Chris Taylor’s Sermon – 6/1/08

Finding Quiet Amid the Chaos

Psalm 46

This is a great text; one of those passages that we could earmark and turn back to again and again amid all the ups and downs of our lives. There is reassurance, and comfort, and great encouragement here.

This text served as the inspiration for Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” – perhaps the single most powerful hymn to come out of the Protestant Reformation. One of the gifts of the Reformation was the effort to reclaim the place of congregational singing in worship. As Luther once put it, “If any man despises music… for him I have no liking; for music is a gift and grace of God… Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity and other devices.” Down through the centuries, “A Mighty Fortress” has certainly proved a source of inspiration and strength for the faithful.

Our focus this morning is on that imperative that comes to us in the tenth verse, “Be still, and know that I am God!” Be still and know. The word used for “know” here is the Hebrew “yada” which refers to far more than intellectual knowledge alone. It a knowledge of the whole being; a knowledge that combines intellect and heart, insight and experience. When the psalmist says “Be still and know,” then, he is inviting us into an experience of God – a knowledge of God that impacts every fiber of our being.

It is a timely message because our lives tend to be so full of sound, so dominated by a kind of constant activity. We live in a very different world from that which our grandparents, or great-grandparents knew. Just consider the technological advances of the last one hundred years. It really wasn’t that long ago that the horse and buggy were still the dominant forms of transportation. The changes have been enormous.

I will always remember my first computer. I bought it back in 1984. It was called a Kaypro, and was contained in a massive metal box that must have weighed somewhere between twenty and thirty pounds. They called it a “portable.” It had a six inch monochrome screen, 64 kilobytes of memory, and for its operating system it used CPM – long since replaced by the industry standard DOS.

Before my Kaypro I used to handwrite the first and second drafts of my sermon, and then type the third. It was a fairly labor intensive process. It was a revelation to me to be able to take my first draft and turn it into my second and third and fourth as I deleted whole paragraphs or moved entire sections from one part of the sermon to another. I figured the computer probably saved me three or four hours the very first time I used it.

We tend to think of these innovations as saving time, but their real impact has been something altogether different. The stress and pressure that we face, and what is routinely expected of us, has increased exponentially as a result.

Thirty or forty years ago, for example, when a client wanted to contact her lawyer, she would write a letter. The very effort involved in writing a letter meant that she wouldn’t contact her lawyer with minor questions or comments, and ordinarily, she wouldn’t expect a response for two or three weeks.

What happens today? One or two line e-mails are commonplace. You’ve got a thought – why not send an e-mail? And the expectation is that the lawyer will respond right away. Imagine the lawyer getting ten or twenty such e-mails in a given day. It is going to change the nature of a given day. He or she not only has their other work, but now has all these messages to answer, as well. And what is true of law, is true of virtually every other field and business, as well. The pace of work has picked up. With all these innovations we are expected to accomplish that much more each day. The day itself, in other words, is that much more intense.

I used to pass a statue of John Wesley every day on my way to school. It stood outside Wesley seminary down in Washington, D.C., and it featured him riding a horse. I think about Wesley and that horse every once in a while. At one level, of course, it was a symbol of his dedication to the Gospel; riding that horse from parish to parish, day after day. But at another level, just consider what that was like – no cell phones, no computers, no radios or televisions. It was Wesley, his horse, his Bible and God’s creation. There was, in other words, all kinds of time for him to think.

Where do we find that kind of time today? Where do we find some quiet amid all the chaos? Scripture tells us that it is not in our busyness and hurry that we are going to meet God. There, it is easy to miss God all together. It is in the stillness, it is in the quiet that we experience his presence. There, that we hear God’s voice.

When the great prophet Elijah journeyed to Mount Horeb, the place of Moses’ encounter with God a thousand years before, he did not meet God in the mighty wind, or in the shaking of the earth or in the consuming fire. He met God in the “sheer silence” that followed. He was there that he heard God’s voice (I Kings 19:11-13) – a light, murmuring sound; a gentle whisper.

In her comments a few minutes ago, Joan McConahy mentioned her experience of answered prayers during her son’s struggle with cancer – the strength they found, the blessings they encountered along the way. She quoted that wonderful passage from Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

That’s what the Psalmist is talking about here in our text. It is about placing our trust in God. It’s about pulling back from all the frantic activity, and letting go: recognizing that it is God who has the answers, God who offers that one foundation which cannot be shaken. It is in God that we find the strength and hope that we’ve been looking for.

Before there was electricity; before their were cell phones and computers, cars and planes and the constant buzz of radios and televisions, soccer practices and dance recitals and music lessons, people had time to catch their breath. They had time to think about their lives and to think about what God was doing. That kind of time is no longer a given in our lives. We have to choose it. We have to intentionally seek it out.

That, then, is the invitation of this text. Carve out some time each day to be still before the Lord. Find some quiet space away from the noise, away from all the activity, where you can simply sit before the Lord. Even if it is just for five minutes each day; find a way to come before God in a kind of loving attentiveness. Be still and listen for that quiet whisper. Be still and know (experience!) the gift of God’s presence; the gift of God’s loving care.

Kenneth W. Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories, (Kregel, Grand Rapids, 1982), p. 15