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10:30 am Worship

Saturday, February 22, 2025

Psalm 93

¹The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved;

²your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.

³The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring.

⁴More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, more majestic than the waves of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord!

⁵Your decrees are very sure; holiness befits your house, O Lord, forevermore.

Are we losing something? Leaving it behind in intermittent and growing fits of human despair? Have we lost sight of the greatest truth?

Eugene Peterson, who devoted a significant portion of his life to interpreting ancient scriptures, noticed a strange characteristic of the Israelite monarchies. They were occasionally good, often bad, and sometimes completely corrupt, but every one of the monarchs was crowned in a religious service that recognized the ultimate sovereignty of God.

It is perhaps fashionable for people to turn away from institutions of faith, arguing they have utterly failed to heal the most serious brokenness of humanity. One can make the argument convincingly. Some people of faith continue to exhibit their allegiance to God, speaking often and loudly concerning the rules of holiness, but then they choose to rely completely on human political structures even as they continue praying.

“By crowning their kings in the setting of worship, the ritual and song and prayer shaped the imagination of the people to respond to God,” Peterson wrote. “The kings didn’t always remember this, nor did the people. But at least the right foundations were laid.”

The Israelites never lost sight of the idea that rulers ought to do the right things for the right reasons.

I learned something about the reality of God on the battlefields of Vietnam. There, I saw profane men, strong men who seemed in every way to deny various spiritual realities, brought to shouted and fervent prayer. Fear and suffering can bring even the most hardened non-believer to cry out to God. Later, when I read the prayers and essays of a German priest who lived through World War II, I learned the truth. What is prayer, he asked? Prayer is the silent quaking of human hearts in rubbled-over bunkers, listening to an endless stream of bombs falling above.

“Do you remember the nights in the cellar, the nights of deadly loneliness amidst the harrowing crush of people,” Karl Rahner wrote.  “The nights of helplessness and of waiting for a senseless death? The nights when the lights went out, when horror and impotence gripped one’s heart, when one mimed being courageous and unaffected? When one’s innocently bold and brave words sounded so strangely wooden and empty, as if they were already dead before they even reached the other person? When one finally gave up, when one became silent, when one only waited hopelessly for the end, death?” (Karl Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer, [Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press,1997], 4.)

Father Rahner’s experience became a powerful metaphor.

During such bombings, he said, it was possible for the cellar to be buried in rubble, and he later realized that picture of a rubbled-over cellar described humankind.

We are buried anew each day in the rubble of human brokenness. What can take away our fear, heal our divisions, and bring forth peace? Only one thing. Don’t worry. If despair turns our faces away from God, the rubble, destruction, and noise will most certainly bring us back.

Hymn of the day: Trading My Sorrows. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

Rev. Lawrence Keeler