In this week which we call “Holy” the Psalms will guide the sermons. The Psalms have served as something like the Prayer Book for the faithful for 2,500 years. One of the things that I so value about our Anglican tradition is that it is saturated in Scripture. Nearly all of our liturgy comes from Scripture and there is hardly a time when we gather for worship that a Psalm is not said or sung. When we pray the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, we read at least 2 Psalms each day and the entire Psalter once a month. The Psalms are a companion to the faithful, helping us to sing praises to God, to lament, to find comfort, and to guide us in faith. This was true for Jesus as well – the Psalms served as a prayer book for him; he even died with a psalm on his lips, showing us the importance of this book for our spiritual lives. So it seems meet and right to focus on the Psalms this Holy Week.
Yesterday,
on Palm Sunday, we learned from Psalm 31 and tonight it is a portion of Psalm
36. The Collect for Holy Monday also helps to frame this sermon as it notes
that the way of the Cross is none other than the way of life and peace.
Immediately, we have to note the dissonance between these ideas. The Cross is
an instrument of death and violence, the very opposites of life and peace. I
recently came across a definition of mystery that I very much appreciate –
mystery is not a way of saying that something is a problem we cannot solve,
rather mystery describes a reality in which, the deeper we go into it, makes us
question everything that we thought we knew.
In
this sense, Holy Week is a mystery. How the betrayal, suffering, and death of
Jesus was done for us and for our salvation is a mystery in that we can’t fully
explain it, and yet the Cross is what makes sense of everything else. The Cross
is the way of life and peace, which makes us reconsider what life is truly all
about and what peace really looks like.
Psalm
36 guides us in going deeper into this mystery of our salvation. In verse 5, we
hear of God’s all-surpassing love – it reaches to the heavens, it is priceless,
and it is what we feast abundantly on. God’s love is something we try too often
to put boundaries around. While we might not go so far as to say that God
doesn’t love that group of people, we have a hard time seeing God’s love for
them as our own love for them. If I’m meeting someone for the first time and I
have no previous knowledge of them, I’m going to be going on first impressions,
which, as we all know, can be wrong. If they say something wrong or have a faux
pas, I might judge them for it. But what if I’m meeting someone for the first
time but someone I very much trust and admire has told me that this stranger is
actually quite a wonderful and lovely person. I’m going to very likely give
them the benefit of the doubt in a way I otherwise wouldn’t. Well, that’s what
God’s love does. I might not know anything about someone, but I can be
confident that God loves them. And that love not only transforms them, but it
transforms my relationship with them. That’s the mystery of love, it makes me
question my judgments and intuitions that are less than loving. God’s love has
no limits.
And,
most certainly, this applies to ourselves as well as it does to strangers.
There is no situation in which we can be separated from the love of God. St. Paul
assures us of this in Romans when he writes, “neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” No mistake, no omission, no
doubt, no sin, not even death can separate us from the love of God. There are
so many things to worry about in life, but whether or not we are loved doesn’t
need to be on that list because God’s love reaches to the heavens.
And
likewise, God’s righteousness and justice are as strong as the mountains and
deep as the ocean which are different ways of saying the same thing – we can
trust and count on God. We don’t have to worry about there ever being a scarcity
with God. Even if things don’t work out the way we expected, it doesn’t mean
that the story is over. This is why we can pray so audaciously as to connect
peace to the Cross. Yes, the Cross is incredibly unpeaceful – it is violent, it
is gruesome, it is unsettling. But God’s righteousness and justice are stronger
and deeper than the Cross is disturbing. Through the Cross, God was working out
salvation and bringing peace all that had been distorted by Sin and Death. If
it doesn’t look like peace that simply means that God is still at work and that
at the bottom of the depths, there is always hope for God’s peace which passes
all understanding.
The
Psalm says that “with God is the well of life, and in God’s light we see
light.” We only know what life is when we look at God. We would not know that
the way of the cross is the way of life and peace had not Jesus showed it to
us. If the way of the cross were not the way of life and peace, we wouldn’t
know who Jesus of Nazareth was. He would have been lost to history, just as the
thousands of others who were executed as criminals of the Roman Empire. Without
the cross, we would have every reason to believe that they were right – that
peace comes through victory, that violence is the way of peace.
CS
Lewis is famous for writing, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun
has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.”
Or, as the Psalmist had said some 2,500 years earlier, “In God’s light, we see
light.” In God’s light, we see and interpret everything else. You might know
that over the past few months, we’ve been doing some much needed painting in
the church offices – it had only been about 30 years. Well, when we were
looking at paint samples, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, the light makes all
the difference. Turn the lights off and the color completely changes. The walls
opposite windows with natural light looked different than the samples on walls
with only lightbulbs shining on them. The light completely changes what we see
and how things appear. And it is only by God’s light do we properly see
everything else. It is only through the prism of the cross that we see abundant
life and true peace. With the cross at the center, we can pray with confidence
as Psalm 36 would have us to do that God will continue to show us
loving-kindness and favor.
Holy
Week is about the mystery of our salvation that comes through the love of God
in Christ crucified. How it is that the cross is the way of life and peace is a
mystery would have us question everything else we thought was a settled matter.
It calls us to reexamine our allegiances, our priorities, our core convictions.
As one of the great hymns of our faith puts it, “When I survey the wondrous
cross where the young Prince of Glory died, my richest gain I count but loss,
and pour contempt on all my pride… Were the whole realm of nature mine, that
were an offering far too small; love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my
life, my all.” Amen.
