How Shall We Defeat the Enemy? (2)

The poem in the previous post asks a question that for me lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and therefore at the apex of Christian witness to the subversive reality and radical call of Jesus Christ. "How shall we defeat the enemy?" At church today I was leading the Remembrance day service, and reflecting on what we understand by the word enemy, and its connection with fear and faith. The next three posts share the gist of what I was trying to explore. Three Psalms informed my thinking; the first is psalm 46.

When we come to church, we come to the place where God expects us to be honest, but often enough we try to be pious and spiritual and behave the way we think God expects. But seldom does God expect what we offer, and not often enough do we offer what God expects. We just don't see ourselves clearly enough, our self-awareness is clouded by our self justifying habits of mind, and ready made excuses reduce our sense of unworthiness to stand before the Love that knows us to the depths of our being.

The Psalms are a powerful corrective to that unreality, indeed dishonesty, with which we view ourselves. They are laced with raw emotion – glad gratitude, honest hatred, aggressive anger, silent serenity, hard won hope, downward dragging despair, jubilant joy – and that inevitable and recurring tension in mind and soul, of faith and fear. In Psalm 46 there is a towering confidence, "God is our refuge and our strength...", that defiance that looks at the worst and won’t run away. "Though” – though mountains shake; though the seas roar and foam - that word "though" contains most of the things that can go wrong in our lives and in our world. It is a hinge point in the Psalm, and a picotal word of faith. Whatever it looks like, it looks different when God is in the picture.

We now live in a world where it seems most of the things we thought were fixed and given, have been shaken and may be taken away – from personal pensions to world peace, our children and grand-children’s future now threatened by an impoverished world – global recession, accelerating consumption of earth resources, the spoiling and soiling of the planet.

Psalm 46 is no escapist vision – it is faith calling in question the way things are – and saying the way things are can be changed by a different vision – God in the midst of the city. Political uproar is nothing new, nations in turmoil is the story of history, war threatened by the brink of economic collapse is a recurring crisis in our human story. But against that threatening sky, the Psalm speaks of "the river that makes glad". Instead of panic, gladness, instead of terror, trust, and in place of resignation, hope.

That verse must be interpreted beside Rev 22.1 Another river flowing from the city, and there are trees growing along this river, and the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. In our day it is the eurozone that may "fall into the sea", the collision of religious and political ideas that "roar and foam", the shift of economic power to Asia has "nations in uproar", the evidence of a planet anaemic from being drained of its life-blood feels like "the earth giving way". And still, and yet, there is need for that people who witness to the leaves of the tree that are for the healing of the nations.

Remembrance Sunday is when we remember the cost of war, and though we say we will not fear, it is right to fear the possibility, the reality, the consequences of war. V9 is one of those verses that is both comfort and terror – "He shatters the spear". But if the spear is pointed at me and God breaks it then I am saved; if I am pointing the spear at a dangerous enemy and it is broken, I am defenceless. At which point, and only then, the command of God is heard, “Be still and know that I am God.....I will be exalted..."

Being still is hard for a technological, consumer growth driven world. But sometimes faith has to rest content without practical answers – and acknowledge that God is within this glorious, tragic, rich, broken but beautiful creation and only his promise she will not fall. But alongside our renewed trust in the redemptive love and costly mercy of God, we have to face with honesty one of our deepest human  wounds - our love affair with hatred, which I'll reflect on in the next post..

 

 

Comments

[Perpetua]

A beautiful profound post, which demands to be reread and pondered.