Psalm 27
Lent is a time, for sure, to recognise our need for God, but it is also a time to rejoice in the faithfulness of God, who will not let us go. A time to recognise the very nearness of God.
Psalm 27 speaks into that feeling because it is primarily a reflection on the nearness of God to us as we journey through life. It’s a reflection on how God protects us and guards us even in the most difficult times of life, and how we can practically seek God out when life is tough for us. Lent is not only about sackcloth and ashes.
Psalm 27 reminds us of closeness and intimacy that we share with God. This sounds great when things are going well, but what about when we are struggling. Well, David was struggling in a big way when he wrote this Psalm. Listen to these struggles:
“Evildoers assail me to devour my flesh”
“An army encamps about me”
“War rises up against me”
“Do not cast me off, do not forsake me”
“Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries”
“False witnesses have risen against me and they are breathing out violence”
Yet, despite these verses, David knew that God was very near. How does David, more than any other person in the Bible apart from Jesus manage to achieve this certainty that he will never be forsaken or forgotten? On the contrary, he is always certain of the nearness of God.
I think David gives two pointers on how we too, can achieve this certainty and confidence.
Firstly, I think, we need to focus on what we know about God, not how we feel about God.
V.4 says, “One thing I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after: to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.”
There are many times in my life when I feel really close to God. But equally there are times that I, and all of us I suspect, have lived with a sense of the absence of God. The sheer, repetitive, routine of everyday life; the same old same old. When major life plans have not only failed to bear fruit, but failed even to start growing in the first place!
So, in these times, we have to remind ourselves of what we know about God rather than how I feel about God. If my faith relied on my feelings, then my faith would never really grow at all.
Instead, I have a personal history in which I have seen the footprints of God in my life, so I know that he has been with me. I have surrounded myself with people of faith and listened to their life-stories and so I know that God has been active in their lives.
I have tried to soak myself in scripture, so I know that God has been active throughout history. I have had to, like all of us, return time and time again to what I know, not feel. We could call this spiritual discipline.
David in v.4, also writes that he yearns “to seek his will in his temple.” For David, and Jesus, there was a direct link between holding firm with God in the midst of life’s trials and regularly attending worship.
When we feel far away from God, we give church a miss one Sunday, and then we give it a miss a second Sunday, and then the pattern starts to emerge and suddenly, we find we have stopped coming to church altogether.
When that happens, our little fire goes out and we will never be able to truthfully give an answer as to why.
But here’s the thing. Our feelings are real too. They may deceive us from time to time, but our emotions and feelings, as well as our rationality, also come from God. So to ever seek this nearness of God, we must engage our emotions as well as our minds.
As you may know the Anglican Church, before there was even a notion of England, has its deepest roots in the Celtic Christian tradition – long before there was even a church in Rome.
The Celtic tradition is beautiful in that it engages all of our senses and speaks to our emotions and how we can find God in the tangible things of life: creation, people, art, and more.
In the Celtic tradition, there is something called ‘thin places’. ‘Thin places’ are geographical locations where people may go to be closer to God. They built communities there, probably the most famous are on Iona (west coast of Scotland) and Lindisfarne (far NE England), but elsewhere as well.
‘Thin places’ are important for us to find because they suggest that, as I’ve mentioned quite a lot, the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world is very thin indeed. I think many of us know ‘thin places’: a beach somewhere, your garden, a rainforest creek.
Now it is not so much that the place itself is sacred so much as the emotions that the place stirs up in us and we suddenly realise that God is closer to us than we may think. Especially when we are struggling, or in a wilderness time.
This is the second point I think David makes from v. 4 of this Psalm. I think we are to pursue beauty in life and find God in that. The ‘thin places’ of our Celtic tradition. The Psalmist writes, “One thing I ask, … that I may gaze upon the fair beauty of the Lord” (ESB). To gaze upon the beauty of the Lord. What a wonderful thought!
Beauty is such an important thing for us. Beauty feeds our souls, beauty enlivens our imaginations. Beauty makes us feel whole as it engages our creativity. As emotional human beings, we find God through beauty.
Now, beauty looks different for each one of us, probably. For me, I find beauty in the Psalms, in the poetry of the Romantic period, in exquisite pottery and lots of other places. I love beauty – it recharges me and changes me!
For you it may be in the garden, or a Rembrandt painting that stirs your soul. Wherever you find beauty, pursue it, because in beauty, you will find the face of God. Just as we need food to nourish our bodies, we need beauty to nourish our souls.
So much of our world contains violence and brutality that we need to temper that with beauty. It seems to purify our emotions like an air filter purifies the air we breathe. We can again trust our feelings.
And we need to share our experiences of beauty with one another and also learn about beauty from one another. Sharing beauty with each other is one of the quickest ways, I think, to get to know and understand each other better.
As we decide to pursue beauty, our hearts will soften, and we will rediscover the closeness or immanence of God.
When David wrote this Psalm, he was going through a tough time. There was chaos and disorder in his world; he was in danger physically, emotionally and spiritually. In the natural course of things, he didn’t feel close to God. So he knew that he should actively seek out two ways of filling his life to change that.
He had to focus on what he knew about God, rather than how he felt about God. He had to pursue beauty and find in that the face of God. It wouldn’t have been any easier for him to do that than it is for any of us when we are struggling in life.
But let’s consciously do that this Lent – it strengthens and preserves our faith in this time of travelling with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross of our Lord. Let us pray ...