Message 10-23-05
Series: Going Deep
Scripture: Psalm 145
Title: Three Chickens
Psalm 145
A psalm of praise. Of David.
1 I will exalt you, my God the King;
I will praise your name for ever and ever.
2 Every day I will praise you
and extol your name for ever and ever.
3 Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise;
his greatness no one can fathom.
4 One generation will commend your works to another;
they will tell of your mighty acts.
5 They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty,
and I will meditate on your wonderful works.
6 They will tell of the power of your awesome works,
and I will proclaim your great deeds.
7 They will celebrate your abundant goodness
and joyfully sing of your righteousness.
8 The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
9 The LORD is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made.
10 All you have made will praise you, O LORD;
your saints will extol you.
11 They will tell of the glory of your kingdom
and speak of your might,
12 so that all men may know of your mighty acts
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
13 Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and your dominion endures through all generations.
The LORD is faithful to all his promises
and loving toward all he has made.
14 The LORD upholds all those who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down.
15 The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food at the proper time.
16 You open your hand
and satisfy the desires of every living thing.
17 The LORD is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.
18 The LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.
19 He fulfills the desires of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and saves them.
20 The LORD watches over all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.
21 My mouth will speak in praise of the LORD.
Let every creature praise his holy name
for ever and ever.
We are going to get a little mystical today. There’s no way to avoid it. Mysticism can make some people uncomfortable because it can make them think that we’re talking about weirdness that has nothing to do with real life. But that’s not Christian mysticism. Christian mysticism has transcendence about it but it is mixed with an imminence that is both Biblical and practical. Now that sounds like I know what I’m talking about doesn’t it. You start tossing around words like transcendence and imminence and you start sounding like it shouldn’t be this early on a Sunday morning.
But keep hanging on to that word “practical”. There’s a practical touch with real life that’s in there but we Christians are a mystical people. Christian mysticism has a transcendent aspect. We are talking about something outside the normal human experience. When we say that God became a man and that he lived and died and came back to life, we are speaking outside the normal human experience. And because we talk about that we need to remind ourselves that Christianity is mystical. When we say that we are the body of Christ, when we bow and pray together we also claim that God is imminent, that is he is right here with us. When we say that Jesus was God and that he lived on the planet and said that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that is, at the end of our finger tips. We’re saying that we experience God as both transcendent and imminent. God is both beyond our comprehension and reveals himself to us daily. We are a mystical people. Christians are mystical.
Today we’re starting a series of messages called “Going Deep” and for the next few weeks we’ll be examining the words of hymns that have been passed down through the ages. The first one we’ll look at is “All Creatures of Our God and King”. The words of this hymn are by the man we call St. Francis who lived some 800 years ago. When we get involved with someone like Saint Francis we need to feel okay about mysticism, because Francis went off into mysticism in a big way. If all we do is say that Francis was weird then we miss the point of his good work. So let’s explore this a bit so we can get into the depth of this hymn.
Study:
Christianity is a mystical religion. You may not think about it that way and you may in fact not want to think about it that way. You may want Christianity to deal with real life. The issue really comes down to what is real life and how do you experience it. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, “real” life is when there’s no mention of God. The idea of God is too mystical for some people. But when you expect that God is in your life and in relationship with you, you can’t get away from mysticism. But I think it is important to see how the mystical interacts with the daily life we live.
God calls us into relationship with him and that is a mystical union. It transcends the normal human experience and opens our eyes to a larger world than just the one of our private experience. Some mysticism removes us from the world and we talk about out-of-body experiences and otherworldly demonstrations of God’s power. If you read the book of Revelation you get a taste of that kind of thing. But we aren’t all having visions. The Bible leads most of us to a mysticism that gets us more in touch with life. It makes us more deeply engaged with the everyday. In regular Christian meditation we don’t empty ourselves the way that some mystical experiences or religions do. We don’t separate ourselves from the world. We fill ourselves up with the presence of God and we get more connected with the world.
Our spirit is not separate from our body. The mystical in Christianity fills our whole selves. Spirit is not separated from body. We have an oneness that is not broken apart. We get more in touch with real life – not less.
So when we experience the mystical nature of God we connect with the world, this world, our everyday world. The flow of God’s will and activity is seen in everyday things and in fact in everything. So we can call on the all created things to join us with their own voices and sing.
Christians do just that on a regular basis. Has any of you ever called on every created being to join you in praise of God?
Song:
Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
As Christians we have done this on a regular basis. This is what Francis did. There’s a very famous story about Francis that says that he was prompted by God to go to a place and preach to the assembled congregation. He went to the place and found no one there. So he waited. Soon he realized that up in the trees there were tons of birds. They were the only congregation he could see so he preached to them, telling them to praise God who had given them their feathers as clothes, their songs for praise and who fed them without them having to work.
Now we can say what we want about that story and it may prove that Francis was a little weird, but suppose he wasn’t just weird. Suppose he was doing what he was told by the Spirit of God. What affect would preaching to the birds have on him?
In our Psalms today we read how we can recognize God’s work in creation. The Bible prompts us to see ourselves as creatures. We are created in the same way everything else is created and it’s good to recognize that. I think that’s the kind of thing that Francis would learn. He’s a creature. We all need to be reminded of our creatureliness. It’s good to recognize that we have a relationship with God that is like anything else he created
At the same time that we have been given a responsibility to care for our planet as stewards. Some people see us as in charge of the planet – that everything has been placed under our feet – but then some people take that to be a license to exploit and use up the planet. That’s not the way Scripture describes our role. The Bible suggests that we’re all stewards.
We are taught in Scripture that we are to listen to nature and we are to talk to nature. Do you talk to you plants? That might sound a little weird to you, but think about it.
I mean, let’s get this practical. The mystical should have a practical edge to it. It should be something that makes sense in everyday life, even if it touches the things that are out of the ordinary. Let’s talk about listening to life. Let me tell you a story.
A young couple in the church of a man I knew struggled to have children. They finally gave up and then, surprise, they learned she was pregnant. And then they learned that she was expecting twins. They couldn’t have been happier. It had been such a harsh experience trying to get pregnant and to suddenly have their prayers answered in this way was amazing. Then some time into the pregnancy they got terrible news. Something was wrong. One of the babies had died. The other had too much wrong with it to survive. The likelihood was that it was going to die also. If it survived then the list of things it would be dealing with was going to be overwhelming. It wouldn’t last long in any case. The couple was devastated.
They fell into a crisis of faith. The man I knew, their pastor, walked alongside them as they struggled. The husband, in particular, had deep trouble. He was furious, heartbroken and refused help. Finally, he agreed to go with the pastor to a silent retreat, but he went as an angry man who wanted nothing to do with God. At one point the participants in the retreat were asked to take a walk outside and to look at nature, to see what they could of how God revealed himself there. They were to come back in a bit and share what they saw. The husband determined that he was going to see nothing. He went out to a hillside where there was a tall, cement set of stairs. He decided that he was going to spend the time walking up the stair, looking only at the concrete and seeing nothing.
When the group gathered again he came back and fell into tears. He told them his plan and his purpose. And he told them how he had been walking up the steps staring only at them and then a strange thing happened. Suddenly all he couldn’t see the steps clearly. He knew he was crying he said. He was crying because he was so angry and as he cried it appeared that the steps were all lined with cracks. But then he said he realized that the cracks were real. There were cracks in every step ahead of him and in each of the cracks there were little plants, tiny flowers growing up. “I saw life,” he said, “Life was getting through. It couldn’t be stopped.” What he found he told them was that he was not alone in his pain and emptiness. He heard God speaking into his heart in the tiny cracks that were there as well.
We need to listen to nature. We need to hear God’s voice all around us. We need to take time to get into nature and be a part of it. And I believe we need to talk to it. We should talk with animals and talk with every other created thing. And I want to support that suggestion. It will feel weird and awkward, but try it sometime. Try telling the sun to do its job. Tell the wind to act responsibly. Tell the water you see to show God and God’s ways.
What do we get from this? We get a reminder that we as human beings have been made a little lower than the angels, but higher and in responsibility over all living things. We get reminded that we are creatures, created by God and not somehow better than the rest of the planet. We are like them and we should join with them in praise of God by living out our praise.
Here’s an interesting thing I just learned. Do you realize that we can never share the same point of view? No matter how close we get together, even putting our eyes up next to each other, we’re still just a little distance away. But you know what will draw us closer, listening. We can all share a moment of hearing, but even that is still somewhat separated by what’s going on inside us and how each of us is interpreting what we’re hearing. But there is something we can do that will bring us even more in line with each other.
We can sing. Think about it. When we sing together, when we unite our voices, we suddenly are more closely linked with each other than at any other time, in any other experience. Suppose we could sing with every created part of our planet. Suppose everything could express praise to God. In our song today we are calling out to the rest of life to join us in the thing that ties us more closely together than almost anything else we can do.
We can share the experience of living in relationship with God. We can share it with each other and we can share it with the world. So, talk with the animals.
