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Today week we look at chapter 16 in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, which deals with Psalm 134. The theme is Blessing.

Peterson begins this chapter by relating a scene from Charles Colson’s life in which he found himself with President Nixon and Cheif of Staff H.R. Haldeman on the night of Nixon’s presidential victory in 1972. They had reached “the power pinnacle of the world, and not a single note of joy discernable in the room.” (p. 189) Colson, reflecting on his on experience, confessed that despite having been the architect of the victory there was “a deadness inside me.”

“The way of discipleship that begins in an act of repentance concludes in a life of praise.” (p. 190) The journey of discipleship takes a rigorous, challenging, invigorating path, and ends up in blessing. Remember, the Songs of Ascents are pictured for us as being sung on the way to Jerusalem by the Hebrews, traveling spiritually as well as physically to the place of worship and celebration of God. “Each of the psalms following [Psalm 120] has described a part of what takes place along this pilgrim way among people who have turned to God and follow him in Christ.” So when we travel the path and arrive at “where we are going, what then?” Will we, like Colson and the others in 1972 (see p. 189), be disappointed? Psalm 134 says, “no.” It says we are blessed because we find that God meets us on the path and in the journey. As we experience God’s blessing in our daily lives, we bless God in return.

“Psalm 134 features the word in a form that might be called an invitational command: ‘Come, bless God.’” (p. 192) On one hand, it is an invitation: “Come, bless God.” Peterson emphasizes that whatever the challenging realities of the trip to be here, the invitation to let loose and celebrate at Temple Worship is a gift. We may lay aside our troubles and preoccupations and praise God. On the other hand, it is a command: “bless God.” This is a reminder not to get distracted by the sights and sounds of the destination (in the Hebrew’s case, Jerusalem)–”You are here because God blessed you. Now you bless God.”

“Go through the motions of blessing God and your spirit will pick up the cue and follow along.” (p. 194) Sometimes we don’t feel like blessing the Lord. Perhaps life has thrown us curve after curve, we are in a period of spiritual dryness, or maybe we’ve simply become disinterested in God. Other things have come to occupy our attention. We can “act ourselves into a new way of being” by practicing the actions and letting the feelings follow instead of depending on our feelings to lead the way.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism states: “The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” (p. 198) ”Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, ‘Bless God.’” While as a rule we would not say that the end always justifies the means, it remains true that “the end shapes the means.” (p. 197) Much is involved in Christian discipleship that has been considered in the Songs of Ascents, but it is critical to remember that “all the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced.” (p. 198) After all, as Peterson points out “grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth.” Taking God seriously but not ourselves is a good way to live this out. Karl Barth, probably the greatest theologian of the 20th century once said, “The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all.” (p. 196)

Authentic enjoyment of God seems to me to go hand-in-hand with a life that glorifies God. The people I most admire in the Christian faith have a depth of commitment that truly glorifies God and genuinely takes up crosses and practices self-giving service to others as they follow Jesus and all the while a deep and wonderful enjoyment of God emanates from them in everything they do.

This week we look at chapter 15 in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, which deals with Psalm 133 on the theme of Community.

“We can no more be a Christian and have nothing to do with the church than we can be a person and not be in a family.” (p. 175)  ”Community is essential. Scripture,” Peterson reminds us, “knows nothing of the solitary Christian.” (p. 176) The issue is not whether we will be a part of a community of faith, but “How am I going to live in this community of faith?” (p. 176) Of course, community is messy and frustrating as well as joyful and uplifting because people are that way. But a community of faith can love and shape a person in Christ where a “private” experience of faith cannot.

“Two ways to avoid community.” (p. 178) (1st) When we are focused on our own needs and wants, we tend to look at others “not as an ally but as a competitor.” (p. 179) Being a community of faith means loving one another according to the example of Christ, which runs counter to Peterson’s helpful observation that “it is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community.” (p. 179) (2nd) “Another common way to avoid community is to turn the church into an institution. In this way, people are treated not on the basis of personal relationships but in terms of impersonal functions.” (p. 179-180)

“Each other’s Priest.” (p. 180) Two images from the Psalm help us with insights into community life. (1st) “The first image describes community as ‘costly anointing oil.’” (p. 180) Oil “is a sign of God’s presence” and marks one “as a priest. ” (p. 181) So, the membership is a community in which all are gifted with the presence of God in order to serve as priests to one another. (2nd) The community is like fresh morning dew, communicating “fresh and expectant newness.” (p. 183) The healthy, alive community of faith carries a sense of expection, excitement, and wonder at what God will do in and through each member’s life.

Psalm 133 says that “the rousing good fellowship is in heaven.” (p. 183) While we sometimes picture heaven as boringly pious, Psalm 133 lifts up heaven as the place where good times with friends and family, times filled with laughter and joy, truly are.

This week we look at chapter 14 in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, which deals with Psalm 132 on the subject of Obedience.

“We want a Christian faith that has stability but is not petrified, that has vision but is not hallucinatory.” (p. 163) Peterson asserts that many experience religion as something “to help them with their fears but that is forgotten when the fears are taken care of; a religion made of moments of craziness but that is remote and shadowy in the clear light of the sun and the routines of every day.” (p. 162) He suggests, based on this assessment that the most religious places are “battlefields and mental hospitals,” (p. 162) but that “what most Christians do is come to church, a place that is fairly safe and moderately predictable.” (p. 163) So, while its true that we are careful to avoid the extremes mentioned, we don’t want a faith that is too safe–we want not the lukewarm middle, but the dynamic center.

Psalm 132 “roots obedience in fact and keeps our feet on the ground.” (p. 164) So, given this desire for a dynamic center from which to live the Christian life, we hear in this psalm (and in the Christian Tradition) “obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact.” (p. 164) In remembering Israel’s experience with the ark of the covenant, the embodiment of God’s presence with them, they/we recall important facts about faith–”the importance of having God with you and the danger of trying to use God or carry him around.” (p. 165) “Biblical history is a good memory for what doesn’t work… [and] for what does work.” (p. 167)

Psalm 132 “gets [our feet] off the ground…for obedience is not a stodgy plodding in the ruts of religion, it is a hopeful race toward God’s promises.” (p. 168) That desire for a dynamic center from which to live the Christian life, we also hear in this psalm (and in the Christian Tradition) “obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that…reaches into a promised hope.” (p. 164) In taking a next step of faith, we are usually if not always becoming more of what we’ve always been. In other words, we are taking the essential character God has molded in us as Christians and as a Church and re-appropriating that to the present situation in which we find ourselves. Peterson says it this way: “Psalm 132 cultivates a hope that gives wings to obedience, a hope that is consistent with the reality of what God has done in the past but is not confined to it.” (p. 169, italics mine)

“Psalm 132 cultivates the memory and nurtures the hope that lead to mature obedience.” (p. 170) One of my favorite quotations is the one that begins this chapter from John Calvin. Often, the followers of Calvin and Wesley find themselves in disagreements on theology, but I don’t think that’s true here: “True knowledge of God is born out of obedience.” At the end, Peterson sums it up in this: “What [Christian living requires] is obedience–the strength to stand and the willingness to leap, and the sense to know when to do which.” (p. 171)

The “sense to know when to do which” is the real sticking point, is it not? Seems to me that people fall by temperament towards either being standers or leapers, so it is a spiritual discipline and an activity of the community of faith to discern that all-important sense of “when to do which.”

This week we look at chapter 13 in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, which deals with Psalm 131 on the subject of Humility.

“Christian faith needs continuous maintenance” (p. 149).  Like a plant that needs to be pruned in order to grow and flourish, our spiritual lives need to be pruned as well. What “psalm 131 prunes away are unruly ambition and infantile dependency.”

“One temptation that has received…some special flourishes in America, is ambition” (p. 151). While I tend to think of ambition as having good or bad expressions, Peterson seems to be making the same distinction I am by using two words to convey the difference. “Unruly ambition” is one helpful way that he describes it. So, ambition is contrasted with aspiration. Whereas aspiration is “the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ” (p. 153), ambition is pictured as the basic sin of Scripture and is sometimes hard to pick out: “It is additionally difficult to recognize unruly ambition as a sin because it has a kind of superficial relationship to the virtue of aspiration–an impatience with mediocrity and a dissatisfaction with all things created until we are at home with the Creator” (p. 152). In differentiating the terms further, Peterson writes, “Ambition is aspiration gone crazy. Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ” (p. 153).

“Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike faith” (p. 154). Peterson writes: “Having realized the dangers of pride, the sin of thinking too much of ourselves, we are suddenly in danger of another mistake, thinking too little of ourselves.” Some persons adopt a simplistic “dependency on God” to the exclusion of active participation in working out God’s desire for our lives. Peterson notes that we were given the model of Christian faith “not because of the child’s helplessness but because of the child’s willingness to be led, to be taught, to be blessed” (p. 155). Radical dependence is biblical, I think, but neurotic, immature dependency is not: “There are some who conclude that since the great Christian temptation is to try to be everything, the perfect Christian solution is to be nothing” (p. 154).

The image of the weaned child as a picture of maturing faith became more clear and relevant on my second reading of this sentence, a quotation that Peterson employs from another:

“And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.” (p. 155)

“Another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility” (p. 157). Instead of continually alternating from the extremes of going it alone without God on the one hand and running back in a panic on the other, we can choose “the plain way of quiet Christian humility.”

This week we look at chapter 12 in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, which deals with Psalm 130. The theme is Hope.

“A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering” (p. 137). Trouble and suffering are a part of the human condition. Suffering intensifies the experience of pain because it adds the “awareness that our own worth as people is threatened, that our own value as creatures made in the dignity of God is called into question, that our own destiny as eternal souls is jeopardized.”  

“By setting the anguish out in the open and voicing it as a prayer, the psalm gives dignity to our suffering” (p. 138). One response to suffering is to deny it is real–to erect a mental or emotional wall so that we avoid dealing with it altogether. This is hazardous because pretending it does not exist does not make it cease to exist. It is still there having its effects. “The gospel offers a different view of suffering: in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.” Rather than to deny, the biblical view is to engage suffering because, “The depth is simply the height inverted” and “[God] is holier than our deepest sin is deep” (p. 139).

“Psalm 130…immerse[s] the suffering in God–all the suffering is spoken in the form of prayer” (p. 140). God is understood and trusted as personal, as the redeemer who brings help to us because, in words of Karl Barth, whom Peterson quotes: “God’s very being is mercy” (p. 141). Peterson adds: “And this, of course, is why we are able to face, acknowledge, accept and live through suffering: we know that it can never be ultimate, it can never constitute the bottom line.”

“There is a procedure for participating in [the reality of suffering]…given in two words: wait and watch” (p. 142). ”Wait and watch add up to hope.” The image given is that of a watchman. Peterson shares his experience of finding truth in the image of watchman. He could watch and wait for the dawn because he knew that he was not to control the workings of the building–there were others present for those duties. Knowing that God cares for the world and is in control of it gives one the contentment to wait, watch, and hope, exercising “a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. [Hope] is imagination put in the harness of faith” (p. 144).

Hope is… “imagination put in the harness of faith.” (A Long Obedience, p. 144)

This week’s chapter in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, deals with Psalm 129. The theme is Perseverance.

 ”I have also found that [perseverance] is one of the marks of Christian discipleship and have learned to admire those who exemplify it” (p. 125). The first word he uses is “stick-to-itiveness,” which I like for its clumsiness and clarity. Peterson compares Christian faith to “a tough perennial that can stick it out through storm and drought” (p. 126) with something fragile, in need of weather conditions that are “just right.” I know something about perennials after being married to a gardener for a few years now. He asserts that “the person of faith outlasts all the oppressors.” Jesus and Paul are lifted up as examples (pp. 126-127). I wonder what examples each of us calls to mind as exemplars of perseverance…

“The life of the world that is opposed or indifferent to God is barren and futile” (p. 129). Peterson lifts up two images from the psalm–that of “evil plowmen” seeking to do great damage only to find that their ability to enact that damage has been cut off my God, and that of the shallow rocky soil in which the grass withered. This seems to be a larger picture kind of vantage point that helps us see how God is being faithful even while we endure some sufferings as people of faith.

“What we will do is admire [the angry passage in the Psalm]’s energy” (p. 130). He’s writing in reference to the outburst, tame by Psalm standards actually, in verse 5, “Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation.” Peterson declares that we cannot explain or excuse the psalmist’s rantings but we can appreciate the energy and forceful nature of it: “The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern” (emphasis mine). The key is in harnessing that energy toward the forward progress of the kingdom work in our souls. When we get weary of maintaining patience, and express ourselves with an angry or worn tone, we can offer up “our anger to God, who trains us in creative love” (p. 132).

“Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness” (pp. 132-133). Our success at sticking it out in our journey of faith is founded upon God’s gracious promise to us and provision for us. It isn’t all, or even mainly, about us. God plays the greater role and he is trustworthy. Perhaps, like the comparison of faith and the mustard seed, we could say that just a small amount of determination to persevere is enough to engage the power of God who wants us to persevere. Speaking of the role models of faith described in Hebrews 11, Peterson says, “But God stuck with them so consistently and surely that they learned how to stick with God.” May the same be said of us.

This week’s chapter in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, is Psalm 128: Happiness. 

“In the course of Christian discipleship we discover that without Christ we were doing it the hard way and that with Christ we are doing it the easy way” (p. 115). This statement is explored throughout the chapter, but the basic point at the beginning is that “being a Christian is what we were created for.” Even when the Christian life is challenging, we know that life is made to work in Christ. This is like (I think) CS Lewis’ famous image comparing a car and gasoline with the human person and God, saying we are made to run on God and don’t function well when we don’t. Peterson is asserting the same thing, though from the other direction–we’re made to run on God, so look how well it works when we do: “A good life…promises of blessing…pronouncements of blessing…experiences blessings between those boundaries” (p. 116).

“Blessing has inherent in it the power to increase. It functions by sharing and delight in life” (p.118). The image at the center of Psalm 128 is that of a wife bearing more and more children–more aligned with the values and practicalities of the culture in which the psalm was written than those of modern American culture for the most part. But, as Peterson puts it, “the meaning is still with us.” “The characteristic of blessing is to multiply.” ”Too much of our happiness depends upon taking from one to satisfy another.” This is a sort of happiness through hording–according to the psalm, no happiness at all. Christian happiness runs counter to this and is exemplified in the saying of Jesus found in Acts 20:35, “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (p. 119).

“The blessings…do not…exclude difficulties. But the difficulties are not inherent in the faith: they come from the outside” (p. 119). “Temptations, seductions, pressures” harass us, yes. Christians deal with “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” “But the way of faith itself is in tune with what God has done and is doing.”

“Not only do we let God be God as he really is, but we start doing the things for which he made us” (p. 120). Fearing (or revering, or being in awe of) the Lord, and walking on his straight road means that we are letting God be God and that we doing the things that God has made us to do. This relates to Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:10: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

“If you go against the grain of the universe you get splinters” (p. 121). This image is key for the point of this chapter I think. Peterson says that those who try to achieve meaning apart from God are disappointed, turning their frustrations toward pilgrims on the journey, all the while not realizing clearly that they are working “against the grain of creation,” and thus making life more difficult than it is meant to be. For me, this closes the circle with Point #1 and what Peterson is saying at the beginning of the chapter.

Continuing with the weekly look at Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, today we’re reading chapter 9 on “work” from Psalm 127. 

“The Christian has to find a better way to avoid the sin of Babel than by imitating the lilies of the field, which ’neither toil nor spin’” (p. 106). God’s people over time have tended to choose one of two extremes: workaholism or laziness. Some in the earliest church took the latter approach and were chastised by Paul for doing so. The issue was and is how to understand work in a world that God has made and his caring for, and in which Christ has worked a salvation for us that we receive as a gift. Perhaps we can see why the Thessalonians quit working. But the answer lies in a third way between these two alternatives: “Psalm 127 shows a way to work that is neither sheer activity not pure passivity” (p. 107).

“Before anything else, work is an activity of God” (p. 108). The story of creation is guided along by the truth that work is affirmed as good because God works. Perhaps any work is good because it reflects the stamp of the divine image in each man but with the clear and unequivocal message of the Psalm is found in the first line, “If God doesn’t build the house, the laborers labor in vain.” Building on the theology that work is good, Peterson also addresses the issue of passion and/or calling when he says, “The curse of some people’s lives is not work, as such, but senseless work…work that takes place apart from God” (p. 109).

“The character of our work is shaped not by accomplishments or possessions but in the birth of relationships” (p. 110). It is hard to follow Jesus genuinely and at the same time measure our work by “accomplishments or possessions.” Rather, “people are at the center of Christian work” (p. 110). Peterson looks to procreation (the Psalm points in that direction) for an image of what work may have been intended to be like: “We participated in an act of love that was provided for us in the structure of God’s creation” (p. 110). Noting the psalm’s shift toward talking about the blessing of children, Peterson asserts that “what does make a difference is the personal relationships that we create and develop” (p. 111).

“Psalm 127 insists on a perspective in which our effort is at the periphery and God’s work is at the center” (p. 112). The key to a “third way” of understanding and practicing Christian faith in the realm of our work is participation. We are invited to participate in God’s work–not take it all on ourselves or push it all off on God when there are things we could do. God is at the center, but we are invited to a genuine participation with God in the world through prayer and through our responsiveness to the Spirit’s guiding us into God’s work for us. This sort of participation implies following the lead of God, going with his plan, and pitching in our own energy and creativity and intelligence in the service of his agenda. This sort of participation demands close observation and listening for God. And it involves great joy in celebrating what God has done and is doing in our midst and through us.