No Weak Sauce--October 26, 2023"O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever.
Do you see the pattern? Is the message getting through?
Because, in truth, this was just a short snippet of the repetition that runs throughout what we call Psalm 136. It is a literal refrain, and the psalm itself is written as a sort of call-and-response, where each verse starts with a statement about God, and often what God has done for the people, and then the answer replies that God's "steadfast love endures forever." Twenty-six times that same pattern occurs, without variation and without fail: the leader would call to mind something that God had done to save and bless, and the congregation would state the obvious conclusion: here is more evidence that "God's steadfast love endures forever."
I find this whole psalm fascinating, not just because it gives us a glimpse of ancient Israel's corporate worship life, but because of what those distant ancestors in the faith knew was important enough to keep saying. I mean, at one level, it's kind of cool to be able to reconstruct a bit of what it might have sounded like to be an Israelite worshiping at the Temple, or on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It's powerful to think that, even removed by three thousand years in time, give or take, there are connections between our patterns of liturgy and those of ancient times. This psalm is sort of the Hebrew version of the preacher calling out, "Can I get an Amen?" and the congregation all replying with a shouted "Amen!" back, or our rhythm in Sunday prayers of intercession. And that by itself binds us together with those past generations.
But like I say, beyond the church-nerd factor that says, "How cool! Even ancient Israelites used litanies in worship!" the thing that is really powerful here is what those Hebrew congregations were focused on. Of all the things they could emphasize, the simple idea worth coming back to over and over is the enduring love of God. Any good teacher will tell you that repetition is one of the best means of emphasizing your point and driving it home, and what the poets and song leaders of the psalms want us to retain, above all, is the unending steadfastness of God's love. That really is amazing when you consider that there are no parallel psalms with refrains like, "God's wrath burns eternally!" or "God's grudge-holding is unflinching!" There's not even a chorus of, "God's holiness is uncompromising and unwavering!" even if that might also be true (whatever we think we mean by "holiness"). But there is this song, unique in all of Scripture, that keeps insisting we remember the persistent steadfast love of God, or what the late Brennan Manning called "the relentless tenderness" of the divine. Our ancestors in the faith wanted to ingrain those who came after them with the news of God's unending, unfailing love, until it becomes dyed in the wool of who we are.
Now, given the lengths this well-used hymn has gone to so that people ever since would be grounded in God's unending love, here's my question: what do people around us first think of when they think of their local church... and of the God proclaimed in those pulpits and pews? What impression of God do people currently get from the churches where you and I live and work and worship? What one message is hammered home over and over again the most clearly? And what do people believe that WE believe about God, based on what they hear and see from Respectable Religious People around them?
I ask, almost a little bit afraid of really finding out the answer, because I know for a lot of people, the messages they've heard time and time again from folks who claim to speak for God don't line up with the emphasis here in Psalm 136. For a lot of folks, all they've ever heard has been the fear of getting zapped by a wrathful sky deity who is cut more out of the cloth of Zeus or Jupiter than the One whose "steadfast love endures forever." A lot of other folks have been sold some version of a faith that comes with a list of Things-You-Have-To-Do to get yourself acceptable to "God." And plenty of other folks have heard some tepid, mealy-mouthed weak word about God's love that comes with a "but" or an "if," as in "God loves everybody in general, but not if you are any of the following things..." or "God loves you if you do these other things." And like the old line goes, a lot of folks find themselves unaffected by the power of the authentic gospel because they have been inoculated against it by a weak version of the real thing. But the singers of this psalm have no place for that; they have no patience for weak sauce.
Maybe it's time to ask what those saints of the distant past who learned the refrain, "God's steadfast love endures forever," would say to the loophole-riddled, highly-conditional version of God's love so many have heard... and maybe it's time for us to recover the news they've been shouting to us for thousands of years: God's steadfast love endures forever. There is nothing that can stop it, nothing that can end it, and nothing that will wear it down.
What would it sound like for you and me today to be willing to keep repeating that news before anything else to the people around us? What would happen if the listening world came to know us for being people who spoke of God's relentless tenderness, and who didn't water it down?
May we be such people today. May that refrain be on our lips, upon our hearts, and in our hands.
Lord God, keep ingraining us with your unending love, and let it pour out from us in our words and actions.
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