Psalm 78:1-7
November 6, 2011
“We Didn’t Start the Fire (with apologies to Billy Joel)”
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
We have an odd thing today. It is All Saints’ Sunday, still an odd thing to many of us in mainline Protestant churches who grew up with the idea that saints are pretty weird. But the oddness doesn’t stop there. The primary lesson for today as chosen by our curriculum isn’t even one of the lessons appointed for All Saints’ Sunday. It’s from the lessons that would have been read today if we had celebrated All Saints’ on its traditional day, November 1st. Plus, it’s a psalm. I love the psalms, but I don’t usually preach from them. I’m not sure why, but I don’t usually do it. Still, I’m glad we have our psalm as the primary lesson. The further I got into it, the more right it seemed for us and for the day.
Psalm 78 is a very long psalm, seventy-two verses in all, making it the second longest in the Bible. Psalm 78 rehearses many of the important episodes of the life of the people of God from its experience of liberation from slavery in Egypt, its desert wanderings, its possession of the “land of promise,” its troubling experience as first one and then two kingdoms, ending at the disappearance of the North Kingdom when it was conquered by the Assyrian empire.
It isn’t just a history lesson, though. It is history with a difference, history as the story of God and God’s people, a holy history which is more than history as one thing after another, a history with meaning and purpose that comes from the relationship of this people and their God.
From the point of view of the psalmist there had been many, many changes: Slavery, freedom, confusion, triumph, controversy, estrangement, terror, relief and hope. Each of these were part of the story. Each new stage of their journey brought them new challenges and new problems to solve. But no matter what they went through, the psalmist could not tell the story except as the story of the people and their God. It was that relationship that gave meaning to the whole.
The people of God had to adapt to new realities, not just once or twice, but constantly. We know this well. It’s our experience, too. Things have changed since this church was built. When this church was built, our town had its share of middle-aged men who had seen the horrors of the Civil War. Some of them showed it, too, as they went about their lives missing a leg or an arm. The first telegraph line across the country had only been laid twelve years earlier. The first successful airplane was twenty-nine years in the future. The Lakota and other Native American nations of the plains still freely followed the herds of buffalo. It would be nearly half a century before women had the right to vote in national elections.
We’ve been through a change or two since then: two world wars, the Great Depression, the McCarthy-inspired witch-hunts, the civil rights movement, the suffrage movement, Prohibition, second-wave feminism, the digital revolution, globalization, international terrorism, the sexual revolution, the Great Recession. Each of these has presented its challenges and its opportunities. To each of them First United Methodist Church has had to respond with new ways of being the church.
Wander through a Cokesbury store or their display at a church event and you will see dozens of titles that offer sure-fire ways to meet the challenges with innovative ministry. To be sure many of the ways of doing church that we regard as natural and normal and necessary no longer seem to work or make much sense. In our consumer-driven culture it should come as no surprise that there is a market for simple, easy to implement answers.
On the other hand, I’m old enough not to be taken in by claims that the latest thing will be the last thing. I’m old enough to have seen fads come and go. I’m not as easily fooled as I used to be. I’ve worked hard to become a curmudgeon and I’ve made a good deal of progress.
There is a flip side to change and innovation. Beneath the ocean’s surface that is crashing waves one day and calm the next, beneath the surge of tides that come in and go out with the sun and the moon, there are deep, deep currents that move slowly but nearly unstoppably. And beneath the surface noise of our news cycles, beneath the business cycles of boom and bust and fashion cycles of in and out, there are movements that are measured in millenia, not minutes.
So I point us toward the psalmist and the psalmist points us toward story-telling:
Give ear, O my people, to my teaching;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known,
that our ancestors have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children;
we will tell to the coming generation
the glorious deeds of the LORD, and God’s might,
and the wonders that God has done.
What the psalmist describes is called “tradition,” which refers to something that is handed over and received from one to another. Tradition is more than habit or custom. Tradition is habit or custom or story that is passed on. The psalmist knows that tradition is a technology for keeping us true to who we are in the midst of the great changes that we have to make and even champion. At the heart of tradition is story-telling. The psalmist has stories to tell, “dark sayings from of old, things that we have heard,” because they are things that psalmist’s ancestors (literally, parents) had told her. And she promises that she will not keep these things to herself: she will tell them to the next generation. In this psalm she keeps her promise. She tells some of the glorious deeds, the mighty acts, and the wonders that God has done.
And that’s what we do, too. We have stories to tell and we tell them, stories of the creation of the universe, stories of release from slavery, stories of speaking truth to power, stories of exile and return, stories of death and new life and, above all, stories of Jesus who lived among us and showed us what God’s love is really like, who taught us how to follow him and how to change the world, and who left us stories to tell. Many of the stories of Jesus that we have are meal stories. Some are Jesus’ parables: the wedding feast and the prodigal son, for example. Some are the stories of the meals that Jesus shared with us: like the time he fed a huge crowd with just five barley loaves and a couple of trout, or the time we ate with him on the night before he was killed, or the fish fry we ate with him after he been killed and raised again.
So when we gather around this table, we remember those meal stories and we remember the actions that go with the stories: how there is a place at this table for each of us and for anyone else no matter who we have been or what we have done. We can’t deserve it, so we just accept it, a gift we can’t repay, but that we can and must and do pay forward, so that those who have little to eat may rejoice as we gather and rejoice at this table. This is a story told in actions as much as words: of the world as it will be when God’s whole will is done, of how the ninety-nine percent can come and receive all that they need and of how the one percent can come, too, and be burdened with nothing more than they need and then that day will have come when all of Abraham and Sarah’s children will have gathered from north and south, from east and west, to feast at the same table together.
That’s the story we have to tell, the drama we enact, the sign we display. We didn’t start it. We received it from “of old.” We won’t finish it either. We’ll pass it on to the next generation. We’ll be faithful to tell the story. We will tell it as we have for a hundred and sixty years. We’ll tell the story in brick, a place for God’s people to gather, a place for hospitality to the whole community. We’ll tell the story in words that we speak from the pulpit, in Sunday School classrooms, from the choir loft, in newsletters and articles in the newspaper, in the words of loving and caring conversations we have with our families, our friends, our neighbors, and even with our enemies. And most importantly of all we’ll tell the story in bodies of flesh and blood that live and work to bring God’s love into our daily lives and the lives of those we meet.
We didn’t start the fire. We didn’t start it, but we’ll tend it during our time. We’ll ensure that it doesn’t go out. We’ll give our love and energy and money to make sure that it stays lit, to make sure that it will help light up our children’s world. And when our grandchildren tell the story to their grandchildren, when they tell our story, the story of a time so incredibly primitive that we still thought Facebook was a pretty neat idea, the story they tell will not be just one thing after another. It will be the story of a people and their God and the wonders, the mighty actions and glorious deeds that this God has done.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
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