(As I am supply preaching this SUNDAY... I have a sermon not a prayer this week)
With God on Our Side?
Psalm 68
1 Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered;
let those who hate him flee before him.
2 As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;
as wax melts before the fire,
let the wicked perish before God.
3 But let the righteous be joyful;
let them exult before God;
let them be jubilant with joy.
4 Sing to God, sing praises to his name;
lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds[a]—
his name is the Lord—
be exultant before him.
5 Father of orphans and protector of widows
is God in his holy habitation.
6 God gives the desolate a home to live in;
he leads out the prisoners to prosperity,
but the rebellious live in a parched land.
7 O God, when you went out before your people,
when you marched through the wilderness,Selah
8 the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain
at the presence of God, the God of Sinai,
at the presence of God, the God of Israel.
9 Rain in abundance, O God, you showered abroad;
you restored your heritage when it languished;
10 your flock found a dwelling in it;
in your goodness, O God, you provided for the needy.
Pennie and I spent a week on the road to Boston...
so I could attend my 40th seminary reunion.
On the way home we stopped and had dinner with a couple of our friends who we know from our time in Worcester when we there in the 90's.
Gary was the Chairman of the board who brought me to do campus ministry in Worcester.
We are brothers in ministry and peace and justice issues and the kind of liberal/radical theology that worked in certain settings but occasionally got us into grief over the years.
While Gary's wife Annie and Pennie were in the kitchen talking about important stuff like grandchildren and life... Gary and I got into a theological discussion in the front room.
I told Gary I was working on a paper for the Cincinnati Civil War Roundtable.
This is a group of men and women who meet once a month discuss the events, battles, and people who were involved in that tumulus conflict that defined us as a nation.
I said I was writing about the role of religion in the Civil War and how many leaders and soldiers believed they were acting for God...
that God had a stake in the war and they were fighting with God's blessing and guidance.
They believed their side would ultimately win...
because they believed they had God on their side.
Even Abraham Lincoln believed the war was God's judgement on America's 250 years of slavery.
Gary said his understanding of God was different... that he saw God in everything and everyone... and that he didn't see God acting or directing history like Lincoln did.
Whoa... I said... what do you do with the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures... Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos.... prophets who believed that God does judge peoples and nations... who preached that God sent Israel into exile because it had forsaken God and God's commandments.
Yes... the prophets did say that... Gary confessed... but he saw God in a different way.
And with that we were off... exercising what is left of our wits... which does not take very long these days.
So when I got the email from Linda Nicols about preaching today...
I looked up the lessons for today.
And there it was... as if ordained...
this reading from Psalm 68.
Just a quick reading makes clear...
this is not some sweet poem written by a shepherd boy created while tending his flock.
No... this is a stirring and eloquent recital of the God of Israel who protects God's people ...
who vanquishes her enemies and provides for them.
Verses 7-10 recite the Exodus story... the defining myth of how God delivered the Hebrew children from the clutches of the Pharaoh... Led them through the Red Sea... thru the wilderness... across the Jordan... into the promised land.
7 O God, when you went out before your people,
when you marched through the wilderness,Selah
8 the earth quaked, the heavens poured down rain
at the presence of God, the God of Sinai,
at the presence of God, the God of Israel.
9 Rain in abundance, O God, you showered abroad;
you restored your heritage when it languished;
10 your flock found a dwelling in it;
in your goodness, O God, you provided for the needy.
For the Psalmist...
for the prophets...
for all of Israel... for Jews then... and today...
God acted...
God intervened of their behalf...
and led them to the promised land.
The Psalmist and the prophets believed that God intervened in history...
Israel's history.
The later prophets would warn of God's judgement of their sins...
and the punishment of exile for those.
They believed that.
But do we?
Do we believe that God acts in history...
judges peoples and nations?
Do we believe that God intervenes in human life and human history?
Or are we...
most of us like my friend Gary...
who sees God everywhere...
but not a God who interferes in our human affairs...
who moves and is engaged and acts in our lives as a people or a nation.
Hang with me a minute...
I think there is more at stake here than just a theological argument.
Because the kind of God we believe in defines who we are as persons...
who we are as a nation....
and who we are as a church.
You see....
I think there is part of us who does believe that God does act in human life...
in human history.
Just listen to how we pray.
In a few minutes we will pray for the world...
for different countries...
for the Earth...
we will lift up together people amongst us we wish God to care for... touch... comfort and heal.
Surely when we pray for all of these people and nations and churches and the Earth...
we pray these words because we want...
expect God to do something...
care and touch and comfort and heal
We want God to act.
So like the Psalmist and the prophets...
we do believe in a God who acts in human affairs...
in human history.
But... And there is but coming.. You just know there is...
do we believe that God will always act the way we think... we hope...
we want God to act.
Or to put it another way...
is it our expectation that God will always be on our side?
Such thinking or believing recalls Bob Dylan's song... "With God on Our Side."
"With God On Our Side"
Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And the land that I live in
Has God on its side.
Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.
The Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.
If we are honest...
though we may not say it as bluntly as Dylan's words
we believe that we are God's chosen people.
We believe because of our history...
founded and sustained as a Christian nation...
that whatever crisis or conflict we are engaged in...
we have God on our side.
We ought to be careful believing that.
We ought to pause...
think...
proceed with great caution before we make such an automatic assumption.
We need to humbly confess that we may not know what God's desired outcome in every crisis and conflict.
In doing so... we may be in for a surprise.
We need to struggle with who God is... surprising... unpredictable... free
and confess that God may not be on our side.
Listen for a minute to someone in our own history to someone who struggled with these question.
Listen to Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address...
as he attempted to discern what God was doing in the midst of our terrible Civil War...
trying to discern whose side (North or South) God was on.
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other... The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Lincoln makes two arguments we as 21st Americans ought to ponder when we want to ask about how God acts in history.
First... Lincoln believed that the war was God's judgement of America for its 250 years of slavery.
He called it an "offense" and that God had decided to give us this war as punishment.
Some may find such an argument outrageous...
or like my friend Gary...
just not acceptable or compatible with his understanding of who God is.
But you know...
I am not sure God really cares all that much about how we "conceive" God.
God is much more concerned about how we follow God's commandments...
whether we care for "the least of these..."
is much more concerned about how we make war on one another...
and make little peace with one another.
In light of those expectations...
I believe God does judge...
judges persons...
judges peoples...
judges nations
Yes... our ultimate judgement is mercy and grace through the saving power of Easter.
But in our living.... our history...
as people and as nations...
God does pronounce and carry out judgements for and against God's people... and their nations.
Do we seriously believe that all we have done and are doing to our world...
The Earth that God created and appointed us as it's stewards...
has escaped God's notice...
or will escape God's judgement
Second... the vital question for Lincoln was not to ask whether God was on our side...
but whether we can affirm that God acts in God's own way
the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Unsaid is this truth:
We will not always like what God intends to do in our crisis or in our conflicts...
We may be shocked to discover that God is not on our side but the other side.
The genuine question of faith for us is...
can we accept what God has done and is doing in our lives...
as people and as nations...
even when God does the opposite of what we hoped... what we prayed for.
even when God is on the other side.
My favorite story about God and Lincoln concerns a meeting he had with a group of ministers who came to visit him.
At the end of the meeting... one of the ministers invited Lincoln to join them as they prayed for God to be on their side.
Lincoln turned them down...
but told them ...
if they had a prayer to ask to be on God's side...
that prayer he would join in praying with them.
A writer once said... "God always gets the world God wants."
The Psalmist believed that.
Abraham Lincoln believed that.
Maybe we should too.
Amen.
