Celebrate Grace

Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-173 Sunday 07 Oct 2001

Reading: PSALM 81 – SOUND THE ALERT, CELEBRATE GRACE

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

‘O my people … if you would but listen to me’ (v 8). ‘Holy Spirit of God, help me now to listen deeply to your Word.’

‘If you would but listen to me …’: perhaps some of you identify with my experience of finding it hard to listen to the Lord during holidays and week ends, while from Monday to Friday it seems essential for survival! Perhaps in these next months we will choose to spend some leisurely Sunday time to allow this poetry to seep deeply into us, opening us to new possibilities of living responsively to God.

Psalm 81 is probably a song for the Feast of Tabernacles, the cheerful yearly autumn camp-out of the Jewish people. It takes them back in memory to the time of their precarious desert freedom from the forced labour, racism and, yes, the delicious diet of Egypt. (See Exod 1:9-14; Num 11:4,5) Imagine the psalm sung aloud, full orchestra and massed choirs (vs 1-3), in celebration of the exodus, God’s startling, unfathomable expression of grace (v 5). But after the tents of green branches are taken down for another year, well… it’s back to business as usual, to the many tangible, safer alternatives to God (vs 8,9), to dogged, joyless self sufficiency (v 12).

We’re here too in this poem. We regularly commemorate the great act of God which brought us freedom. And instead of living responsively to him (vs 8,11,13), we tone down the vast truths of Jesus’ cross into something manageable, undemanding. (See Heb 12:2,3; 1 Pet 4:1,2) Only emergencies make us serious about the Lord (v 7).

So we mostly live skimpy, risk-free lives, without passion towards the God who covenants to give us life at its best, sustaining goodness in the hardest places (vs 10,16).

‘Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You drink, but never have your fill … This is what the Lord Almighty says, “Give careful thought to your ways”‘ (Haggai 1:5,7).

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001