Back to School Lesson 2

This is my Back to School sermon series, meaning that a few weeks ago I admitted to you that I’ve fallen off in my Bible study habits.  I’m renewing those efforts by preaching on texts that are less familiar to me, that I’ve never preached on before—so I have to study.  And I’m enjoying that—it’s good to learn new things.  Today we’re in Psalm 78 and right at the start what I have to share is that I wish I had so much more time with this text.  I wish there had been more time to study and prepare, and I wish I had much more time to preach this morning because there is just so much going on in this text that is worth talking about.

Psalm 78 is the second longest of the Psalms, 119 is by far the longest at 176 verses, but Psalm 78 has 72 verses—so we didn’t read the whole thing this morning.  These longer psalms often share history in the form of poetry; you might compare that to epic poems of the ancient Greeks or even to modern songs like Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire.  The point isn’t primarily to report history, but to remember and reflect on it.  But why?  What’s the point?

When I read the Bible in preparation for a sermon, I often start by wondering about what problem or issue is being addressed by this text?  What question might a person be asking to which this text gives an answer, or at least, a response.  The issue that spoke to me in this text is, “What kind of life do I want to live?  What message do I want my life to speak?”  More specifically, “Do I want the way I live, the things I say and do to show negativity, criticism, and despair, or do I want my life to speak of possibility, encouragement, and hope?  How will my life speak?”  Let’s take a look at Psalm 78 together and I’ll tell you how I got there.

The verse of this Psalm that really spoke to me is in verse 4 where the poet writes, “we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.”  This is a Psalm about what we teach our children, what we pass on to the next generation, and what we tell ourselves about life in the world.  Is this a world of corruption and despair, or is it a world of hope and possibility?  What do we wish to teach our children and tell ourselves about life in this world?

The answer comes in looking at the rest of the Psalm’s 72 verses, which remember the amazing things God has done in history; tragically, it also remembers the lack of gratitude human beings tend to show in response.  So often God is showing up with grace, and hope; and we’re too busy to notice, too stuck in our own ways to care, or too pessimistic to believe.

According to biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, this psalm is one of many Old Testament references back to a foundational story in the Bible, found in Genesis 18.  The story is about Abraham and Sarah.  This is the ancient couple to whom God first gave the promise:  from you will come a great nation and descendants like the stars in the sky.  But Abraham and Sarah waited for decades, and the promise was  not fulfilled; they never had a single child.  As this story begins, they are quite old, and one day three travelers appear at the door of their tent in the wilderness.  Abraham and Sarah welcome the travelers, who turn out to be angels, but when the angels remind them of the promise and inform them that it is about to be fulfilled, Sarah overhears them and laughs out loud.  As many of you will know, the promise turns out to be true, Sarah does conceive and bears a son, who continues the lineage that will become  the twelve great tribes of Israel.  Also from this family come the descendants of Hagar and her son Ishmael to which Islam traces its roots, and so all the great religions of the western world find their foundation in this story—which is a story of imaginative hope!

The point of this story about Sarah laughing and the reason this story is foundational in the Bible is this:  you never, never, question God’s freedom!  You never take away the idea that God can act and act in power and glory in the face of anything that might cause you to fear or despair.  God’s ways may not be our ways, and what you want may not always be what you get, but God’s freedom will not be laughed at—for with God, all things are possible.

This story, from Genesis 18, is what Psalm 78 is talking about when it says “we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord.”  Our children will not grow up as hopeless or helpless; no, they will grow up believing that they were placed in the world by God of loving, grace-filled imagination, whose freedom runs wild in the world.

Psalm 78 goes on to give other examples of the ways that story about Abraham and Sarah is relived again and again in the history of the Bible.  One of them is the story of manna in the wilderness.  In that story, the Israelites have left Egypt, they’ve been released from slavery, but they don’t know how to be free. Even though they have seen God bring the great plagues over their slavemasters in Egypt and the the Red Sea parted in two, somehow when the people find themselves free and liberated on the other side of the sea, they come to fear that they will die there of hunger.  So the Lord sends bread from heaven to feed and reassure them.  And if we had enough time, I’d unpack that story for you as well, because it’s much more complex than many of us realize, with little nudges and turns of phrase that reveal it to be a story about so many big ideas, about faith and doubt, scarcity and abundance, generosity and sharing, and learning to live as a people who are bold and not afraid.  This—says Psalm 78—this is the kind of story we want to teach our children, this is what we want them to know about living a good life in God’s world, and the Psalm is 72 verses long because it references story after story in the history of the world where God shows up in imaginative hope again and again and again.

Developmental psychologists will affirm this biblical idea of what we want to teach our children.  Erik Erikson’s classic theory of psychosocial development claims that at every stage of life, human beings who develop in a healthy way are making a series of choices—as we grow, we are learning our way into trust instead of mistrust, industry instead of inferiority, intimacy instead of isolation, generativity instead of stagnation, integrity instead of despair.  This is the path healthy people are on.  Each of these stages of development run the risk of going wrong when conditions are not healthy, and all of them are built on the same basic idea:  we are trying, in the midst of life’s challenges, to become people who experience hope and faith in a world they know and trust, rather than despair in a world they see as impossible.  Being on the right side of this kind of development depends on support from good parents, friends, teachers, and guides, who help us to grow into mature people.  This is why we have to teach our children.

Similarly, God’s approach to teaching us to live with hope isn’t just a bunch of naivety and positive thinking.  If you read Psalm 78 in its entirety, it’s full of not only wonderful stories about how God shows up in the world, but also hard memories—chastisements in fact—about the many ways that humankind keeps on turning away from God.  Each time that God shows up to renew the relationship with humanity, it’s because we’ve gone astray, and a strong element of what Psalm 78 wants to teach us is to learn from the past and stop doing that.  Trust in God, and stop leaning on your own understanding.

Erik Erikson argued that those developmental stages don’t end in childhood, they last our whole lives, and in the same way, this Psalm asks, “what will we teach our children?” but that question is equally about how we all are living as adults.

Grown-ups too need to live with a sense of imagination too:  Walter Brueggemann, who I mentioned before, says stories like these are trying to teach us a “hopeful imagination.”  We too often limit our ideas of imagination to the child who wants to be a Disney princess or a Transformer, but imagination is, in fact, how adults make the world go round.  Imagination—the notion that things can be different than they are—is at the heart of every great invention and innovation—that’s probably obvious.  But imagination is also what gets us unstuck from the greatest challenges and frustrations in life.  The ability to imagine things as different and better than they are is the key to fixing a broken relationship with a spouse or a child, finding our way through a crisis with career or our finances, a struggle with addiction, or dullness in our spiritual lives.  Collective, social problems also require hopeful imagination—that’s usually what it takes to end conflicts like the terrible ones we see today in Sudan, in Gaza and in Ukraine, or in our own country around intractable problems like opioid abuse or gun violence.  Do you remember the story I began with this morning—about the Peace and Hope Lifestyle?  I have no way of knowing or explaining how an individual who spent 15 years in prison could imagine a new and different life apart from crime and gangs—but if he can do it, so can any of us.  The only explanation I can give you is the power of the story of God.

Perhaps you think that you’re too old or too reasonable for imagination, perhaps you hear these Bible lessons and think to yourself, well thanks Adam, but I don’t really need imagination—you see I’ve been around the block and I’ve seen a few things; I know how the real world works.  Well, that’s imagination too.  Based on our life experience, all of us can look at what is in front of us and imagine the worst.  How many of you have sat worrying about things, imagining the worst of what might happen, stuck in a cycle of despair.  Psalm 78 admits as much—this is the kind of imagining that humans usually do.  The question is:  Is that how you want to live?

I know that some of you will say that life doesn’t always turn out hopeful—that sometimes the bad news comes to pass.  You would be right, and the world is full of that news, I hear it every day, same as you.  It’s important to note that the Psalms talk about that too.  Perhaps you’ve heard these quotations:  “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept…; Out of the depths I cry to you God…, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me…?”  These also are the words of the psalms—and they each have their purpose.  But folks, these are not philosophical discourses, meant to unpack every angle of a problem and leave no idea unexplored.  No!  It’s poetry!  And the poem we read today is about a reality we have all seen in people we have met.  We all know folks who walk through the world with dismay you can read on their faces, convinced that the world is going to hell—and they want to take you with them!  And we all know people who are full of hope and possibility, ready with a good word about what God has done—and they too want to bring you along.  And the reality is that most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle, trying to decide which way we will go and who we are going to be.