Sermon: "Silence and Contemplation"

1st in the "Soul Training" series.
Delivered February 21, 2010 by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Psalm 8

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Turn now to Psalm 8. If you use the Bible that's in front of you, under the chair in front of you, that would turn out to be page 496, Psalm 8. And what I'm going to do is, let's have a moment where you read this silently, and just read through the psalm in silence, and then I will read it out loud so that we can hear it together.

Psalm 8: "LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet: all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!"

Let's pray: Lord, this is your Word. Open our eyes. Open our hearts, for we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

Well, I'm a grandfather again, and I mentioned that last week to you. I have to mention it again this week. But there's actually a reason behind that because as I've been watching my son with his little daughter, it's reminded me of a time about 30 years ago when I had my first child, my daughter, in my arms. I can still remember looking at her quiet, sleeping face and just all of a sudden having a rush of protectiveness and love. At that moment, when I looked at that little baby, I understood that I would do anything necessary to protect her, that if it needed be, I would die in her place.

I took that moment of insight, and I pondered that. And as I went into my quiet times across the days and weeks that followed, I started to understand more and more deeply something about the love of God. I realized that some of the fire, some of the fierceness of that love and the gentleness as well, was a characteristic of the love of God, a love that God had for me. I already knew in my head about the love of God, but something happened in that period of time when a whole lot of what was in my head started to move towards my heart. And I started to understand, deep inside of me, something about the love that God had for me. I understood that I had worth; I was valuable because the God of glory loved me like that and exceedingly beyond that.

Now that's something that grew out of my experience. If you don't have that experience or if you had a bad relationship to a parent and all, then maybe that particular moment wouldn't happen to you. The thing is that something happened in my life and then it threaded together with my faith, and something moved from just head knowledge to heart knowledge.

We always want to move towards this moment when we recognize that, as Christians, our deepest answers, the answers to our deepest questions will always end up centering on God because that's what Christianity is. It's turning from a selfish life. It's turning from a life that has all kinds of extra dimensions of pain and brokenness because of our alienation from God and turning back to God, receiving the forgiveness that God is willing to give out of that passionate love, and receiving that worth, and partially, and in greater measure, receiving some of the wholeness that God can give us as we're in a relationship with him.

And so what we discover is that our worth, my worth, our worth, will always be found in this relationship to God. The greatness of God is what assures our worth. And ideally what grows out of that conviction is going to play itself out in the way we live.

But is that really the case for us? Now I'm not talking about what we say we believe. I'm talking about what we really believe. In other words what motivates us to go out and work when a new day starts? What do we believe so deeply that it forms the basis of our reflexes whenever crisis comes? What is it that finally calms our fears? How do we handle our successes? Who do we thank for our joys? It's out of these deep patterns of life that we find out what our true convictions are.

As Christians we affirm that the greatness of God is what assures our worth. But to experience the security of that, to experience the joy that can overflow in our lives because of that, requires that it goes from our head to our hearts. Just having it in our heads alone isn't enough, and that's what we see happening in Psalm 8.

This sort of movement from head to heart is not going to happen in the normal routine of life and all the busyness of all the errands and activities we have to do. That's not where that movement is going to happen, and, to be honest, that movement is not going to happen when you listen to a sermon. It might just happen when you worship. And for many of us we will find that it happens most often when we're quiet in prayer before God and we think deeply about the things that God has revealed about himself, contemplation.

And that's what David is doing in Psalm 8. He's contemplating. Now I'm going to give you a definition for that because we can define it all over the map. But what I mean about it is that the act of observing and thinking long and carefully about something, the act of observing and thinking long and hard about something. And this is something David is superb at. There are other psalms that are the fruit of his contemplation. The most famous is, perhaps, Psalm 139. And you might want to take a look at that on your own sometime. He thinks deeply and out of that he integrates it with his faith and has new insights that shape the way he lives. The truth moves from his head to his heart.

In this psalm we see not only what David is convinced of, because what David is convinced of is the same thing I've already shared. It's that the greatness of God is what assures our worth. This is what David is going to teach us in Psalm 8. But it's not only important to see what he says, but also to see a little bit about how he comes to understand that.

The first verse in Psalm 8 teaches us so much. "LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!" Just in this verse we learn so much about what it means to contemplate things as a believer. The first thing we see in it is that it's relational. Christian contemplation is a conversation with a living God. There's a conversation going on. There's a relationship that exists. And we see David beginning by saying, "Lord, you exist and I want to talk to you." David is such an amazing example. People have known God for centuries and centuries and here's David saying, "I have a living relationship with you, and I want to express that right now."

The second thing about this contemplation is that it's worshipful. When David thinks about these things and he responds in relationship to God, it's a response of worship. He recognizes the incredible worth of God, the mercy, the power, the glory. And true Christian worship, following in David's footsteps, is going to be worshipful.

The third thing we see about it just in this first verse is that it's based upon revelation. This contemplation is part of a bigger conversation. God first revealed himself. Here's David, king of the entire Jewish people. And in these opening words he acknowledges that God spoke first because he begins by saying, "Lord, Yahweh." He uses the covenantal name that God revealed himself to Moses. He's not just thinking logically about supreme beings and all. He's relating to a God who met Moses and revealed himself. And when Moses said, "You know they're not going to believe you sent me. Who should I say sent me?" And then God at that moment says, "Say that I Am sent you. Yahweh." And that covenantal name follows through the rest of Scripture.

It's based upon revelation. He's not just in logic. He's not just using reason. He's using all of those things. He's being very logical. He's being very observant, but it's inside of what God has revealed of himself. And what he sees is that the greatness of God is what assures his worth.

At the end of verse 1 and verse 2, David points out a contrast that actually shapes the rest of this psalm. On the one hand we have the fact that God has created. "You set your glory above the heavens." And then his mind goes to children and infants. "You have established a stronghold against your enemies to silence the foe and the avenger through the praise of these children." God's glory is shown in the surpassing sighs of creation and its glory, but God's glory is also shown through the most powerless people imaginable. So there are humans and there are children within that. And even children, the praise that they raise up can silence God's enemies. He shows his glory so powerfully through that. And that contrast of the greatness of creation and the smallness of humanity shapes the rest of this psalm.

Verse 3 and 4 carry the critical question that's his point of contemplation. "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?"

In verses 5 through 8, David develops this thought and he goes back to the very first books of the Bible and reflects on the words that we see in Genesis, and he reflects on what they mean. He's particularly thinking about Genesis 1:26 and 27. I'd like to read that to you.

"Then God said, 'Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.' So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

See how many words in here are reflected in the psalm? He's meditating on Genesis 1:26 and 27. Humanity has glory and meaning because the mighty glorious God created us, is mindful of us. He's placed us just a little lower than himself, crowns us with honor, and makes us God's chosen rulers over creation. And all of these signs of worth and value come directly from God. The greatness of God is what assures our worth.

Now, if we don't believe in God, if someone believes that humanity is just the result of a random history of chemical processes, to be honest I can respect the science behind that. I can respect people who are thinking that way in terms of the drive for intellectual coherence and integrity that drives us in that direction, but they have a problem if they believe that. It's very real. It's where do you get meaning out of that?

If I'm just an accident of biochemistry, what ultimately roots my meaning? Sure I might survive and somebody else might not, but why does it even matter? And I think that many people are struggling with that and are trying to give good answers from their perspective of life, but I believe as Christians we have that center. Whatever the biochemistry proves to be, whatever the history proves to be, ultimately God is in this giving us meaning as our Creator.

As Christians, well as David, as a devout and growing Jew in his spirituality, is pondering deeply what it means for him to be created by God, as Christians we share that heritage. But we have another perspective on humanity that's added into that in Jesus Christ. And I just want to go to Hebrews for a moment and read one set of verses that are directly out of Psalm 8 that come up in the book of Hebrews, chapter 2, where it says this, Hebrews, chapter 2, verse 5:

"It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified: 'What are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.' In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone."

Our understanding of the value of humanity is not only that we were created in the image of God, but that God has chosen to become human because we were valuable enough to rescue. And that even though God has created us in this position of rightful rule, and we're not talking about the terrible things we do to creation right now, but rightful, in harmony with creation and with God, that rightful place, we don't see that being worked out properly. But what Hebrews is telling us is that by God becoming human, he raises up once again the value of humanity and we see it in a resurrected Jesus that things are subject now to him and he is the first fruits of an entire humanity that will inherit some of that reality.

When we see what David is doing in Psalm 8, we recognize that he didn't just know Genesis 1:26-27. He thought deeply about it. He pondered it. He looked up in the night sky and saw the immensity of the stars and the moon and compared that to his own sense of insignificance. And he found the answer to what made him worth something. That God, the God that created this immense creation, the God of the night sky, cared about him, had made him, together with all other human people, and he made us rulers of the very creation that surrounded him. And so what David knew in his head moved to his heart.

And that's the kind of knowledge that satisfies our hearts, that calms our fears, and leads us to live differently. And David discovered this as he looked at the stars. It says here, "When I consider the works of your hands." It was just like I discovered something when I looked into the face of my child. We will never develop enough heart knowledge to live as we really desire to live. We will never develop enough of that heart knowledge in the crazy noise and flurry of life. The noise blocks so much out.

Pastor George reminded me of something that was in Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, and I want to read that to you. One of the things that Richard Foster says is,

"In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged with "muchness" and "manyness," he will rest satisfied."

Psychiatrist C.G. Jung once remarked, "Hurry is not of the devil, it is the devil."

One of our biggest enemies to the kind of spirituality that David is living out in front of us is the noise and pace and crowding of our lives. So contemplation is about creating space in that noise, in that hurry.

First of all it is about creating a space in time, to put aside activity for a moment, to consider the big things that don't get enough attention. We have to create the time. We did a survey about a month ago of all the people who came to worship that week and we asked them, "In describing your conscious efforts in relating to God, how would you describe it? I don't think about it at all, a few minutes a week, up to 30 minutes a day, over 30 minutes a day."

Forty percent of the people who come here to worship described it as a few minutes a week. Four percent said, "Don't think about it at all." And the vast majority of the rest were saying, "Up to 30 minutes a day." But you know, as we looked at the ages, every age group was struggling more or less the same. So we're all in this together. I mean sure some of us are doing a little better than the rest, but you know, when we take a look at the whole picture this is one of our profound struggles, is that we want to know God in a few minutes a week. So contemplation is about creating a space in time.

So maybe you need to just get up a few minutes earlier to create a little bit of that space or maybe you need to leave for an appointment a little earlier. I can imagine that one of the ways you can create that space is just get into your truck or your car 10 minutes earlier than you need to and don't start it yet, but grab a Bible, that you sit there on the seat and just pick it up and read it for a moment, pray for a moment before you turn on the ignition. I don't know what will work for you, but somewhere in the day, somewhere in your life, create the space.

The other is creating a physical space because creating a physical space can help us. It might be a comfortable chair in the house. It might be a corner in a quiet room. I have one room in the house, has a little corner. That's my corner. In another room Debbie has her corner. Naturally hers is neater.

And maybe your house doesn't have the room for that. I think of Susanna Wesley, John Wesley's mother. She didn't have the room. What she would do she would pick up her apron and put it over her head, and when he apron was over her head, the kids knew, "Uh-oh, Mom is having her time with God, leave her alone." So maybe you need a towel or something, you know? Space and time, a physical space. But the goal of those two things is, this is the goal, to create emotional, spiritual space inside of us, to create that space to wrestle with God's truth, to look at the reality of our lives, and have the truths move from here to here, from head to heart.

This spiritual discipline is so important and our lives are so noisy and busy that we're actually going to offer a special space for contemplative prayer during Lent. It's not just a service. It's not a service. It's just a time of guided prayer. It's only going to be for five weeks. As we gather we will focus on allowing time for silence, equipping each other for the discipline of silence and listening prayer, and it will be a time to provide a regular place for healing prayer.

We're going to do that at nine to ten o'clock on Sunday morning, which works out real well for you all. You'd only have to come early if you wanted to do it. People at nine o'clock actually have a more complicated decision. You can come early and just make use of that silence. Open up your life to what God might want to do there. It starts 2/28 and will go through Palm Sunday, 3/28, and some weeks I hope to be there myself.

In 1974, I was in my twenties, and it was at that point in my twenties that I, for the first time at least consciously, ever saw the Milky Way. I knew a lot about it. I mean I was a science nut, but I'd never seen it. And there it was. I was on a retreat with a bunch of Christians on the Hudson River, on a little island on the Hudson River. The embers had died down on the fire, looked up in the sky, was laying in my sleeping bag out under the stars, and saw the incredible beauty of the Milky Way. I had seen individual stars and seen the moon, but it was always in the light-pollution of the city. And so I'd seen a few things, only the bigger things did I see, didn't see all the subtle things and all the really beautiful things.

And that's how it is in our spiritual lives. We see the big things. You can see that even when you're in a hurry, but if you want to see the deeper things, the beautiful things, the things that draw it all together, we need to get away from the noise and we need to take the time. On that night I got a chance to see the same night sky that maybe David saw. And maybe in a small way share some of his thoughts. There are some things that we'll never see about the beauty and majesty of God, some of the things that we'll never be able to accept about ourselves, some of the things that we'll never move from our head to our heart unless we make the time.

In fact one of the steps of seeking God during this Lent maybe should be that you make a little bit of time for contemplation. We're starting a series on spiritual disciplines this week and this is, perhaps, one of the most fundamental. In fact we're going to take a few minutes, right now in worship, to be silent and contemplate the truth we just heard.

So I'd just like you to sit back in your seats a little bit, get comfortable, open up your Bibles again to Psalm 8. If there's some other Scripture burning on your heart, turn to that. That's fine. But otherwise turn to Psalm 8 and just read down the text. And right before you read just pray, "God, just use these moments to reveal yourself in some way to me." And browse down the verses until something catches your eye, and then just see where that leads you in thought and in prayer. We're only going to spend a few minutes on this. Let's now seek the Lord. I'll close in a few minutes.

May the meditations of our heart somehow, through your grace, be acceptable in your sight. Oh Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org