"That His glory may dwell": Singing Peace Amidst Christmas Wrath ~ Psalm 85 (Songs We Sing While We Wait sermon series, No. 2)

You, Lord, showed favor to your land;
    you restored the fortunes of Jacob.
2 You forgave the iniquity of your people
    and covered all their sins.
3 You set aside all your wrath
    and turned from your fierce anger.

4 Restore us again, God our Savior,
    and put away your displeasure toward us.
5 Will you be angry with us forever?
    Will you prolong your anger through all generations?
6 Will you not revive us again,
    that your people may rejoice in you?
7 Show us your unfailing love, Lord,
    and grant us your salvation.

8 I will listen to what God the Lord says;
    he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants—
    but let them not turn to folly.
9 Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,
    that his glory may dwell in our land.

10 Love and faithfulness meet together;
    righteousness and peace kiss each other.
11 Faithfulness springs forth from the earth,
    and righteousness looks down from heaven.
12 The Lord will indeed give what is good,
    and our land will yield its harvest.
13 Righteousness goes before him
    and prepares the way for his steps. ~ Psalm 85

This sermon did not take me where I thought it would. When I planned out our Advent series, I was expecting it to be more romantic comedy – “Love and faithfulness meet together”, the Psalmist giggles. “Righteousness and peace kiss each other,” he whispers. But as I read the text carefully, sat with it, spoke with some of you who are struggling, I couldn’t escape the elephant in the room. That if we are to understand this text at all, worship the God for whom it is about, enter into Advent waiting, practice peacemaking, then we have to talk about wrath. And so this Psalm quickly moved from a Rom-com (romantic comedy) feel to a very different kind of song. A song more like

this (click here).

Okay, I think you get the point. Is that God? Is that what the Psalmist is telling us – that Yahweh is an angry God for whom we should sing, “You’d better watch out. You’d better not cry. You better not pout I’m telling you why. God is coming to kill the whole town!” Well, “no” is the answer but a “no” that demands a thoughtful response rather than dismissive one because the text does talk about God’s anger. And truth be told, it’s a bit ambitious, if not ludicrous a friend advised me, to deal with such a delicate topic in such a short time on a Sunday morning but I couldn’t escape it. So please know that I’m not going to be exhaustive and that I realize that there’s much more to be said on the issue. So I ask for a certain grace. But we need to talk about Christmas wrath. I know, I know, it’s like the underwear that you would get from your Aunt Myrtle – what kind of Christmas gift is that?

1.    When considering God’s wrath focus on the verbs (vss. 1-3).

Verses 1-3 function as a call to confession reminding the people and God of God's past saving acts. God's grace is actively on display in the verbs used “favored,” and “restored.” The verb “forgave” in vs. 2 literally means “carried” and the verb “covered” means “to smother.” So vs. 2 can also be read: “You carried the evil of your people and smothered all their sins.” That’s strong language.

We like to think of God as always loving and forgiving and He is. But we also live in a world in which there is real evil and real consequences to our actions that hurt others, ourselves and all of creation. Wrath takes seriously the fact that him, her, you and creation are all objects of God’s love. So if we stick closely to the text two things stand out: 

 1) One is the activity of what God is doing to wrath. Wrath is something God “sets aside” or “withdraws” and “turns from.” Wrath is nothing that God stokes, fumes or rants about. That’s what people do but not God. The word order reveals that while God is in the right to be angry; it’s not something that God actively engages. No, he “set’s it aside.” 

2) The second thing to notice is God’s motivation. What animates God? Verses 1-3 reveal that favor, carrying, and covering, are the heart of God and what animate wrath. In part this is illustrated by the object of God’s actions. As much as we might imagine that God’s wrath is for God’s enemies alone, and thus we are quite happy to pronounce it on others, our text says that it is an experience of God’s people whom God loves (vs. 2). So we begin to move toward a better Biblical understanding when we understand wrath as a metaphor of sorts for God’s anger towards those God loves when they hurt

or harm those whom God loves. This can sound very abstract so let me offer an analogy: I love my children. Now, if I walked into a room and saw one of my sons beating up the other, I’m not going to sit idly by and allow the one to harm the other saying, “What can a do? I love my son and so will let him do what he wants.” On the other hand, I’m not going to jump into the fray and in return beat the offender to a pulp saying, “This is what you get because I love my son.” So wrath is God’s challenge of love and the experience of that love in the presence of sin. But love is always what motivates God to handle wrath differently, to take responsibility for it and for our failure to live peaceably. Remember the verbs.

2.    When considering wrath, remember it’s a rhetorical question (vss. 4-7).

A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question that attempts to make a point rather than elicit an answer. It’s intended to start a discussion or at least draw an acknowledgement that the listener understands the intended message. “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” (William

Shakespeare) Or, silly ones like, “Is the pope Catholic?” And so the Psalmists asks, “Will you be angry with us forever?” It’s rhetorical. The point of the question is to prompt a discussion about the fact that God is love. The Psalmist knows that wrath is not who God is. So there’s a bit of important theology here that we miss with grave consequences. Wrath is NOT an attribute of God; that is, it’s not a part of God’s eternal nature. It does not exist alongside God’s holiness, love or faithfulness. God IS those things and will be them forever. God IS love, the Bible tells us (1 John 4:8). However, the Bible never states that God IS wrath. In fact, the message of the Old Testament could rightly be summarized as the “steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end” (Lamentations 3:22). So again, whatever we might say of wrath, the eternal nature of God is to show us his unfailing love.

3.    When considering wrath, remember that Jesus is God’s glory dwelling in our land (vss. 9-13).

When you read Psalm 85 with an Advent lens it is striking to see it as being about the coming of Jesus. Jesus is our peace, we learn in Ephesians 2:14. Jesus is our righteousness, Paul announces to us in 1 Cor. 1:30. Jesus is God’s glory dwelling in our land (vs. 9). So we begin to see what God has done in Jesus Christ as the expression of his unfailing love and his own activity to “set aside” and “turn” from wrath. Jesus is the love child of “righteousness and peace kissing each other.” (vs. 10)

Jesus is “faithfulness springing forth from the earth, and righteousness looking down from heaven.” (vs. 11). Whatever we might say about wrath has to be said with Jesus in mind. So we should question any description of God that doesn’t sound like Jesus because Jesus IS, Paul tells us, the very image of God and that in him the fullness of God did dwell. (Colossians 1:19; 2:9). Or, as one theologian put it, “God is Christlike and in him there is no unChristlikeness at all.” So who God shows himself to be in Jesus is simply what he always is; he doesn’t decide to be like Jesus for thirty-odd years or even thirty thousand. And funny enough – Jesus’ relationship to wrath is less about what he gives and, like Psalm 85, more about what he carries, covers, forgives, even endures.

4.    Remember what we did when glory dwelt in our land (read any Gospel, if you forget).

The funny thing about preparing our hearts for Advent and telling the story of Christmas is that if we tell it straight it’s a brutal and scary story – Mary and Joseph not finding anyone who would take them in, the odd people who actually come like pagan magicians and filthy shepherds, the murderous threats of a ruler so insecure and wicked as to kill innocent children rather than risk his political fortunes, and Jesus with his parents fleeing the violence as refugees to Egypt. And when we tell it straight, we realize something quite striking and terrible – that it’s not God’s wrath that we should so much fear but our own. The Gospel of John reminds us of a harsh reality of what we human beings do when God’s “glory dwells in our lands” – we reject him. John’s own odd version of the Christmas story tells of God’s light and glory, Jesus, the Word, moving into our neighborhood full of grace and truth and our response. “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to his own home, and his own people did not accept him.” (John 1:10-11) In the end, the oddity of Christmas, the strangeness of the story of God coming to save us from our sins is not God’s anger but our own.

Whose wrath should we fear more, I wonder? The God who loves us without measure or ourselves?  I don’t know if you noticed but I skipped one verse of our Psalm – vs. 8: “I will listen to what God the Lord says; he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants – but let them not return to stupidity (or “folly”).”  The warning serves as a reminder that the people of God have been in this place before, and the people will be there again. The response to God's peace should be more than words, it involves a change in behavior. It involves an honest confession that I often act stupidly and don’t want God’s Christmas gift of peace.

I want to sing my carols and to keep my enemies.

I want to have my nativity and distrust foreigners and people without homes.

I want to tell of Angels singing, “Peace on earth. Good will toward everyone” and

maintain my support for war and violence.

I want this baby but I’m not sure that I want his peace. I’d rather have a tank and

strike my enemies from the face of the earth.

And I stand at the manger with a motley crowd and recognize wrath in my heart. I

realize that I’m being stupid. I look at the baby and whisper, “Restore us `again, God our Savior, and put away your displeasure toward us.”

And the baby laughs and grabs my finger – “And love and faithfulness embrace; righteousness and peace kiss.” And tears come to my eyes as I pray, “Please, Lord, carry our evil and smother our sins, again.”