April 29, 2007--Fourth Sunday of Easter

Lectionary Texts:
Psalm 23;
Acts 9:36-43;
John 10:22-30;
Revelation 7:9-17

Sermon Texts: Psalm 29; Mark 4:34-41

The Song of the Storm:
Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “Give credit where credit is due.” I read a lot and I write a fair amount. It is really a matter of survival when you stand up here a few times a week and preach for half an hour. All that output requires some input. One of the ways I know what to read is this: When I’m reading a good book that really speaks to me, if I see a little number at the end of a sentence, I go to the bottom of the page where the notes are. I discover who gave the author this great idea, and I put that book on my list of books to find and read, and I go and buy that book. Such is the life of a nerd like me.

Don’t laugh! You do it too. If you hate reading and would rather wait for the movie, then you know you can’t see one without noticing those words on the screen at the beginning and end. If you see one you really like, you may just make a mental note of the director or the main actor. Then the next time you are in the video store, or deciding what to see, when that name pops up again, that is what you choose. That’s why it is so important to give credit where credit is due. If you’ve had to do any kind of research writing, it was probably drilled into your head as it was into mine, “Give credit where credit is due.”

That’s sort of what the psalmist is doing here. In one way he is a little like a high-school composition teacher who is telling students, “You’ve got to give credit where credit is due.” Only the students he is talking to really aren’t his students; they are angels, heavenly beings. What he says, in essence, is “give credit where credit is due.” “Properly footnote the strength and glory that belongs to God.” So he isn’t really like a composition teacher. He is more like a worship leader, only he is calling the angels to worship. He doesn’t want them to footnote anything. What he wants them to do is worship. “Give credit and glory and honor to God you heavenly beings. Stand at attention and dress yourself in holiness and splendor. Give credit to God because strength and glory are his!” (vv. 1-2, author’s paraphrase). Where this subject is concerned, even if you are an angel, you’ve got to give credit where credit it due.

I’ve always found it very helpful to make a practice of giving credit where credit is due. When I have turned in academic papers, giving credit where credit is due has prevented me from failing and being expelled for stealing other peoples ideas. It has also helped me to be able to sleep at night. But there has been another kind of instance where giving credit has been helpful. You see not all sermon material comes from books. While I was in Memphis, I served with an associate pastor who was very fond of telling corny jokes. I would always moan and try my best to forget the joke, but occasionally, while I was studying a passage and trying to decide just how best to preach it, something in a passage of scripture would remind me of one of those ridiculous jokes he told. So I had a decision to make. I could tell the joke in the sermon, it would help us get into the passage, and we would be better for it. The only problem was, if I did that I would have to hear the whole congregation groan at me.

We served together for almost five years, and this happened once or twice. I realized just what I needed to do. I needed to give credit where credit was due. So, while preaching, I would walk over to where the associate was sitting and say, “Pastor Tim told me this the other day . . .” then tell the joke. They would all groan at him, and then I would make the connection to the passage. I’m telling you, it is always wise to give credit where credit is due. Because sometimes there are some things you just don’t want credit for.

Take for example the rest of the psalm. Did you catch what it was talking about? The voice of the Lord is over waters, it thunders over the waters. Have you been in an Oklahoma thunderstorm lately? Do you really think that God wants credit for that? Are we really supposed to give credit to God for that? One of the young ladies that lives at my house thinks so. At some point during the past year, we were weathering a particularly strong thunderstorm, and she came running into the living room, hands over her ears, and yelling through her tears, “Daddy, we need to tell God that’s too loud!” You’ve been in storms like that, where the thunder is so loud you can’t talk over it and the wind seems strong enough to make a brick house creak. Does God really want credit for storms that scare tears out of little girls and make big people nervous too?

Later on, it says God “sits enthroned above the flood.” It was a while back, but the pictures are still fresh in our minds. Shacks along the beach around the Indian Ocean were reduced to rubble. Rich tourist and poor peasant alike were in shock and searching for loved ones. Or even more recent and closer to home, the carnage caused by hurricanes in the Gulf. Streets turned into rivers and families living for days on a can of tuna in an attic while mourning those who didn’t make it. Does God really want credit for that?

When I was about 8 years old a tornado came through our small town. It touched down, damaged a farm at the city limits, lifted up and passed over our end of town. It set back down on the other end of our block where there were about eight vacant lots, all wooded, that together made up a small forest that we used to play. The next day, it looked like giant hands had taken the trees I liked to climb and twisted them into gnarly licorice ropes. I’ll never forget the sight of the mangled trees, and I’ll never forget the sound. I heard the roar as we were heading into the house to get to the basement. “The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon. The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl.” Is that train sound God’s voice? Does God really want credit for that?

The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. One summer our family visited a place called Mesa Verde. While making the drive to the cliff dwellings there, we drove through some beautiful scenery. We came around one bend and were shocked to see a stand of charred trunks of trees covering most of a valley. We later heard at the ranger station that a single bolt of lightning probably caused the blaze that took out a large chunk of forest, and if I remember right, more than one park service building. The voice of the Lord? Flashes of lightning that produce wildfires charring farms and forests and prairies and suburban houses? Does God really want credit for that?

Several years before I moved here, I saw some news coverage after some particularly devastating tornado activity. One of our former presidents had flown to Oklahoma and was on the steps of one of the storm research center buildings at Oklahoma University. During his address, he declared some disaster areas, and then he praised the people who worked in the building behind him. He said something like, “These folks are working hard to try to find ways to prevent and control this kind of thing in the future.” It seemed as though he and this crack team behind him were going to prevent a tornado. I stand before people and talk, and I know you can slip and say things you don’t mean. I’m sure that was what happened there, because every one of us knows that’s the rub about the storms. You can’t control them.

Ever been through a storm, something you just can’t control? Last week Christina told us that her uncle was stung by a bee and died in 5 minutes. Earla has a friend who had a baby just a few weeks ago, and when the baby was 10 days old she started having trouble breathing. They rushed the little one to the hospital and she never came home. For some families storms strike quickly. After 15 years of what seemed to be a good marriage, a husband finds out there is another man his wife is seeing while she is away on business. Your family was healthy one day, and then the waters of sickness were unleashed, and the flow of appointments is only surpassed by the flow of bills in which you and your family now try to tread water.

Sometimes the storms are rapid like tornadoes, with very little warning. Sometimes there are not so rapid. Earla and I have a friend whose father spent the last years of his life on dialysis and died very slowly, very young. Just a couple of weeks later, when she was barely 30, his daughter was diagnosed with the very same problem her father had. She grew up watching the slow destruction of his body, and now like coastal dwellers watching a slow moving killer hurricane approach on the radar, she and her husband wait for the devastation to begin.

The truth is, whether they develop slowly, with days and weeks of warning, or they are upon us in a moment, when the storm comes every one of us, from the biggest burly man to the skinniest little girl, can’t do much but cover our ears and cry out to God. We tell Him that it is too loud and too dangerous and too scary. Does God really want credit for all those storms?

When big storms have happened, where oaks twist and cedars break and houses fall, when lightening strikes and burns off acres of forest or prairie, when lives are completely devastated, two questions usually emerge. Frankly, the first makes me much more comfortable. The first question is “how” does this happen? A seismologist can credit an earthquake for a tsunami, and a meteorologist can credit changes in moisture level and tropical air pressure, for the storms and the lightning. A medical professional can show us x-rays and CAT scans, and track the progress of the cancer. The expert may be a psychologist, and the explanation may include a timeline; problems in her family that created a weakness toward temptation. An opportunity arises and then comes adultery. There is guilt and a cover-up. Finally, there is a storm of confrontation, anger, separation and divorce. The experts can usually tell us a lot about how it happens.

But that explanation is never good enough. We hear that explanation, and if the experts happen to use small enough words, we get it. But once all of the “how” questions are answered, we then turn to the “why?” And, for those of us who go around the rest of the time talking about God (I’ll just be honest) we can get very nervous here. If the voice of God is over the water, and flashes forth flames of fire, breaks cedars, causes oaks to whirl; if He sits enthroned on the flood, do we give Him credit for all those things? “Why did my house get blown away? Why did my spouse leave me? Why did my baby die? Because God wanted it that way?” Is that really the right answer? Is that what this psalm is about? Some ask that question. How much do we blame and assign to God?

It could be that He wanted credit for those things . . . if it was a Psalm written in praise to a pagan concept of deity. Chances are there were some psalms just like this written to Baal, who was said by his followers to be the god of the thunderstorm. Baal was the deity who, according to the pagans, rode on the clouds and controlled the storms. Baal followers could make it rain at just the right time (No lightning, please. That’s dangerous). If the people could just figure out how to manipulate Baal, they could figure out how to control the storm themselves. You see, no matter what you call god, whether it is Allah, or the Great Spirit, or science . . . even God, if your God is a control freak, all you have to do is get the right words, right incantation, right body posture and you can control the world by manipulating the “control freak” god.

Would it surprise you if I told you that nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is in control? Oh, it does say in Philippians 2 that God has made all things subject to himself. That means that He is King of all things. Let me ask you a question: How many kings do you suppose could, or cared to, control every detail of every subject? Kings set processes in motion to transform and maintain kingdoms, and then let those processes work. Kings rule by their relationship with the governing bodies they set up. The word says that God is enthroned as King over the waters.

“The voice of the Lord thunders over the water.” In Genesis 1 it says that in the beginning the earth was formless and void, and darkness covered the face of deep, and the breath (or the Spirit) hovered over the water, and God spoke. He brought the atmosphere into existence with His voice. He created the land. It was the voice of God that drew boundaries for the water. It could only go so far. So, because of the way creation happened, lightning strikes and forests burn off, because I’m told by a scientist, that if they don’t the forests will die from too much underbrush. The pagan culture said that Baal rode in the clouds and controlled them, so if you could manipulate Baal, you could control the storms. But the worship leader of Israel said, “Give credit where credit is due. It’s Yahweh, the Creator that sits enthroned on the storms and speaks to us in the storms.” Why do you suppose that God wants us to hear His voice when we are in the storms?

I’ve asked it a couple of times this morning: Have you been through a storm? And you’ve said to yourself, “Yes.” In fact all of us probably said, “Yes.” Nearly everyone here remembers a situation over which we had no control. You just had to wait it out. Why would God want us to hear His voice right in the middle of the storm? Could it be possibly because we all have them?

In Mark chapter 4, Jesus tells His disciples, “Let’s go to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they got into a boat. A great storm arose, and the boat was being swamped. There was Jesus. He was incognito, but He is God the King, riding out the storm in the boat with the disciples literally, in the same boat as them. As the psalm says, the King is riding on the waters, and His throne is described as a cushion in the hold of the boat. As Kings are wont to do, He takes a nap! How could He take a nap with the thunder and lightning, and the wind and the waves? Could it be because He knew that all those sounds together were the voice of his Father? Could it be that the storm was like a lullaby for Him?

The disciples wake Him up, “Don’t you care we are perishing!” He woke up, and His voice spoke (who knows, maybe there was some thunder along with it). His voice said, “Peace,” and the winds and the waves stopped. Do you think maybe the disciples got out a note pad to write down, “how to stop a storm . . . next time there is a big storm, pray the exact words: ‘Don’t you care that we are perishing?’ We got it. No more need for fear now.” That’s not what happened. No, the disciples were filled with awe, saying, “Even the wind and the water obey Him.”

We just have to admit, some things are out of our control. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got some family members that are going through some stuff I’d give anything to fix. The voice of the Lord thunders over the water, breaks the cedars, causes oaks to whirl, flashes forth flames of fire and all in the temple say “Glory.” But because of the awesome power and the mighty strength of God’s majestic voice in creation, we say something else too.

I think another little girl who lives at my house has that figured out. She was only six weeks old when we moved here. She has a large window in her room and knows nothing but loud storms. When one comes, through the whole thing, she sleeps quietly and wakes up strong for the day (strong enough to wear us out). She is a little like our friend who discovered her kidney problem. By the time she told me about it, she said, “I have to tell you that I know there are some stormy days in the future, God has just given me a peace about it. He’ll be with me through all of it.” The voice of the Lord thunders in the storm and we say, “Glory.” And we also say may the Lord give strength to His people. May the Lord bless His people with peace!

You see, I think God wants us to know that His voice speaks in the storms because it means He doesn’t just sit back and manipulate them. He is in them with us. Our God allows the storms so we can remember all that power is His, and we can ask Him to give us strength and peace. And when He does you are able to walk through the storm in peace.

When all those people are saying, “My, how strong she is.” Or, “Wow, he is a person of peace.” Remember . . . give credit where credit is due.