Looking Back and Looking Ahead in Faith

Scripture: 1 Chronicles 16: 1-13 and Hebrews 10: 32-39

Sermon: Looking Back and Looking Ahead in Faith

Topics: time, reflection, review, crashes, accidents

Preached: January 6, 2008

Rev. Mike Abma

1 Chronicles 16: 1-13

They brought in the ark of God, and set it inside the tent that David had pitched for it; and they offered burnt-offerings and offerings of well-being before God. ²When David had finished offering the burnt-offerings and the offerings of well-being, he blessed the people in the name of the Lord; ³and he distributed to every person in Israel—man and woman alike—to each a loaf of bread, a portion of meat, and a cake of raisins.

4 He appointed certain of the Levites as ministers before the ark of the Lord, to invoke, to thank, and to praise the Lord, the God of Israel.⁵Asaph was the chief, and second to him Zechariah, Jeiel, Shemiramoth, Jehiel, Mattithiah, Eliab, Benaiah, Obed-edom, and Jeiel, with harps and lyres; Asaph was to sound the cymbals, ⁶and the priests Benaiah and Jahaziel were to blow trumpets regularly, before the ark of the covenant of God.

David’s Psalm of Thanksgiving

7 Then on that day David first appointed the singing of praises to the Lord by Asaph and his kindred. 

⁸ O give thanks to the Lord, call on his name,

   make known his deeds among the peoples. 

⁹ Sing to him, sing praises to him,

   tell of all his wonderful works. 

¹⁰ Glory in his holy name;

   let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice. 

¹¹ Seek the Lord and his strength,

   seek his presence continually. 

¹² Remember the wonderful works he has done,

   his miracles, and the judgements he uttered, 

¹³ O offspring of his servant Israel,

   children of Jacob, his chosen ones. 

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

It was the Christmas break of 1983.

I was a Calvin student, just finished my exams, and I was driving home in my trusty 1975 Toyota Corolla. I was giving a ride to another student and we were cruising down the highway somewhere between Lansing and Flint on the way to the Canadian border.

Suddenly the car ahead of me slammed on their brakes.

I slammed on mine too, and had to swerve onto the shoulder a little to avoid hitting his rear bumper.

When I came to a stop, I breathed a sigh of relief and looked in my rearview mirror.

The person behind me had also just stopped in time.

The person behind them had just stopped in time.

But the car behind that didn’t, and smashed right into the car ahead.

For the next several seconds, all I could see in my little rearview mirror was glass and plastic spraying all over the highway as one car smashed into another causing a bigger and bigger car pile-up.

There was a certain horror and sense of helplessness in looking back and seeing all those cars crash and crunch into one another. By the time things had settled down and all traffic had slowed, I thought to myself – “but for a split second, that could easily have been me in that pile-up.”

I was very thankful I had survived – that I emerged totally unhurt, and that even my Toyota was totally unscathed. I resumed my trip home, but this time, I must admit, I was driving a little more slowly and a lot more defensively.

DAVID and the PRESENCE OF GOD

The Chronicles passage we just read comes at a time of newness in David’s life.

He has just been crowned king of Israel.

He has just captured Jerusalem and made it his new capital.

He has just defeated the perennially pesky Philistines.

And now, he has just brought the ark of the covenant to his new capital city,

making Jerusalem not only the political capital of the nation,

but the religious center as well.

Everything seemed to be going David’s way.

But David knew that he had had some narrow escapes along the way.

More than once he had narrowly escaped from King Saul.

More than once he had narrowly escaped from the Philistines.

Where he had managed to make it through seemingly unscathed,

looking into the rearview mirror of his life,

David could see all the brokenness that littered the path of his life:

the former king, Saul, was dead;

Saul’s sons, and most of his family, were dead;

And when David first tried to bring the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem,

one of the sons of Abinadab, by the name of Uzzah,

died when he tried to steady the ark and ended up touching it.

So as David looked in the rearview mirror of his life,

there was a lot of brokenness,

a lot of death,

a lot of misery.

It’s almost as if David begins his reign in Jerusalem slowly and carefully,

full of thankfulness and praise.

He appointed a number of Levites to care for the ark of the Lord.

He appointed Asaph and his family to become the music directors in Jerusalem.

Then he slowed the whole nation down

basically saying they did not have to work for their food that day

for he gave every person in Israel

a loaf of bread, a piece of meat, and a cake of raisins.

And finally he led the nation in a song of thanksgiving

singing:

Seek the Lord and his strength

Seek his presence continually.

Remember the wonderful works he has done,

His miracles and the judgments he has uttered.

The ark of the Lord in Jerusalem,

this representation of God’s presence at the heart of the new capital,

was so very important to David.

It represented that God was at the heart of his rule and his reign.

Remembering what God had done in the past (praise)

and continually seeking God in the present (prayer),

is what would characterize David’s life.

For us, this season has something of the same rhythm to it:

On Christmas, we celebrate Jesus’ birth,

A week later we celebrated the beginning of a New Year.

I tend to see in these events something of a parallel to what happened for David.

Here David celebrates the arrival of the ark of the Lord in Jerusalem,

the ark being God tabernacling with his people,

And soon after he celebrates the beginning of a new era,

A new dynasty,

A new beginning for Israel.

In something of a similar way,

but in an even more intimate and personal way.

we celebrate the arrival of Jesus Christ at Christmas,

of God literally tabernacling with us,

of the Word becoming flesh and living with us.

And we do so just as we are about to begin a new year.

What a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the presence of God in our lives.

To remember all the wonderful things God has done.

and to pray for God’s continuing presence in our lives.

ABSENCE OF GOD

The other day someone stopped in my office.

Not a member of our church,

simply someone off the street who has been going through some hard times

lately.

Life had been good – steady work, steady income.

But then he had a back injury.

It meant no work, no income, and a family life that was left in tatters.

He had not avoided the crash.

He was smack dab in it!

His life was a wreck.

He couldn’t help but feel as if God had abandoned him, forgotten him, rejected him.

If we are using the life of David to reflect on this evening,

then it is probably helpful to reflect on his whole life, not just part of it.

Up until our passage,

David may very well have avoided many crashes before becoming king.

But anyone at least partly familiar with David’s life knows that he had his fair share of crashes while he was king:

* there was the time he was recklessly romantic with Bathsheba

* there was the time he was blind-sided by his own son, Absalom

* and there was one family crisis after another

No, David did not live a crash-free life.

But the thing that characterized his life,

from beginning to end,

through thick and thin,

in the joys but in the sorrows too,

was his ability to seek God’s presence.

Praise and prayer were the alpha and omega of his life.

The book of Chronicles tries to show this.

Here in 1 Chronicles 16, David begins his reign with this psalm of praise.

In 1 Chronicles 29, how does David’s life and reign end?

With a prayer that clearly parallels the psalm of praise that began his reign.

Praise and prayer – the bookends of his life.

Whether it was good, bad, or ugly,

David laid his life before the Lord.

Whether he was glowing with victory,

or trapped in the gloom of loneliness and grief,

David brought it before the Lord.

The biggest thing about David’s story was not David, but God.

You see, David’s story is in many ways a gospel story.

It is the story of God doing for David

what David could not do for himself.^[1]

CONCLUSION

Isn’t that the way it is for every salty saint in God’s kingdom?

Whether things are going well,

or things are going terribly,

we lay it all before the Lord?

This past year ended with enough tragedy:

* all the great promises of democracy have soured in Kenya, as their elections

have turned into chaos;

* all the great promises of Pakistan as a partner for peace have been shaken

by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto;

* all the great promises of change and justice in our own country

flounder as all the surveys conclude

the rich are only becoming richer and the poor, poorer.

The year ended with enough tragedy for a number of us personally.

I’m not even sure where to start in terms of the number of people

we all know who are facing the constant struggle of an aggressive disease,

of those who are trying to recuperate from yet another injury,

of those in a marriage that is seemingly hanging by a thread,

or a job that may not be there tomorrow;

of those who live with the constant ache of grief.

Lew Smedes was one of those salty saints who would not let God off the hook when it came to the tragedies of life.

He was one of those salty saints who spent a good part of his life praising God,

but a good part of his life complaining to God as well.

But in the end, it was not so much Lew who would not let God off the hook.

It was the other way around. It was God who would not let Lew go.

As Lew admitted,

“It has been ‘my God and I’ the whole way.

It was not that God was always pleasant or easy company for me.

It was also not because I could always feel God’s presence

when I got up too early in the morning,

or when I was afraid to sleep at night.

It was because God did not trust me to travel through this life alone.”

I rarely end sermons with a poem.

But that is how I would like to end this one.

The poem is the one by Rod Jellema that appears

at the very beginning of Lew Smedes memoir, My God and I.

Letter to Lew Smedes about God’s Presence:

I have to look for cracks and crevices.

Don’t tell me how God’s mercy

is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea.

I already believe it, but that infinite prospect

gets farther away the more we mouth it.

I thank you for lamenting God’s absences –

his absence from marriages gone mad,

our sons dying young, from the inescapable

terrors of history: Treblinka, Vietnam.

September Eleven. His visible absence

makes it hard for us in our time

to celebrate his invisible Presence.

This must be why mystics and poets record

the slender incursions of splintered light,

echoes, fragments, odd words and phrases

like flashes through darkened hallways.

These stabs remind me that the proud

portly old church is really only

that cut green slip grafted onto a tiny nick

that merciful God himself slit into the stem

of his chosen Judah. The thin and tenuous

thread we hang by, so astonishing,

is the metaphor I need at the shoreline

of all those immeasurable oceans of love.

1. This point is made admirably by Eugene Peterson in the 19^th chapter of his book, Leap Over a Wall. ↑