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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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The Goodness of God |
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Psalm
27 Twenty
Second Sunday after Trinity October
12, 2008 Beginning next Sunday I hope to begin preaching about some of the foundational teachings of the Christian faith. I have been doing some of this during the past two years, laying what might be called the groundwork for these sermons. But I have not presented the kind of systematic treatment that needs to be presented from the pulpit on a regular basis. God willing, I will preach on these things through November. Meanwhile I have been preaching from the Psalms for the past several weeks, attempting to show their application to our own lives, and also to give a sense of how to understand the Psalms as we read them in Church and in our personal and family worship times. I have been especially concerned to show their application to New Testament Christian faith as well as to the Old Testament people of Israel. It is good, therefore that we end these sermons with the Psalm assigned for today, Psalm 27, for, I think, it is especially easy to show this application in this Psalm. I will first talk about the Psalm’s application to Israel. It applies to Israel because it applies to David, the author of the Psalm. It is the prayer of a person besieged by troubles. These trouble are not mere trivialities. They are not just the little headaches and flat tires we all face in life. These are really tough problems. David has enemies within his own country, and he has hostile nations around him ready to pounce upon him and annihilate Israel (vs. 14). They are the kinds of troubles that cause burnout. They leave you feeling completely incapacitated. David says he would have fainted. He is not talking about swooning. He is talking about fainting away in exhaustion and despair. He is talking about being used up so that he has no strength left, and being in despair because he has no hope of going on. When Job had lost everything, and was sick and weak, his wife came to him and said, “curse God and die.” That is the kind of fainting David wrote of in this Psalm. The duties of leading Israel were too heavy. His enemies were too strong and were constantly invading and raiding his land. Years of war had taken their toll on David. On top of that his own people deprecated him and jeered him. They neither knew nor cared about the sacrifices he personally made for them. Some people think this Psalm was written during the war with Absalom. You will remember that Absalom was David’s son who wanted to be king and actually formed an army and drove David out of Jerusalem, out of the palace. This was a war that ended only when Absalom was killed and his army defeated in a terrible and costly war that killed many of Israel’s best young men and divided the nation. Did David write this, heart broken and despondent, as he sat in the wilderness pursued by his own son, with not only his throne, but also his very life in jeopardy? Whenever this was written, David felt like he was about to give up. That is the meaning of the word “faint” in this Psalm. Surely Israel as a nation felt this way sometimes. In Babylon, after Jerusalem was sacked, the Temple leveled, and hundreds of thousands of their people had been executed, the Jews must have felt like all hope was gone. They must have fainted in their souls. When they returned to Jerusalem and saw the immeasurable vastness of the task of rebuilding the city and the nation, their hearts must have fainted within them. They must have thought, “I don’t have that much to give. I don’t have the strength it will take to rebuild this city.” Certainly the Church has felt like fainting. It is difficult for us to understand the sacrifices made by the Church down through the ages. The Romans intended to wipe it off the face of the earth by killing Christians in such gruesome ways, no one would even think of converting to that religion. But convert they did; more than the lions and the gladiators and the crosses and the flames could kill. And die they did because they believed with all their heart that the truth of God was worth any price, even their own lives. Finally a time of relative peace came to the Church, but it was not complete, for immediately it was torn from within by heresy and worldliness. It was torn loose from its biblical foundations, so that, by the Middle Ages it was no longer recognizable as the Church of the New Testament. It needed to be renovated. It needed to be reformed. But this was no easy task. Kings and popes and powerful people had vested interests in keeping the Church in its spiritual weakness and worldly power. So they fought against the Reformation, and many people died for the faith. But these things are worth dying for. And they are worth living for. I wonder where the faith of the modern church has gone, for it seems to me most “Christians” are concerned with everything under the sun except biblical Christianity. They have fainted away and given in to the gospels of self-indulgence, entertainment, and moral/ideological relativism. Yet, even today people suffer and die because they are Christians. Even as I speak Christians are facing violence and death. God be with them. So the Church, like Israel has her enemies. We find ourselves more and more marginalized in today’s relativistic hodgepodge world where anything goes except biblical faith and morals. The darkness hates the light. Read the first chapter of the Gospel of John today as it sets up the tragic truth that men loved darkness rather than light. Sometimes the Church feels like fainting. Sometimes we feel like giving up. Pastoral burnout is one of the biggest reasons why pastors leave the ministry. They simply “faint.” But notice that the Psalm does not say, “I fainted.” It says, “of whom, then shall I be afraid?”(vs.1). “Yet will I put my trust in him” [God] (vs. 3). And it says, “I should [would] have utterly fainted, but,” and this is the important part. The enemy was so powerful, the sacrifice was so great, I was so exhausted, I would have utterly fainted, but, “that I believe to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” He had faith. He believed God. He trusted in God, who promised to set him on a rock, and to give him victory over all his adversities and all his enemies. Most of all, he trusted in God who will bring about His will infallibly upon the face of this earth. Evil will not win. Corruption, crime, hate, violence, idolatry, and unbelief will all be cast down one day. Meanwhile, we endure, knowing that in this life and in the next we will see with our own eyes all the goodness of God. Thanks be to God. Amen. The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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