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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Psalm 29 – A Hymn to the Lord of the Storm

Give Yahweh, o sons of God
Give Yahweh glory and praise,
Give Yahweh the glory due his name!
Bow down to Yahweh
In the splendor of holiness.

The voice of Yahweh is upon the waters,
The God of glory rolls the thunder;
Yahweh is upon the mighty waters.
The voice of Yahweh is strength itself,
The voice of Yahweh is very splendor.
The voice of Yahweh shivers the cedars,
And Yahweh shivers the cedars of Lebanon;
The voice of Yahweh cleaves with shafts of fire.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
And Sirion like a young wild ox.


The voice of Yahweh convulses the desert,
Yahweh convulses the desert of Kadesh.
The voice of Yahweh convulses the terebinths,
And strips the forests bare;

While all in his temple – all of it,
All cry ‘Glory!’
Yahweh has sat enthroned since the flood
Yahweh is enthroned as King forever.
Yahweh will give his people victory,
Yahweh will bless his people with peace.

The curious thing about this hymn to the Lord of the Storm is that it may have started out as a hymn to the Canaanite storm-god, Baal. It seems likely that the biblical writer of Psalm 29 found in this hymn many statements that were true – not of the pagan god Baal who was worshipped as the lord of the storm by the Canaanites, but of the One True God -Yahweh, and so adapted the hymn to the praise of Yahweh. Missionaries often work this way – by finding the “hidden” gospel in the culture and folklore of the countries to which they are sent, and by using these to teach the truth of God to those who don’t yet know him. The Apostle Paul worked this way as well; he utilized an altar on Mars Hill dedicated to “an unknown god” to teach his audience about Yahweh, and the Son he sent to redeem mankind.

We know, of course, that we are able to worship God in the beauty of holiness wherever we are. We are not bound to this building (though in Minnesota winters, we appreciate it), we are not confined to this space; we are not restricted to this room. There is no place in the universe where we could not experience the transcendent presence of the Living God. We can worship wherever we are.

And the author of this psalm demonstrates that for us. The psalmist is watching as a fierce storm blows up from over the Mediterranean Sea and sweeping over the land. The thunder crashes. Rain pours through gashes carved in the sky by jagged knives of flashing lightning. Hear the crash of the thunder; see the flash of the lighting. Feel the sting of the driving rain against your skin.

We know that thunder is the sound produced by lightning. The sudden increase in pressure and temperature from lightning produces a rapid expansion of the air surrounding and within a bolt of lightning. In turn, this expansion of air creates a sonic shock wave which produces the sound of thunder. We know this. But people of the ancient near east did not. When our children cringe or cower because of the noise of the storm, we can tell them that it’s “just” thunder. But it wasn’t so for the ancients. They heard the thunder and they feared.

They feared the crash of the thunder and the flash of the lightning because these were uncontrollable forces that threatened to undo them. The storms that swept across the countryside could bring fertility and fecundity to the land – or they could bring death and destruction. But there was nothing they could do to control this force. The ancients feared the thunderstorm with its loud cacophony and its violence, and so they sought to appease Ba’al, the god of the storm, the god of rain and thunder.

The ancients often thought of thunder as the voice of God. Now, we might scoff at such an unscientific notion; we know that thunder is the shock wave produced as super heated air explosively expands and contracts in the wake of a lighting bolt, and that lighting is the discharge of electricity from the cloud to the ground. We might dismiss their primitive superstitions. We might scoff at those in our past who believed thunder and lightning to be manifestations of the gods.

Yet even the biblical writers understood these natural phenomena to be (if not literally, then symbolically) to be manifestations of the presence of God. Repeatedly throughout the scriptures the voice of Yahweh is compared to the sound of thunder – at Mount Sinai when the people of Israel received the torah they heard the voice of God in the thunder. When Elijah was hiding in the wilderness he expected to hear the voice of God in the thundering storm. And even in New Testament times thunder was equated with the voice of God. When Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan River, God spoke saying “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased.” Some who heard it thought it was an angel speaking, others (those more skeptical and modernish, perhaps) dismissed it as “merely” thunder.

Merely thunder?

The sound of Yahweh’s voice could be heard thundering over the mighty waters – the biblical symbol of all that is chaotic. From the very beginning Yahweh’s voice was thundering out over the chaotic waters. When the world was nothing but a twisting, seething, foaming, crashing, expanse of chaotic waters, Yahweh spoke – thundering over the waters; calling the chaos into order and pronouncing it good.

The ancients feared the storm because it was an uncontrollable force. By offering sacrifices as an appeasement to the storm god, Baal, they sought to control their world. And still today in our modern, skeptical lives we want to control our world. But we can no more control the weather than the worshippers of Baal could. We can’t even predict the weather with confidence or high degrees of certainty. We may understand the general patterns of moving fronts of hot or cold, moist or dry air… but we cannot control or predict it. There are too many variables, too many particles moving in too many different directions at different speeds. If we miss one little bit all of our predictions are invalidated. (The butterfly effect, “a butterfly flaps its wings in China and there’s a thunderstorm in New York…)

We may not be afraid of a thunderstorm anymore (though many rational people are still sometimes spooked by the crash of thunder and the flash of lightning) but we are still afraid of the uncontrollable. We want to be in control. We want to be the shapers of our destiny. We want to be the authors of our own lives. But, like the ancients, we cannot, and we are afraid.

We plan for the future – or we try to anyway. We set money aside for expected expenses. We save for important things. We set goals. We dream about what we would like to do in five years or ten years. We plan for our children. We plan for retirement.

But it doesn’t take much to bring our plans into ruin. A sudden storm blowing into our lives can undo all our plans. Things like cancer or lay-offs can crash our well made plans. An unplanned pregnancy. An aging parent that requires our care. Accidents.

The fear of a loss of control leads to all sorts of interpersonal violence and struggle. From the bully on the schoolyard to international conflicts and wars, people everywhere are attempting to control the world around them. “We fear the unknown and our lack of control. And it is this fear of the unknown that is at the heart of human violence. People who turn to violence nearly always do so with the assumption that they know how history should turn out. Violence is a tool humans use to ensure that their vision of the future will prevail over someone else’s.” (Choosing Against War: A Christian View John D. Roth, pg. 110)

We want to be the shapers of our lives, the masters of our destinies, we want to be the author of our own stories. But this is narcissism. We can no more shape the events of our lives than we can control the weather. Yet we find it difficult to let go, and let God. And for many of us this leads to a fear of the storm – the uncontrollable swirling and crashing around us.

But if we can recognize the voice of Yahweh thundering over the waters – speaking into the chaos of our lives – we will begin to recognize that he is calling that chaos into order, speaking his goodness into effect in our lives. To live in this way is to live humbly and with humility. We have to learn to yield our wills; we have to learn to surrender our desire to control to the one who speaks in the storm.

It may be that this surrender of control results in miraculous blessings – health, wealth, and the desires of our hearts. It may be that by yielding our control we find ourselves in a place of wonderful contentment. But it is also possible that we will find ourselves in a difficult and demanding situation. And this is hard for us to accept. We want a faith that is simple. We want a faith with easy answers. . We want it to be “merely thunder.” We are afraid to release control because there is the possibility that bad things will happen.

But bad things will happen even despite our attempt to control the world - and often happen because of our vain attempt to control the world. But in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in bright blue skies and in dark stormy nights, our God, the Living God, the Lord of the Storm is with us. His voice thunders through the world bringing order from disorder, creating form from the formless.

Either way – in bright sunny days and in dark dangers storms -we learn to live humbly, sharing with Jesus in the agony of his execution, and in the triumph of his resurrection.

We are in the beauty of his temple. And we cry ‘Glory!’

Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood
Yahweh is enthroned as King forever.
Yahweh will give his people victory,
Yahweh will bless his people with peace.

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