My God, My God: A Lenten Meditation on Psalm 22

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

why art thou so far from helping me, 

and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; 

and in the night season, and am not silent.

But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

They cried unto thee, and were delivered: 

they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

Our appointed Psalm for this Sunday is particularly fitted to the season of Lent.  The Church takes this time between Epiphany and Easter to remember the necessity of suffering and sacrifice as we move through this fallen world, seeing the consequences of sin, death, hell, and the devil manifest all around us.  We hear of wars and rumors of wars, of persecutions and martyrdoms and oppression that come as the powerful savage the weak and helpless.  There are people young and old, college students, professors, anarchists, and activists, screaming profanities into every mobile camera they can find, destroying their own neighborhoods, relationships, and bodies, even as their insane ramblings fill the internet with their destructive bafoonery.  Inside ourselves we feel the war of the Spirit against the flesh, the pull of the world’s seductive pleasures toward the same hellish insanity while the Word of God calls us to life, peace, and joy.  In all the suffering of the Christian as an individual or of all Christians bound together into the one indivisible Church, where do they go to find meaning in their pain?

They look to Jesus.  After the betrayal of his friends, His unjust conviction in a corrupt court, His flogging and crucifixion at the hands of pagan Romans through the urging of His own people’s religious leaders— hanging upon the Cross, nearing His own death, and seeing His blessed mother Mary with St. John and some of the other women surrounded by the mocking, murderous, perverse crowds, He quoted to them Psalm 22.  Even as Jesus was succumbing to the greatest suffering and injustice ever to be perpetrated on this planet, He taught His people to keep their faith in their saving God, to hear and believe His saving Word, and to trust in His saving grace.

It might be easy to miss, reading the crucifixion narrative from a western 21st century perspective.  The numbers and divisions of chapters and verses in our modern Bibles are novelties from the Middle Ages, and certainly unknown to the ancient Hebrews.  When Jesus said in His agony, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me,” it was the first line from Psalm 22.  Like many old hymnals in the Christian tradition, we name songs for their first line or stanza, such as “Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Beautiful Savior,” or “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”  When quoting the Psalms— the inspired hymn book of the Hebrew people— Jesus used this common convention and spoke the first line.  Jesus knew the confusion, despair, and horror which was creeping into His disciples’ hearts as they watched the Savior of the Word being murdered on a Roman cross, and in that moment, Jesus pointed His people back to the Eternal Word of God.  

Psalm 22 isn’t about God abandoning His people, and even less His only begotten Son.  It is a testament to God’s faithfulness in every generation, to everyone who will put their trust in Him and His living Word.  It is both prophetic, with David describing 1000 years before Jesus’ Incarnation how the Messiah would would be treated (down to the details of pierced hands and feet, casting lots for His clothes, etc.) and retrospective, remembering the salvation of God to His people for thousands of years before King David was born.  It is a perfect harmony of Law and Gospel, dealing unflinchingly with the real wages of sin and death which surround all people, but comforting those same people in the midst of even the most terrific suffering.  It is an assurance from the Creator of the universe that He is also its Savior, that His Word endures from eternity to eternity even as this world grows old and fades like an over worn garment.  It is a portrait of God enduring with His people, abiding with His people, and never abandoning His people.  It is the truth that God so loves this fallen world, that He is willing to move heaven and earth to rescue it.  It is a divinely inspired revelation of Jesus.

If your suffering and sorrow surround you, and you think you have nowhere to go; if you are encircled by the malevolence of your enemies, and death’s dark portal looms large before your eyes; if you feel the darkness of a wicked world pressing upon your soul, and the demonic insanity of perverse people weighing upon your mind; if you cannot fathom how things came to be the way they are, and how the love of so many has grown cold; hear the Word of the Lord come to you this day.  From the Cross of Jesus, hear Him teach you of the love of God even in the midst of your suffering.  Hear Him as He tells you of His love which created the world, which saves the world from the evil of men and demons, and rescues the world from death, hell, and the devil.  Hear Him as He speaks to you of the unfailing promises He gives to you by His Word, and see His Word nailed to a Cross to save even you.  Our God is not absent from us in our suffering, but enduring it with us, carrying us through it, giving to us His strength and victory in place of our own weakness and defeat.  If you have not done so recently, go back and read Psalm 22, and hear it come to you from the parched and bloody lips of Jesus as He endures all things to rescue you.  Hear Him, repent, believe, and live.  Amen.

For the Sake of the Gospel: A Meditation on 1st Corinthians 9

For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: 

for necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!

For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but if against my will, 

a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.

What is my reward then? Verily that, when I preach the gospel,

 I may make the gospel of Christ without charge, 

that I abuse not my power in the gospel.

For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all, 

that I might gain the more.

And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews;

 to them that are under the law, as under the law, 

that I might gain them that are under the law;

To them that are without law, as without law, 

(being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) 

that I might gain them that are without law.

To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: 

I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

And this I do for the gospel's sake, that I might be partaker thereof with you.

In St. Paul’s 9th chapter of his first epistle to the church at Corinth, he addresses a controversy which appears to have arisen regarding the exercise of the pastoral office.  The chapter begins by asking if only he and Barnabas should be forbidden from being married and having their living provided through the ministry they devoted their lives to, unlike St. Peter and other Apostles who apparently had both.  Paul notes from Moses and Jesus that a minister of the Word of God is worthy to receive his living from his pastoral work, and the gifts of the people he serves are what provide for him to bring the gifts of the God’s Word to all who will hear, believe, and live in it by grace through faith and repentance.  The eternal benefits of the Word of God, which He established through its preaching as the Holy Spirit creates saving faith and gives a new birth from above unto eternal life, are incomparable to the temporal material things which the people in return can provide to their preachers so that they may not live destitute in this world.  The ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ face the scorn and persecution of a dark world, of politicians, of bureaucrats, of evil people and wicked demons in high and low places, as they bear the Cross of Jesus so that others might live.  In this system which God Himself established, the ministers of His Word are called forth from among His people to serve His people, and the people reciprocate by supporting the ministers whom God has called and ordained among them.  It is a sacred bond between God, His people, and the servants of His Word.

Paul, however, found it necessary in his time to set aside his prerogatives in the ministry to which he was called and ordained, for the sake of the people he was sent to serve.  His missionary work carried him into pagan lands where there were few or no believers to support him, into places where even the people of God turned on him and tried to kill him, often driving him out of their synagogues.  When he moved from one town to another, the persecutors would follow him, harry him, churn up mobs to beat him, imprison him, and eventually promote his martyrdom at the hands of pagan rulers.  The people to whom Paul was sent often scorned him, rejected him, abandoned him, and left him alone in his chains.  And even among those who heard the Gospel and believed, where the first missionary churches were established through his preaching, there apparently was some subset of the people who accused him of selfishness or wrongdoing should he choose to be married or receive a meager living from the household of faith.  In such a context, Paul decided to eat and live from the work of his own hands, using the trade God had given him as a tent maker, so that his ministry would be unencumbered and the Gospel not blasphemed by those inside and outside the Church.

While today there are many pastors who live in the God-ordained partnership between them and the congregations they serve, an increasing number of pastors are finding it necessary to revisit the model of St. Paul’s tent making ministry.  These pastors have found that the rising tide of secularism in the ever more pagan culture is hostile to the Word of God, and missionary work in such a culture requires resources to sustain them.  They have also found an increasing rise of persecution within their own church fellowships, where bureaucrats angle for money and power at the expense of the Gospel, and too many parishioners prefer to hear seductive lies rather than necessary truths.  Pastors have been lured into enormous educational debt by their church fellowship’s seminaries, only to be turned over to congregations which treat them as hired mercenaries rather than stewards of the mysteries of God.  Others found themselves having to choose between feeding and housing their families, and being faithful to the Word of God— where their church bodies or congregations threaten to take their meager living from them should they rock the institutional boat.  More and more of these ministers of God are returning to the model Paul lived out in his time and place, often to the ridicule of other pastors, and the human institutions they refuse to be slaves under, all that the Gospel might be freely proclaimed and unimpeded by evil men.

The good news, of course, is that the light of the Gospel continues to shine in every age, regardless of its relative darkness.  That Word of God is still the means by which the Holy Spirit calls, enlightens, and enlivens every soul through faith in Jesus and reconciliation with the Father.  It is still the source of new and enduring life for all who will hear, repent, believe, and live within it.  It continues to create and sustain the church as the people of God, to call and ordain ministers of the Word, to send laborers into the world, and to reconcile the world to its Creator.  Regardless of the evil which men and demons bring to bear in the culture at large or within the visible structures of the Church, the Word of God continues unabated in its declaration of Jesus as the life, hope, mercy, grace, and salvation of all who will trust in Him.  Just as the Word of God was made flesh and burst upon a darkened world which could neither comprehend nor overthrow it during Jesus’ Incarnation, so does it enter and remain in our time, even to the chagrin of those who would avoid or repress it.  

And so, the Word of the Lord comes to you this day, through the preaching of faithful pastors of various types and kinds.  Some abide in the love and fellowship of local congregations who live into the divinely established economy which both Moses and Jesus testified to.  Others like St. Paul strive in ministries, chaplaincies, missions, and works of mercy which are supported by their own labors, so that the Gospel may be freely proclaimed where others would not support it.  But however the Word of the Lord comes to you, it still bears the power of Almighty God to declare to you the forgiveness of your sins and eternal life for Jesus’ sake, and make present in you the grace, faith, and repentance which rescues you from the darkness of a fallen world.  Hear the Word of the Lord as it comes to you in an eternal Law and Gospel which no malevolent force in all creation can restrain, and which stops at nothing to bring the light of God’s love and mercy to you.  Hear His free and unchained Word call you to life, love, and joy in this world and the next.  Repent, believe, and live.  Amen.