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[Sermon] In the Muddle

Guest Preacher Jeff Tobin



Guest preacher Jeff Tobin walks through Psalm 85's three movements: grateful memory of God's past deliverance, anxious lament in a disoriented present, and hopeful vision of a healed future. Drawing on the post-exilic setting and Nehemiah's account of a fractured community, Jeff names our own experience of living "in the middle, in a muddle." He points to memory, our capacity to recognize God's quiet, ongoing faithfulness, as what steadies us between what God has done and what God has promised. He closes by locating that promise in the resurrection, where steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace find their fullest expression.



Sermon Transcript

From YouTube's automatic captions, lightly edited by AI for readability.


Good morning, friends. It's a privilege to share with you this morning. And Megan, that was a beautiful reading of the psalm, thank you very much.

 

I have with me this morning a little black book. Now, I don't know what associations you have with that phrase, but this is a Bible, or at least it's a part of a Bible. It's a New Testament and the Psalms. And why would someone publish a New Testament with only the Psalms? There's lots of other Old Testament books to choose from. Well, Martin Luther, in his 1528 preface to the Psalter, called the Psalms "the little Bible," because he believed they summarized the whole of Scripture. And maybe Psalms are sometimes attached to the New Testament because, though they are found in the Old Testament, they are a valuable resource for us as we try to live out our New Testament faith.

 

Most of Scripture speaks to us. The Psalms can speak for us. They can give us a vocabulary for what is often beyond our own words: articulating our grief, our doubt, our lament, our joys, and our gratitude. The Psalms can also connect us with those ancient Israelites who have come before us. We have with them a connection of our common faith in the God of the Bible, and a connection with them to our common humanity.

 

Philip Yancey, in his book The Bible Jesus Read, says Psalms gives examples of ordinary people struggling mightily to align what they believe about God with what they actually experience. And I think this morning our psalm can help us see that.

 

The psalm is structured around three related sections. Could we have the first slide, please?

 

The psalmist begins looking at the past, and some of the words are very upbeat: "You were favorable with your land. You restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave their iniquities." Second slide. But when we come to the middle of the psalm, we see that the mood changes, and instead of those very positive, upbeat words, we find words like, "Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?" Something has gone wrong.

 

And finally, in the last section, verses 8 through 13, the psalmist begins to envision a new future, a not-yet, that will be. He talks about steadfast love and faithfulness meeting, and righteousness and peace kissing each other, so that the estrangement of those beautiful things is ended. And that's how he navigates this past, present, and future in his Psalm 85.

 

Scholars tell us that this psalm is post-exilic, which means that the phrases like God's favor and God's restoration of Israel's fortune that we saw in the first part all refer to the happy deliverance of the Israelite exiles from 70 years of Babylonian captivity. You remember that the city of Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, and the horror and the terror of that experience is reflected in the book of Lamentations. Could we have that slide, please?

 

"How lonely sits the city that once was full of people. How like a widow she has become. She that was great among the nations, she that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal. Judah has gone into exile with suffering and much hard servitude. She now lives among the nations and finds no resting place. Her pursuers have overtaken her in the midst of her distress. Enemies have stretched out their hands over all her precious things. She has even seen the nations invade her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter the congregation. All her people groan. They search for bread. They trade treasures for food to revive their strength. O Lord, see how worthless we have become," says the psalmist.

 

Jewish author Elie Wiesel says the word "remember" is the most important word in the Bible. Remember, remember what? Remember the mighty acts of God on behalf of Israel. The yearly Jewish Passover, a commemoration of the Exodus, Israel's liberation from slavery in Egypt, is remembered as if modern Jews personally came out of Egypt themselves. Exodus 13:8 says, "You shall tell your child on that day" (that is, the day of the Passover) "you shall tell your child, it is because of what the Lord has done for me when I came out of Egypt."

 

Remember: on Israel's journey across the wilderness, making their way to the promised land, there came a point where the people had to cross the Jordan River so as to enter Canaan. The Bible story tells us that as the priests carrying the ark of the covenant stepped into the water, the river stopped flowing, allowing all of Israel to cross on dry land, but not before they had collected twelve large stones from the riverbed. Once across, they erected a cairn with those stones. And so we read in Joshua 4, "When your children ask in time to come, 'What do those stones mean to you?' then you shall tell them the waters of the Jordan were cut off in front of the ark, and these stones shall be to the Israelites a memorial forever."

 

"Remember," says Elie Wiesel. Hundreds of years later, the return of the exiled Jews from Babylon would mark another of God's mighty acts on behalf of Israel. And no wonder we read in Psalm 126, "When the Lord restored the fortunes of Israel, we were like people who dreamed."

 

But as we continue with the text of the psalm, verses 4 through 7, the present in which the psalmist stands, we see that the mood has changed dramatically. Here we find anxious pleas: "Restore us again. Will you be angry with us forever? Revive us again. Grant us your salvation." Indeed, something has gone wrong.

 

For those of you who can remember popular music of the 1960s, and with apologies to Lesley Gore, for the psalmist and the returned exiles, everything was not sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. This is how Nehemiah described things. Slide, please.

 

"Now there was a great outcry of the people and their wives against their Jewish kin. For there were those who said, 'With our sons and daughters, we are many. We must get grain so that we may eat and stay alive.' And there were those who said, 'We are having to pledge our fields, our vineyards, and our houses in order to get grain during the famine.' And there were those who said, 'We are having to borrow money on our fields and vineyards to pay the king's tax. Now our flesh is the same as that of our kindred. Our children are the same as their children. And yet we are forcing our sons and daughters to be slaves. Some of our daughters have been ravished. We are powerless, and our fields and vineyards belong to others.'"

 

And later in that same chapter, Nehemiah says to the gathered elders, the officials, and the nobles, "You are all taking interest from your own people. As far as we are able, we have gathered back our Jewish kindred who have been sold to other nations, but you are selling your own kin."

 

Clearly, this was a time of disorientation, not only because of the dissension within the Jewish community, but because Judea and its capital, Jerusalem, were not actually free. They were still under the imperial control of someone else, no longer Babylon, but Persia, who had conquered Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians.

 

The psalmist's urgent prayer in verses 4 through 7 sounds like, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." The psalmist, standing in the present, is remembering the past. He's in the middle, but he's in a muddle. He cries out, "Lord, I remember what you did before. Won't you do it again?" The psalmist is in a muddle because of the seeming contradiction between Israel's present precarious situation and the covenant promises and actions their faith was built upon.

 

And what about us, here in the present, in the middle? Doesn't life sometimes feel like a muddle? We are tested by paradoxes. We know that God created a world of order, but we see chaos. We know that God is good, but there's so much evil. What resources do we have to deal with our disconnections?

 

If Yancey is correct, the Psalms give us examples of ordinary people struggling to align what they believe about God with their actual life experience. If so, Psalm 85 may provide us with a template, a pattern we can follow in our own faith journeys. And it starts with memory. It's no accident that any of us is here this morning. We're all products of our prior life experiences. And we remember, and as we remember, we may detect in those very experiences God's continual providential care.

 

In 1 Kings 19 we have the story of the prophet Elijah, who fled for his life from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. He ended up on Mount Sinai, defeated and alone. And the Bible story tells us that standing at the mouth of a cave, Elijah experiences a series of powerful events: mighty winds, shattering rocks, earthquakes, and fire. But the story goes on to tell us God was not present in any of those mighty manifestations. Rather, Elijah hears a still, small voice. Instead of thundering, God whispers to Elijah.

 

What if memory is what allows us to recognize the times that God has whispered to you and me? Could it be that it was actually God whispering to us when that total stranger showed up and gave us an unexpected and undeserved kindness? Did God whisper to us in the awe we felt when we saw the cosmos anew through the pictures from the Hubble and the Webb telescopes? Was it God whispering to us in the realization that we were actually grateful when we didn't get something we thought we really, really wanted? Was it a God-whisper that caused us to look in the mirror one day and say, "Enough. I don't want to be that person anymore. I can't live like that."

 

As the psalmist draws strength for the present by remembering the past, so may we. We've seen the psalmist invoke the past. But his song of praise also looks forward. In verses 8 through 13, speaking from his present disorientation, he anticipates in hope a new future.

 

Jews today speak of a Hebrew idea called tikkun olam, which means "the healing of the world." And in the concluding verses of our psalm, the writer poetically envisions what such a healing might actually look like. It looks like long-lost friends, steadfast love and faithfulness, meeting again. It looks like righteousness and peace reconciling with a kiss. As the future vision goes on, we read in verse 11 that the distance, the divide between heaven and earth, will be bridged, because from the earth faithfulness springs up, and from heaven righteousness looks down.

 

Righteousness is one of the really big biblical words. It has an internal dimension of moral uprightness, but it also has an external dimension of God's actions in the world. In Psalm 72, God's active righteousness is displayed in this description: "He defends the cause of the poor. He gives deliverance to the needy, and he crushes the oppressor." God's righteousness makes things right. Isn't this righteousness, this kind of righteousness, this very righteousness, what we pray for when we pray for God's kingdom to come and his will to be done right here on this earth?

 

Steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace are not only a future vision of healed human relationships. They actually describe the very character of God. That's who he is.

 

Mark Twain is reported to have said, "History is just one damned thing after another." And for us here in the muddle of the present, it may feel like that. But unlike Mr. Twain, the overarching biblical narrative, including Psalm 85, is relentlessly optimistic. In literary terms, the Bible is a comedy, not a tragedy. That is, it ends in good news.

 

The biblical vision of God's new heaven and earth gives hope to our faith here in the muddle of the moment. The 19th-century preacher Theodore Parker, paraphrased later by Dr. Martin Luther King, said, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends surely toward justice." Justice and righteousness are almost the same word biblically, and it's righteousness which will characterize the world's future.

 

The Bible story is really God's story. And since God is just, he will put things right. And just as the Israelites used stones, things tangible and physical, to make a cairn in remembering God's mighty acts of bringing them across the Jordan, we remember God's mightiest act of justice in the tangible physicality of bread and wine. Man's perennial inhumanity to man, epitomized in the crucifixion of Jesus, was overruled, was put right, by the righteous God of resurrection.

 

The past, the present, and the future are given ultimate meaning in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus, the one who taught us and showed us how, here in the middle, in the muddle, to live out the reality of a future of steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness, and peace.

 

George MacDonald, the 19th-century Scottish pastor and author who profoundly influenced C.S. Lewis, is said to have had a conversation with his son in which the young man told his father that the glorious biblical vision of the future seemed too good to be true. "Nay," said the old Scot, "it's just so good, it must be true." And that, friends, is good news.

 

As David Horton would say, can I get an amen? Amen.

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