inhabit silence.
This is what he says at one point:
You can listen to silence….
It has a strange, beautiful texture….
And sometimes….sometimes it cries,
And you can hear the pain of the world in it.
Psalm 65 knows what Danny is talking about.
For what is the first thing that comes out of the silence in verse 1?
It is an awareness of our misdeeds and transgressions.
It is an awareness of the pain and misery of the world.
Take a walk in a forest,
hike up a mountain,
watch and observe this earth closely.
And what do you notice?
You notice that the temperatures are getting warmer.
and the weather is getting weirder.
We have a sense that the misdeeds of humanity
are more than we can handle
and seemingly more than the planet can cope with.
And yet, here is where the psalm pulls us into God’s presence.
It pulls us into God’s courts,
His house,
His temple.
Here is where we are pulled into the orbit
of God’s love for his creation
and for all his creatures.
He answers with a willingness to atone for his creation.
He answers with a promise to deliver his creatures.
He answers….
with love and care for his creation
and that is why this psalm calls him
the hope of all the ends of the earth.
LOVE ON A MACRO-SCALE and MICRO-SCALE
The rest of the psalm,
from verse 6 onwards
is a description of God’s love and care for his creation,
first on a big, macro scale, then on a smaller local or micro scale.
First the Macro scale.
On the Macro scale
God addresses the roar and chaos of the seas,
and the roar and chaos of the crowds.
He brings order; he restrains chaos.
He allows his beauty to shine forth from this world.
John Calvin once said,
Practically wherever we look in this vast creation
We catch glimpses of the goodness and the glory of God.
Even agnostics feel the need to thank someone or praise someone
when the beauty of a sunset over Lake Michigan overwhelms them.
Then we get to that last part of this psalm,
Which describes God’s love for creation on a more local or micro level.
Here God looks, to all the world,
like a gardener watering his garden,
like a farmer irrigating his crops.
And is that any surprise?
I think we sometimes forget that almost everyone in Biblical times
was something of a farmer or at least gardener.
Everyone grew something
in a garden, or a field, or a vineyard, or an orchard.
Anyone who has grown anything knows
that there is nothing better
after a good long stretch of dry, hot weather,
than a good solid rain shower —
just think of what we got Thursday and Friday.
The rain is a river of blessing,
whose source is God, the farmer,
watering the trees in the orchard
the crops in the field,
the plants in the garden.
PRAYER
This ability to be silent,
to look, to listen, to notice,
few people are better at this than the poet Mary Oliver.
In her poem, “The Summer Day,”
she writes,
I don’t know exactly what prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.[2]
The truth is,
it is easy to be overwhelmed by the pain and misery of the world.
Sometimes that pain, that misery, arrives
right on our doorstep…..
It is then that we need to listen
for the deeper melodies and harmonies and refrains of this world.
Sometimes I like to ride out of town
just to stop beside a hay field
so I can smell the smell of fresh-cut grass.
Sometimes I like to stop at a cornfield
just so I can walk up and down the rows
to be lost in these stalks, all standing at attention.
Sometime I simply go to the garden,
pull a few weeds,
and look at the tomatoes, green now, but heading toward ripeness.
In many ways it does not really matter where we go
in this glorious world,
in this verdant creation.
As long as we can be silent enough,
and to look long enough
and to listen intently enough
so that we begin to hear creation singing,
and the world shouting,
not in pain
not in misery
but with joy — life, laughter, and exuberance.
Amen
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