here i am, Lord, standing on the bottom step

I come to worship you, Lord. I desperately need it, but I’m having a hard time getting my head in a right place.

“Nothing in my hands I bring”?

Hardly. I come with wounds and weariness. There are stains on my soul. Battle stains. ‘I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war’

…have mercy, O Christ…I am so, so tired…

Years ago I read a mostly forgettable book but for one sentence. That single line so resonated with me I can still quote it twenty years later. The author said, “Whatever the enemy wants to do to you he uses people to do it.”

Paul mentioned something to the Ephesians about the devil and his “fiery darts.” That’s real. If you’ve ever been in any kind of spiritual warfare you know it’s real.

Sometimes it’s an unkind text. Perhaps you caught an eye roll from your husband or a hurtful facial expression from your fellow staff member. Maybe you walked into a café and spotted your friend at a table with your least favorite person.

There was a time I had to take a strong stand as a pastor, and some of my dearest friends questioned my position. I had made enemies in the church and now even my friends were turning against me. Sandy and I were utterly bereft. I called my spiritual mentor and cried through the entire conversation. It was easily one of the lowest points of my life.

This was during a time our son was not doing well at all, constantly rebelling and deepening our sorrow. It was all too much. The devil was setting up bulwarks and laying siege to our home and Sandy and I felt completely cut off and alone.

Fiery darts, man. One day you’re going along happy as you please when a stranger cusses you out for trying to change lanes. Sometimes those fiery darts come in the form of words flung from people you are supposed to trust. Those are the hardest.

Sandy and I can easily put ourselves in the sandals of this pilgrim who has just come through a war zone. He stands on the bottom step of the temple, knees feeble, arms hanging. The man is spent. And he desperately needs a kind word from God.

In those seasons, of which we are in one now, the only comfort we have is the word of God.

Here we are, Lord, standing on the bottom step.

too stressed to bless

Psalm 120 is the first of fifteen worship songs created for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem to celebrate a national feast day. The subscript in your Bible might read “ascent” since Jerusalem was “up” to the travelers; others call them “step” psalms to indicate the fifteen steps taking the pilgrims up into the Temple.

So this psalm is the very first step. Problem is, our soloist is already tired before he even begins. The journey starts out rough. This worshiper is struggling to get to church and now he’s wondering if he should even go. Maybe just turn this caravan around. Check out.

In my distress I called to the LORD…
Psalm 120:1

“Distress.” The word he uses in the opening verse means ‘rival wife.’ It’s possible he wants us to think about Hannah in 1 Samuel 1:6-7 where we find the same word. Read the highlighted text if you aren’t familiar with her story. The insults she got from her rival wife Peninnah were taunting her all the way to the tabernacle.

By the time she arrived, she was too stressed to bless the Lord. She went anyway. Hannah yearned for a kind word from God.

In some forms the word means ‘pebble’ and you can see how well that ties in. Ever tried to walk anywhere with a stone in your shoe?

What was so distressing? Why the furrowed brow, mate?

The very next verse tells us:

Deliver me, O LORD,
from lying lips,
from a deceitful tongue.
Psalm 120:2

Like Hannah, this weary worshipper was harassed by people who did not share his heart. They were unsafe. The taunts he received were an amalgam of bald-faced lies and honeyed words that hid a sharpened knife.

Our pilgrim in this story pulled into the church parking lot feeling like he’d been through a war zone. I’m pretty sure he wanted to put his feet in reverse and go home. Or maybe he realized he was home, the safest spot on earth.

“Woe is me!” he cries from the first step.

meshechites among us

Woe to me, that I sojourn in Meshech,
that I dwell among the tents of Kedar!
Psalm 120:5

Eugene Peterson sets the stage:

Meshech and Kedar were barbarian tribes with a reputation for wildness. They were neighbors to the biblical Hebrews. The person who prayed Psalm 120 was praying in the company of people who were on their way to worship God in Jerusalem but feeling immersed in enmity, lying lips, and a deceitful tongue. He is committed to a way of peace, God‘s peace, but he feels hostility all around him. ‘I am for peace,’ he says, ‘but when I speak, they are for war.’
—Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection, 135

Some people are always spoiling for a fight. They quite enjoy starting fires. Their demeanor is mostly antagonistic, but if you happen to catch them on a good day, count your blessings.

Our pilgrim worshipper had come through a string of bad days. Like a certain apostle, he was “troubled on every side…distressed…persecuted…knocked down.” There seemed to be no end to the assaults. Enmity was everywhere.

a closing word

Sometimes the enmity never lets up. You pray, plead, beg, cry, and practically crawl for resolution, but no help comes. Unfortunately, this psalm doesn’t end on a high note. However, we mustn’t forget a very important truth: the very next step offers a better view of things.

I hear you: Lord, hurry up and get me on the next step!

Sandy and I are right there with you.

If perchance you read on you’ll find the worshipper ascending to a new step. In fact, go ahead and read the next psalm now; we could all use some of its encouragement.

I’ll give you the highlights, the better vantage points from the next step:

My Source is true, theirs is a lie
My strength and hope comes from God
He’s wide awake; he sees what’s happening
He’s right beside me, protecting me

The last thing I’ll say is this. Our weary traveler is not alone. Yes, of course God is with him. But he’s also in a company of fellow travelers.

They’ve heard the taunts too. They’ve also been blindsided. They are people of faith of whom can be said, ”They understand. They’ve been there also. They have scars too.” Know they are standing with you on the first step, linking arms, holding you up.

No matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.
—Ann Lamott

Selah, beloved.

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God is in the groaning

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:15-5:4

Fellow pilgrim, follower of Christ, brother and sister in the faith, we are not built for this world. We are made for the next.

Paul invites us to GROAN over our situation. He puts us in a chapel with a soft organ playing “Abide With Me” and “I Come To The Garden Alone” in the background.

Candles flicker in the stifling air.

Grim-faced pallbearers line the front pew and fellow mourners flank us on every side.

He sets us in front of an open casket; we look inside and see…ourselves.

This life has taken its toll on us and we see the effect of it in our corpses. We mourn. Lament. Groan.

Reality hits us:

We are not made for this world.

C.S. Lewis wrote in ‘Mere Christianity’,

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Paul tells us the most natural thing for us to do is GROAN.

We’re not alone, either. Romans informs us even creation feels deep pangs of anxiety and later in the same chapter, that the Holy Spirit himself groans wordless prayers in his intercessions for us.

“Jesus knows all about our struggles,
He will guide till the day is done,
There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
No not one; no not one”

It might surprise us to turn around inside that funeral chapel and see who the mourners are. Trees and mountains, seas and forests, flowers and soil, stars and planets. Each weeping alongside the broken-hearted saints who long for release from the pain of this earth.

Nightbirde

A young 30-something singer/songwriter known to her fans as “Nightbirde” experienced career-ending cancer in her lungs, spine, and liver. The pain of her battle with cancer is found in these words she penned last March, nearly a year ago:

“After the doctor told me I was dying, and after the man I married said he didn’t love me anymore, I chased a miracle in California and sixteen weeks later, I got it. The cancer was gone. But when my brain caught up with it all, something broke. I later found out that all the tragedy at once had caused a physical head trauma, and my brain was sending false signals of excruciating pain and panic.

I spent three months propped against the wall. On nights that I could not sleep, I laid in the tub like an insect, staring at my reflection in the shower knob. I vomited until I was hollow. I rolled up under my robe on the tile. The bathroom floor became my place to hide, where I could scream and be ugly; where I could sob and spit and eventually doze off, happy to be asleep, even with my head on the toilet.”

Then she courageously added,

“Call me cursed, call me lost, call me scorned. But that’s not all. Call me chosen, blessed, sought-after. Call me the one who God whispers his secrets to. I am the one whose belly is filled with loaves of mercy that were hidden for me. Even on days when I’m not so sick, sometimes I go lay on the mat in the afternoon light to listen for Him. I know it sounds crazy, and I can’t really explain it, but God is in there—even now. I have heard it said that some people can’t see God because they won’t look low enough, and it’s true. If you can’t see him, look lower. God is on the bathroom floor.”

Nightbirde died last month.

Did you hear her groaning? This precious girl, blessed with singing talent and promised a future? Her candle snuffed out. Her song tragically morphed into her obituary.

Nightbirde groaned, but found in her groaning on the bathroom floor that God was there.

God groans when we hurt

Nightbirde included this paragraph in her brief ‘memoir’:

Call me bitter if you want to—that’s fair. Count me among the angry, the cynical, the offended, the hardened. But count me also among the friends of God. For I have seen Him in rare form. I have felt His exhale, laid in His shadow, squinted to read the message He wrote for me in the grout: “I’m sad too.”
—Nightbirde, ‘God is on the Bathroom Floor, March 9, 2021

Our Lord promised us in Isaiah 63:9 “when we suffer, He suffers.”

Mary and Martha groaned because their brother was gone. Jesus visited them in their sorrow… and what did he do?

He GROANED.

Before “Jesus wept,” he groaned. “He was deeply moved” (ESV) is, quite literally, “He was angered in spirit and troubled himself.” The word describes a warhorse snorting and stomping its hoof, itching to charge into the fray and face the enemy.

Sometimes our suffering, or seeing another suffer, makes us just plain mad.

Jesus knew that anger.

Our Savior doesn’t just “feel your pain.” He also hates it. He hates what it does to you. Yes he knows the long game, that every eye will be dried one day and there will be no more pain, but he also meets us in our moment with mercy and justice on the bathroom floor.

God is on your side in the groaning

The Lord is with you when your spouse leaves you for another; he’s with you in the doctor’s office when she tells you the bad news, the worst news. The Father’s with you at the bottom of a cliff. He’s with you when you’ve cried yourself to sleep over your prodigal child; and he is with you when your bleeding heart is inside a casket as it’s being lowered into the ground.

I’m spending my mornings reading from the book of Jeremiah.

Just this week I was reading where he felt “deceived” by God. He had just preached a sermon that got him slapped and put in chains and in a very raw and earnest moment he accused God of “deceiving him.”

This word is used throughout the prophecies of Jeremiah. The major “flaw in the system” in Judah was deception and lies and Jeremiah calls it out again and again.

Now, however, he applies it to God.

How could you, God?
Why?
This is unbecoming of you! How dare you! I am your prophet and you are treating me this way?

He threatens to retire. To quit. To just walk away.

But four verses later, he has a change of heart. God meets him in his anguish and gives him a vision. Jeremiah saw in the Spirit that God was with him…and not just as a friend!

Jeremiah saw God as a WARRIOR standing over him, protecting him, shielding him.

A eulogy of no regrets

Paul, the officiant, delivers a pitch-perfect eulogy. In our fog of beleaguered sorrow, he waxes pastoral as he answers each of our complaints with gospel hope.

“Yes, you’re wasting away…but that’s just your ‘tent’; the real you is glorious!”
“I know these troubles are all you can see; to you they seem impenetrably mountainous. I assure you, God’s love for you is an eternal mountain range and these trials are but dust in the wind.”
“Beloved child, you can see no end to your groaning, but your Father is wise, loving, and good; BUT YOUR FATHER SEES…AND HE KNOWS; he keeps his eye on the clock and his hand on the thermostat.”

We groan, but don’t give up.

Why?

Because we know a secret.

Paul stacks hyperboles, showing how small our worst trials and troubles are here on earth (as well as our happiest moments) compared to what is being prepared for us in glory.

The day after tomorrow Sandy and I will be venturing out west with friends to see the Grand Canyon. I’ve never seen it. I cannot tell you how excited I am.

Even so,

Pastor Paul tells me I can put that glorious event on one scale — standing on the precipice of the Grand Canyon — then pile on the other side of the scale, higher than the heavens, the Day of my uncovering as I stand in the presence of Jesus.

Now, that’s something for which I really, really, really can’t wait.

I only have one message. I’ve shared it forty years in life, word — and groaning — all across the country. It’s my soulsong, my life verse, my core theology, and my eulogy:

God is God,
God is good,
God is good at being God.

And (don’t forget this),

God is good at being God in all our groaning.

Selah, beloved.

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why your “why” matters

Which of these is true:

Your life is temporal and ultimately lacks meaning and lasting value
You are imperfect at best so do what you can with what you have
You were created for a divine purpose and your Heavenly Father will perfect your calling and transform your life into a beautiful work of grace
Only the really important people can do the really important stuff

If you’ve been paying attention, you picked ‘C.’ As we saw in the last post, Sunday school teachers, lowly monks, maids, wives, sisters, whoever and whatever, can rise to their calling and find their “beautiful works” (καλὸν ἔργον) remembered forever in the logbooks of Glory.

The Lord of heaven pays attention even to the littlest of mites and smallest of lunches…and leaves space for each in his trophy case. He calls them “beautiful.”

As we discussed prior, a “beautiful” work (also Matt 5:16) is something that is selfless, sacrificial, motivated by love, and blesses the heart of God.

That’s what a beautiful work is, but what does it do? How does it move the needle?

🔸a “beautiful work” brings a bit of heaven to earth

John adds this pleasant detail inside his account of the story: “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” And so it is when we offer anything of loving sacrifice to our little worlds. The echoes of glory reach into that sacred space; the luster of heaven shines where it happens.

The ancient scene before us takes place in a village called “Bethany.” I’ve always thought that name was so lovely, so feminine. It sounds like someone you would want your son to marry. But then you study the name, what it means. You find out it is a combination of two words translated, “house” and “depression.” House of sorrow, if you will.

Now when you see what Mary did that evening, by filling the entire house with the aroma of sweet sacrifice, you begin to understand how “beautiful works” can bring heaven to earth.

In her book, ‘Suffering and the Heart of God,’ Diane Langberg describes a place outside Cairo called “Garbage City.” The streets and roofs of houses are made of compressed garbage and the stench gets in your hair and sticks to your clothes and skin. Rats skitter about your feet. There is no sewage system to wash away the filth.

Garbage mounts and rises to the sky in hills and small mountains. Pass through the streets and they’ll take you to an area about half the size of a football field where trash that can’t be recycled is burned in incinerators. The smell is sickeningly exacerbated; it hangs low and heavy in the air.

But just past all this is an area pristine and clean, with gleaming white walls and floors. “You see a room where woven handbags, rugs, and placemats are displayed,” Langberg writes. “Hanging on the walls of another room are quilted wall hangings, comforters, and pillow covers. Women are there sorting rags according to color and placing them in different baskets. Others work at two looms to create beauty out of the garbage.

If you continue down the steps you will hear the sound of water in large tubs as bags of shredded paper dissolve into pulp. Women in rubber aprons spread the mush into sieves, pull the sieves out of the vats, and stack them into the press where the new paper is drained. The paper is then dried in the sun and cards are made with gold embossing and marbled designs. More beauty created from garbage.

She continues:

There is a Coptic Church in the garbage community that began as a Sunday school nineteen years ago…you will enter one of two cave churches built on this mountain. The larger cave seats 10,000 and rivals the Red Rock amphitheater in Colorado in its dramatic beauty. Thousands of people gather – people whose lives are full of garbage, people who work with garbage, people who smell of garbage – for praise and preaching service. It is beauty in the midst of garbage.
Diane Langberg, Suffering and the Heart of God, 329-ff

🔸a “beautiful work” is borne from the fruit of personal sacrifice

When Mary broke the seal of her perfume, Mark described it by using a graphic term, συντρίβω. It means to to crush or strike together; to smash against, like a ship run aground, battered by the waves. That young woman in our story could not, would not bring her Master something that did not come at great cost.

We read in Matthew, “Where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” Instinctively, Mary knew the death of Jesus was close at hand and what did she bring him? Her broken heart. Consequently, that broken-and-spilled-out-sweet-smelling sacrifice filled a house, surrounded by sorrow and depression, with the aroma of resurrection life.

Beloved, whether you are bedbound, homebound, working a third shift job, raising children, supervising workers, answering phones all day, teaching a Sunday school class, living in a childless marriage, fighting off chronic illness, leading presentations at work, standing in front of church congregations and expounding the truths of God’s word each week, blue collar, white collar, or T-shirt and jeans, tenured or part-time, single or hitched, wherever you fall in the spectrum of life, you can spill the goods knowing whatever you do, even if goes unnoticed or criticized, you do it for the applause of heaven.

🔸a “beautiful work” disarms folks and exposes their heart orientation

Mary received some startlingly negative feedback after she offered her service. First off, how dare she? and second, what in the world?? Imagine looking to buy something on Amazon and seeing every reviewer giving one star because there was no option for zero. That would be the disciples in the room. Then imagine a single raving review of 5 stars! That would be Jesus.

Side note: sometimes ‘the church gonna church’ but Jesus is the only vote that counts.

2 Cor 2:15-16 tells us we (the people of “good works”) are are an odorous folk who either make people sick to death of us or drawn to the Life of Jesus in us.

Because of Christ, we give off a sweet scent rising to God…
2 Cor 2:15, The Message

Just as Mary discovered, you too will find not everyone will be a fan of your beautiful deeds. Some will assume the worst. You weren’t sincere. You did it to be noticed. You want something in return. I wouldn’t have done it that way…

Do it anyway. Let them question. Let them criticize. So what if you don’t get the result you hoped for. One thing is certain: every “beautiful work” is seen and remembered in heaven.

🔸a “beautiful work” receives the approval of the Master and reaps eternal rewards

Which brings us to my favorite, most mind-blowing part of the story:

…wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.
Mark 14:9

The gospel story has been published and preached in thousands of languages, spanning two millennia. Every continent and country has heard the good news in some form….and everywhere it’s been told, this woman’s “good work” has been remembered.

Imagine! Having yourself offered special mention in the gospel story! Having future generations talk about your story being instrumental to the global spread of the gospel!

Astounding!

Hey you. Doubting lamb. God has written you into his great gospel story, too.

You are his masterpiece, created for good works.

You are an aroma of grace.

There is a shine inside of you that only gets out when you realize you are nothing without Christ, eternally indebted to him, and yearn to be “wasted”on him for no other reason than he is your “Why.”

Perhaps your story won’t be mentioned worldwide, but many years from now, your children and your children’s children and their children will point to a photo of you and say, “That’s my grandad. That’s my dad’s great-aunt. They loved Jesus and that’s why I’m a Christian today.” Others will pick through stories of your life and marvel at how you loved and they will be pressed to pick up the mantel and, in so doing, find their “Why” too.

May your story (and mine) always be a story of prodigal love. Selah, beloved.

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