Sunday Service 28th July

The place of dark thoughts

28/7/24

Call to worship

Hymn 128(JP): Jesus bids us shine

Time for all : Amanda

Hymn 63(JP): God who made the earth

Reading: Psalm 139

Prayer

Hymn 557: O love that wilt not let me go

Sermon

Prayer

Hymn 167: Guide me, O thou great Jehovah

Benediction

Welcome to our meditation for 28 th of July.

There is often a struggle within us, the lofty thoughts that we want to have, and then in

the middle of them some dark thoughts that creep in.

What do we do with such thoughts: pretend they don’t exist, see them as something

fleeting and just ignore them, see them as an external influence and reject them?

We will look at that after our reading and prayer.

Prayer

God who is with us,

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present in this moment, here and now,

with us in this church, with us in our homes,

with us at this hour, and in every hour,

we come to offer our praise to you.

Praise because Your love knows no boundaries, your grace knows no limitations,

your compassion reaches out into the dark nights of the soul, when our minds race

and our imaginations take over,

and you bring assurance that you are with us, through it all.

Search us this day,

may we believe that we are known by you,

in our sitting and rising, in our thoughts and our questions,

in our laughter and our tears, in our speaking and our actions,

that you know us fully,

with all our bravery and courage...and all our timidity and fear.

Remind us that You formed us,

knitted together in our mother’s wombs,

and we are wonderfully made in all our glorious difference,

we are part of your creation, and we praise you for it.

Forgive us for whatever needs forgiving,

and you and we know what it is that needs forgiving.

May we be given such self awareness that we are conscious of the affects that we have

on others for good or for ill, and we seek to repent from the ill we do.

And nurture us, day by day, to grow into your likeness,

that we too would live with grace and openness,

love and joy, steadfastness and assurance.

This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, who taught us in trust to say;

Our Father,

Which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil;

For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever.

Amen.

Sermon

‘O God, how I wish you would kill the wicked!

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How I wish violent men would leave me alone!

They say wicked things about you; they speak evil things against your name.

O Lord, how I hate those who hate you!

How I despise those who rebel against you!

I hate them with a total hatred; I regard them as my enemies.’

Why is this verse stuck in the middle of this Psalm?

It is such a great Psalm up until then.

So that got me thinking about the writer of this Pslam, what was he feeling when he

wrote this Pslam?

Did he think that he was being super religious?

The rest of the Psalm is reflective, thoughtful, touching even, and then we get to this bit

and it seems to jar us, like it was part of some other Psalm, some vengeful cry of

someone who has been deeply hurt and he wants revenge.

It doesn’t make any sense, well not to us, but it did make sense to the writer.

I was reading Leviticus in my private devotions the day I was to write about this Psalm,

and in that reading that day it talked about a man who was gathering wood for a fire on

the Sabbath, and the people were commanded by God, or so they say, to take that man

and stone him to death.

To us that seems such a minor infringement of breaking the Sabbath rules, but to the

people of that time it was really serious.

There was no minor infringement, there was only getting it right, or getting it wrong.

They lived in a world of Black and White, good guys and bad guys and none in-

between, you were either for God and did what was right, or against God and did what

was wrong, and if you did what was wrong then you were punished.

Maybe that was the way this Psalmist was thinking, ‘God is wonderful, God is great,

God is awesome, and our response should be to destroy anyone who thinks differently.’

That’s why how we read the Bible is important.

I think a dangerous temptation we live with constantly is to try to read the Bible and

think it is easy;

there are good guys and bad guys, like in our world,

where there are good guys and bad guys, and of course we are the good guys.

And the Bible is very aware of that.

And even though we try to read the Bible with our black and white eyes,

the Bible fights back and gives us very varying shades of colour.

The characters that we automatically think of as heroes are more complex, more real

than we would like to imagine.

And that confuses us because what are we supposed to do with those heroes that

aren’t acting heroically?

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I don’t look at it that way, I see myself as messy, and the Bible I read is full of messy

people, like me, to me that’s how it can guide me.

AS God helped those messy people with their messy lives, So God can help me with

my messy life.

But not everyone agrees with that.

My wife often says I could cause and argument in an empty house.

I managed to cause a row in a Bible Study Group while I was on holiday.

At this group there was a person who idolised David the King.

To her he was the hero shepherd that defeated the evil Goliath, who took over from the

evil king Saul, to made the Israelites a powerful empire, who wrote the 23 rd Psalm.

And she told us all that he was a hero that we should try to follow.

With the sensitivity of a bull in china shop I said,

‘This is the man who had sex with Bathsheba, a married woman, and when she

became pregnant had her husband murdered and married her to make it look

legitimate.’

‘He repented from that and was forgiven,’ she said.

‘He repented only when he was confronted by Nathan the prophet, if he was such a

good guy his own conscience would have driven him to seek repentance.’ I said.

‘But he was anointed by God,’ she said.

‘That didn’t stop him doing some really evil things.’ I said.

‘Like letting the man who raped his daughter get away with it. Is that the act of a kind

and good man?’

We are complex beings.

That is why this Psalm is disturbing.

It is thoughtful and reflective and profound...but also angry.

Where can we hide from God?

He is the one who created us and knew us before we had any self consciousness.

Like a parent has watches their child grow and develop, so he has watched us.

As a parent listens to the naive child try to lie, and the parent can so easily see through

their deception, so he smiles at us as we try to hide what we really are from Him.

So it may be that the original writer really thought that the response to the wonder that

God is always there,

is that he should show his complete commitment to the cause,

those that are not for God are against him and should be destroyed.

Black and White, good and evil.

But I think for us today it gives us a different message.

If God knows us and knew us even before we were born, before we knew God,

and God accepted us as a child of heaven even then,

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then maybe all people are like that, even the evil ones.

God knows them, even before they know him, and God accepts them as a child of

heaven.

If we read the Psalm without the bit about dealing with God’s enemies then it would be

very easy to understand this passage as one where we are not deserted by God, no

matter how far away from him we feel.

And therefore that others are not deserted by God either, no matter how far away their

actions and thoughts seem to be from God’s ideals.

But we do have that bit we read at the start of the sermon.

‘O God, how I wish you would kill the wicked!

How I wish violent men would leave me alone!

They say wicked things about you; they speak evil things against your name.

O Lord, how I hate those who hate you!

How I despise those who rebel against you!

I hate them with a total hatred; I regard them as my enemies.’

What do we do with that?

I think we acknowledge that even in our most contemplative, our most serene, those

times we are really close to God, that dark thoughts get in there.

They are part of us.

We know those thoughts.

We have had those thoughts.

The childless woman, who while smiling in celebration of a new mother and child,

wonders why she has been childless, it doesn’t seem fair.

I was talking to this woman at the Alva Games and she was telling me about her son,

only 29, who didn’t smoke or drink and collapsed with a heart attack and died. Decades

later you could still hear the resentment in her voice, ‘why did her son die when so many

others waste their lives and are still alive?’

All those dark thoughts

Why is my spouse struggling with dementia?

Why did I never get married?

What did she do to deserve being happy when I did nothing wrong and my sadness is

like an endless pit?

Why is it always me that is left with all the responsibility?

It doesn’t help by pretending that they are just passing thoughts and we can ignore

them.

It doesn’t help by thinking that they are voices from the devil and we rebuke them.

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It doesn’t help by just pretending that we didn’t think them and move on.

Or even by saying, ‘well they are just thoughts and they don’t count if I don’t act on

them’.

I think the strength of this Psalm...is that it is awkward,

that even in the most profound moments that we have, even there,

that we have a shadow in our lives,

and we only deal with it when we admit to it and face it with God.

So what becomes the important thing is NOT the dark thoughts, BUT WHAT WE DO

with the dark thoughts.

We can only deal with those dark thoughts because we have already admitted that God

knows what we are like.

God knows our deepest thoughts and we can’t hide them from him.

And even though God knows all this stuff anyway, he still deeply loves us and cares for

us,

and it is from that place of knowing what God is like,

and knowing that God fully knows us, better than we know ourselves,

from that place we can give all that darkness to God.

What does God do with that darkness?

He forgives us, he loves us, he changes us so that the darkness no longer dominates.

That’s what this Psalm gives us, a way to deal with the darkness within us.

And if we can trust that, if we can believe that, then we can then finish the Psalm in

faith.

‘Examine me O God, and know my mind;

Test me, and discover my thoughts.

Find out if there is any evil in me

and guide me in the everlasting way.’

Let us pray

God who is ever present, all-knowing and all-seeing,

may we open our hearts and minds to your presence in this moment of prayer,

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and ask that our perspective of the world around us might be shaped by your

perspective,

that our desires for the world would be informed by your unshakeable love,

and our concerns would be your concerns.

Search our hearts this day,

release from us any burdens that hold us back,

where we are caught up in disputes then bring peace and understanding to our hearts,

where we hold a grudge against another then melt our stubborn hearts that we might be

a source of healing,

test us and challenge us that we might be fit for service in your family and community.

We pray today for people who know separation:

for those whose relationships have broken down,

for those who have seen family fly the nest,

for those who are grieving a loss,

for those living from their homes,

for those who have left their families

though they feel separation, may they not feel isolated.

May they know that you are with them,

May they feel you through the presence of your Holy Spirit,

May they feel you through the kind words of neighbours and friends,

May they feel you through the members of the family of faith,

May they know that know they are not alone,

that they have a place at your table,

and that we all are drawn into the creation of a loving community of grace.

We pray today for situations that divide and disrupt:

for those parts of the world caught up in conflict,

for growing inequality,

for the rules that protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable,

for societies that privilege the few and deny rights to the many,

that you, God of all,

would work in the souls and hearts of even the most hardened cynic,

to bring about change, justice and joy.

Amen.