A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

When you went to Jerusalem, ated you, God redeemed you, God provided for you. In Jerusalem you saw in ritual and heard proclaimed in preaching the powerful historyshaping truth that God forgives our sins and makes it possible to live without guilt and with purpose. In Jerusalem all the scattered fragments of experience, all the bits and pieces of truth and feeling and perception were put together in a single whole

When a person is confused and things refuse to fit together, he sometimes announces a need to get out of the noise and turbulence, to get away from all the hassle and “get my head together.” When he succeeds in doing this we call that person “put together.” All the parts are there, nothing is left out, nothing is out of proportion, everything fits into a workable frame. As I entered a home to make a pastoral visit, the person I came to see was sitting at a window embroidering a piece of cloth held taut over an oval hoop. She said, “Pastor, while waiting for you to come I realized what’s wrong with meI don’t have a frame. My feelings, my thoughts, my activities-everything is loose and sloppy. There is no border to life. I never know where I am. I need a frame for my life like this one I have for my embroidery.” How do we get that framework, that sense of solid struc ture so that we know where we stand and are therefore able o do our work easily and without anxiety? Christians go to worship: week by week we enter the place compactly built, “to which the tribes go up” and get a working definition for life: the way God created us, the ways in which he leads us. We know where we stand.

But very often we don’t feel like it, and so we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise God when I don’t feel like it. I would be a hypocrite.” The psalm says, I don’t care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed (RSV), “give thanks to the name of GOD.” I have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic: “The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”1 We live in what one writer has called the “age of sensation.”2 We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it.

If we stay at home by ourselves and read the Bible, we are going to miss a lot, for our reading will be unconsciously conditioned by our culture, limited by our ignorance, distorted by unnoticed prejudices. In worship we are part of “the large congregation” where all the writers of Scripture address us, where hymn writers use music to express truths that touch us not only in our heads but in our hearts, where the preacher who has just lived through six days of doubt, hurt, faith and blessing with the worshipers speaks the truth of Scripture in the language of the congregation’s present experience. We want to hear what God says and what he says to us: worship is the place where our attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.

Psalm 123 is an instance of service. In this, as so often in the psalms, we are not instructed in what to do, we are provided an instance of what is done. A psalm is not a lecture; it is a song. In a psalm we have the observable evidence of what happens when a person of faith goes about the business of believing and loving and following God. We don’t have a rule book defining the action, we have a snapshot of players playing the game. In Psalm 123 we observe that aspect of the life of discipleship that takes place under the form of servanthood.

if God is God at all, he must have a more comprehensive grasp of the interrelations in our families and communities and nations than we do. “Heaven-dwelling God.” When the Bible uses that phrase, and it does use it frequently, it is not saying anything about geography or space.

We are presented with the God of exodus and Easter, the God of Sinai and Calvary. If we want to understand God, we must do it on his terms. If we want to see God the way he really is, we must look to the place of authority—to Scripture and to Jesus Christ. And do we really want it any other way? I don’t think so.

He is not a police officer on patrol, watching over the universe, ready to club us if we get out of hand or put us in jail if we get obstreperous. He is a potter working with the clay of our lives, forming and reforming until, finally, he has shaped a redeemed life, a vessel fit for the kingdom.

In obedience we pray “Mercy!” instead of “Give us what we want.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Reward us for our goodness so our neighbors will acknowledge our superiority.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Punish us for our badness so we will feel better.” We pray “Mercy!” and not “Be nice to us because we have been such good people.”

Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated. But not many feel or act free. Evidence? We live in a nation of complainers and a society of addicts. Everywhere we turn we hear complaints: I can’t spend my money the way I want; I can’t spend my time the way I want; I can’t be myself; I’m under the control of others all the time. And everywhere we meet the addicts—addiction to alcohol and drugs, to compulsive work habits and to obsessive consumption. We trade masters; we stay enslaved.

Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1). The psalm’s emphasis on actual, physical service (not a spiritual intention, not a desire to be of service) is picked up in the invitation to present our everyday, ordinary life.

As we live out the implications of a life of service, we are provided with continuous encouragement and example by Jesus Christ, who said: Do you understand what I have done to you? You address me as “Teacher” and “Master,” and rightly so. That is what I am. So if I, the Master and Teacher, washed your feet, you must now wash each other’s feet. I’ve laid down a pattern for you. What I’ve done, you do. I’m only pointing out the obvious.

The work of liberation must therefore be accompanied by instruction in the use of liberty as children of God who “walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:25 RSV). Those who parade the rhetoric of liberation but scorn the wisdom of service do not lead people into the glorious liberty of the children of God but into a cramped and covetous squalor.

Through the week I get case histories of family tragedy and career disappointment, along with pessimistic recountings of world events. The concluding line is a variation on the theme: “How do you explain that, you who are so sure that God is for me?” I am put on the spot of being God’s defender. I am expected to explain God to his disappointed clients. I am thrust into the role of a clerk in the complaints department of humanity, asked to trace down bad service, listen sympathetically to aggrieved patrons,

The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm 124 is an excellent model. It does not argue God’s help; it does not explain God’s help; it is a testimony of God’s help in the form of a song. The song is so vigorous, so confident, so bursting with what can only be called reality that it fundamentally changes our approach and our questions. No longer does it seem of the highest priority to ask, “Why did this happen to me? Why do I feel left in the lurch?” Instead we ask, “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’?” The psalm is data that must be accounted for, and the data are so solid, so vital, have so much more substance and are so much more interesting than the other things we hear through the day that it must be dealt with before we can go back to the whimpering complaints.

It is inevitable, in one sense, that we should respond to enthusiasm with some cynicism. Advertisers are routinely so dishonest with us that we train ourselves to keep our distance from any who speak with passion and excitement for fear they will manipulate us. We see Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Martha Stewart speaking on behalf of a product and inwardly discount the witness; we know the words were written by a highly paid copywriter and that the testimonial was done for a handsome fee. In the midst of that kind of world we come on the lines “If God hadn’t been for us when everyone went against us, / We would have been swallowed alive,” and we say, “Vigorous poetry! Well done! But who was your copywriter, and how much did they pay you to say it?” The only cure for that kind of cynicism is to bring it out in the open and deal with it. If it is left to work behind the scenes in our hearts, it is a parasite on faith, enervates hope and leaves us anemic in love. Don’t hesitate to put the psalm (or any other Scripture passage) under the searchlight of your disbelief! The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.

inserted like a commercial into our lives to testify that life goes better with God; it is not part of a media blitz to convince us that God is superior to all the other gods on the market. It is not a press release. It is honest prayer. The people who know this psalm best and who have tested it out and used it often (that is, the people of God who are travelers on the way of faith, singing it in all kinds of weather) tell us that it is credible, that it fits into what we know of life lived in faith.

Every day I put hope on the line. I don’t know one thing about the future. I don’t know what the next hour will hold. There may be sickness, accident, personal or world catastrophe. Before this day is over I may have to deal with death, pain, loss, rejection. I don’t know what the future holds for me, for those I love, for my nation, for this world. Still, despite my ignorance and surrounded by tinny optimists and cowardly pessimists, I say that God will accomplish his will, and I cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing will separate me from Christ’s love. Every day I put love on the line. There is nothing I am less good at than love. I am far better in competition than in love. I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another.

How God wants us to sing like this! Christians are not fussy moralists who cluck their tongues over a world going to hell; Christians are people who praise the God who is on our side. Christians are not pious pretenders in the midst of a decadent culture; Christians are robust witnesses to the God who is our help. Christians are not fatigued outcasts who carry righteousness as a burden in a world where the wicked flourish; Christians are people who sing “Oh, blessed be GOD! … He didn’t abandon us defenseless.”

It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.

In the position of Judea there was not enough to tempt her people to put their confidence in herself, but there was enough to encourage them to defend their freedom and a strenuous life. And while the isolation of their land was sufficient to confirm their calling to a discipline and destiny separate from other peoples, it was not so complete as to keep them in ignorance of the world or to release them from those temptations to mix with the world, in combating which their discipline and destiny could alone be realised. GEORGE ADAM SMITH

Later in life, as I read Scripture for myself, and still later when as a pastor I had the responsibility for guiding the spiritual development of others, I acquired a very different way of looking at the conditions under which the Christian walks the way of discipleship.

We still live in that kind of world, and we still build those defenses although the forms have changed somewhat. The process is not only political but personal. The outer world is only an extension of an inner, spiritual world. Psychologists who observe us talk of the elaborate security systems (Sullivan) and the defense mechanisms (Freud) that we use to protect ourselves. People of faith have the same needs for protection and security as anyone else. We are no better than others in that regard. What is different is that we find that we don’t have to build our own: “God is a safe place to hide, ready to help when we need him” (Ps 46:1). “Mountains encircle Jerusalem, and GOD encircles his people.” We don’t always have to be looking over our shoulder lest evil overtake us unawares. We don’t always have to keep our eyes on our footsteps lest we slip, inadvertently, on a temptation. God is at our side. He is, as another psalmist put it, “behind and before” (see 139:5).

God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round about his people.”

There is nothing more certain than that he will accomplish his salvation in our lives and perfect his will in our histories. Three times in his great Sermon, Jesus, knowing how easily we imagine the worst, repeats the reassuring command “Do not be anxious” (Mt 6:25, 31, 34 RSV). Our life with God is a sure thing. When mountain climbers are in dangerous terrain, on the face of a cliff or the slopes of a glacier, they rope themselves together. Sometimes one of them slips and falls—backslides.

Joy is not a requirement of Christian discipleship, it is a consequence. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience life in Christ; it is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience. We come to God (and to the revelation of God’s ways) because none of us have it within ourselves, except momentarily, to be joyous. Joy is a product of abundance; it is the overflow of vitality. It is life working together harmoniously. It is exuberance. Inadequate sinners as we are, none of us can manage that for very long. We try to get it through entertainment. We pay someone to make jokes, tell stories, perform dramatic actions, sing songs. We buy the vitality of another’s imagination to divert and enliven our own poor lives. The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal.

One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed. A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. There isn’t a hint of that in Psalm 126. Laughter is a result of living in the midst of God’s great works (“when God returned Israel’s exiles we laughed, we sang”). Enjoyment is not an escape from boredom but a plunge by faith into God’s work (“those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing”). There is plenty of suffering on both sides, past and future. The joy comes because God knows how to wipe away tears, and, in his resurrection work, create the smile of new life. Joy is what God gives, not what we work up. Laughter is the delight that things are working together for good to those who love God, not the giggles that betray the nervousness of a precarious defense system.

The psalm does not give us this joy as a package or as a formula, but there are some things it does do. It shows up the tinniness of the world’s joy and affirms the solidity of God’s joy. It reminds us of the accelerating costs and diminishing returns of those who pursue pleasure as a path toward joy. It introduces us to the way of discipleship, which has consequences in joy. It encourages us in the way of faith to both experience and share joy. It tells the story of God’s acts, which put laughter into people’s mouths and shouts on their tongues.

The unexcelled organization and enormous energy that were concentrated in building the Tower of Babel resulted in such a shattered community and garbled communication that civilization is still trying to recover. Effort, even if the effort is religious (perhaps especially when the effort is religious), does not in itself justify anything. One of the tasks of Christian discipleship is to relearn “the works you did at first” (Rev 2:5 RSV) and absolutely refuse to “work like the devil.”

But the promise is not fulfilled: lethal automobiles, ugly buildings and ponderous bureaucracies ravage the earth and empty lives of meaning. Structures become more important than the people who live in them. Machines become more important than the people who use them. We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.

The curse of some people’s lives is not work, as such, but senseless work, vain work, futile work, work that takes place apart from God, work that ignores the if.

Then, through the noise of the crowd, someone would strike up the tune: “If GOD doesn’t build … guard …” The pilgrimage is not at the center; the Lord is at the center. No matter how hard they had struggled to get there, no matter what they did in the way of heroics—fending off bandits, clubbing lions, crushing wolves—that is not what is to be sung. Psalm 127 insists on a perspective in which our effort is at the periphery and God’s work is at the center.

But we have a greed problem: if I don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy. The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or by industry but in church, among Christians who learn a different way to pursue happiness. Christian blessing is a realizing that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” As we learn to give and to share, our vitality increases, and the people around us become fruitful vines and olive shoots at our tables.

“Righteous” is a common translation for the Hebrew term. “Righteous is out and out a term denoting relationship, and … it does this in the sense of referring to a real relationship between two parties … and not to the relationship of an object under consideration to an idea.”

The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for. There are endless challenges in it to keep us on the growing edge of faith; there is always the God who sticks with us to make it possible for us to persevere.

Giving Dignity to Suffering The psalm begins in pain: “Help, GOD—the botton has fallen out of my life! Master, hear my cry for help! Listen hard! Open your ears! Listen to my cries for mercy.” The psalm is anguished prayer. By setting the anguish out in the open and voicing it as a prayer, the psalm gives dignity to our suffering. It does not look on suffering as something slightly embarrassing that must be hushed up and locked in a closet (where it finally becomes a skeleton) because this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to a real person of faith. And it doesn’t treat it as a puzzle that must be explained, and therefore turn it over to theologians or philosophers to work out an answer. Suffering is set squarely, openly, passionately before God. It is acknowledged and expressed. It is described and lived. If the psalm did nothing more than that, it would be a prize, for it is difficult to find anyone in our culture who will respect us when we suffer.

our lives examined by researchers zealous for the clue that will account for our lack of health or happiness. Ivan Illich, in an interview, said: “You know, there is an American myth that denies suffering and the sense of pain. It acts as if they should not be, and hence it devalues the experience of suffering. But this myth denies our encounter with reality.”1

cross. P. T. Forsyth wrote: The depth is simply the height inverted, as sin is the index of moral grandeur. The cry is not only truly human, but divine as well. God is deeper than the deepest depth in man. He is holier than our deepest sin is deep. There is no depth so deep to us as when God reveals his holiness in dealing with our sin … . [And so] think more of the depth of God than the depth of your cry. The worst thing that can happen to a man is to have no God to cry to out of the depth.

Not that Christians celebrate suffering—we don’t make a religion out of it. We are not masochists who think we are being holy when we are hurting, who think personal misery is a sign of exceptional righteousness. There is some suffering in which we get involved that is useless and unnecessary; but there is adequate commonsense wisdom in Christian ways which prevents us from suffering for the wrong reasons, if only we will pay attention to it. Henri Nouwen wrote: Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.4

The second important thing Psalm 130 does is to immerse the suffering in God—all the suffering is spoken in the form of prayer, which means that God is taken seriously as a personal and concerned being. Certain sentences in the psalm show specific knowledge of the character of God as a personal redeemer: God is personal so that we may have an intimate relation with him;

There is meaning to our lives and there is salvation for our lives, a truth summed up by Forsyth when he said, “Our very pain is a sign of God’s remembrance of us, for it would be much worse if we were left in ghastly isolation.”6 Eight times the name of God is used in the psalm. We find, as we observe how God is addressed, that he is understood as One who forgives sin, who comes to those who wait and hope for him, who is characterized by steadfast love and plenteous redemption, and who will redeem Israel.

suffering: we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line. God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries. God seeks the hurt, maimed, wandering and lost. God woos the rebellious and confused. If God were different than he is, not one of us would have a leg to stand on: “If you, GOD, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance? As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped.” Because of the forgiveness we have a place to stand. We stand in confident awe before God, not in terrorized despair.

It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time. It is the opposite of making plans that we demand that God put into effect, telling him both how and when to do it. That is not hoping in God but bullying God. “I pray to GOD—my life a prayer—and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.”

But there are differences from time to time and from place to place which cause special problems. For instance, when an ancient temptation or trial becomes an approved feature in the culture, a way of life that is expected and encouraged, Christians have a stumbling block put before them that is hard to recognize for what it is, for it has been made into a monument, gilded with bronze and bathed in decorative lights. It has become an object of veneration. But the plain fact is that it is right in the middle of the road of faith, obstructing discipleship. For all its fancy dress and honored position, it is still a stumbling block. One temptation that has received this treatment in Western civilization, with some special flourishes in America, is ambition. Our culture encourages and rewards ambition without qualification. We are surrounded by a way of life in which betterment is understood as expansion, as acquisition, as fame. Everyone wants to get more. To be on top, no matter what it is the top of, is admired. There is nothing recent about the temptation. It is the oldest sin in the book, the one that got Adam thrown out of the garden and Lucifer tossed out of heaven. What is fairly new about it is the general admiration and approval that it receives.

It is additionally difficult to recognize unruly ambition as a sin because it has a kind of superficial relationship to the virtue of aspiration—an impatience with mediocrity and a dissatisfaction with all things created until we are at home with the Creator, the hopeful striving for the best God has for us—the kind of thing Paul expressed: “I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back” (Phil 3:14). But if we take the energies that make for aspiration and remove God from the picture, replacing him with our own crudely sketched self-portrait, we end up with ugly arrogance. Robert Browning’s fine line on aspiration, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” has been distorted to “Reach for the skies and grab everything that isn’t nailed down.” Ambition is aspiration gone crazy.

We don’t seek out death-defying situations, and we avoid mentally unstable teachers. But in doing that we don’t get what some people seem to want very much, namely, a religion that makes us safe at all costs, certifying us as inoffensive to our neighbors and guaranteeing us as good credit risks to the banks. It would be simply awful to find that as we grew in Christ we became dull, that as we developed in discipleship we became like Anthony Trollope’s Miss Thorne, whose “virtues were too numerous to describe, and not sufficiently interesting to deserve description.” We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory. How do we get both the sense of stability and the spirit of adventure, the ballast of good health and the zest of true sanity? How do we get the adult maturity to keep our feet on the ground and retain the childlike innocence to make the leap of faith?

As this old ark song is resung now by the people of God on pilgrimage, historical memories are revived and relived: there is a vast, rich reality of obedience beneath the feet of disciples. They are not the first persons to ascend these slopes on their way of obedience to God, and they will not be the last. Up these same roads, along these same paths, the ark had been carried, accompanied by a determined and expectant people. It had been carried in both good and bad ways. They would remember the time they carried it in panic (“I’m scared! Pray for me!”), superstitiously as a secret weapon against the Philistines. That ended in calamity. They would also remember the Davidic parade of awed adoration and dancing celebration as obedience was turned into worship. Christians tramp well-worn paths: obedience has a history. This history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us.

The only person they consult is themselves, and the only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.

A Christian with a defective memory has to start everything from scratch and spends far too much of his or her time backtracking, repairing, starting over. A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam. Psalm 132 activates faith’s memory so that obedience will be sane. “Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.”

“I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry.” The devout mind goes back to those years in the wilderness when God gave water from the rock, manna from the ground and quail from the skies, and fashions a hope for abundant, eternal providence. “I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes; the holy people will sing their hearts out!” No other people knew so much of salvation as Israel. The priests renewed the knowledge and applied it to daily life at every gathering of worship—occasions that were always marked with joy—renewing the life of redemption. Has any other people had such a good time with their faith as Israel? From Moses’ song at the edge of the Red Sea with Miriam and the women accompanying with tambourines, to the victorious trumpets that shook and finally tumbled the walls of Jericho, to the robust hymns of David that we continue to sing in our churches today, the joy has overflowed. “Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David! I’ll fill it with light for my anointed.” Light—radiant light!—pervades Scripture and creation as a sign of God’s presence. The hope is that its brightness will provide light for the path of the one who represents God’s presence, a light we now identify with revelation in Scripture and in Christ.

Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it.

Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is ever a threat to obedience: the danger that we should reduce Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living. It gives us, instead, a vision into the future so that we can see what is right before us. If we define the nature of our lives by the mistake of the moment or the defeat of the hour or the boredom of the day, we will define it wrongly. We need roots in the past to give obedience ballast and…

If we never learn how to do this—extend the boundaries of our lives beyond the dates enclosed by our birth and death and acquire an understanding of God’s way as something larger and more complete than the anecdotes in our private diaries—we will forever be missing the point of things by making headlines out of something that ought to be tucked away on page 97 in section C of the newspaper or putting into the classified ads something that should be getting a full-page color advertisement—mistaking a sore throat for a descent into hell. (“Peterson, pray for me!”) For Christian faith cannot be comprehended by examining an Instamatic flash picture which has caught a pose of…

Its rhythms stimulate us to new adventures in the Spirit without making us lunatics. For Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground; it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue.

A person who leaps about constantly is under suspicion of being not a man but a jumping jack. What we require is obedience—the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which.

Living together in a way that evokes the glad song of Psalm 133 is one of the great and arduous tasks before Christ’s people. Nothing requires more attention and energy. It is easier to do almost anything else. It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community. If a person can be isolated from the family (from husband, from wife, from parents, from children, from neighbors) and then be professionally counseled, advised and guided without the complications of all of those relationships, things are very much simpler. But if such practices are engaged in systematically, they become an avoidance of community. Christians are a community of people who are visibly together at worship but who remain in relationship through the week in witness and service. “In the beginning is the relation.”2

Every community of Christians is imperiled when either of these routes are pursued: the route of defining others as problems to be solved, the way one might repair an automobile; the route of lumping persons together in terms of economic ability or institutional effectiveness, the way one might run a bank. Somewhere between there is community—a place where each person is taken seriously, learns to trust others, depend on others, be compassionate with others, rejoice with others. “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote, “Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”4 And what Christ has done is anoint us with his Spirit. We are set apart for service to one another. We mediate to one another the mysteries of God.

In the second image, the community is “like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion.” Hermon, the highest mountain in that part of the world, rises to a height of over nine thousand feet in the Lebanon range, north of Israel. Anyone who has slept overnight in high alpine regions knows how heavy the dew is at such altitudes. When you wake in the morning, you are drenched. This heavy dew, which was characteristic of each new dawn on the high slopes of Hermon, is extended by the imagination to the hills of Zion—a copious dew, fresh and nurturing in the drier, barren Judean country. The alpine dew communicates a sense of morning freshness, a feeling of fertility, a clean anticipation of growth. Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother’s behavior, our sister’s growth. Each person in the community is unique; each is specially loved and particularly led by the Spirit of God. How can I presume to make conclusions about anyone? How can I pretend to know your worth or your place?

When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them. They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities. We explore the fascinating depths of their friendship, share the secrets of their quest. It is impossible to be bored in such a community, impossible to feel alienated among such people.

The other word is bĕrakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out his own life for us, he shares the goodness of his Spirit, the vitality of his creation, the joys of his redemption. He empties himself among us, and we get what he is. That is blessing.

Did you quarrel with your neighbor while making the trip? Forget it. You are here now. Bless God. Did you lose touch with your children while coming and aren’t sure just where they are now? Put that aside for the moment. They have their own pilgrimage to make. You are here. Bless God. Are you ashamed of the feelings you had while traveling? the grumbling you indulged in? the resentment you harbored? Well, it wasn’t bad enough to keep you from arriving, and now that you are here, bless God. Are you embarrassed at the number of times you quit and had to have someone pick you up and carry you along? No matter. You are here. Bless God. The sentence is an invitation; it is also a command. Having arrived at the place of worship, will we now sit around and tell stories about the trip? Having gotten to the big city, will we spend our time here as tourists, visiting the bazaars, window shopping and trading? Having gotten Jerusalem checked off our list of things to do, will we immediately begin looking for another challenge, another holy place to visit? Will the temple be a place to socialize, receive congratulations from others on our achievement, a place to share gossip and trade stories, a place to make business contacts that will improve our prospects back home? But that is not why you made the trip: bless God. You are here because God blessed you. Now you bless God. Our stories may be interesting, but they are not the point. Our achievements may be marvelous, but they are not germane. Our curiosity may be understandable, but it is not relevant. Bless the Lord. “When the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled” (1 Cor 13:10). Bless God. Do that for which you were created and redeemed; lift your voices in gratitude; enter into the community of praise and prayer that anticipates the final consummation of faith in heaven. Bless God.

arms. Lift your arms in blessing; just maybe your heart will get the message and be lifted up also in praise. We are psychosomatic beings; body and spirit are intricately interrelated.

Many think that the only way to change your behavior is to first change your feelings. We take a pill to alter our moods so that we won’t kick the dog. We turn on music to soothe our emotions so that our conversation will be less abrasive. But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings. One person says, “I don’t like that man; therefore I will not speak to him. When and if my feelings change, I will speak.”

Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.” That goes for a Christian too. Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that. Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.”9 The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.

Charles Dickens described one of his characters as a person “who called her rigidity religion.”11 We find that kind of thing far too often, but, thankfully, we do not find it in Scripture. In Scripture we find Jesus concluding his parable of the lost sheep with the words “Count on it—there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue” (Lk 15:7). Not relief, not surprise, not selfsatisfied smugness. And certainly not the “deadness inside me.” But joy.

Sometimes he calls one of these people into his office and says something like this: “You have been around here for several months now, and I have had an opportunity to observe you. You get good grades, seem to take your calling to ministry seriously, work hard and have clear goals. But I don’t detect any joy. You don’t seem to have any pleasure in what you are doing. And I wonder if you should not reconsider your calling into ministry. For if a pastor is not in touch with joy, it will be difficult to teach or preach convincingly that the news is good.

The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?” What is the final purpose? What is the main thing about us? Where are we going, and what will we do when we get there? The answer is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Songs of Ascents have shown some of them. But it is extremely important to know the one thing that overrides everything else. The main thing is not work for the Lord; it is not suffering in the name of the Lord; it is not witnessing to the Lord; it is not teaching Sunday school for the Lord; it is not being responsible for the sake of the Lord in the community; it is not keeping the Ten Commandments; not loving your neighbor; not observing the golden rule. “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”

“Charis always demands the answer eucharistia (that is, grace always demands the answer of gratitude). Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”12 God is personal reality to be enjoyed. We

Best of all, we don’t have to wait until we get to the end of the road before we enjoy what is at the end of the road. So, “Come, bless GOD … . GOD bless you!” May it be our blessedness, as years go on, to add one grace to another, and advance upward, step by step, neither neglecting the lower after attaining the higher, nor aiming at the higher before attaining the lower.

form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman or child. That is supernatural work, and I am not supernatural. Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer—helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer. This turned out to be slow work. From time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results. But after a while it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people’s lives than helping them attend to God. More often than not I found myself getting in the way of what the Holy Spirit had been doing long before I arrived on the scene, so I would go back, feeling a bit chastised, to my proper work: Scripture and prayer; prayer and Scripture.

We live in sin-cramped conditions, mostly conscious of ourselves—our feelings and frustrations, our desires and ideas, our achievements and discoveries, our failures and hurts. The Bible is deep and wide with God’s love and grace, brimming over with surprises of mercy and mystery, peppered with alarming exposés of sin and bulletins of judgment. This is an immense world, and it takes time to adjust to the majesty—we’re not used to anything on this scale.

Imaginatively. The Bible includes us, always. Our lives are implicitly involved in everything said and done in this book. In order to realize this we must enter the story imaginatively. We must let our conversations and experiences and thoughts be brought into the story so that we can observe what happens to us in this new context, through this story line, rubbing shoulders with these characters.

Obediently. Obediently? We aren’t used to this. We have grown up in a culture that urges us to take charge of our own lives. We are introduced to thousands of books which we are trained to use—look up information, acquire skills, master knowledge, divert ourselves … whatever. But use? Well-meaning people have told us that the Bible is useful, and so we pick it up. We adapt, edit, sift, summarize. We then use whatever seems useful and apply it in our circumstances however we see fit. We take charge of the Bible, using it as a toolbox to repair our lives or as a guidebook for getting what we want or as an inspirational tract to enliven a dull day. But we aren’t smart enough to do that; nor can we be trusted to do that. The Author of the book is writing us into his book, we aren’t writing him into ours. We find ourselves in the book as followers of Jesus. Jesus calls us to follow him and we obey—or we do not. This is an immense world of God’s salvation that we are entering; we don’t know enough to “apply” anything. Our task is to obey, believingly, trustingly obey. Simply obey.