"A Song of Ascents"
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Hilary J. Barrett
preached at Pleasantville United Church of Christ, September 27, 2009
Psalm 124
“Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”
Psalm 124:8

Whenever our family takes long road trips, we often rent a couple books on tape to help take our minds off the tediousness of the journey.  We learned to do this after years of making the 16 hour long road trip from Philadelphia to Northern Michigan each summer, where my in-laws have a summer cottage.  The challenge, of course, is finding something we can all tolerate listening to for 16 hours.

Last weekend, as many of you know, our family was engaged in a different kind of road trip altogether.  Instead of driving 16 hours for a family vacation in Michigan, we were driving 16 hours to the city of Chicago where we would do something wholly unnatural to us as parents: we would leave our son in a strange city and drive away.

I thank you for your prayers for us last weekend.  We needed them.  Sam seems fine.  We are adjusting.  But there is no doubt that letting go of our child to the degree that is necessary now is one of the hardest things we have had to do as parents, and we are taking our lessons from all of you who are veterans in this arena.

Our 16-hour long road trip to Chicago included many things: plenty of music, lots of arguing over directions, and hours and hours of listening to Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. 

It’s a little hard to describe what this book is like; you certainly get a glimpse of it in the title: A Short History of Nearly Everything.  But if you’ve ever read Bill Bryson then you know he’s both a humorist and a naturalist and this book is full of fascinating facts about everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization.  Bryson pretty much tries to address the oldest and biggest questions about the universe -- like, “how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us.”[1]

Over and over again, Bryson brings home the point of just how miraculous it is that we are alive on the planet -- alive on the planet, as opposed to – say – suddenly obliterated by an asteroid hit, or suddenly annihilated by an explosion of the super volcano which is Yellowstone Park.  After a while, listening to Bryson’s book began to remind me of the television show called, “1,000 Ways to Die.”  By the time our family had reached Indiana I was exhausted by the possibilities of disaster that awaited us in the solar system alone – not to mention whatever might happen to our son in his first year of college.

There is no doubt that we live in a dangerous universe.  (If you do have any doubt of that I’ll loan you Bill Bryson’s book and that will really pick up your spirits!)  But after hours and hours of Bryson’s humorous chronicling of ‘what could go wrong here’ – and by ‘here’ I mean the Milky Way -- I ended up coming away from the book with a deepened sense of the miracle which is life on this planet.  The world we live in, the planet we live upon, really is a miracle.  If things had gone just a little bit differently – if we were just a little closer to the sun or a little farther away from it, we’d either burst into flames or freeze into a solid.  (You see what I mean about Bryson.)  Either way, life on the planet would be impossible for us.  And so when I turned to the psalm which is given to us for our study and reflection this week, I kept hearing it through the echo of the Bryson’s universe:

“If the Lord had not been on our side –
let Israel say –
            if the Lord had not been on our side…”

…there is no way any of this would have been possible.

Psalm 124 is one of fifteen psalms which begin with the words, “A song of ascent.”  Songs of ascent were songs of celebration, meant to be sung by pilgrims on their way up to Jerusalem and to the Temple.  In ancient times, Jews were obliged to make a pilgrimage to the Temple three times a year.  Since the city of Jerusalem sits high atop mountains that overlook the Judean Desert to the east and the Mediterranean plain to the west when a pilgrim goes up to Jerusalem, they are literally ascending.  This is a song for that occasion.  This is a song that recalls the faithfulness of God in the midst of the dangers of the world:

¹If it had not been the Lord who was on our side
—let Israel now say—

²if it had not been the Lord who was on our side,
when our enemies attacked us,

³then they would have swallowed us up alive,
when their anger was kindled against us;

⁴then the flood would have swept us away,
 the torrent would have gone over us;

⁵then over us would have gone the raging waters.

⁶Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

⁷We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers;
 the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

⁸Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth

This particular psalm is not long and it talks about something that many of us don’t really like to acknowledge in polite company: it talks about enemies.  Jesus talked about enemies too.  He said we need to forgive them.  We need to love them.  We need to turn the other cheek towards them.  But in order to do all of those things, we need to acknowledge that we have them.  They may be real or imagined, but either way, enemies threaten our well-being and heighten our sense that the world is a dangerous place.

If you want to know how to pray, read the Psalms.  You may be shocked by the things you hear in them.  You may be appalled by how angry they can sound or how vengeful they can be.  But the psalms are extremely honest.  They do not worry about what is polite; they simply speak what is true.  And by doing so, they invite us into a deeper and more honest relationship with God.

Psalm 124 says something that people of faith have said forever: If it weren’t for God, I would never have survived.  If it weren’t for God, I would have been swallowed up alive by the things in my life that have torn me down.  If it weren’t for God, I would never have been able to survive the losses in my life.  If it weren’t for God, I would not be standing here today.

This room is full of people who are living examples of the truth of this psalm.  This room is full of people who know that were it not for the Lord they would never have made it this far.

There are lots of things in this world that remind us of what a miracle this life is.  This morning we are baptizing Kamryn Lelle Holohan.  We baptize her with the waters of Christ and in the name of the Holy Trinity and in doing so she is claimed by the Lord who made heaven and earth.  We pray that her life will be blessed with a faith that knows how to appreciate the miracles which surround her everyday.  We pray that she will be blessed with a faith that strengthens her in times of suffering.  And we pray that she will never be afraid to give God honor and praise for the ways that she has been sustained by grace and mercy.

The scriptures teach us how to live faithfully in a world that is filled with dangers.  They do not shy away from the hard truth that there are things in this world that threaten to undo us.  There are experiences that can destroy us.  And were it not for God who is on our side, we might be swallowed up alive. 

And so with pilgrims everywhere, from time before time, we join our voices with theirs as we search our lives for evidence of the truth of these words:

¹If it had not been the Lord who was on our side
—let Israel now say—

…we would never have made it this far.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.