Psalm 138: 1-8 (links validated 7/13/23)

As President, Barack Obama worked long hours. He made it a priority every evening when it was possible to have dinner with his wife and daughters but once that was finished up, he went back to work. Most days he ended up in his private study upstairs at the White House where he worked until 2:00am and the key thing he did in those final hours of a long work day was personally writing letters back to a handful of letters his staff had singled out for him to see. No President can read the torrent of mail that comes in every day but Obama made sure he did see a half-dozen or so per day and composed handwritten notes of reply. One can only imagine how it felt to those few folks every day who received such a personal reply from the most powerful person in the world. The closest I have ever come to this was when I wrote a thank-you note to former President Jimmy Carter in 1993 for something he had said in a speech I heard him give at a conference and that I used in a sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which I enclosed with my letter to him. A few months later I got a letter that was a xerox copy of my original letter on which President Carter hand-wrote a few lines of reply to me. I was thrilled. I framed that and it is still in my office to this day. When the powerful take note of ordinary folks, it feels amazing and good. Israel knew they received exactly such royal treatment by the God of the universe and as in Psalm 138, they could not express their wonder over this often enough.

In a sermon of his I heard a while back, Tom Long talked about the spiritual fruit of kindness. He noted that a key motivation for kindness is our ability to see deeply into every person we meet. We see past their outward flaws and appearance to the radiant image of God that glows inside every one of us. C.S. Lewis noted something similar in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis said that if we could right now see our neighbors as they will appear when transfigured into resurrected beings in God’s eternal kingdom, we might be tempted to fall down and worship them. They might well appear THAT luminous to us. Perhaps this explains why God is able to stoop down to care for us in all our littleness: he can see past our sins and our foibles to the divine images he made us to be and that in Christ he will one day restore us to be. In the meanwhile, Long and Lewis would counsel, our ability to look for this in others can help us be a little kinder, too. Because God demonstrates that kindness is not soft and weak. It may just be one of the most powerful forces in the cosmos!

In his “Space Trilogy” of science fiction novels, C.S. Lewis toyed with the idea of intelligent life on other planets. Unlike “Star Trek” Lewis did not do so by zooming far out into outer space to find worlds like Vulcan but instead imagined other life right here in our own solar system, on Venus perhaps or Mars. In his stories, though, Lewis does not let this idea of other lifeforms diminish the Gospel. Instead he lets Earth retain its unique status as being “The Visited Planet,” referring to this being the world where the Son of God became incarnate. Beings from other worlds would speak of Earth in hushed, almost reverent tones for this very reason. There may be life on other planets, Lewis was essentially saying, but that will never remove us from God’s loving care or from the fact that once upon a time, God came down here quite literally in person to get saving work done!

Life is sometimes like the Hebrew alphabet: it’s all consonants and no vowels. All by itself, it’s all hard sounds that are impossible to vocalize. Of course, native Hebrew speakers/readers know instinctively which vowel sounds to supply in between which consonants to make the language speak-able and pronounceable. And that is what faith does for all of us, Buechner said: it supplies the vowels that help our lives to make sense. Into the jumble of consonants that our lives throw at us, we are given by grace the vowels we need to make of it all something lovely after all...

In his “Space Trilogy” of science fiction novels, C.S. Lewis toyed with the idea of intelligent life on other planets. Unlike “Star Trek” Lewis did not do so by zooming far out into outer space to find worlds like Vulcan but instead imagined other life right here in our own solar system, on Venus perhaps or Mars. In his stories, though, Lewis does not let this idea of other lifeforms diminish the Gospel. Instead he lets Earth retain its unique status as being “The Visited Planet,” referring to this being the world where the Son of God became incarnate. Beings from other worlds would speak of Earth in hushed, almost reverent tones for this very reason. There may be life on other planets, Lewis was essentially saying, but that will never remove us from God’s loving care or from the fact that once upon a time, God came down here quite literally in person to get saving work done!

In a sermon of his I heard a while back, Tom Long talked about the spiritual fruit of kindness. He noted that a key motivation for kindness is our ability to see deeply into every person we meet. We see past their outward flaws and appearance to the radiant image of God that glows inside every one of us. C.S. Lewis noted something similar in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis said that if we could right now see our neighbors as they will appear when transfigured into resurrected beings in God’s eternal kingdom, we might be tempted to fall down and worship them. They might well appear THAT luminous to us. Perhaps this explains why God is able to stoop down to care for us in all our littleness: he can see past our sins and our foibles to the divine images he made us to be and that in Christ he will one day restore us to be. In the meanwhile, Long and Lewis would counsel, our ability to look for this in others can help us be a little kinder, too. Because God demonstrates that kindness is not soft and weak. It may just be one of the most powerful forces in the cosmos!

Though the arrangement of images is completely different, some of the elements are similar: the long basilica-shaped "temple," groups of people. But there are differences as well. In the notes for Harley, the description for Psalm 137: People praising the Lord (left) and the Psalmist standing before a temple; (lower image) people in captivity hold up their hands (left) and a king is given gifts by the hand of the Lord (right). What is missing as you read the text? Do you agree with the identifications of the images?

But my garden had a different lesson. After 20 minutes of pulling the relentless, viney grass, I discovered a clump of garlic had defended a couple of square inches for itself. I must have missed that head of garlic last year. Sometimes when you harvest, the stem breaks, and you just can’t find the luscious head of garlic. After more weeding, I found another, two whole heads of volunteer garlic! I began to separate them and replant them with more space. I was elated because garlic is my one true joy of my garden. As I walked home with my rake and shovel in my squeaky wheelbarrow, a good friend and neighbor walked his dog. He called out, “Hey, there’s the farmer! What’s growing today?” I replied, “Well, I’m a reluctant gardener mostly, and I spent the day weeding, which I hate. But I did find two clumps of volunteer garlic. He gave me the questioning look of someone who grew up in Brooklyn. “What is volunteer garlic? What does it volunteer to do? Will it do your weeding?” I explained that a volunteer in the garden was something that came up on its own. A random seed that fell to the earth and grew. Its nature doing its thing beyond my control, hence a volunteer...

The Psalmist’s call to the kings of the earth to join him in praising God made me think of a wonderful novel by Ann Patchett. Bel Canto is about the beauty of music overcoming the divisions of humanity. A multi-cultural group of dignitaries are invited to hear a world-famous opera singer perform at an exclusive dinner party in a third world country. As they sit mesmerized by her “bel canto,” a band of guerillas raid the party and take everyone hostage. For the next 4 months, these ragged rebels hold hostage these important people from all over the world—Japanese, Russians, English, French, Spanish, etc. Throughout that time, the opera singer performs each day and the power of her music draws them all together, captors and captives, poor and rich, male and female. All are transformed by the power of beauty, even as the Beautiful Savior, the King of Creation, will one day re-unite all things (Eph. 1:9, 10).

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