Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
There sure are lots of
acronyms enmeshed in American culture, in the USA. At least once a week I ask my daughters if they
would like a PBJ, a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. In lots of conversations I’ll either say or
hear a reference to being or not being PC, Politically Correct. There always seems to be good reason to say
FYI, For Your Information. When
wondering what exact time someone is going to show up at my office or home,
I’ll ask them about their ETA, Estimated Time of Arrival. As a pastor of the PC(USA), the
Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, I will on occasion need to
consult the BOO, the Book of Order as well as the BOP, the Board of
Pensions.
I could definitely offer a very long list of
the many words formed from the initial letters of set phrases. But this morning, it’s an acronym that originated
in my mind one day while parenting that I hope will be helpful for us to know
as we reflect on today’s Psalm and what love means in the context of this
Advent season
How many of you have
children and grandchildren who, when asked to do something, always listen the
very first time the request is made? Now,
and on the other hand, how many of you have to make repeated requests? In home life with my dear daughters, I admit
I’m often on repeat. Then, with impatient
frustration, I very often exclaim, Listen
the First Time! So often, in fact, this phrase gave birth to a
new household acronym – LIFT. How well the acronym is responded to may not
be much better than if I use the full phrase, but I enjoy saying it anyway! “Children, FYI, our ETA is 7:30, so LIFT and
let’s get those PBJ’s made!”
When I read Psalm 84,
I’m inspired to wonder how many times throughout history God might have shouted
LIFT in our direction. God
is always speaking. God speaks through
every page of Scripture, straight to our hearts and minds through the power of
the Holy Spirit. God speaks as well
through hymns, sermons, Bible studies and through every day conversations and
interactions. How well do we listen the
first time? How often is God on repeat?
I find the human frustration
children not listening the first time rises out of a desire to be heard,
respected, and ultimately trusted for having the family’s best interests at
heart. It is not arbitrary -- it is firmly
rooted in deep abiding love. Direct,
loving communication is needed as a constant in family life.
Since each of us was knit
together at our birth by the abiding love of our Creator, it seems true enough from
reading the Scriptures that God gets frustrated when we fail to listen. This, in turn, can become frustration for our
faithful family life. While God’s
grace covers all failures, we aren’t excused from diligently working toward a
healthy, mutually loving relationship with God and with one another. We need to listen with love, to declare, along
with the Psalmist, “Let me hear what God the Lord will speak …”
How well do you welcome
this divine, community of love building communication? What blocks you from intentionally making
time to lovingly listen to God?
Asking questions like
these is what I do when I meet people one on one for spiritual direction. Spiritual direction is a set-apart time from
other pastoral duties where I prayerfully discern with someone where God might
be most actively engaging that person’s daily life. It’s a special, intentional time for listening
to sacred love. Just a quick reminder–
I am available as a Spiritual Director (which, come to think of it, is more like
being a Spiritual Connector!) to you, your loved ones, your friends, pretty
much whomever wants to be intentional about the time.
I mention it here
because when I was training for certification in this field of ministry, my
favorite required reading was a book called The Awakened Heart. It was written by Gerald May, an M.D. who
practiced medicine and psychiatry for twenty-five years before becoming a truly
inspiring teacher of contemplative spiritual practices.
In May’s chapter
“Loving the Source of Love,” he writes how having a more child-like faith can
help us be more directly attentive to God’s presence in our lives. In a beautiful turn of phrase, he invites us
to consider the “unadmitted sparkle of the child” we each have within us. In this sparkle, he encourages us to recognize
that we have, to quote him directly, “a sometime longing to climb into God’s
father lap, to nestle against God’s motherly breast, to rest for a moment in
the shadow of God’s wings … held in God’s strong and tender arms.” Following this affirmation, he continues with
this question – “If you could allow yourself to feel it, are there not times
when you would love to cry on God’s shoulder, to let God tell you are
worthwhile and beautiful?”
I sure find this to be
a rhetorical question … especially since I believe we are spiritually
hard-wired to crave this attention and nurture from our Creator. Dr. May
follows next with some blunt bit of advice.
“Dispense with your maturity for a moment and indulge yourself … direct
relationship with God is the one place where you can be absolutely trusting of
your desire and give it full reign. You
will never know how safe the place is until you risk being in it fully.”
All relationships
require this risk … this deepening of trust of between our most basic desires and
another person. It’s so much more so
with our first love, the love that never lets us go … the love we experience
with God.
I surely hear this spiritually-centering risk
in the Psalmist’s voice. It’s not a
voice making academic sounding statements about the reality of God. It’s a voice confessing the basic need to
turn the human heart toward heavenly hope.
It’s the voice of a child of God waiting on a holy, loving, parental
kiss. Evidence of this kiss takes
form, sings the Psalmist, wherever God’s steadfast love and our faithfulness
meet, wherever signs of God’s deep peace and our right living share
intimacy.
In this Advent season,
we are preparing ourselves to be reminded on Christmas Eve when and where and
why this holy kiss most fully happened in the course of human history. We are preparing our imaginations to enter
into ancient history and hear God directly speaking to us of love, beginning
with the gleeful gurgles of a newborn infant so tender and mild.
Yet so much of our
preparation time for this intimate audience with the Almighty gets audibly
blasted by commercial begging and the sounds of stress within and around
us. The space we should be creating to
listen in love for what God has to say to us gets so easily crowded out by
extra demands on our time and drains on our energy. We get culturally forced to focus more on
mommy kissing Santa Claus than on Christ come to kiss our sin away. The
life presented to us by Psalm 84 – a life “portrayed as full, complete, and
healthy … lived to the fullest in relationship with God as part of a community
of faith”[i]
– gets squeezed into commercialized spaces.
We get repeatedly tempted to replace thoughts about right living with
God with obsessions about getting the right gifts and having the right
décor.
All the while, I
honestly believe God cries out, LIFT! Listen to the First Time I spoke saying “Let there be light” and
declared all of Creation good. Listen to
the First Time I spoke to humankind saying “Be fruitful and multiply” along
with invitation to be faithful companions and stewards of all. Listen to the First Time I warned of the
dire consequence of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. Listen to the First Time I made
covenant promises and cried out through prophets. Listen to the First Time I directly took a
human breath and cried out for love.
A fellow preacher’s blog, which can be found at
www.theharestquestion.com, has this insightful conclusion about the meaning of
Psalm 84 – “God does not deny the inherent tensions in the nature of humanity,
the capacity for great love and great deceit,” for “love and faithlessness” but
“God does not consider these tensions reason to alter God’s plan for our
creation.”
So very true. God’s plan for wholeness in relationship with
us and all of Creation does not ever cease.
We live with and through these tensions, these times of listening and
loving and times of turning deaf ear and of denying, because we do believe God’s
most precious, most intimate, most communicative plan for creation was birthed
in Bethlehem of long ago. And this
good news is one hundred plus percent uplifting! So may we each turn our hearts and declare our willingness to
listen to what the Lord is speaking in love this very moment, in this special hour,
on this Advent day. Amen.
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