STEADFAST LOVE
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Texts: Psalm 107
Steadfast is an old-fashioned word. It speaks of Victorian notions of romance and duty. It hearkens back to the time of Shakespeare and even beyond to medieval tales of chivalry. The young squire was a steadfast attendant to his knight. The lovers knew a love that was steadfast and true. The nobles stood steadfastly behind their king. Or in the world of Gilbert and Sullivan, the young Frederick chose to remain steadfastly bound to the pirate crew because it was his duty as did Ralph Rackstraw stay steadfast to the salty captain and crew of the HMS Pinafore. Webster’s says the word’s origins are Old English and it means “firmly fixed in place: immovable; not subject to change; firm in belief, determination, or adherence: loyal.” As a synonym, they offer “faithful.”
Over and over today’s text asserts that God’s love is steadfast - firmly fixed in place: immovable; not subject to change. The Hebrew word here translated as “steadfast love” is hesed, which means something like “lovingkindness” and implies a covenantal or kin relationship. Ideally, “steadfast love” is the glue in the relationship between God and God’s people. It is intentional, willful, dependent on the keeping of commitments for its life and well-being. As for God’s steadfast love, one definition of hesed I found online calls it “the consistent, ever-faithful, relentless, constantly-pursuing, lavish, extravagant, unrestrained, furious love of our [parent] God!” (hesed.com.)
What do we know personally about steadfast love? We know about young love. We know about the love in long term relationships. We know about vows in which partners promise to love, honor and cherish one another until death parts them. We know about the love that binds parents and children, families and communities. We know about erotic love and careless love and selfish love. How do any of these compare or even relate to the steadfast love of God? Today’s text gives us a perspective on God’s steadfast love.
Psalm 107 begins the 5th book of Psalms in the biblical collection. These are largely Psalms of praise and thanksgiving, collected and written down, composed and sung after the Hebrew people have returned from exile in Babylon. They are hymns and poems of gratitude that God has indeed heard the cries of their lips and hearts and has delivered them. “O give thanks to God, for God is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of God say so, those redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.” Clearly these words are sung with great joy in heartfelt thanksgiving for all that God has meant to and done for this people. Not only has God sat with them and sustained them through the misery of their exile, God has brought them back to the place promised as part of the ancient covenant that God would be their God and they would be God’s people.
We have here four stanzas, each shaped around a particular experience of distress, followed by a repeated prayer for deliverance, an affirmation of God’s redeeming work and a word of thanks and praise for deliverance. First we see that there are those who have been lost, wandering in desert wastes, hungry and thirsty, no civilized habitation in sight. This imagery harkens back to the Exodus and the years they spent wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and Israel before finding their way from slavery back to the Promised Land. It also speaks to the journey back from Exile in Babylon, across other desert lands, again to their home of ancient promise. It is interesting, and not insignificant, to note that the Psalm speaks of a fainting of “the soul” rather than the body. In a literal trek across a barren, desert wasteland, one might expect the body to give out before the soul, but that is not the case here.
The Psalmist is speaking symbolically to souls that have known more distress than that which comes with literal exile. Is the Psalmist also speaking, through the ages, to you and me? Have you ever felt your life’s journey enter a desert waste in which your soul hungered and thirsted for the refreshing and redeeming sustenance that only God, in steadfast love, could give? Have you ever cried out in distress from an arid place in your own soul and found that God truly “satisfies the thirsty, and fills the hungry with good things”?
“Some sat in captivity and in gloom, prisoners in misery and in irons…Their hearts…bowed down with hard labor…with no one to help.” The Children of Israel had literally known the forced labor of slavery in Egypt and exile in Babylon. They knew what it meant to be oppressed, to have their cities and temple destroyed, their way of life dismantled. But the Psalmist goes beyond the literal to suggest that a turning from the covenant with God may have led them into captivity. Whether or not we believe that such a causal connection between the iniquity of rebellion and exile as a punishment is so, you may still know something of what it means to live in captivity. Perhaps you have been chained to a destructive habit, addicted to a life-sucking substance, hidden in the backs of closets from which you thought you’d never see the light of day. Perhaps you’re a slave to your job, chained to a computer or some other electronic device, buried under a pile of debt as you try to keep up with your neighbors while living beyond your means. Have you ever cried out from your captivity and gloom and found a little liberation, that God could break the “bonds asunder...shatter…the doors of bronze, and cut…in two the bars of iron?
The Psalmist says that others were “sick through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities endured affliction; they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death.” I can well imagine that there was physical illness that came with living in captivity in a strange land, eating strange food, drinking alien water, immersed in unfamiliar culture. It may be that there is a reference here to the ancient notion that sickness was a direct result of sin, but it does seem that the Psalmist is more concerned with soul-sickness. There is undoubtedly sickness that comes as one sinks into sin, moving further and further from the steadfast love of God. It is not God who sends the sickness; rather it is the inevitable result of abandoning the Source of nourishment that gives health and well-being. In fact, an alternate reading for “sick” in verse 17 is “fools” – “Some were fools through their sinful ways.” We’re not talking of viruses and germs and bodies that wear out; we’re talking about those who foolishly turn their backs on the Source of all life and health.
Have any of us ever foolishly turned away from God, who made us and loves us with such ineffable love, who desires nothing more than to walk beside us and be in communion with us? Have you known the heartache, the soul-sickness that kills the appetite and sucks from us the will to live and thrive? Have you ever found yourself in the position of the Prodigal Son, so hungry he would have eaten the pigs’ food when he suddenly remembered all that was available to him at his father’s house? Have you ever cried out in affliction from the very “gates of death” and found that God was ready and willing to send out a healing word, one that delivers from destruction?
Finally, there are the sea-farers, an unlikely lot for largely land-locked people, but here the Psalmist describes the perfect storm. “…they saw the deeds of God, wondrous works in the deep. For God commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards, and were at their wits’ end.” This sounds a lot like our old friend, Jonah, and the results of trying to run from God. Maybe there was a class of sailors who stepped forward when this stanza was sung in the temple, seamen who knew the real threats of working at sea in small craft powered by their strong arms on the oars or the sails.
“Sometimes I am tossed and driven” the old spiritual says. Have we ever felt that way? Another old prayer affirms that “the sea is so wide and my boat is so small.” Have you ever felt like you were caught up in the perfect storm, the waves, high as mountains crashing over you, sending you into pits so deep you thought there was no bottom? Has life ever just seemed so overwhelming you were sure your small boat would be swamped and you would drown? Perhaps drown in debt or depression, in pain or tears? Have you cried out in all your trouble and discovered that God, in steadfast love, had “made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed”? Were you “glad because [you] had quiet, and [had been] brought to [your] desired haven’?
Clearly this is a Psalm for those whose prayers have been answered, who, in crying out. have experienced God’s deliverance, who can celebrate the providence of God that brings them out of their distress. Just as clearly, we know this is not all of us all the time. I imagine each of us can recount experiences when we prayed or cried out and did not get the answer we wanted, did not get the deliverance we expected, did not receive the healing we so deeply desired. It may be that Psalm 22, which we considered a couple of weeks ago, is for those who find themselves in a state in which God does not seem present or willing to give us what we want. I know there are no easy answers to the question of what we sometimes label “unanswered prayer.” Perhaps today’s Psalm can give us a word of hope that God is very present and at work in our lives, a “consistent, ever-faithful, relentless, constantly-pursuing, lavish, extravagant, unrestrained, furious [lover].” If we have the ears to hear and eyes to see, if we can turn our aching hearts and our sin-sick souls God-ward, even when it is not clear how or why, we may yet find a way through to a renewed experience of God’s steadfast love.
There is more to life than we can ever know or understand. Beyond the conventionality of young love and the love of long term relationships, of the love that binds parents and children, families and communities, of erotic love and careless love and selfish love, there is the steadfast love of God, firmly fixed in place: immovable; not subject to change. In this steadfast love is deliverance, redemption, the real power to transform the world, to attend to suffering, to ease pain, to heal our every ill and make us whole. It may not be in the form we want or on a time schedule of our choosing, but the promise remains and those who sing this Psalm affirm it. If you cannot confidently sing this Psalm today, take the hand of someone near you who can; let them walk with you and help you find your way. In the meantime, old-fashioned as the notion may be, “Let those who are wise [– or at least those who would be wise -] give heed to these things, and consider the steadfast love of God.” Amen