Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-202 Sunday 18 Nov 2001

Reading: PSALM 87 – COSMOPOLITAN ZION

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

‘Lord, we become dulled to your apparently familiar Word. Alert us to your surprising ways, and deal with our fears of them. Amen.’

I wonder how the first hearers of this psalm responded when they heard, ‘The Lord loves the gates of Zion’? , Or ‘Glorious things are said of you, O city of God’? ‘Amen! Yes, indeed! That’s what we like to hear’? But how about ‘Rahab … Babylon … Philistia … Tyre … Cush … born in Zion … born in Zion’? Indrawn breath, disapproving frowns? The ancient enemies, enslavers and marauders, now incredibly – offensively listed among God’s own people?

Scholars describe this psalm as one of the most jumbled and disordered texts in the Old Testament. Eugene Peterson suggests that this chaos is not the result of poor transmission or copying, but ‘honest, awkwardly spontaneous prayer in the presence of an excess of meaning, a surplus of reality’ (Earth and Altar, IVP, 1985). The poet seems overwhelmed at the revelation of Zion, Jerusalem, as the place of new birth, of God’s welcome, for all peoples. At its best, there was a gritty authenticity about Israel’s lifestyle that drew people from the surrounding nations to worship the living God. We keep meeting them in the Bible. (Josh 2:1,8-13; Ruth 1:4,16,17; Isa 44:28; Acts 2:5-12)

Perhaps some of the poet’s original listeners shared his stammering delight at God’s surprising ways. I’m sure others felt uneasy about these ‘outsiders’. As we do today, we who are supposedly Biblical Christians, as war and economic turmoil uproot distant people from Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, Uganda, East Timor, Indonesia and make them our neighbours. We find that many are passionate God-lovers, evangelists in places the Western church has given up on. But somehow God’s new ways of reaching the world with his love don’t suit us. They’re untidy and alien, so different…(See Acts 10:9-15)

So… will we choose to make music together, or shall we stay uneasily outside the vitality of our common life in God (v 7)?

‘Lord, help us not to prescribe the ways in which we’re prepared to recognise your work.’

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001

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