Make Still
Psalm 107

May 7, 2006


As confirmed People of the Book, something is always going on when we read about the characters and events of the Scriptures. It isn’t really that we want to become a particular Biblical character - or have the ability to do so - but we find ourselves participating in their dilemmas and adventures, lose some of the same battles and win some others. So you don’t become David or Jonah, but you discover that their problems are much the same as the ones you tussle with.

While this involves individuals, the church as a collective community also lives and participates in the old old story that keeps becoming all too new. The Old Testament is a huge collection of books that are often quite different from one another. Since they are perceived collectively as Scripture, a lot of church people assume that there is a common theme or thread that ties all the stories and prophecies, genealogies and prophecies, psalms and proverbs together. A thread has never been definitively found, so instead there are a handful of different scenarios used almost at the same time, three main ones, in fact.

Some see the giving of the Ten Commandments at Sinai and the covenant established with God as the central event. Lots of churches are gathered around the conscious action of covenanting together to do God’s will. Churches in the Reformed wing of Protestantism are covenantal congregations, and that includes the United Church with our thinly masked “mission statements.”

The Exodus from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land is the most striking Biblical story, and churches that have experienced slavery, oppression and discrimination, such as the Black Churches, see themselves as participants in the march towards freedom. Usually there is no trouble finding a Pharaoh or a good idea of just what the Promised Land should look like and where it is, flowing with contemporary milk and honey. Adopting or identifying a Moses is a more careful task: many feel called to be a Moses, few really are.

The third story is a variation on the theme of Exodus, that of the Exile from Babylonian Captivity. The idea is not so much slavery, as deprivation and isolation from one’s culture. Isaiah, in particular, described the return from Exile in the language of a Second Exodus. Being an exile, however, is more of a permanent state. A few years back Stanley Haeurwas and William Willimon wrote Resident Aliens, a book about the contemporary church that showed how we are no longer the dominant culture and, in fact, are living as resident aliens, a modern translation of sojourner, in an alien culture that views the Church, Christians and Christianity with suspicion. To attend a church to worship is now an almost brazeningly unique act, no longer the cultural norm. Are we not resident aliens when we no longer recognize what George W. Bush proposes as Christianity to be Christian? It is to such exiles that the Psalmist speaks in Psalm 107, and so the Psalmist sings our song as well.

There are all kinds of psalms and 107 is neither one of those whining defeated laments, nor one of those calls for the vengeance of God upon one’s enemies, nor even a meditation upon the wonderfulness of God’s law. It is a psalm of thanksgiving for deliverance - we have been exiled, but now are coming home to freedom. “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good.... Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!” In many a church still that is our clarion call for we sojourners in a strange land, let the redeemed of the Lord say so!

The reality of the Babylonian Exile was not one massive march home across the desert to Jerusalem of Hebrew exiles at the liberation of Cyrus the Great of Persia. They trickled home over a couple of centuries, and some did not make it, some got waylaid along the way.

Some of us have wandered in the desert wastes “looking but not finding a good place to live,” ending up exhausted and lost before calling upon God to direct their lives. Some of us were imprisoned but not for what we believed, not that idyllic martyr’s time in an oppressor’s jail, but convicted by our own arrogance as we declared we could do it on our own without the interference of God. The Psalmist speaks to those Jews who spent decades in Babylonian cells because they had ignored their God in Jerusalem, and then their walls came tumbling down. Still others became deathly ill, not the victims of an epidemic or influenza, but because of the way they had lived. Our generations have become specialists in living badly.

But no matter what mess we have made of our lives and our faith and our health, there is a refrain, an idea repeated again and again so that we get the idea. “Then, in your desperate condition, you called out to God. He got you out in the nick of time.” You can make a disaster of things for a long time, you can pretend that God doesn’t really play a role in your successful career, you can act as if God doesn’t exist and that you are self-sufficient, not needing another soul. But someday, whether you like it or not, you are going to be an exile, a resident alien, a stranger in a strange land. Yet God will be the only there to get you out in the nick of time.

Then there are those who go down to the sea in ships. You have to understand that the Israelites were land people, shepherds and farmers who lived in the highlands. The Philistines were the ones who controlled the sea in those days. The Israelites, after all, preferred to walk through the Red Sea than to sail over it. To be a sailor was an unusual occupation for an Israelite - you had to be different and unique to get on a ship and dare the stormy waves - an exile from the land, a resident alien more like Noah than the farmer rooted to his land.

Sort of like the Saskatchewan Navy. It was said that the Navy did recruit Saskatchewan natives during the war because a Saskatchewan lad was used to looking out and seeing nothing for miles and miles to the horizon and not having it bother him. There is no sailor, especially in non-modern times, who has not experienced a storm that threatened ship and life. Throw in the factors and iniquities of war and being on a ship is not the place for a person who ignores God. Just like on the prairie you can watch the forces of nature force their way into being. “Out at sea you saw GOD in action, saw his breathtaking ways with the ocean,” sings the Psalmist. War’s inhumanity wrenches nature into a diabolical force and we have seen its bitter fruits, not the least upon the Atlantic. Those who went down to the sea in ships during the long years of world conflict knew what the Psalmist was saying before he said it.

Once again, “then, in your desperate condition, you called out to God. He got you out in the nick of time. He quieted the wind down to a whisper, put a muzzle on all the big waves. And you were so glad when the storm died down, and he led you safely back to harbor.

War is not over with the last gun fired, for its effects last for generations. Being an exile does not end once you have found a home. God, nevertheless, makes all things still, creates peace in our souls, brings peace to the mess we make of our world, redeems us and starts us all over again as new creations in God’s creation. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so! Let all of God’s children say Amen!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan