Psalm 126 Matt Mardis-LeCroy Des Moines November 26, 2015 I. Memory and Hope Good morning! Welcome to the worship of God here at Plymouth Church. No matter who you are, no matter where you are on life s journey, you are welcome here. It is Thanksgiving Day, and we are delighted that you have decided to spend some of it with us. Of course, most of us here this morning have some place else to be. But we are in luck. My colleague, the Rev. Miller-Coleman, has devised a most ingenious contrivance whereby my discourse may be kept to a reasonable length. [HOURGLASS HAPPENS]. Today is Thanksgiving Day a high holy day on the calendar of Congregational Christians. Today we pause to remember our roots, to recall where we come from and, most of all, to give thanks for all of God s goodness to us. And I don t know about you, but.i m not very good at that. Stopping and giving thanks, I mean. I get too busy. I get too distracted. I get fixated on some thing I think is important and I fail to notice, let alone give thanks, for all of God s goodness to me. Thanksgiving is hard. Thankfully, we have some help this morning, in Psalm 126. This psalm reflects the realities of a specific time and place. The place is Israel, the time about 500 years before the birth of Jesus, and the mood is mixed. The author of this little psalm has seen a lot both the dramatic deliverance of God s people and the deep disappointment that follows. The deliverance, in this case, is the end of Israel s exile. Six hundred years before Jesus was born, the Babylonian Empire is the biggest, baddest nation on the block, the uncontested sole superpower of the Ancient Near East. Empires live for conquest, and so in the year 587 Babylon does Babylon does best: it conquers the nation of Judah 1
and destroys the holy city of Jerusalem flattens its walls, burns its buildings and tears its temple to the ground. Most of the population is carried off into exile; forced to live as foreigners some six hundred miles from home. The experience of exile traumatizes God s people terrorizes God s people like nothing has before. 1 But seventy years later, something remarkable takes place; something that, in time, Israel will come to call a miracle: Babylon falls. A bigger, badder bully the empire of Persia claims for itself the title of Ancient Near Eastern Heavyweight Champion and forces Babylon into an early retirement. Then comes the miracle: Cyrus, the king of Persia, decrees the end of the exile. The prison gates swing open. God s people are going home. So they do some of them, anyway and the psalm opens recalling the giddy joy of that great homecoming day: When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy The return from exile is one of those pinch me moments, when life seems too good to be true, when you find yourself laughing, even at jokes that aren t funny; when you feel like you just might burst into song. Against all odds, Israel returns from exile. Only God could have done such a thing. And Israel is not alone in its amazement; even other nations even the pagan nations notice this mighty act of deliverance: Then it was said among the nations, The LORD has done great things for them. To which Israel can only answer in an astonished echo: The LORD has done great things for us, and we rejoiced. 2 The return from the exile is a dream come true. So you might expect the psalm to end at verse three, to go out on a high note: And they all lived happily ever after. But life rarely works that way, and neither does the Bible. The exile may have ended, but the letdown was yet to come. And so, at verse 4, the mood shifts significantly. The psalmist s attention turns from the happy memory of deliverance past to the urgent need for deliverance in the present: Restore our fortunes, O LORD, like the watercourses in the Negeb. 2
The end of the exile brings on a brand new batch of problems. All is not well in the New Jerusalem. The city still lies in ruins; the people probably came back from exile with the clothes on their backs and precious little else; they are hungry and anxious and insecure. The home they thought they had turned out to be a barren patch of wilderness, like the watercourses of the Negeb. The Negeb is the dry and desolate southern region of Judah. On average, it receives less than eight inches of rainfall annually. But when the rainy season comes, for a brief time the desert is drenched and the dry river beds run over with life giving water. 3 That is how the psalmist feels like a desert in need of a deluge, like thirsty ground that yearns for a drink. You did it before, O God. Now we need you to do it again. Restore our fortunes, O LORD. But strangely enough, Israel often does best in desperate moments like these. In the last two verses of the psalm, the writer looks forward to what will be. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves. This ending exhibits the kind of theological genius that got Israel through every exile time. In a bold and daring act, the psalmist re-imagines the current crisis as a season of opportunity as a seed time, a time to plant and water and wait, to do what we can, and then live in the hope of a harvest to come. 4 So there may be weeping for now, but joy is on the way. There may be scarcity right now, but soon we will shout for joy as we carry in the sheaves. God has delivered us before; God will deliver us again. And so the psalmist ends up on a note of joy. Those who went out weeping will return with shouts of joy. III. So if we want to give thanks this morning, the psalm can show us the way. This psalm suggests that thanksgiving can be found in a particular place; that thanksgiving resides at a specific address. Call it the intersection of memory and hope. Thanksgiving is a matter of memory looking back and calling to mind all the good things God has done for us and for our people. Today, at Plymouth Church, that means remembering a small Pilgrim band that crossed an ocean to live according to conscience. And it means remembering that when our ancestors came to these shores, they surely would not have made it through that first winter had it not been for the 3
hospitality of the native peoples. We came here as strangers, and they fed us. We came here as refugees, and they took us in. But memory must be honest. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our God, to remember and tell our own story truthfully. And that means remembering that our ancestors got a lot of things wrong. The landing at Plymouth Rock opened a terrible chapter in the lives of the native peoples of this continent. Some of the wealthy families at Plymouth plantation owned slaves. And rigid Puritan theology laid the foundation for witch trials and terrible persecutions. All of this is part of our story as well. We remember all of it; we give thanks for what is good; we ask God s mercy for the rest. We remember that, if we are descended from such people, we probably get a lot of things wrong as well. So we examine ourselves, we examine our privilege; we entertain the possibility that we might be wrong. Genuine thanksgiving arises in honest remembering. But thanksgiving is also a matter of hope. In a sermon to that same pilgrim band, aboard the Mayflower, John Robinson spoke the words that have come to mean so much to us: There is yet more light and truth to break froth from out God s holy word. In other words: God is still speaking, the best is yet to come. And God is still working: in us and through us, we hope; around us and in spite of us if need be. Our Pilgrim ancestors got a lot wrong, but God was at work in their midst. No doubt we get a lot of things wrong, but God is working still. We give thanks this morning because God has given us a vision of the world as it will be: A world where the orphan the widow, the forgotten and the vulnerable, the alien and the refugee, will form the center of our common concern. A world where the nations will beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. A world where everyone shall sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid; A world where all will be welcome and no one will be turned away. A world will all be fed and housed and clothed and cared for, a world where all will be well. I know it may seem this morning, on Thanksgiving Day 2015, that we still have a long way to go, but looking back to the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, I am reminded that we have come a long way already. God is faithful and God is good and God will do what God has promised -for us and for our world. So we remember. We hope. 4
We give thanks to God. Amen. Notes 1 Exile. The Harper Collins Bible Dictionary. Edited by Paul J. Achtemeier. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), pp.315-316. 2 A point made clear to me by Brueggemann et al in Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary on the NRSV Year B. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp.21-20. 3 Negeb, Ibid, pp.745-746. 4 John Calvin, Commentary on The Book of Psalms, Volume V. Translated by Rev. James Anderson. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), pp.95-103. Plymouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ 4126 Ingersoll Avenue Des Moines, Iowa 50312 Phone: (515) 255-3149 Fax: (515) 255-8667 E-mail: mmardis-lecroy@plymouthchurch.com 5