Thursday, August 24, 2017

During the twelve or so weeks of summer, I make plans, right, on how to spend the time, not only with the kids but also on my own. And, lately, the past three or so summers, I mark a mid-week church service in the Calendar app. I feel the need to keep up "meeting together" (Hebrews 10:25) when the school-year programs go on break.

But for whatever reason, I hardly attend a mid-week service except for maybe once. Tonight, I was early, as usual. The parking lot was jammed but I'll be damned if I knew where everyone was. They weren't in the gathering space and they weren't in the sanctuary. Their wall clock in the gathering space is ten minutes slow but everyone goes by it. So, the few singers were still rehearsing and we let them finish up.

I sat towards the back thinking I would need to leave early. I thought they were ending James but they already had. The pastor wanted to do ten psalms, chapters 11-20; they had done 1-10 last summer. But first he wanted to hear whether anyone had experienced a miracle of God in the past week. A couple of people shared that God had provided opportunities to speak with their neighbors about him. "Divine appointments," they called them. I thought that was just a euphemism for when you're running late.

Not to be outdone, a woman named M--- shared about a friend who was going through a tough time with personal loss. As soon as she mentioned his association with Villanova University, I braced myself. The friend was a Catholic and M---, being a former Catholic herself, had all the answers: "How can a loving God ...?" "But they chose it ..." "I've never heard that before ..."

Somehow we have it all backwards, we believe folks who tell us things we've never heard before.

Then M--- related that the friend said her words sounded better than the Catholic Church and she said, "That's because this is better than the Catholic Church," and so on. And I listened, thinking, do people still say such things? They do. I looked at my watch, only five minutes into the service and someone was bragging on witnessing to a Catholic. 'Bout right.

Psalm 11 is short, only seven verses. The pastor read from the King James but the pew Bible was NIV. I followed along, flipping around as he took us to the end of Isaiah, 1 Thess. 4:11-12 (lead quiet lives, etc) and 1 Timothy 5:13 ("busybodies"). The idea about psalm 11 is that the Psalmist, taken to be David himself, was getting bad advice, in a way similar to Job. But rather than focus on present circumstances, that one person posited may be exaggerated in order to manipulate, the Psalmist reaffirms personal faith in God's sovereign position (in his holy temple, on his heavenly throne).

I thought the pastor glossed over words and phrases that are problematic, notably "the righteous" (in sharp contrast with "the wicked"), and when someone asked about it, he seemed uncomfortable that he didn't have a pat answer. He also stumbled over the strong language in verse 5, that the LORD "hates with a passion" (NIV). He wanted to insist that God hates the violence committed but not the person. Naturally, someone mentioned Jacob and Esau (Romans 9:13) and began to explain that since we are in the image of God and we have emotions, then God also has emotions. The anthropomorphism was getting a bit uncomfortable. And the emphasis on God's justice. I felt an impulse to give the pastor Cardinal Kasper's book but maybe that wouldn't do any good.

My own idea about this psalm and the psalms in general is that, as wisdom literature, they overstate matters, draw sharp contrasts between wicked and righteous, attempt to model godly living but at the same time the psalms aren't the most consistent place to begin at synthesizing a systematic theology. The psalms are filled with human emotion which is why they speak to us and soothe us.

Ultimately, there was an admonition to try to give good advice to others. Things wrapped up in about an hour and I didn't even need to leave early.

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