Stable, Not Petrified
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An incident took place a few years ago that has acquired the force of a parable for me. I had a minor operation on my nose and was in my hospital room recovering. Even though the surgery was minor, the pain was great and I was full of misery. Late in the afternoon a man was assigned to the other bed in my room. He was to have a tonsillectomy the next day. He was young, about twenty-two years old, goodlooking and friendly. He came over to me, put out his hand and said, “Hi, my name is Kelly. What happened to you?”
I was in no mood for friendly conversation, did not return the handshake, grunted my name and said that I had gotten my nose broken. He got the message that I did not want to talk, pulled the curtain between our beds and let me alone. Later in the evening his friends were visiting, and I heard him say, “There’s a man in the next bed who is a prizefighter; he got his nose broken in a championship fight.” He went on to embellish the story for the benefit of his friends.
Later in the evening, as I was feeling better, I said, “Kelly, you misunderstood what I said. I’m not a prizefighter. The nose was broken years ago in a basketball game, and I am just now getting it fixed.”
“Well, what do you do then?”
“I’m a pastor.”
“Oh,” he said and turned away; I was no longer an interesting subject.
In the morning he woke me: “Peterson, Peterson—wake up.” I groggily came awake and asked what he wanted. “I want you to pray for me; I’m scared.” And so, before he was taken to surgery, I went to his bedside and prayed for him.
When he was brought back a couple of hours later, a nurse came and said, “Kelly, I am going to give you an injection that should take care of any pain that you might have.”
In twenty minutes or so he began to groan, “I hurt. I can’t stand it. I’m going to die.”
I rang for the nurse and, when she came, said, “Nurse, I don’t think that shot did any good; why don’t you give him another one?” She didn’t acknowledge my credentials for making such a suggestion, told me curtly that she would oversee the medical care of the patient, turned on her heel and, a little abruptly I thought, left. Meanwhile Kelly continued to vent his agony.
After another half an hour he began to hallucinate, and having lost touch with reality began to shout, “Peterson, pray for me; can’t you see I’m dying! Peterson, pray for me!” His shouts brought nurses and doctors and orderlies running. They held him down and quieted him with the injection that I had prescribed earlier.
The parabolic force of the incident is this: when the man was scared he wanted me to pray for him, and when the man was crazy he wanted me to pray for him, but in between, during the hours of so-called normalcy, he didn’t want anything to do with a pastor. What Kelly betrayed in extremis is all many people know of religion: a religion to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and the routines of every day. The most religious places in the world, as a matter of fact, are not churches but battlefields and mental hospitals. You are much more likely to find passionate prayer in a foxhole than in a church pew; and you will certainly find more otherworldly visions and supernatural voices in a mental hospital than you will in a church.
Stable, Not Petrified
Nevertheless we Christians don’t go to either place to nurture our faith. We don’t deliberately put ourselves in places of fearful danger to evoke heartfelt prayer, and we don’t put ourselves in psychiatric wards so we can be around those who clearly see visions of heaven and hell and distinctly hear the voice of God. What most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable. For we have an instinct for health and sanity in our faith. We don’t seek out death-defying situations, and we avoid mentally unstable teachers. But in doing that we don’t get what some people seem to want very much, namely, a religion that makes us safe at all costs, certifying us as inoffensive to our neighbors and guaranteeing us as good credit risks to the banks. It would be simply awful to find that as we grew in Christ we became dull, that as we developed in discipleship we became like Anthony Trollope’s Miss Thorne, whose “virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.”
We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory. How do we get both the sense of stability and the spirit of adventure, the ballast of good health and the zest of true sanity? How do we get the adult maturity to keep our feet on the ground and retain the childlike innocence to make the leap of faith?
Psalm 132 is one of the oldest psalms in the Bible. It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.
It is a psalm of David’s obedience, of “how he promised GOD, made a vow to the Strong God of Jacob.” The psalm shows obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact and reaches into a promised hope.
Obedience with a History
The first half of Psalm 132 is the part that roots obedience in fact and keeps our feet on the ground. The psalm takes a single incident out of the past, the history of the ark of the covenant, and reminisces over it: “Remember how we got the news in Ephrathah, learned all about it at Jaar Meadows? We shouted, ‘Let’s go to the shrine dedication! Let’s worship at God’s own footstool!’ Up, GOD, enjoy your new place of quiet repose, you and your mighty covenant ark.”
The ark of the covenant was a box approximately forty-five inches long, twenty-seven inches broad and twenty-seven inches deep, constructed of wood and covered with gold. Its lid of solid gold was called the mercy seat. Two cherubim, angel-like figures at either end, framed the space around the central mercy seat from which God’s word was heard. It had been made under the supervision of Moses (Ex 25:10-22) and was a symbol of the presence of God among his people. The ark had accompanied Israel from Sinai, through the wilderness wanderings, and had been kept at Shiloh from the time of the conquest. In a battle the ark had been captured by the enemy Philistines and was a trophy of war displayed in the Philistine cities until it became a problem to them (the story is told in 1 Samuel 4—7) and was returned to Israel, to the village of Kiriath-jearim (7:1-2), where it rested until David came to get it and place it in honor in Jerusalem, where it later became enshrined in Solomon’s temple.
The history of the ark was, for the Hebrews, a kind of theological handbook. It provided an account of the presence of God among the people. Its history showed the importance of having God with you and the danger of trying to use God or carry him around. And so the ark itself was important in that it emphasized that God was with his people and that God was over and above his people (for God quite obviously was not in the box). The ark was the symbol, not the reality. When the ark was treated as a talisman, as a curio or as a magical device with which to manipulate God, everything went wrong. God cannot be contained or used.
The psalm does not retell this history, it only remembers the history. There is only enough here to trigger the historical memories of the people. For the rich symbolism of the ark was everyday stuff to them. Its extensive and intricate history was common knowledge, much as the story of Jesus is to Christians. With promptings from the psalm, the story would come alive for them again, especially the part telling of the time when David rediscovered the ark in an obscure village and determined to set it at the center of Israelite life, restoring an old unity to the life of the people of God in adoration and worship. “Remember how we got the news in Ephrathah, learned all about it at Jaar Meadows.” News had come to David of where the ark was; he vowed to get it and was obedient to his vow. He gathered his people to himself and said: “Let’s go to the shrine dedication! Let’s worship at God’s own footstool!” He went to the ark and brought it up to Jerusalem in festive parade: “Up, GOD, enjoy your new place of quiet repose, you and your mighty covenant ark; / Get your priests all dressed up in justice, prompt your worshipers to sing . . .” As the song was sung, we are told, “David danced with great abandon before GOD. The whole country was with him as he brought the Ark of God with shouts and trumpet blasts” (2 Sam 6:14-15).
As this old ark song is resung now by the people of God on pilgrimage, historical memories are revived and relived: there is a vast, rich reality of obedience beneath the feet of disciples. They are not the first persons to ascend these slopes on their way of obedience to God, and they will not be the last. Up these same roads, along these same paths, the ark had been carried, accompanied by a determined and expectant people. It had been carried in both good and bad ways. They would remember the time they carried it in panic (“I’m scared! Pray for me!”), superstitiously as a secret weapon against the Philistines. That ended in calamity. They would also remember the Davidic parade of awed adoration and dancing celebration as obedience was turned into worship. Christians tramp well-worn paths: obedience has a history.
This history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us.
What would we think of a pollster who issued a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he had interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters—matters such as answered prayer, God’s judgment, Christ’s forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.
To remain willfully ignorant of Abraham wandering in the desert, the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt, David battling the Philistines, Jesus arguing with the Pharisees and Paul writing to the Corinthians is like saying, “I refuse to remember that when I kicked that black dog last week he bit my leg.” If I don’t remember it, in the next fit of anger I will kick him again and get bitten again. Biblical history is a good memory for what doesn’t work. It is also a good memory for what does work—like remembering what you put in the soup that made it taste so good so you can repeat and enjoy the recipe on another day, or remembering the shortcut through the city to the ocean that saved you from being tied up in traffic and got you to the beach two hours earlier.
A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam. Psalm 132 activates faith’s memory so that obedience will be sane. “Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.”1
Hope: A Race Toward God’s Promises
But Psalm 132 doesn’t just keep our feet on the ground, it also gets them off the ground. Not only is it a solid foundation for the past, it is a daring leap into the future. For obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion, it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises. The second half of the psalm has a propellant quality to it. The psalmist is not an antiquarian reveling in the past for its own sake but a traveler using what he knows of the past to get to where he is going—to God.
For all its interest in history the Bible never refers to the past as “the good old times.” The past is not, for the person of faith, a restored historical site that we tour when we are on vacation; it is a field that we plow and harrow and plant and fertilize and work for a harvest.
The second half of Psalm 132 takes seriously what God said to David and how David responded (matters that are remembered in the ark narrative) and uses them to make a vision of the reality that is in the future of faith: “I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry; I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes; the holy people will sing their hearts out! Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David! I’ll fill it with light for my anointed! I’ll dress his enemies in dirty rags, but I’ll make his crown sparkle with splendor.” All the verb tenses are future. Obedience is fulfilled by hope.
Now none of these hopes is unrelated to or detached from actual history: each develops from what a person with a good memory knows happened.
“I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry.” The devout mind goes back to those years in the wilderness when God gave water from the rock, manna from the ground and quail from the skies, and fashions a hope for abundant, eternal providence.
“I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes; the holy people will sing their hearts out!” No other people knew so much of salvation as Israel. The priests renewed the knowledge and applied it to daily life at every gathering of worship—occasions that were always marked with joy—renewing the life of redemption. Has any other people had such a good time with their faith as Israel? From Moses’ song at the edge of the Red Sea with Miriam and the women accompanying with tambourines, to the victorious trumpets that shook and finally tumbled the walls of Jericho, to the robust hymns of David that we continue to sing in our churches today, the joy has overflowed.
“Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David! I’ll fill it with light for my anointed.” Light—radiant light!—pervades Scripture and creation as a sign of God’s presence. The hope is that its brightness will provide light for the path of the one who represents God’s presence, a light we now identify with revelation in Scripture and in Christ.
“I’ll dress his enemies in dirty rags, but I’ll make his crown sparkle with splendor.” The shame of God’s enemies and the glory of God’s king will finally be decisive. The triumph will be complete. Evil will lie sprawling in defeat, righteousness will flourish in victory. That is an agenda that hope writes for obedience.
Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it. All the expectations listed in Psalm 132 have their origin in an accurately remembered past. But they are not simply repetitions of the past projected into the future. They are developments out of it, with new features of their own.
Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is ever a threat to obedience: the danger that we should reduce Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and breadth; we need a vision of the future to give obedience direction and goal. And they must be connected. There must be an organic unity between them.
If we never learn how to do this—extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates enclosed by our birth and death and acquire an understanding of God’s way as something larger and more complete than the anecdotes in our private diaries—we will forever be missing the point of things by making headlines out of something that ought to be tucked away on page 97 in section C of the newspaper or putting into the classified ads something that should be getting a full-page color advertisement—mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell. (“Peterson, pray for me!”) For Christian faith cannot be comprehended by examining an Instamatic flash picture which has caught a pose of beauty or absurdity, ecstasy or terror; it is a full revelation of a vast creation and a grandly consummated redemption. Obedience is doing what God tells us to do in it.
The Strength to Stand, the Willingness to Leap
In such ways Psalm 132 cultivates the memory and nurtures the hope that lead to mature obedience. It protects us from a religion that is ignorant of the ways of God and so keeps us prey to every fear that thrusts itself upon us. It guards us from a religion run riot with fantasies and nightmares because it has gotten disassociated from the promises of God. It develops a strong sense of continuity with the past and a surging sense of exploration into the future. It is the kind of thing we sing to stay normal without becoming dull, to walk upright in the middle of the road without getting stuck in a long rut of mediocrity. Its words prod us to reach into the future without losing touch with daily reality. Its rhythms stimulate us to new adventures in the Spirit without making us lunatics. For Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground; it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue. A person who leaps about constantly is under suspicion of being not a man but a jumping jack. What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which. Which is exactly what we get when an accurate memory of God’s ways is combined with a lively hope in his promises.