For our wedding, my bride chose a psalm to be read that has had much meaning to us as a couple over the years. Happens to be Psalm 46, which doesn't sound much like a text for a wedding, lamenting as it does about the world falling apart. There are, for sure, sweet verses in the psalm that sound very wedding-like, but surely not ones like these: "Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall, the earth melts."
Reminds me of a song sung at a Christian wedding in Taiwan: "Home, Home on the Range," the old cowboy ode about deer and antelope playing. For our local friends, it had sweet meaning as they crooned, "Where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day." But for us few foreigners present, all we could think of was sweaty ranch hands and cow dung.
Yet Number 46 is a surprisingly fitting scripture on which to start a life together. We all want to live "happily ever after." But life is more often filled with sorrow and pain, chaos and confusion, twists and turns we couldn't have anticipated in a thousand years. While there are those moments of unrestrained joy, there are also those times of agonizing heartache. It is in the midst of all this chaos, the sons of Korah write, that God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.
I think about this and the modern world in which we believers find ourselves. We long for peace and security without the panic and turmoil. But God has promised us peace and security in the midst of natural and social upheaval of the nth degree. It is the God of Jacob, a man who led a very complicated and frustrating life, who is "our fortress." Jacob grew up and fled from one very dysfunctional family to another and then started his own, which proved even more of a mess. There was no end to heartache in his life. And yet his God was his anchor, an anchor he found only while fleeing for his life from his own brother.
We want life to go one way and it goes another, so we adjust to that new way, only for it to take yet another turn and go in a third unplanned direction. We keep waiting for that "home on the range" which we think of as a ranch house in the 'burbs of Dallas only to discover that we are homeless in Seattle or helpless in Detroit. In all this chaos of life, slowly it dawns on us that our "home" is -- as I wrote for a school assignment at the age of 13 -- "the presence of God."
I have pondered these thoughts in #46 at various stages in my own life and I have often reflected on them concerning the Church, particularly in America. Unlike most of the rest of the world, we as the American Church are not used to upheavals. Even 9/11, as traumatic as that was, did not really destroy the American dream we have come to accept as our God-given birthright on this earth.
Do we fight for issues like pro-life (meaning anti-abortion) or pro-marriage (meaning anti-gay) because we want to fulfill our role of being salt and light in the world or because we are fighting hard for a certain type of status quo lifestyle, a '50s-style (white) dream world in which all is well with God and the universe? How much we forget that every period in history has been heaven for some, but hell for others and there is no ideal world, in this life at least, we can hold onto.
So what if America goes to hell in a hand basket? I am not saying to go out and tear down the nation ourselves. I am saying that if the world as we know it collapses, it may not necessarily be the much anticipated apocalypse. It may only be the next opportunity for God to prove that God alone is our refuge and strength.
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