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Psalm 146 1 Hallelujah! Praise the Lord, O my soul! 2 Put not your trust in rulers, 3 When they breathe their last, they return to earth, 4 Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help! 5 Who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them; 6 Who gives justice to those who are oppressed, 7 The Lord sets the prisoners free; 8 The Lord loves the righteous; 9 The Lord shall reign for ever, your God, O Zion, Hallelujah! |
Knowing God
The longer I’m on this spiritual journey, the more I marvel at the mystery of what it means to know God. People talk about it a lot in the Bible and in religious circles. I feel like I’ve run across people who make me think: “That person knows God.” But for me, the mystery deepens with every passing day as I’m increasingly aware of the limits of my ability to comprehend what it means to know God.
I’m thinking about all this in response to the psalm printed above, a psalm you may have heard in church yesterday. It comes near the end of the Book of Psalms, when the tone shifts to a focus on praise. We’ve heard all kinds of voices in the psalter: lament, fear, vengeance, regret, forsakenness, even some whining. And as the collection of 150 psalms winds up, again and again the theme is praise, which is really about celebrating the character of God. For those of us who sense audacity in the claim to know God, psalms like this one give us insight into the character of the Holy One. Of all the things that the psalmist could say, these are the kinds of things that merit our praise.
God is the one who brings justice to people who are oppressed, food to the hungry. God sets prisoners free, opens the eyes of the blind. God lifts up those who are bowed down. God cares for the stranger, and sustains the orphan and widow.
That picture of God is reflected in the inaugural sermon Jesus gave in his hometown synagogue (to mixed reviews). As recorded in Luke 4, Jesus stood before the congregation and read from the prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
In a bold affirmation of the incarnation (another fathomless mystery), Jesus seems to claim that he is one with the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. They share the same character, the same heart. Jesus thereby gives us a window on that divine character. Again, it’s an audacious thing for Jesus to infer. So much so that the congregation tried to throw Jesus over a cliff. I’ve had negative reactions to sermons, but this is a whole other level.
There is, of course a sense in which we understand this divine ministry as symbolic. All of us have hunger, hunger for meaning or relationship. All of us can cite oppression from the judgement of the world. All of us are blind in some way, failing to see what is right before us, failing to see Christ in all persons, for instance. All of us are prisoners of some sort, captive to addiction or resentment. Our faith tells us that Jesus can reach each one of us in those places with liberating, life-giving, loving presence.
But we should be careful not to over spiritualize this. The church over the centuries, on good days, has recognized that a big part of its ministry is taking this vision quite literally: offering food to those who are hungry, worshipping God by going to the kitchen. The church has recognized its call to healing ministry, offering welcome to the stranger. There are ways great and small we can do that. We can do that in our common life with the ways we vote and the ways we advocate for justice. We do that when we fulfill the baptismal promises to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to love neighbor as self, to strive for justice and peace, to respect the dignity of every human being.
The psalmist makes the following connection for us: We do all those things because that is what the God we worship does. We do all those things because that is what Jesus came to do. We do all those things because we are now Christ’s hands and feet in the world. And here’s another mystery. As we serve in this way, we not only get to know more about God’s character. We come to know God, to enter into deeper relationship with the Holy One.
As St. Paul said, we now see through a glass darkly. May we have eyes to see the needs around us and to reflect God’s character this week. There’s probably a specific way you can do that. I bet your church can help make that possible. Give it a try and see if in any way it gives a glimmer of the character of the God we worship, the God who came to us in the form of a servant.
–Jay Sidebotham
