Nothing You Can Do
Psalm 145[1]
I meet a lot of people who seem to think that there’s some
“line” out there they can cross over that will put them forever outside God’s
grace, mercy, and love. Of course, the church has spent centuries not only
engraving that message into our souls, but also spelling out just exactly what
kinds of things constitute crossing the “line.” There was a time when
“drinkin’, dancin’, and card-playin’” were high on the list. And, of course,
anyone who didn’t come to church on the Lord’s Day had crossed the line. In fact,
that’s still true in some churches to this day! The funny thing about those
“lines” and the people draw them is that they always point the finger at what
somebody else is doing. They always conveniently overlook their own faults.
Of course, that’s given people the idea that God is the
ultimate nitpicker, the definitive fault-finder. The idea that there’s a line
we can cross that puts us outside God’s grace, mercy, and love leads to the
image of God just waiting to “strike” us. With that kind of image of God, it’s
no wonder people have been leaving the church in droves for the last fifty
years. Who wants to go to church only to be criticized and berated for always
failing to measure up? Who wants to live in constant fear of stepping over some
unseen line that puts them outside God’s love forever? Who wants to be beaten
over the head with the message that they have no hope? Not many people I know!
All of this is introduction to one of my favorite chapters
of Scripture: Psalm 145. I’ve been reading the Psalms on a regular basis since
I was a freshman in college. But I didn’t really “discover” this Psalm until my
first year as a pastor in the PCUSA, 2006. I think what caught my attention was
the statement, “The LORD is gracious, kind and tender. He is slow to get angry
and full of love” (Ps 145:8, NIrV). The reason that verse caught my
attention is because I know it’s an echo of the original revelation God gave to
Moses: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6). That’s a
statement about who God is that echoes again and again throughout the Bible.
Unfortunately, in the original setting, that “revelation”
about God is complicated. It follows the incident when the people who had just come
out of Egypt and promised to love and serve only God made a golden calf to
worship as their “god.” God’s response isn’t “slow to anger,” but rather God
immediately gets angry enough to threaten to destroy the people of Israel! I
think that may have actually been a test of Moses’ commitment to the people,
because Moses pleads with God for them, and God “changes his mind” (Ex 32:14).
But then Moses leads the tribe of Levi to slaughter those who had worshipped
the calf, 3000 people in all. It’s not a very inspiring story!
By way of reassurance that God would not abandon them,
Moses asks God to “show me your glory” (Ex 33:18). God fulfills his promise to
“make all my goodness pass before you and … proclaim before you the name,
‘The Lord’” (Ex 33:19) as God “covered” Moses in the “cleft of the rock.”
And the revelation of God’s very “goodness” is found in the statement I quoted
earlier: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to
anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6). But in this
original context, it goes on: “keeping steadfast love for the thousandth
generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means
clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children
and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation” (Ex 34:7)! On
the surface, at least, it doesn’t sound very assuring. How do you know whether
you get to be one of the ones whose “iniquity” or sin gets forgiven or the ones
whose guilt is passed down to their children’s children’s children?
For one thing, in that situation, God forgave even those
who were guilty. The whole people took part in worshipping the golden calf,
breaking their promise to be true to God. And in response to Moses’ prayers and
the people’s repentance, God forgave them all and restored the relationship
they’d broken. I think that’s why, in the echoes of this basic statement of
God’s character, it’s the first part that gets repeated over and over:
“The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” That was Israel’s experience
with God. They continually went astray, and God continually forgave them and
restored them.
By the time this Psalm came to be written, that had become
the focal point for God’s true character. As we heard in our Scripture reading
for today, the Psalmist praises God for being “gracious, kind and tender. He is
slow to get angry and full of love” (Ps 145:8, NIrV). The Psalmist
expands on that theme: God is good to everyone and “He shows deep concern” for
all creation (Ps 145:9, NIrV). God is trustworthy in all his words,
“faithful in everything he does,” the one who always acts out of his unfailing
love (Ps. 145:13, 17). God “takes good care of all those who fall” and “He
lifts up all those who feel helpless”; God “opens” his “hand” and satisfies
“the needs of every living creature” (Ps. 145:14, 16). And the point is that
God does all of this and more for us because of who God is, not because of
anything we’ve done.
By the time we get to Jesus, this is clearly what he
emphasizes about who God is: God is full of grace, mercy, and love. As Jesus
said in the Sermon on the Mount, God pours out his blessings of sun and rain,
which are necessary for us to have food, equally on those who do what is right
and those who do wrong (Mt 5:45). And if that seems unfair, we hear in the parable
of the workers in the vineyard from our Gospel lesson for today a story that
illustrates how God gives us all what we don’t deserve. And he does so simply
because he is “generous” (Mt 20:15). That’s what grace means: God freely gives
his blessing to all of us equally, and he does so simply because that’s who God
is!
With this in mind, I want to take us back to our original
question: is there some line out there that we can cross that will forever put
us outside God’s grace, mercy, and love? I’ve known people who think so. I’ve
known people who seem to be afraid that the answer is, “yes.” The answer from
Psalm 145 is a resounding “No, there is not!” And Jesus gives us the same
answer, “No, there is not some line out there you can cross.” So does St. Paul.
He assures us that God has demonstrated once and for all by sending his Son Jesus
to die for us that he is “God-who-is-for-us,” not a God who is just waiting to “strike”
us. And Paul asks, “if God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom 8:31). The
whole intent behind everything God has done for us is to restore us to himself.
Since that’s God’s purpose, Paul concludes that there is nothing “in all
creation that will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus
our Lord” (Rom. 8:29). The reason for that is because there is nothing and no
one who change who God is or undo what God has done for us in Jesus. That’s why
I love the blessing that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has handed down to us: “There
is nothing we can do to make God love us more” and “there is nothing we can do
to make God love us less.”[2]
[1] ©
2023 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 9/24/2023 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time,
32.
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