A Faith That Sings: Faith from Above

Psalm 121

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
Juvenal Cervantes, Pastor
May 1, 2022

Do you ever struggle with insomnia, sleepless night? I’ve got a sermon to help you with this. We can sleep comfortably at night when we realize that God’s providential care is unwavering, all-inclusive and unending.

Sometimes we toss and turn at night because there is so much to be in control of, there is so much to worry over. There’s the job and the kids, and the house, and the car, and the vacation to plan, there’s taxes, and bank books and college expenses and there are all the things to get done around the house. Then the test results you’re waiting for from the doctor and there’s always your friends and family and the things they’re going through. Our brains can get into this vicious cycle and we just can’t fall asleep. We have so many things to be responsible for.

Those sleepless nights are reminders of our weakness and our vulnerability. We make our way through this life and we don’t have control over everything as much as we would like to and we are incapable of making this pilgrimage through life all on our own. We need more help than we can provide ourselves.

But it is good news that Jesus does not just save us and give us a ticket to heaven and says, “See you there.” Instead he promises to walk alongside us and walk with us, and to be intimately involved in those soap opera details and trivia of our lives. He is involved in all of that. He takes a keen interest in those very things that keep us up at night.

But despite of all of our own efforts and our attempts to control all of that, we are not capable of protecting ourselves from everything that this pilgrimage and all the events that accompany it can throw at us.

Traveling on pilgrimage in that ancient world meant that at any time walking down on that rocky road you might step on a loose stone and twist an ankle. You might be out on the sun bearing down upon you all day long and suffer a heat stroke or dehydration. If they traveled at night, they worried that being under the moonlight too long could make you lose your mind, that’s where we get our words lunatic and lunacy from, that the moon would strike you down at night.

And our pilgrimage also leaves us open and physically vulnerable to injury and disease. We are emotionally vulnerable to the stresses that bear down to us, like the heat of the sun and we too under those stresses can find ourselves unusable in our thinking and maybe distressed and deeply affected by all of that and we get to those places in life where all those things turn down on us and we wonder, “Where do we turn?” “Where do we find our help?”

It might be an assumption on our part that God may be far too busy, running the big details of the universe to have concerns about the tiny trivial matters of our own lives. He’s managing the immensity of the galaxies and the stars and all of that and we’re probably not even on his radar on those tiny things.

Often that leaves us turning instead into God, we turn to the culture around us, to some kind of self-help or DIY solutions, to the things going on in our lives. We begin to think that the success of our pilgrimage is really all on our shoulders. It’s all up to us. We’re the ones that must make this thing work.

Or we might assure that God’s got bored looking after us in our boring life and he’s giving his attention to more exciting Christians who are doing more exciting things.

We might think that God has gotten disgusted on our pilgrimage with our tendency to meander off to disobedience here and there and maybe he said, “I’ll be back to you when you get in the right way.”

Or maybe God’s lost touch with us. Maybe he’s too busy fulfilling prophecy in the Middle East to be paying attention to our piddling needs. We can get to thinking that way, that we’re on our own and maybe God will be there tomorrow, maybe not, and we’ve got to make our way through life around all these little details so we stay up at night.

Those kinds of beliefs about God are really part of the problem. It’s a false understanding of who God is and who God wishes to be in our lives.

There was a bestselling kind of self-help book, I’ve donated a copy of this book to our library, written some decades ago by M. Scott Peck called “The Road Less Traveled” and his famous opening sentence, three words, “Life is difficult” and he goes on to explain that once we accept that life is difficult, it becomes less difficult. Part of the problem is that we think life should not be difficult, that we should not have troubles, that we should not run into difficulties and our expectations are constantly being dashed about that. Once we accept the reality that our journey through this life, our pilgrimage is going to be marked by things that are not going to be pleasant, we ask, “Where’s our help?” “How do we get help from that?”

Maybe we’re thinking about these struggles all the wrong way.

Eugene Peterson who you may know from his paraphrase of Scripture known as The Message. He also wrote a lot of books for pastors and bible study books. He tells the story about one day he decided he was going to change the blade on his lawnmower and he didn’t look at the instruction manual and he turned the thing upside down, he got the biggest wrench he could find and he started pulling and pulling trying to undo the nut that held the blade on and he couldn’t budge at it and it seem to be frozen in place and he got a big four foot piece of pipe and stuck on the end of that wrench to get a little more leverage and he tried and tried and couldn’t get it to budge. His neighbor was noticing him from the yard next door and came over to the fence and said, “I’ve changed the blade on my lawnmower and it said in the manual that the nut that holds that on is threaded in reverse. You need to be turning it the other way.” And he did and it came right off. When you try and try to struggle the wrong way, you only make things worse and we need to turn things the right way. And our turning to the culture around us to help us with our insomnia, is probably not the best way to get our way along in this pilgrimage.

Our beliefs about God need to be turned right, especially when life is not turning out the way we expected it to be.

Psalm 121 is one of those Psalms the pilgrims sang as they made their way from various parts of the country up. You always traveled up to Jerusalem, no matter which way you were traveling north, south, east, west, because it was Mount Zion. It was a spiritual ascent as well as a physical one. And they sang this song as they faced this journey of physical injury, sun stroke, and moon stroke, and this important question in verse one:

I lift up my eyes to the hills—

    from where will my help come?

That’s a big question. We look to the hills and the mountains and we may see them as symbols of strength, and might and power and security, but the ancient Hebrews saw something else when they looked to the hills. When they look to the hills they were reminded that this is the place where the ancient gods of Canaan had been and continued to be worshiped, it’s what is called in the Old Testament “the high places.” There were often, people were commanded to take down and destroy the high places. The place where Baal and Asherah and other pagan gods were worshiped, up in the hills and this is the question that is being raised here: I lift my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from? Do I turn to Baal and Asherah, to the gods of the culture? Do I go find protection on my pilgrimage by getting an amulet or a spell or a curse to protect me along the way? Is that where my help comes from? And verse two answers that because that’s the wrong way. Verse two says:

My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

The creator, the one who manages the universe that he created, that’s the one that is concerned about the details of my life.

That’s a hard thing to grasp: that the God who is big enough to manage this earth which we learn more and more about, and God keeps it and has kept it, is the same God who is interested in your life and mine.

Psalm 147 has this beautiful description of God of the galaxies and God of the broken hearts.

He heals the brokenhearted,

    and binds up their wounds.

He determines the number of the stars;

    he gives to all of them their names.

I love the tension in the Psalms that he is this God who calls all the stars and knows everyone of their names and he tends to biding up the wounds of our broken hearts. He is both and that.

If we are going to make our way successfully on the pilgrimage that is this life in following after Christ, like those ancient pilgrims, it would be very helpful if we had a psalm to keep the right things, the truth in mind. We need a song in this journey that reminds us of God, that God’s providential care for each and every one of us is absolutely unwavering.

I heard about a pastor who was on vacation and he asked a preacher friend to supply at his church while he was traveling. When the pastor returned from his vacation, the church people told their pastor, “That preacher you sent to us, he scared us to death.” And so the pastor said, “What did he do?”

It turns out the guest preacher was fairly creative and the text that was assigned to him was John 3:16 and he started to preach and he just got going, just a few minutes and then he stopped and he said, “Did you know that there are exactly 132 lights in this room?” He continued “And there are arranged is such a manner…” and people thought, “This is kind of strange.” And then he said, “Never mind” and he got back to text to John 3:16 and talked for a little bit and then he paused a little longer this time and he said, “You know what, as I was coming to the parking lot this morning I met a man that reminded me of my uncle Johnny back in Mississippi.” And he told about his uncle Johnny and wondered off and people were wondering about him and he got back to the text and began talking about John 3:16 and in a little while he paused for a third time, a real long time so people were getting uncomfortable. And then he said, “Do you know what I’ve been doing?” And there was this sigh of relief because at least he knew what he had been doing. He said, “I’ve preaching the way you listen.” Then he made his point, he said, “You know what, our attention wanders off all the time; we focus and we lose focus, we focus and we lose focus.” And then he said, “John 3:16 reminds us that God never loses focus, he never takes his eyes off of us, he always loves us, he never loses attention, he never gets distracted.” And they were a little relieved by the time they got to that point, but he scared them.

The Psalm says

He will not let your foot be moved;

    he who keeps you will not slumber.

He who keeps Israel

    will neither slumber nor sleep.

We’re encouraged to be able to surrender our insomnia because God has an incurable case, he never sleeps a wink, his eye, his attention is always on us. He never loses focus. Even the Hebrew structure of time is built around this understanding of God’s constant watch over us, even through the night. Consider this: in creation as the story is told, it sounds backwards, doesn’t it? “And there was evening, and there was morning the first day.” We would say, “There was morning, there was evening the first day,” but to the Hebrew the day started at sunset, not at sunrise. The day started at sunset and when the day started that was time for human activity to come to an end, that you ate your last meal, put things in order and go to bed and rest through the night. And the next morning when you got up, the day was half over and you’ve done nothing. You’ve been unconscious for half a day and God has been at work through the night, protecting, preparing, working. That perspective carried over beyond day and night; it was the understanding that no matter where you were going, God got there first and it is a better understanding than the one our culture has.

You and I sleep all night, we’re useless at night. We can’t do anything. But God doesn’t sleep a wink and God is preparing the day and God is at work in all of these places. When we get up in the morning we just step into the day, before we’ve had our first cup of coffee, we step into the day that God has well under way and he knows it well. And every conversation we enter into, God got there first. Every meeting we go to, God got there in the room first, every worship service we gather in, God got there first. He is always, the theologians call it “prevenient,” he comes before us, he goes before us. We can take great comfort in that God is always at work, he never sleeps.

Pagan gods, on the other hand, were thought to have a problem with that, they slept. You might remember the story of Elijah having the god contest at Mt. Carmel with the prophets of Baal and they built an altar and were trying to persuade their false god Baal to bring lighting to consume the altar and they tried to beat themselves and praying and Elijah started mocking them:

He says to them in I Kings 18:27:

At noon Elijah mocked them, saying, “Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”

But not our God, he never has to be awakened. He who keeps Israel never sleeps.

Sometimes it might seem when we’re in the midst of the rigors of our journey and things are not going the way we wanted and how we expected it and life seems a bit chaotic or out of control. It may feel like God has lost attention or fallen asleep on the job.

Sometimes you’ll find in the Psalms themselves the psalmist praying that very honest feeling because that’s a real feeling that we have sometimes. Psalm 7:6 says:

Rise up, O Lord, in your anger;

    lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies;

    awake, O my God;[a] you have appointed a judgment.

Or Psalm 35:23, Awake, and rise to my defense! Contend for me, my God and Lord.

Psalm 44:23, ,Awake, Lord! Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.

The psalmist helps us pray every feeling we ever had. Feelings of anger and hatred and abandonment, we pray those things. That doesn’t mean they’re true, that God really has fallen asleep, but it feels that way sometimes. Like the disciples during the storm, they find Jesus asleep on the boat and exclaim, “Awake Lord, don’t you care that we perish…” (Mark 4:38).

But Psalm 121 corrects that perspective. WE may feel that way, but Psalm 121 assures us: His attention never wavers, he never forsakes us. Our God never sleeps, he’s not like those pagan ones.

There was a 19th Century preacher named Thomas Chalmers. Notice how he described God’s providential care for us:

“When I walk by the wayside, He is along with me. When I enter into company amid all my forgetfulness of Him, He never forgets me.

 In the silent watches of the night, when my eyelids are closed my spirit has sunk into unconsciousness, the observant eye of Him who never slumbers is upon me.

I cannot flee from His presence. God where I will, He leads me, and watches me, and care for me.

The same Being who is now at work in the remotest domains of nature and of providence is also at my hand to make more full every moment of my being, and to uphold me in the exercise of all my feelings.”

Chalmers had a grasp on this truth, that our God, no matter how we feel, how our circumstances appear to be, our God never loses attention. He never waivers, his loving care, is upon us. And we need a song to remind us of that. Psalm 121 does that. So go on to sleep tonight. All your worrying is not going to make a bit of difference in the world and there is one who will stay awake and watch so you could sleep. It is a good thing to know. And regardless of circumstances, we need a Psalm to remind us that God’s providential care is all inclusive, it touches all parts of our lives. All parts of our lives.

There’s no sacred and secular part of your life, it’s all one life, it’s all sacred. There is not spiritual and physical life lived, it is all life lived in the presence of God who is spirit. His care for us includes everything that goes on in our lives, He cares about our thoughts and our actions, our bodies and our minds, he cares about our relationships with our families, our friends, total strangers, even our enemies. What we feed our minds and our bodies is of concern to him, he cares about us, there is no stronger way to put it: He cares about all of its details.

Verse five say,

The Lord is your keeper;

    the Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The word “keeper” some translation would render it “watch,” or “guard.” It is a word like a shepherd guarding over his flock.

The Lord will keep you, he guards you in any and every circumstance, he watches you, God’s eye is upon us. HE will not let harm come to you.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

    nor the moon by night.

It does not promise that the sun will not beat on us, but it will not harm you. In the stresses and circumstances, that are inevitably a part of our lives, he promises there will come to us not ultimate harm, he will be with us. Even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, which we will at times, he says that he will be with us on this pilgrimage. Even death itself when it comes is not an ultimate harm to those who walk in faith in Christ for he is the resurrection and the life and those who believe in him, he said, will never die.

Karoline Sandel lived in the 19th century, she was born in 1837. She was the daughter of a Swedish Lutheran pastor, she loved her father very much. She had been stricken in childhood with a partial paralysis that left her bedridden most of her time. Her parents were confident that God was going to heal her someday but the doctors were not hopeful. One Sunday when she was 12 her parents were at church and had left her at home in bed and she was reading her bible and praying and she was healed. When her parents came home from church that day they found her dressed and walking about the house. It was an amazing kind of thing. And she began at age twelve to write poetry about her life with God. By the time she was 15 she published a book of it. A few years later, she was 26, she was sailing across Lake Bayton with her father and there was a storm, her father fell overboard and drowned right before her eyes and she became even more prolific writing these beautiful poems. She wrote about 600 hymns all together. One of those hymns is one that many of you would know, it is called “Day by Day.” Most of her poems have this childlike faith in Jesus and the awareness that He is with her. She wrote:

Every day the Lord Himself is near me
With a special mercy for each hour;
All my cares He fain would bear, and cheer me,
He whose name is Counselor and Power.

The protection of His child and treasure
Is a charge that on Himself He laid;
“As your days, your strength shall be in measure,”
This is the pledge to me He made.

Help me then in every tribulation
So to trust Your promises, O Lord,
That I lose not faith’s sweet
Consolation
Offered me within Your holy Word.

 Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting
er’e to take us from the Father’s hand,
one by one, the days, the moment’s fleeting
till I reach the promised land.

The point of her song and the psalm was that everything that comes our way is something that is under the hand of God’s providential care. Nothing escapes it. It’s not to say that God sends these things, but it is to say that God is present when they come and that God is our help when they come and that God will strengthen us for those days, and that God will use them, he will not waste them to form us into his own image, working them together for good in our lives and for his kingdom. That’s the promise to hold on to and he protects us through the journey.

In spite of the way events occur, we need a song to remind us that God’s providential care is unending.

Psalm 121:7-8, The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

You can hear an echo of this in Paul’s cry at the prison cell near the very end of his life in 2 Timothy 4:18, The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

It is this confidence that God’s promise and care for us will never waver, it includes everything and it never ends. It is a warranty that will not expire.

The Christian life is a journey, it is a pilgrimage, a going to be with God and we travel the same ground and breath the same air and drink the same water and shop the same stores and hear the same daily news, and are buried in the same ground as people around us and along the way we face the same dangers, the same pressures, the same difficulties, the same distresses. We’re not granted an exemption from these things just because we’ve decided to follow Jesus Christ. The pilgrimage itself can be brutal at times but we are promised that we are accompanied by God, ruled by God, cared for by God, observed by God, watched by God, all along the journey. He delivers us from evil. We pray that in the Lord’s prayer. He keeps our lives, he watches over us, with his unwavering, all inclusive, never ending grace. So tonight, why don’t you rest your head on the pillow. And let God’s incurable insomnia relieve you from the pressures of having to be in control of your world because He watches over you.