Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, January 15th, 2023
When John the Baptist’s followers came to Jesus to determine whether or not he was the one, Jesus did not give them any great proof. We hear no famous speech from him at this point. He did no miracles for them. Jesus only responded saying, “Come and see!” When did they know that Jesus indeed was who they had been searching for all their lives? Something happened there, something in their conversation with Jesus. Like so many Bible stories, this story skips a lot. It skips things we would like to know, such as the details of this first conversation between Jesus and his earliest followers. The reason why the Bible, book of spiritual exercises that it is, does this is that it wants us to notice what is not said and then inquire into those places and think for ourselves with the help of what it does say.
Where would we look to recover that missing conversation? Let’s look for it in today’s Psalm. The psalms are so unusual and special within the Bible because the voice we find there is not God’s direct voice. It is our own. It is the voice of the disciples we are searching for. It is the human voice expressing in 150 different poetic songs all the emotions of human life. It does this without judgment and with disarming honesty. To the dismay of the moralists of every century, cries for vengeance are found there right next to songs of gratitude and celebrations of peace. It is not the case that the Bible loses its moral compass in these passionate words or condones every feeling there expressed. The point is that the Bible knows how many contradicting feelings charge through the human heart in every moment of awareness. These feelings are there in the Psalms because they are in our hearts already before we ever begin to read. They erupt from the heart in an untargeted manner apart from our choosing. In even the best of us, in any given moment, intense emotions can burst forth inside us and flood our rational capacities.
Fierce hearts such our ours need more than a stringent moral code or even lofty ethical ideals. We need something else more fundamental. In the Psalms, God gives us the words to say back to him. The Creator gives us words for the kind of hearts we have. There are few things that we need more than this. There are so many occasions when I feel something deeply, but I am not sure what I am feeling or what to do with that feeling. The heart can be like a dark forest with no visible path into it. Feelings can be like clouds floating through the heart and mind that resist being grasped or contained. My feelings seem to know things that I don’t know in a conscious way, but I can’t explain to you why that’s true. I don’t know how long they will last. If it is a bad feeling, I often don’t know how to chase the cloud away. If it is a good feeling, I don’t know how to make it stay. What I do know is that these amorphous cloudlike feelings seem to want a name. When a feeling can be named, I feel relief. “Ah, that is what this is. This is what I am feeling.” I’m suddenly less isolated, less alone, because I can explain to other people what I am feeling. I have a word for it. It is the words that I put to my feelings that bring me into the shared human experience where I realize that others understand how I feel.
You parents know this power of naming emotions. Your infants have the full range of human emotions but no words. Babies have feelings without knowing what they mean. They don’t know what is harmless and what is life threatening. Facing life full of feeling, they don’t know when it is time to panic and when it is safe to be calm until they receive from you the way to name their experience. None of us here first heard the words “I love you” initially from our own lips. We first heard these words from someone else looking at us. It was only after that that we first were able to look at the feeling welling up in our own hearts and say, “Ah, I know what that is, I love you, too.” We were given words by our parents to say back to them. It is only after that that we get a sense of how much we needed to be given those words in order to come to understand our own hearts. For better or worse, we discover who we are in the words of others.
When young children play, it is inevitable that they will eventually fall down or bump up against hard objects. They feel their first flashes of pain and cry and scream. In that situation, it is always striking to me how they will ask a parent with utter sincerity, “Look, does it hurt?” If it is not terrible, the parent will give the wound a little kiss and say it is only “a scrape.” The child names the pain “scrape,” calms down, and resumes playing. If you are that parent, you feel like you have magical powers because you made the pain endurable with only a kiss and a name. But if the parent panics, so does the child. The power to name the pain, the joy, the love, and the hope is a tremendous one.
It could go without saying that a lot depends upon whose words we latch onto, whose words will supply the name for what we feel, whose words will assure us that we are alright when we are, and whose words will prompt us to action when we are in danger. It matters whose words will supply the path through the dark inner forest. Of course, when we are very young, we don’t get to choose. But maturity enables us to learn new words and to plot new paths through the heart. For generations of Christians, the psalms have supplied the words that name the feelings of the heart. They take the untargeted surge of passion and place it into the whole grand biblical story of God’s saving relationship with his people. That story channels our passions into the deep streams of Biblical faith. By giving us moment by moment the words that our hearts need, we are given a path through the forest and the pleasant discovery of other people traveling the same path who speak the same language because they were given the same words. The healing we need rarely has to do with ridding ourselves of a particular feeling. Instead, the feeling needs to be seen, known, named, and given a home with others that are good to it.
If you learn how to use the psalms, you will find this healing process extended to you week after week in 150 variations. The psalm always follows the first scriptural reading because it is our human words of response to God’s word. In today’s psalm, the psalmist in prayer sees that the God who made him “takes no pleasure in sacrifice and burnt offerings.” But cruel sacrifices are what gods demand. Story after story from the ancient world speak of gods demanding the blood sacrifice of animals and even children in order to be satisfied. Whatever name one gives the gods of modern nations, whether it be national security, greed, personal success, or fame, they all demand sacrifice. Little has changed from the perspective of the heart. In his heart, with words naming his own feelings, the psalmist becomes free of the power these ancient gods had over him and sees that his Creator demands no such sacrifice of him. His heart responds to this insight by exclaiming, “Behold [or look at me], I come [to you].” This sounds like the response of Jesus’s first followers to his invitation to “Come and see.”
Why does the Psalmist come? Because when the outer voice demanding sacrifice is quieted, he hears an inner voice speaking within saying, “I love to do your will, O my God; [because] your law [or Word] is deep in my heart.” When he listens within, he realizes that that it his voice, the voice of his true self. It is there because God had already long before spoken the word within him, God had already “put a new song in his mouth,” and it was “a song of praise to our God.” Making these words his own, he is able to express how it was this God who all along had “heard his cry and lifted him out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay, and set his feet upon the rock and made his footing sure.” He is like that child that expresses its love for the parent with words that that same parent first gave in response to a cry.
This is but one small example of the immense spiritual riches to be found in our weekly exercise of singing the psalms. They are words that give us way to name feelings that we may not even be aware of. They are words that allow us to hear a voice we may not be able to hear otherwise, even if it is the voice of our true selves crying out so deeply within that–to hear it for the first time–we need this help from without. They are words that don’t shut us down or close us in with judgment, but open up paths of feeling for us to follow. By renewing the conversation within, and supplying fresh words for the feelings, we have the opportunity to grow.
After the first followers of Jesus, Simon and Andrew, responded to Jesus’ outward call for them to “come and see,” did they hear the inner word within themselves that assured them that they indeed had found the one they had been looking for all their lives? It was only when they heard their own voices, like a teacher within, saying who Jesus was for them. Seeing, hearing, touching Jesus, they heard the voice of recognition within themselves agreeing that this man Jesus is who they want to follow and ultimately be like. When Jesus met Simon, he named him, “Peter.” It was an odd thing to do and was an act that would have meant nothing if Simon had not looked down into his soul and heard another more inward voice that said, “Yes Jesus, I am Peter. I am a rock and from now on I know–in the words of today’s Psalm–that my footing will be solid and sure.” In the end, it is this inner voice that is the only fully persuasive one. It is the one that we need to hear now more than ever.
In hearing God’s Word spoken to you, may your hearts, like the first followers of Jesus, find their deepest feelings named by their Creator so that your feet may be set upon a rock, your footing be made sure, and a straight path open before you.
Amen.