Psalm 66:1-12 “Refining Moments”
Some of you who live in
Gwinnett Co. and get the Atlanta Journal Constitution
know that there is a column
each week called the Roundtable in which area pastors offer answer to a
question about religious or spiritual matters.
Most weeks I try to answer this question.
Now just for the record, I do this because I want our name - PCCC - out
there. Because I have some background in
journalism, I know just what an opportunity this is in a city of this
size.
In any case, the questions
vary a great deal. One of my recent favorites was “what spiritual lessons can
we learn from football?” Yesterday’s was about serving alcohol at church
events.
There are questions on prayer,
relationships, and God.
But the questions that take
the most time for me to answer are the questions related to suffering.
Suffering is something we
humans struggle to understand.
I am cautious with these
questions because I don’t want to give simplistic answers to suffering.
Suffering challenges us,
disturbs us, and can shake our faith.
We try to understand it,
explain it, and rationalize it.
The classic book written by
Rabbi Harold Kushner in 1983, “When Bad things happen to Good People”
addresses a question that
challenges most of us at one time or another in our lifetimes.
There is much in the Bible
that offers answers to the question of suffering.
The classic, of course is the
Book of Job. The Book of Job requires
more than a brief mention in a sermon --
but in short, this writing
tells us that God alone knows the answers to all things -- including the
answers to suffering. For some people
this is a comfort, for others, it is not.
But because the Bible is a
collection of 66 books written at different times by different authors with
different experiences, there are other answers to the question of
suffering.
Today’s reading from Psalm 66
offers one more.
The Book of Psalms is an
incredible resource. They were the prayer
book, the hymn book, for the Jews.
The psalms speak of all our
human experiences - thanksgiving, lament, suffering, trust.
I’m going to give you a crash
course in the spirituality of the psalms.
There is a classic movement or style to most psalms that reflect our
human experiences. According to Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar who has studied such
things, many psalms begin first with orientation -
then disorientation - and
then finally a new orientation.
Orientation is a recognition
that the world is created and ordered by God.
The system is reliable,
dependable. This orientation is expressed in psalms of praise and
thanksgiving.
But then inevitably,
disorientation occurs. Bad things happen
to good people. We suffer and we wonder
why.
This disorientation is
expressed in psalms of lament. In
theological terms, Jews understand this as suffering.
Christians understand this as
the cross or crucifixion.
But then finally, new
orientation occurs. This is not just a
remake of the old or a return to the original place of orientation. This is an entirely new place, grounded in
surprising hope, in resurrection possibilities.[1]
In this particular psalm, we
can trace this movement. It begins as a
hymn of praise.
In v. 1-4, we hear unbridled
adoration and thanksgiving for God’s awesome deeds and amazing power.
Next we hear a reference to
the formational event of the Israelites - the passage of
and then reminds us of that
miraculous walk through the sea.
But God’s amazing power goes
beyond the people of
God’s eyes keep watch on all
the nations.
Then the psalm becomes a
community prayer of thanksgiving.
Thankfulness that God has
kept us among the living and has not let our feet slip.
So far, so good. But then we come to the disorientation,
which we all eventually experience in life.
Listen to v. 10-12:
For you, O God, have tested us, you have
tried us as silver is tried.
You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our
backs;
you let people ride over our heads; we went through
fire and through water.
This section of the psalm
then concludes with a new orientation:
“Yet you have brought us out
to a spacious place.”
The psalm continues with an
individual psalm of thanksgiving, which emphasizes even more this new
orientation - a place where God’s steadfast love endures forever. But too often we forget the promise of a
spacious place and God’s steadfast love and get tripped up by the
disorientation.
Too many people get stuck in
the bad stuff of life and decide that God is the source of our suffering.
But what if we looked at this
a little differently?
What if instead of blaming
God for suffering, we looked for how God is with us in our suffering?
What if we recalled the times
we have gone through fire and through water and remembered how God stayed with
us? What if we began to see suffering
as something that refines us, like silver is refined?
I did a little research on
silver this past week and what I found out is that to become the precious metal
that it is, silver must be refined from its raw form into its more valuable
form. And that takes heat. Quite a lot of it, in fact. In order to
remove the impurities from silver after it is mined, it must be held in a
furnace.
In traditional refining, the
silversmith sat with eyes fixed on the furnace, for if it was held in the
furnace a moment too long, the silver would be damaged. The process is complete when the silversmith
sees his own image reflected back from the silver.
If you can picture the
silversmith at work, I invite you to imagine God as a refiner of silver, for
this image is scattered throughout the Bible. In Malachi 3 we read “And He
shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.”[2]
What if the difficult
experiences of our lives are refining us
in such a way
that more and more we can see
God’s image being reflected back in our lives?
Many of us have had
experiences in our lives - we have faced
serious illness, lost loved ones,
been challenged by our
children, betrayed by friends, and endured many other struggles that we would
never choose on our own. But how we
respond to the challenges of our lives is a choice we make.
My grandmother used to say in
her homespun wisdom kind of way, “We get bitter or we get better.”
These difficult periods of
our lives are the times where we are tested and tried,
caught in traps and snares,
walked on by others, burdened with difficulties, and pass through fire and
flood, as today’s Psalm reminds us. But these experiences do not need to be
defining moments.
We don’t have to simply
become the painful event we have experienced.
We are more than the person
struggling with illness, the person who lost his job,
someone who made a
mistake. No matter what our experiences,
we are more than
a woman whose husband left
her, a son whose father beat him,
a daughter who is in
financial trouble, the mother who lost a baby.
These experiences do not have to be defining moments
of our lives,
they can be refining moments.
John Claypool was an
Episcopal priest, author, and retreat leader.
He lived in
to a little restaurant where
the four of them had often eaten.
One of his books tells this
story: “As we sat down, the sight of
the empty chair there beside me sent a wave of incredible pain to the heart of
my very being. It symbolized what had
happened to our circle of love, and I remember thinking, ‘Stop the world. I want to get off. I simply cannot stand the pain of being in a
world
in which Laura Lue is no longer a part.’
However as these thoughts
coursed through my mind, my eyes shifted to my 12-ear old son sitting across
from me. He was as sad as the rest of us
were and seemed so fragile and vulnerable at the moment.
From somewhere the thought
came, ‘Wait a minute. For all you have
lost, there is still much remaining that is worthy of love. You have a family who needs you, a career,
and a life that beckons to be fulfilled.’
That was the moment that I resolved to rejoin the human race and,
although still filled with excruciating pain,
I stooped over and began to
pick up the pieces of a shattered life and set out to explore what could be
made of what was left.”
Psychologist Victor Frankel
called this “our final human freedom.”
Although we cannot determine
what happens to us in life, we can choose how we will respond. [3]
John Claypool chose to let a terrible loss become not
a defining moment but a refining moment.
As we are tested and tried,
caught in traps and snares, walked on by others, burdened with difficulties,
and pass through fire and
flood -- and many of us have been there or may be there now --
we come to learn some answers
to the question of suffering.
Our God is a God of steadfast
love, who walks with us through these tests and trials,
and brings us out to a
spacious place. We have a choice to
make every time we face one of these tests.
Will this challenge, this
event, this struggle be a defining moment?
Or will it be a refining moment, when we can see the
face of God reflected in our lives?