Just a reminder that this Sunday we will be meeting at Golden Gardens for a picnic AND to celebrate baptisms and baby dedications.

Please feel free to invite friends and family for this last picnic of the summer.

Again here are the details

Where: Golden Gardens park
Time: 11:00 a.m.
What to bring: Meat to grill, side, salad, dessert or drink to share, blankets and/or chairs for sitting, frisbees, balls, etc.

Sanctuary will provide, plates, napkins, plasticware

Susan
susu2005@gmail.com

Psalm 137:

8 O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
9 Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!

Modern people have a difficult time handling the anger in the Psalms. Eugene Peterson writes, “People who are looking for a spiritual soporific don’t pray the Psalms, or at least don’t pray them for very long…..”

There is a realism in how the Psalmist processes his anger. He takes his feeling and he opens them up in all their reality and looks at God in all of his reality. His emotions actually drive him to God in a new way, and His presence changes his emotions. Religion tends to say, stifle your feelings, especially those negative feelings. Get on top of them with goodness. You are a good person. Secularism tends to look at venting, and expressing your feelings, as an end in itself. The Psalms doesn’t say, stuff your feelings or ventilate. It doesn’t say stifle your feelings or bow to them. It doesn’t say be under-aware of them or over-aware /awed by them. You PRAY them. You let your emotional reality drive you to the reality of God and if the reality of God is true it ought to change your reality.

One more thing:

Jesus weeps the city as he heads into Jerusalem for the last time. Psalm 137 is on his mind.  Little do the people know that this Psalm prophecies destruction of their city [which was fulfilled in 70AD].  But there’s more on the mind of Jesus.  He himself is to be ‘dashed on the the rocks’ FOR us.

What does this teach us?  Anger demands justice from a just God.  The cross, however, shows us more than a just God who exacts payment.  It shows us a just God who pays. He took the judgment upon himself by becoming sin.   The Father had dashed his little One against the cross for the sins of all humanity.

Anger on this side of the cross goes beyond demanding justice.  It pays for the injustice owed  - paying ‘grace’ forward.  It wills the good of our enemies.  Jesus did from the cross for us.  ”Forgive them,” he prayed.

“Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
- Ps 119:8

The assumption is that if you are not serving God, you are serving something else. If you are not a slave to the spiritual authority of God, you are under the spiritual authority of something else already. The opposite of Christianity isn’t atheism. It’s Idolatry.

Euripides, the greek tragedy writer:

“No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will.”

What is astounding here is this Psalmist is NOT saying, I gave up my freedom to serve you, he says, I now walk at liberty because I sought your precepts. I’m free BECAUSE I’m your servant. I used to be a slave to fear. Because there were certain things I thought I had to have. I used to be a slave to resentment, because I thought there were certain things I had to have. I used to be a slave to guilt. I could never measure up. But now that you are my master, nothing else masters me. Now that I serve you, nothing else orders me around. I can come and I can go. I have choices – finally!

Here’s the point: Freedom is not a lack of restrictions. Freedom is finding the right restrictions. Restrictions that fit your being.