Wait for the Lord

Scripture: Psalm 27

Sermon: Wait for the Lord

Topics: beauty, longing, creation, art, music, redemption, advent

Preached: November 27, 2011

Rev. Mike Abma

Preamble:

Today is the beginning of Advent, and during this season, Peter and I will be preaching sermons based on the Psalms.

These will be sermons that focus on our deepest longings – the longings of our hearts, and the yearning of our souls, and how these are met in that little town of Bethlehem.

This morning we will begin with Psalm 27.

Psalm 27 is an Affirmation of Faith that has two distinct parts or halves:

Part one is verses 1-6.

Part two is verses 7-14.

Unlike many other psalms that begin searching and asking, and end with a strong assurance and confidence, this psalm

goes the opposite way:

Part one is more triumphant.

Part two is more subdued.

Part one is more sure.

Part two is more searching.

Part one is sung in a major key.

Part two is sung in a minor key.

Part one is about the already.

Part two is about the not yet.

Listen

Psalm 27

¹ The Lord is my light and my salvation;

whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold^* of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?

² When evildoers assail me

to devour my flesh—

my adversaries and foes—

they shall stumble and fall.

³ Though an army encamp against me,

my heart shall not fear;

though war rise up against me,

yet I will be confident.

⁴ One thing I asked of the Lord,

that will I seek after:

to live in the house of the Lord

all the days of my life,

to behold the beauty of the Lord,

and to inquire in his temple.

⁵ For he will hide me in his shelter

in the day of trouble;

he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;

he will set me high on a rock.

⁶ Now my head is lifted up

above my enemies all around me,

and I will offer in his tent

sacrifices with shouts of joy;

I will sing and make melody to the Lord.

⁷ Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud,
be gracious to me and answer me!
⁸ ‘Come,’ my heart says, ‘seek his face!’
Your face, Lord, do I seek.
⁹ Do not hide your face from me.

Do not turn your servant away in anger,
you who have been my help.
Do not cast me off, do not forsake me,
O God of my salvation!
¹⁰ If my father and mother forsake me,
the Lord will take me up.

¹¹ Teach me your way, O Lord,
and lead me on a level path
because of my enemies.
¹² Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries,
for false witnesses have risen against me,
and they are breathing out violence.

¹³ I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.
¹⁴ Wait for the Lord;
be strong, and let your heart take courage;
wait for the Lord!

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION — The ONE THING

This is not a pretty psalm.

Whoever wrote this psalm was in trouble.

That trouble is most clearly expressed in verses 1-2 of part one,

and then again in verses 10-12 of part two.

Verses 1-2 talk about enemies, and adversaries, and foes.

There is talk about being surrounded.

There is talk of being assailed, and devoured, and attacked.

Later, in verses 10-12, there is talk about being forsaken:

forsaken by your mother and father,

even seemingly forsaken by God.

In other words, there is a brutal realism to this psalm.

Imagine the worst things happening.

Imagine having your world turned upside down.

Imagine having nowhere to turn.

Imagine have foes without and fears within.

Imagine being in the grip of terror

and feeling the rumble of panic deep in your gut.

Imagine that.

Now, what is the one thing,

the one thing that will pull you through?

the one thing that will keep you going?

the one thing that will calm your quaking heart

and quiet your shaking spirit?

What is the One Thing?

The one thing the psalmist asks for

the one thing he seeks

is to live in the house of the Lord

to behold the beauty of the Lord.

The one thing is again reiterated in verse 8 of part two:

The one thing I seek is the face of the Lord.

That is the one thing that will get him through.

As long as he can behold the beauty of the Lord,

as long as he can see the Lord’s face

as long as he can sense his presence

then the world can do its worst,

but he is going to be okay.

He is going to be alright.

because he has that One Thing.

BEAUTY

So where do we start looking for that One Thing?

Well, we can start by looking for beauty wherever we can find it.

But are we willing to look?

The theologian Roberta Bondi writes that for years she did not like the word beauty. For her, it was a judgmental word, an oppressive word:

She never thought she was beautiful enough,

Or her home was beautiful enough,

Or anything in her life was beautiful enough.

And then …then she spent some time living with the nuns of St. Benedicts in St. Joseph Minnesota. The absolutely refreshing thing about those nuns is that they didn’t seem to care what they looked like and they made no apologies for it. After several weeks with them, Roberta caught herself looking in the mirror, and finally, finally seeing someone beautiful.

And that led her to reflect on the nature of beauty – what beauty really is and where it really comes from. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that all beauty comes from God. That is something the theologian Dionysius had already written in the 6^th century. Beauty is the most easily recognized form of God’s goodness. And since God created his world good, there is nothing in all creation that does not have a share of “the Beautiful” and a share of “the Good” in it. That is why, if we have the eyes to see, we can begin to realize we are surrounded by beauty – a beauty that has its source in God.

Whether we are looking at cells under a microscope

or the galaxies through a telescope;

Whether we are looking at a king crimson maple shedding its leaves in the fall,

or beginning to bud in the spring;

Whether we are listening to musical scales on the piano,

or reading the laws of mathematics in a textbook,

Whether we are looking at the face of a newborn child,

or looking at our own face in the mirror,

In all these ways,

we are catching a glimpse of beauty – beauty that has its source in God.

The recent film by Terence Malik called The Tree of Life, does more to explore this than any film I’ve seen in a long time.

In this very different – and I should warn you difficult — film,

those open to beauty, are open to God;

those closed to beauty, are closed to God.

Those of you who were here on Thanksgiving heard of Seth McFarlane, the TV writer who lives his life with shockingly little gratitude – and I would hazard to guess that his cynical outlook on life leaves him rather closed to beauty.

But beauty has a way of breaking through.

This week I was reading about the English artist David Clayton.

Clayton was also a cold, cranky cynic.

And his art was mainly about the dark, dreary brutality of life.

Then, one evening, he found himself at a choir concert.

The choir was singing the works of the Renaissance composer, Palestrina at the London Oratory.

The music moved him.

In that concert,

he was overcome by more peace and calm,

he was filled with more pleasure and joy,

than he had felt in a very long, long time.

The music moved him so much that he felt that,

even if there were still so many things wrong with the world,

nevertheless, there had to be something fundamentally right

at the core of the universe.

Beauty gave David Clayton a taste of hope.

What do we taste when we hear, or see, or experience beauty?

We get a taste of God’s goodness, his truth, his grace.

And it tastes so good, we want more.

THE INCOMPLETENESS OF BEAUTY

The philosopher Immanuel Kant once observed that our hunger for beauty, unlike our hunger for food, is infinite.

With good food, once we’re full, we’re full. We can’t eat another bite –perhaps you have a recent experience of this.

But with beauty it is different. Real beauty always leaves us longing for more.

We see a rainbow in the sky, we rush to get a better view, and it’s gone.

We hear a magnificent piece of music that seems to plant hope in our hearts,

but when we buy the CD and listen to it again, it doesn’t seem to move us the same way.

We see raindrops glisten on the leaves of a tree.

We get out our cameras and try capture that radiance, try contain that glory, but the pictures never quite seem to capture what we glimpsed.

John Ames, the preacher in Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead put it this way:

The spirit blows on the dark embers of this creation,

which suddenly become radiant, glorious, splendid for a moment

then fade again to dark, cold embers.

There is a reason beauty leaves us wanting more.

Beauty seems to be always pointing

to a deeper truth,

a fuller glory,

a wider blessing.

Beauty is the echo of the Creator’s voice,

but it is a bit like a weak internet connection –

one moment were connected, we see, a world opens up,

it’s breath-taking.

The next moment, we lose the signal and are getting…nothing.

The reality is that even though we were made for beauty,

that beauty has been weakened,

that goodness has been defiled,

that delight has been disfigured.

That is what the Psalmist in Psalm 27 knows so well.

His world is broken.

His world is fearful.

His world is full of terrors.

And in the ugly mess of reality,

he wants to behold the beauty of the Lord.

His heart yearns to see that beauty again.

WHERE DO WE FIND A DEEPER BEAUTY?

So where does this Psalm look for that beauty?

What is striking to me is that this Psalm does not

go to some majestic panoramic mountaintop.

It does not go to some peaceful trickling brook.

It does not go to the majestic waves of the seashore.

No, Psalm 27 says,

I am looking for beauty in your house O Lord.

I am seeking it in your temple.

I am to shout for joy in your tent.

That is where I want to live forever…all the days of my life.

How do we understand those words?

Well, I do not think they mean that the person praying this prayer

wants to literally live in the Temple,

or in the Tabernacle,

or in Church for that matter.

But the Temple/Tent/Tabernacle is mentioned for a reason.

The Temple held within it the Holy of Holies.

The Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant.

The Ark of the Covenant had the wings of the cherubim on either side.

Between these wings was the lid of the Ark,

a pure gold lid,

stained with blood

called the Mercy Seat.

The mercy seat is where God is depicted as being enthroned.

This is what the Jews referred to as the Shekinah — the presence of God.

What made this so beautiful?

Was it the gold?

Was it the wings of the Cherubim?

Was it the blue/purple curtains all around much like our Advent colors?

No, what made this place so beautiful was that

it represented the mercy of God,

the salvation of God.

In other words, there is beauty in Creation — great beauty.

However, for an even deeper beauty of the Lord, we look to the Temple.

Why?

Because there is more beauty in God’s Redemption than in his Creation.

If Creation gives us small signposts of God’s glory,

his redemption gives us massive billboards of his glory.

CHRIST AND THE BEAUTY OF GOD

So I ask you, where is the Temple today?

Where do we go to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord?

We go to the one who came to tabernacle among us.

We go to the one who pitched his tent with us.

We go to the beautiful one,

the radiant one,

who came down to this grey ember of creation

and became disfigured and ugly for our sake.

We go to the delight of God,

who was despised and rejected by us.

We go to the beauty of God,

who became as one without beauty,

one from whom people hid their faces,

one who had nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

We go to him, because there is nothing more beautiful in all the cosmos

than his sacrificial love,

than his redemptive love.

A love that was willing to become ugly

so that we might once again be fully beautiful;

a love that was willing to become nothing

so that we might become everything.

A love that was willing to give all of his beautiful self

in order to restore all the beauty of his creation.

CONCLUSION

This beautiful Savior is who we long for in this Advent season.

The restoration of his Creation to its full beauty is what we yearn for.

Whenever we catch a glimpse of something that is hauntingly beautiful,

we have a deep sense that it is pointing

not simply to some deep creational past,

but more importantly,

that it is pointing to a deeper redemptive future.

A future in which

all our ugly wounds are healed,

all our painful tears are dried,

all our deepest fears are vanquished,

and all our deepest hopes are realized.

It is a hope of breath-taking beauty.

And we get the clearest view of it in the risen Lord Jesus Christ.

Psalm 27 is “an already” and “not yet” prayer.

Jesus is already our light and our salvation.

He is already the stronghold of our life.

He is already our beautiful Savior — full of truth and grace.

If he is for us, who can be against us?

And yet,

we live in an often ugly world:

we are besieged by ugly comments,

and ugly actions,

and ugly motives.

Joy seems so fleeting,

and when we catch glimpses of beauty

they fade all too quickly.

So how do we live in “the already” and “not yet”?

On this grey ember of creation,

we must believe the wind of the Spirit will one day

set this world ablaze in radiance;

we must believe we shall see the full beauty of the Lord

in the land of the living.

And until then, we must wait,

we must wait for the Lord;

we must be strong, take courage

and wait for the Lord. Amen

PRAYER

For you, O Lord, our souls in stillness wait.

For the kingdoms of this world to become the kingdom of your glory,

our souls in stillness wait;

For the beauty of this world to be enfolded into the fullness of your beauty,

our souls in stillness wait.

Until that day, O Lord,

be your light, our strength, our hope, our joy.

Amen