Sermon, Sun 18 Mar: wk6 - 'surely goodness and love...forever'

The last in our shortened series [due to snow!] on Psalm 23.

READINGS: Ps 23; Matt 7:7-12; Rom 8:18-39

SERMON
Let’s pray: may the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

‘Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’

He’s known as the ‘trickster’.
He’s a maker of mischief,
a bringer of troubles.
He’s cunning and clever and always comes up with new ways
in which to embarrass and annoy folk.
He’s always looking to amuse himself at the expense of others.
He can’t be trusted:
he’s shifty –
quite literally –
he can change his shape.
He’s a giant, he’s a joker,
...he’s a god.
Specifically, he’s Loki,
one of the gods from Norse mythology and, his character is such that,
even his fellow gods get a bit fed up.
Eventually, so the story goes,
Loki is banished to a cave and is faced with a fairly nasty punishment.
And, if you’ve seen any of the ‘Thor’ Marvel movie series,
you’ll know that Loki is not a good god.
Run into him, and you do so at your peril.

In the world of our psalmist, there are varieties of nations and
peoples surrounding the nation of Israel.
There’s also a variety of gods –
so many different gods to choose from.
What makes the god of Israel the one to pick?
And so the psalmist draws up a list of
character traits to encourage the Israelites to stick with their particular god.
This is a god who is like a shepherd:
he doesn’t just sit detached looking down on us and leaving us to our own devices –
he looks after us;
he makes sure we lack for nothing;
he ensures we are fed and nourished;
he leads us, guides us –
rather than just let us fend for ourselves;
he takes us to places of refreshing and rest;
he walks with us in the dark places –
and doesn’t abandon us...
with him, we come through the dark places and out to the other side;
he cares for us, even when we are surrounded by enemies;
he shows us that we matter, are special,
by the pouring of oil upon our heads – he treats us like royalty;
he blesses us with his goodness and loving-kindness all our lives –
‘loving-kindness’ a word which we often translate as ‘mercy’.

But there’s more, says the Psalmist, it doesn’t end there –
God’s love and care for us stretches beyond our finite space and time.
It stretches beyond the grave, for, when our days on earth are done,
God invites us to live with him forever...
In life and beyond our earthly life,
God is with us,
and God is loving us –
God’s love never ends.

This is our God, says the psalmist.
Our God does all of this, for us.
And he does all of this because at the very core of his being is love – loving-kindness:
everything stems from God’s great love.
The whole of creation was created in, and with, love:
and God saw that it was ...good.
Good, because it was created in love by the One who is the source of all goodness.
And, here’s a thing:
the great God who made everything –
the Ruler of the heavens and the earth –
is not too grand to stoop to loving us mere mortals.
This is the God who’s worth sticking with;
this is the God who is worth choosing.

This theme is taken up in the New Testament.
In a world surrounded by a variety of gods to choose from,
we find in our Gospel reading that this particular God hears:
ask – and you will receive;
seek – and you will find;
knock – and God will open the door to you:
not with an arm twisted behind his back, but cheerfully, willingly;
delighted that you are asking, and seeking, and knocking –
delighted that you are coming to him,
and no good thing will he withhold.
In Romans, Paul also picks up on this sense of God’s love and goodness:
‘And we know that in all things – all things – that God works for the good of those who love him.’
Paul also understands that God’s goodness, God’s loving-kindness,
is a past, present, and future thing:
God loved us before we were even created;
God loves us here and now;
God will love us for eternity.
Time can’t separate us from God’s love –
God has loved,
God does love,
God will continue to love.
God’s ongoing, consistent love, born out of his sheer goodness,
is...and always will be.
If time can’t separate us from God’s love, what can?
Death can’t.
Life can’t.
All the spiritual powers on heaven and earth can’t.
Nothing we have done, nothing we will do can separate us from God’s love.
In echoes of Psalm 139, we can’t go anywhere without being in God’s loving presence –
whether we’re on the highest of heights,
or in the deepest of depths,
no matter the distance –
there is no distance in God’s love:
we are not held at arm’s-length...
we are held close,
close to the very heartbeat of God.
And there’s nothing in all of creation that can ever separate us:
God, our Shepherd,
looks out for us,
and looks at us with extravagant love.

God has more than enough love to go around –
God’s love is not like pie that needs to be portioned into set bits and kept:
God has enough love to go around with plenty to spare besides.
That is our God.
In amidst the many gods that vie for our attention here in the 21st century,
the god of goodness and loving-kindness is the God who we choose –
or, more to the point, is the God who chooses us.

My Gran, was one of those people everyone should have in their life:
probably the funniest person I’ve ever met,
filled with goodness,
filled with love –
and, standing in her stockinged feet at all of her 4ft 11inches,
she was a fierce fighter on behalf of underdogs everywhere.
When she wasn’t telling stories, or off helping others,
she’d have quieter moments where she’d think about her life: not an easy one.
Occasionally she’d tell me about different people,
or different situations in her life,
and end with saying:
‘Y’know, God plays funny tricks.’
It made me think of Loki – the trickster god, the maker of mischief.
But, our God is not the Loki-variety kind of god:
no shifting sands,
no amusing himself at our expense.
While God does have a sense of humour –
after all, where do you think we get it from? –
God doesn’t amuse himself willy-nilly at our expense.
Our God is not capricious,
is not a will-o-the-wisp,
who messes with our lives based upon a whim:
our God can be trusted.
Our God is entirely consistent.
And we come right back to love and goodness:
it is because God is entirely motivated by love that God is not a god who plays funny tricks.
Probably one of the rare times I disagreed with my gran on something.

Held in God’s love, and, trusting in that love,
we find incredible freedom to let go of all that would stop us from being
the people that God created us to be:
and, as God loves,
so God calls us to love.
As God loves unstintingly, generously,
so we are called to love in that same manner –
to spread God’s love,
not hoard it and hide it away.
Nothing is stronger than God’s love.
Nothing can separate us from God’s love.
We see that, in a journey made by God into the territory of human beings:
we see God’s love...in the flesh and bone of Jesus.
We see love lived out by him as he challenged the powers that be to be loving, not oppressive;
in him, we see love lived out in service of others – and especially the least, and the lost;
we see love moved to journey to the Cross –
travelling into the darkest of valleys...
and love conquering death:
love showing us the way through that valley,
and into the hope of redemption and resurrection,
love that held nothing back:
goodness and loving-kindness without measure.
We see love –
found in the One who is with us –
not against us.
This is the God the Psalmist sang of to his people,
the God that Matthew wrote of,
as he told the story of Jesus telling stories
of asking, seeking, and knocking –
and of the God who responds;
this is the God that Paul spoke of, in a letter to a community of believers in Rome,
faced with persecution at the hands of a ruler who believed himself to be a god...
yet was merely human,
and narcissistic and toxic.
The God of the psalmist, of Matthew, of Paul...
is our God,
who loves us
and whose goodness and loving-kindness is with us all our days,
and who, in his goodness and loving-kindness,
brings us, at the last, to live with him forever:
where there shall be no more tears,
no more pain...
where there shall be:
a place of rest,
a place of joy,
a place of perfect love,
a place promised to us, and in which we hope,
for Jesus has gone before us and shows us the way –
for he is the Way.

What makes the god of the Psalmist,
the god of Matthew, and of Paul,
the god we pick,
the god we choose to stick with?
It’s simply this:
it's because...
1 The Lord is our shepherd, we shall lack nothing.
2     He makes us lie down in green pastures,
he leads us beside quiet waters,
3     he restores our souls.
He guides us in paths of righteousness
    for his name’s sake.
4 Even though we walk
    through the valley of the shadow of death,
we will fear no evil,
    for you are with us;
your rod and your staff,
    they comfort us.
5 You prepare a table before us
    in the presence of our enemies.
You anoint each of our heads with oil;
    our cups overflow.
6 Surely goodness and love will follow us
    all the days of our lives,
and we will dwell in the house of the Lord
    forever. Amen.