Sermon 2016 Reformation Sunday Text: Psalm 46 Theme: “And the River Flows”
We are told that Psalm 46 was written for temple singing. In other words, it was a choir anthem. It was penned to celebrategreat military victories for the people of God. One such victory is described in 2 Chronicles 20. Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, was facing enormous armies that had united to conquer his kingdom.
Yet, God’s people were not afraid as they marched out to meet the armies. Well… I bet they were afraid. In fact I bet they were shaking in their sandals but the definition of courage is not a lack of fear but rather moving forward in spite of fear. They placed their confidence in God, pushed their fears down and marched forward.But, even before Judah met them, God conquered the enemy by turning them on each other. So, this psalm may have been written to celebrate the day that God routed the enemy before his people even had to lift a finger.
Luther came upon this psalm and saw something a little more contemporary than a war in ancient Judah. He saw a psalm that marks the ever-flowing blessings from God to his people – blessings that will reach a crescendo on the day of the resurrection from the dead. And so it was this psalm, a psalm praising God for victory in battle, which inspired Luther to write his most famous hymn – “A
Mighty Fortress is Our God.”
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Since the Garden of Eden, the people of God have lived in one kind of peril or another and yet, God has never failed us – not even a little. We are told in Genesis that a river fed the Garden of Eden.
This river, which also fed the mighty Tigris and Euphrates rivers supplied the garden with all the water it needed. It doesn’t take much in the way of imagination to make the jump from the river to
God’s provision for all life.
Rivers have always been important to powerful cities.
Damascus had a river, as did Memphis, Babylon and Thebes, but
Jerusalem? The city of God did not have a river. One would think that our God, when setting up the city that would be called his city, would have planned it on the shores of a great and magnificent river, or a sea or even an ocean. Yet, a river is conspicuously absent from Jerusalem.
“There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells.” Jerusalem’s river was
not a river of water, but a river of God. When God’s people were
banished from Eden, they were no longer able to walk and talk with
God as Adam and Eve had done. But just because we were banished
from God’s Garden does not mean that God ever left our sides. “God
is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.”
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That is exactly what Martin Luther was counting on, that God would be there at the break of day.
By the time Luther came along, the city of God was no longer
Jerusalem, but the whole Christian Church. Christ had proven that he and his people could not be tied to earthly structures like temples and cities. The veil of the temple was ripped in two from top to bottom at the moment of his death to prove that the division between God and his people had come down. No longer did God’s people need priests to sacrifice animals for them. Jesus was the one sacrifice for all and now we are empowered to be living sacrifices for
God – giving everything we have and everything we are to serve our
God. The city has changed since the Old Testament, but the river
remains the same.
Luther knew that some of the greatest attacks since Good
Friday were about to come against the city of God. So, Psalm 46,
proclaiming God’s presence among his people was of great comfort
to Luther and those who have defended the walls of Zion since.
We of all people know that the attacks have not stopped today.
Today, we struggle not against a Pope in Rome trying to make the
Church his kingdom, but against small-minded, selfish people who
want to make the Church their club. Who has not seen power plays
and politicking as such people try to make the Church be what they
3 | P a g e want her to be instead of watching and learning what God calls her to be?
Luther fought against Biblical illiteracy, which made for a foggy, mystical understanding of God. We fight against those who freely remove large portions of God’s Word so that God will to fit inside the human boxes that we create. If you don’t like a doctrine in Scripture, well you can just call it culturally biased and dismiss it.
Or you can just announce that you FEEL differently. People get rid of all kinds of teachings that they don’t like that way: the Office of the
Holy Ministry, chastity, marriage, murder…sin in general.
Luther fought against Biblical illiteracy and many of us have stood up for Biblicalinerrancy, but today we combat Biblical APATHY!
I just wish someone CARED what the Bible says. Satan has found his most effective foothold in apathy. The Bible, to many in our congregations, is just one man’s point of view and they don’t care about my silly arguments about it being written by over 40 men and women over the course of centuries in three different languages.
WHO CARES? So they had some good things to say but what is truth?
Luther fought against persecution for standing up to Rome. We fight persecution on a far broader more nebulous scale. I wish our target were so fixed as one man in one city. We fight a moving
4 | P a g e target that evolves as quickly as technology. Just when we think we have a bead on the target it moves again. The common denominator seems to be Christian values. Weexperience constant pressure to reduce our commitment to the Church in favor some other entity: work, sports, a civic club, unchurched friends.We are pressured to be tolerant of every aberrant behavior on earth and the only thing that is intolerable are Biblical values and mores. We are shamed for our childish “Sunday School faith” in this modern, scientific world where we all know that macro-evolution is a scientific fact and human beings are the masters of their own gender, orientation AND destiny.
Is this too pointed for you? Well I’m tired of the people of God sitting by and doing nothing as culture waters down and dismisses the things that have always been believed, taught and confessed in
God’s Holy Church. Every tangible thing, every activity and every idea that is held as equally important or more important than what
God commands is detestable in the eyes of the Lord. The Church is the family of God. She is not an organization or human invention and she certainly is not a business. She is completely other than the world and anything she does to make herself look like the world is as sickening to God as it would be to a father seeing his little girl dressed up and made up like a whore.
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If Luther thought the church was under attack in 1517, he should have stuck around for another few hundred years. As we all know, the big guns hadn’t even come out yet in 1517.
When the Civil War was being fought, many Americans had not comprehended that this was a real war. Having not seen war for 40 plus years, they had also forgotten war is ugly and brutal. Many people took picnic lunches to the hills around battlefields intending to watch the skirmish as you or I might go watch a football game.
The horror of war soon became apparent to them as the pink mist of human blood and tissue desecrated their picnics.For a similar reason we celebrate the Reformation year in and year out in our congregations. We need to remind ourselves that we are not a group of picnickers on a hillside watching a game. We are the city of
God, and we are at war, and we are under attack.
But…just as surely as that river flowed back in 860 BC for old
King Jehoshaphat, that river flows for us too. Look at that Baptismal font. Can you see the Spirit of God Almighty bubbling up out of it and flowing throughout this room? Do you remember when that water flowed over you and you were clothed in the armor of God for this very fight? We were given the breastplate of righteousness and the sword of truth and folks, these were not decorations. These
6 | P a g e were gifts given by our God because he knew we would need them, that’s why the river flows!
Can you see the river of God pouring out of this book, the Holy
Scriptures? The Word is pure nectar for our hungry souls. It feeds our faith and strengthens us for battle. EAT!We need the sustenance if we are to fight this battle. God gave his Word because he knew the battle would be long and hard and an army moves on its stomach
– that’s why the river flows!
Our Lord and Master of the Host calls us to his table to eat his very body and blood. There is the medicine of immortality so that though we will suffer the slings and arrows of Satan on the battlefield, we will not fall for we are filled with the very body and blood of Jesus Christ, son of the one true God and even when struck down, we will rise and we will conquer him and all of his minions.
And the river flows!
The Lord is our river, our shepherd, our refuge, our strength, our help, our fortress – and the river flows! The battlefield language and imagery is not accidental and though battlefield imagery and shepherding imagery make for strange bedfellows, they work together nicely to describe the city of God. We are the city of God, armed to the teeth and fed by the holy river that is God. And yet we are an army that moves by faith not by sight. We march against an
7 | P a g e enemy that has us out numbered, out gunned and out financed. And yes, we check our worldly brains at the door and we march forward like a bunch of innocent sheep because that is all that we are called to do. We are not called to understand God’s work or critique God’s work or evaluate God’s work, we are called to MOVE FORWARD – To
GO and MAKE disciples by Baptizing and teaching.
The city of God moves by faith, knowing that if we are doing what God has told us to do, he will handle the details and the river flows. Even a great soldier might occasionally doubt his commanding officer, but a sheep? A sheep never doubts his shepherd – it just isn’t in him to do that. The shepherd leads him beside still waters. The shepherd leads him to green pastures and the sheep knows that all things are in his shepherd’s hands. And the river flows. The river flows.
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