Psalm 146:   God vs ‘Princes’

^{Point of contact: On the way to church this morning a minibus drove past with a Bible text neatly printed on the back: ‘All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’ Romans 3:23). And on the side door: ‘……..Gospel Chapel’.}

^{I grew up in a ‘Brethren Assembly’ where this text from Paul was often the starting-point for ‘sharing the gospel’. Their rationale: ‘Jesus began and ended his public ministry with a call to repentance; so did John the Baptist; so do we!’ The ‘Good News’: ‘If you repent of your sins and receive Jesus as your personal Saviour you’ll go to heaven and not hell.’ÂÂ} 

^{Now I have no problem with people receiving Jesus as their personal Saviour (though that way of putting it is not in the Bible) but when Jesus confronted the ‘Bible people’ of his day he told them their priorities were all wrong. For Pharisees repentance precedes acceptance; with Jesus it’s the other way around. The Good News is about Justice, Mercy, and Faith (Mt 23:23; cf Lk 11.42). See here (http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/13113.htm ) for more about that.}

^{Jesus and other pious Jews would have lived devotionally in the Psalms, and Psalm 146 – the lectionary-psalm for today – would have informed his priorities in this area.ÂÂ} 

^{First: Let’s read this short Psalm through and summarize it in a sentence. (Which we shared with one another).}

My sentence-summary: ‘All real power belongs to God, who uses that power to do mighty things – like creating the cosmos, and helping people in trouble. Beware of  ‘princes’: they mostly use power for other purposes – like bolstering their status and life-style.’

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¹Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! 

²I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

 

The Psalms comprise the Jewish people’s ‘hymn-book’. They express the deep feelings – positive and negative – about life, enemies, God, ‘the good life’, and their troubles. They’re very honest: and I like the fact that God ordained ‘imprecatory’ psalms to be included – poems which angrily ‘tell God off’ for not intervening to arrange things differently/better! God can cope with our honestly sharing our feelings in our prayer!

The Psalter begins with a couple of songs (Psalms 1 & 2) about the righteous flourishing and wicked perishing so ‘kings’ had better watch out! It ends with five ‘Hallelujah’ songs (146-150) which, in a crescendo of praise, invite us to ‘Praise the Lord’ – and also behave righteously. 

Now I grew up with that word ‘righteousness’ as I read and memorized the King James Version of the Bible. A better word, mostly, is ‘justice’. Which is part of the reason I never heard a ‘message’ on ‘social justice’ in my entire Brethren childhood (and as a teenager I used to take notes).

‘Right living’ in the best Hebrew-Christian tradition means three things: obeying the law of the land, obedience to the will of God, and thirdly ‘social justice’ – the strong helping the weak / the right use of power. (More on that here – http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/579.htm ) . The prophets – people who ‘tell it like it is’ – emphasize all three, but particularly social justice.

³Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.^ 

⁴When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.

 

^{So who are these ‘princes’ who are untrustworthy? (Congregation calls out synonyms/descriptors like: powerful people, celebrities, the wealthy, those who run institutions, many are addicted to praise, they’re people you relate to with deference, they live with a strong sense of ‘entitlement’, they’re people who when they speak you don’t interrupt them etc. etc. ) In the ancient world, they’re just about always unelected: they got to be at the ‘top of the heap’ because of their family lineage, or money, or a military victory, or were nominated by someone who ranked just above them who got there by those means.ÂÂ} 

^{So what’s the problem with those people? Simple: you can’t trust them to do what God does with power – using it for the well-being of others rather than themselves. Think of most of the kings of Israel, the Roman Caesars, rulers of nations like North Korea, Syria etc….ÂÂ} 

^{Yes, ‘power corrupts, and absolute power (except for God’s power) corrupts absolutely.’ Exceptions? Yes, Nelson Mandela comes to mind. And Bill Gates, who told us on ABC TV recently that he’d learned somewhere he couldn’t take his ($75 billion?) fortune with him when he died. (And the stingy man is only giving his kids $10 million each!). Of course political leaders can feel emotion (the Australian PM and the Victorian Premier teary when they announce a National Disability Insurance Scheme – they were both thinking of an autistic person they said later).ÂÂ} 

^{‘Princes’ head up institutions: nations, armies, the church. Are church ‘princes’ likely to do unjust things? Item: in yesterday’s press we learned that in the Melbourne Diocese of the Roman Catholic they’ve recorded 849 victims of sexual abuse, by 249 offenders – 98 priests, 114 brothers, 9 nuns, and 42 laypeople. And, they said, that’s not a complete list, because some complaints were settled outside the system. And that’s in just one diocese!}

And in the churches generally? Yes: (and here fasten your seat-belts; we’re about to enter some turbulence!): the notion of ‘ordination’ is a not-so-subtle way of separating ‘princes’ from the rest of us. The idea that all the people of God are ‘ordained for ministry’ is vitiated every time we use the word ‘minister’ in the singular! Certainly some are ‘ordained’ for a ministry of leadership (eg. both my wife Jan and myself, by Australian Baptists) but what are these ‘ordained leaders’ supposed to do? Simple, really: do themselves out of a job. (See the summary of my doctor of ministry thesis in Your Church Can Come Alive, where I note 34 marks of a healthy church from a study of the ‘model’ church in Antioch (Acts 11: 19ff, 13:1-3) including the amazing example Paul and Barnabas offer us by training others – in one year! – to take their place.  More on that (if you’re brave) here – ^{http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/8109.htm . ÂÂ} 

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⁵Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in theLord their God,^ 

⁶who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;^ 

⁷who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free; 

⁸the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. 

⁹The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. 

¹⁰The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord!

 

(Watch for more. Rowland Croucher, June 2013).