Sermon: “The Earth Is the Lord’s”

Text: Psalm 24

15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

July 12, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is Psalm 24.  Modern scholarship about the Psalms owes much to the ground-breaking research and insights of the German scholar Hermann Gunkel, who died in the 1930s.  Gunkel became convinced that individual passages of scripture, like the psalms, should be studied in the context of how they were used in the daily life or worship of the ancient Israelites.  

Gunkel believed that Psalm 24 would have been recited or sung as a procession of worshippers was about to enter the Temple in Jerusalem.  After a brief introduction, the psalm announces a question—presumably asked by the worshippers—about who could enter the Temple.  The psalm then continues with an answer—perhaps given by a priest at the gate—that specified the sort of person who was welcome in the Temple.  Finally, the psalm concluded with an affirmation or blessing.[1]  Some have suggested this is the sort of psalm that might have been sung on occasions like the one from Second Samuel,[2] that Chuck just read.  While Gunkel’s theories have been revised and developed by later scholarship, they continue to influence our interpretation of the Psalms.  As we listen to the words of Psalm 24, we can easily imagine King David, with dancing and song, escorting the Ark of the Covenant to the top of the Temple Mount.

Sermon.  One of my favorite cartoons is from the New Yorker magazine.  A man and a woman are at the Museum of Modern Art and are standing in front of a gigantic canvas filled with an abstract design.  The man turns to the woman and says, “Not bad—for art.”  Of course the humor is that the man is on one level of appreciation for painting, while we readers know that there is another, much deeper level that he has not yet grasped.  We may find ourselves sympathetic to his remark, but it’s still funny.

We have been focusing today on John Calvin and on his 500^th birthday.  Calvin was a great fan of the Book of Psalms.  For one thing, he appreciated their usefulness in private devotions.  Someone once commented that the rest of the Bible contains God’s words to us, but the Psalms are our words to God.  Many persons today use the Psalms as an anchor for their daily devotions—reading a selection in the morning and again in the evening, allowing the words of the Psalms to suggest to us the forms of our own prayers.  Plus, the Psalms are relatively easy to read.  They are short and self-contained, which is a great help to a devotional reader.  But Calvin insisted that we can have an even deeper appreciation of the Psalms.  As our bulletin notes point out, he believed that the Psalms were particularly suited for congregational singing during public worship.[3]  And he used the Psalms as preaching texts, as well, recognizing that more careful attention could bring out the richness of their poetry, through which we can experience the nearness, the majesty, the love, and the mercy of God.  Calvin knew that the Psalms are much more than aids to our spiritual lives.  No less than Genesis or Romans or the Gospels, they are also capable of teaching us theology and showing us how to live an ethical life.

Take the first verses of Psalm 24, for example—the introductory verses.  The first words we hear are, “The whole earth is the Lord’s.”  Where we wind up in our thinking is so often dictated by where we begin.  And the psalmist is careful to have us get right from the beginning the essential truth that everything we have and everything we are belongs to God.  We may think we own our house or our car or even the talents that we were born with or developed, but we would have none of it without God’s generosity.  We creatures belong to the creator—to the one who has “founded the world on the seas and established it on the rivers.”  The psalmist poetically refers here to the great creation story of the ancient world—that the world was in chaos, like the great swirling oceans—until God tamed the chaos and brought out of it order and life.  Sounds like Genesis, doesn’t it: “the earth was a formless void and [dark]” until God created light and ordered the heavens and held back the waters and allowed the dry land to appear.[4]  As the chaos seems so often to close in around us, we can be glad that our God actually uses the elements of chaos to bring forth beauty and life. 

In John Calvin’s most influential work, his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he argues that we cannot know who we are until we know who God is.[5]  And Calvin understood God to be the absolute sovereign—exactly the picture we see in Psalm 24.  World leaders have been meeting in recent weeks struggling for some consensus about global warming and a responsible use of the earth’s resources.  How much easier the discussions would be if everyone around the table had the basic understanding of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it!”  Any notion that we can do with the earth what we wish and leave a mess for future generations to clean up just can’t be squared with a sincere belief that the world does not belong to us in the first place.

Having established who it is that is being worshipped—the ruler and creator of everything that is—the psalmist now moves to the arena of humans, asking who will be allowed to ascend the hill of the Lord in Jerusalem, and who will be allowed to stand in God’s holy place there?  And the answer comes back, “Those who have clean hands and pure hearts.”  “Clean hands” are a poetic reference to our outward behavior—about what we do.  If we are not honest in our business dealings, we do not have clean hands.  If we treat other persons like objects instead of like equals, then we do not have clean hands.  If we seek to protect our own positions at the expense of others, then we do not have clean hands.  In order to stand in God’s holy place, we also must have “pure hearts.”  The ancient Israelites understood that the organ of thought and will in the body was the heart.  To modernize the passage, therefore, we would say that we should have pure minds, pure thoughts and desires and wills.  It is profound that the psalmist requires not only right actions (“clean hands”) but also right thinking (“pure hearts”).  We all know that it takes both.  Wrong actions will eventually corrupt even good motives and the best intentions.  Conversely, as Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount,[6] our desires and intentions eventually affect our behavior.  Living a holy life requires good thoughts and good actions.

The psalmist promises that persons who live that kind of holy life “will receive blessing from the Lord.”  Does this mean that if we live a holy life that God will bless us with easy living and material wealth?  Maybe some in ancient Israel thought so, but I suspect that they only had to look around to realize this was not how God works.  No matter how holy we are, nor how good we may behave, we still live in the same dangerous and unpredictable world that houses the rest of the human race.  If we lead a holy life, the blessing we have is the simple knowledge that we are living in harmony with the will of God, the one who created us and who is sovereign over the world.  The blessing we have is the peace that comes as the peace of Christ—peace that the world cannot give.  When we properly align our priorities, this peace arrives automatically.

I appreciate the insight of Professor Clinton McCann, who suggests that Psalm 24 ends by coming back around to its beginning theme—the sovereignty of God.  Poetry collects many images and thoughts and allows each to enrich the other.  And so it is that with these final verses of the psalm, “Lift up your heads, O ye gates,” we may be thinking of the day when David first brought the Ark of the Covenant to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  Or we may think of later years, as the priests sought the Lord in the Holy of Holies within Solomon’s magnificent Temple building.  With generations of Christians past, we may remember the entry of Jesus—our King of Glory—into the holy city of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  For me, it is hard not to hear the music from Handel’s Messiah when I hear, “Lift Up Your Heads.”  And all of these thoughts and images combine as we look to the future, when the King of Glory will return.  On that great day it will once again be crystal clear to whom the earth belongs.  We will know without a doubt to whom we belong.  And our blessings will be fully realized.

Psalm 24 is certainly useful for private devotion.  But as Calvin recognized, it’s also a worthy preaching text.  This psalm inscribes a long arc—from the creation of the world, to our responsibility of living ethically in the land that God has given us, then to our promised blessing, and finally to the full realization of our blessings when the King of Glory returns.  In the scope of just a few verses, the psalmist has taught us what Calvin thought was so important—knowledge of God, and knowledge of ourselves.  It begins with fact, moves to moral instruction, and ends with hope. 

Not bad—for poetry!