psalm 126

Just shortly before my friends father died,
We decided
That together we would walk the streets
We knew as children
To recover the ghosts of short sleeved summers,
And vapour breathed Novembers
With their curling mist and star spangled skies,
We would return to times and places and people
Only available through the power of shared memory.

A pilgrimage
To the shrines of our youth
A walk of a few short miles
Where memory shines like a torch
Onto windows, over streets, along schools buildings
To show up the yesterdays that are hidden there.

And not for from our lips the words: Do you remember?

For friends, “Do you remember?”
Is seldom a question
Seeking a yes or no answer from us;

For friends
To ask
Do you remember?
Is more like an invitation
To allow memory
to take us back
To something, somewhere, someone
That once touched our lives so deeply.

Do you remember?
Yes, we smile, Laugh, pause silently over.
And in remembering
Something of the goodness, value, delight
That It has been to have lived the one life
That is uniquely
Our little life –
Is recovered and recognised again.

(The moment when we savour –yes it’s been good to be me).

Today
An old friend asks us
Do you remember…

That old friend
Is Israel:
Those who have known what it is
To love, wrestle, doubt, rejoice, run a way from and return to
God
As being at the centre of their living.
From Abraham to David
Elijah to Ruth
Old Israel shares with us the friendship of faith.
And in the bible we see how God’s actions
In time and history, judgement and redemption
Sets them free.
And recalled in this psalm
Is how against all the odds
God released them from exile in Babylon
To return home to Jerusalem again.

The streets they were led out of in chains
Never thinking to see again
Found their childrens feet wandering upon them again
As they were brought back to Jerusalem
By the power of God.

It was like a dream
They said
We laughed and sang
For the Lord had done great things for us.

Israel
Is our friend in the faith
Who worshipped and served the same God we do today,
And in this mornings psalm
Israel asks us
Do you remember
What its like
When God ambushes our expectations
When the inevitable, expected end
Is turned around by God’s power
Bringing us back home:
To the certainty
Yes, there is a God -
Bringing us home to the place of gratitude
Where we rejoice that
Any goodness we have known
Has not been an accident
But has come to us by his hand
Bringing us home to the peace
That trusts how much our little lives
Matter to the living God.

Israel is saying to us this morning
Do you remember
When Gods power in your life
Recovered your lost faith
Restored your broken Hope
Empowered you sad resignation
To go out and attempt to love again.

Our friend Israel asks us: Do you remember?
Not as a yes or no question
But as an invitation
To allow memory to return us
To where God has touched our lives deeply.

So that in our remembering
Something of the goodness, value, delight
That It has been to have lived the life of faith
Is recovered and recognised again.

The place from which Israel asks us to remember
Is not the laid back space of nostalgia.
In the psalm
Israel is doing her remembering
From the place where the soil of her living
Is cracked and dry, hard and disappointed
Like a river bed without any water.

And we see how for Israel
Remembering is the precursor to something else:

Israel moves from memory
To prayer
From remembering God
To requesting from God:
Lord takes us back to our land,
Just as the rain brings water back
To dry river beds.
Let those who wept as they sowed their seed
Gather the harvest with joy.

Even for me
Who is a quintessential city boy
The imagery of Israel’s prayer
Is striking when it says:
Let those who wept
As they sowed their seed
Gather the harvest with joy.

Recently
I planted beneath my study window
Lots of tiny little seeds:
Night scented stock
Which
As the packet informs me
Perfume the night
As the sun is setting.

And I can’t wait until the summer evening arrives
When I can open the window
On a warm summers night
And be greeted
With the scent of these little flowers
releasing their perfume into the evening air.

I can’t wait
But I know I have to…
For it’s in the darkness
Underneath the soil
With the sunlight, rainfall
And the feeding of the soil
That their growth will be invisibly done
And done slowly.

And every day or so I go out
And inspect the dirt for signs of life
Of which right now
There is precious little.
Sometimes
The seed we have to sow
Don’t seem capable of growing much
And we wonder if anything worthwhile
Could ever grow.

What I mean is
The experiences we have
Made up of working, sleeping, looking after children
The sore things and disappointments
The anger and failure,
Loneliness and fears
Seems like fallow ground
To plant anything in.

Yet, when we take our ordinary lives
That promise so little
And offer them to God
In prayer
Plant the daily routines of our living
Around trust
Devotion
Confession
Thanksgiving
Then the psalmist says
Expect a remarkable return
From the little we have planted.

For all the while
Mostly unseen by us
God is working with our soil and seed
And will grow it into something
Far beyond what we can imagine or yet recognise:
What we have planted with tears of sadness
Will in the presence of God
By the power of God
Become a harvest of joy.

The planting of our little lives
In trust around God
Is never a pointless exercise
For the power of God is at work in us
In the way Freddy Buechner describes:

“There has never been a time past
When God wasn’t with us
As the strength beyond our strength,
The wisdom beyond our wisdom,
As whatever it is in our hearts
That keeps us human enough at least
To get by
Despite everything in our lives
That tends to wither the heart and make us less human.”

Just as the soil
The sunshine
And the rain
Work together
To grow from the dirt a small insignificant seed

So the father
The son
And the Holy Spirit
Work with the soreness and the spareness
Doubt and dream
Of our living soil
Until from it something beautiful is grown.

The psalmist is adamant
That the seeds life has given you to plant
Might not seem much
And often will have to be sown with tears
But In the end
God will bring forth from them
A life you will know
Has been worth living
That for those
Who plant their living
In the soil of faith in Jesus Christ
There is for every tear of sadness
A corresponding tear of joy.