Exegetical Outline For Preaching[1]

 

Year: 2011 (B)           Day: Sunday, December 4, 2011             Occasion: Second Sunday of Advent

     

I.  Getting the Text in View

A.   Text(s) Selected:  Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

 

NRSV

1 Lord, you were favorable to your land;
   you restored the fortunes of Jacob.
2 You forgave the iniquity of your people;
   you pardoned all their sin.
          Selah
8 Let me hear what God the Lord will speak,
   for he will speak peace to his people,
   to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.
9 Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him,
   that his glory may dwell in our land.
10 Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
   righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
11 Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
   and righteousness will look down from the sky.
12 The Lord will give what is good,
   and our land will yield its increase.
13 Righteousness will go before him,
   and will make a path for his steps.

 

Common English Bible

 1 LORD, you’ve been kind to your land;
   you’ve changed Jacob’s circumstances for the better.
2 You’ve forgiven
your people’s wrongdoing;
   you’ve covered all their sins.
                         Selah

8 Let me hear what the LORD God says,
   because he speaks peace to his people and to his faithful ones.
   Don’t let them return to foolish ways.
9 God’s salvation is very close
to those who honor him
   so that his glory can live in our land.
10 Faithful love and truth have met;
   righteousness and peace have kissed.
11 Truth springs up from the ground;
   righteousness gazes
   down from heaven.
12 Yes, the LORD gives what is good,
   and our land yields its produce.
13 Righteousness walks before God,
   making a road for his steps.

 

GNT

1 Lord, you have been merciful to your land; you have made Israel prosperous again. 2 You have forgiven your people's sins and pardoned all their wrongs.

8 I am listening to what the Lord God is saying; he promises peace to us, his own people, if we do not go back to our foolish ways. 9 Surely he is ready to save those who honor him, and his saving presence will remain in our land. 10 Love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will embrace. 11 Human loyalty will reach up from the earth, and God's righteousness will look down from heaven. 12 The Lord will make us prosperous, and our land will produce rich harvests. 13 Righteousness will go before the Lord and prepare the path for him.

 

 

B.    Where does the text begin and end?

 

C.  Translation of choice: NRSV (with CEB as guide)

 

II.  Getting Introduced to the Text

A.  Basic Understanding:

vv. 1,8  – “restored,”  “turn,” – Heb. shuv  (also in vv. 4,3,6). Often used to mean “repent,” but in Psalm 85 used almost exclusively to refer to God’s action in turning the people back to what God intends.

 

v. 8: “. . . to those who turn to him in their hearts.” (NRSV, et al) based on  LXX.

        “ Don’t let them return to foolish ways.” (CEB, et al) based on MT.

 

vv. 8, 10 – “peace” – Heb. shalom

 

v. 9 – “salvation” – Heb. yeshua (the root of the name Joshua – in English – which was Jesus’ real name and means “God Saves”)

 

 

B.  How Does the Text Fit Into Larger Context?

Part of the third book of Psalms.

 

III.  Listening Attentively to the Text:

What is Peace? Is it lack of war or conflict? Or is it more than that?

 

V.  Testing What Is Heard in the Text

A.   Historical Exploration:

vv.1-3 “seem to refer to a particular act of divine pardon and blessing for Israel, a probable reference to the beginning of the return of exiles from Babylonia in 538 BCE.”[2] (see Isa 40:1-11).

 

B.  Literary Exploration:

  

B.    Theological Exploration:

 

 

 

 

 

 

D.  Notes From Commentary Explorations

  1. The New Interpreter’s Bible

 

 

  1. Homiletics



  1. The Interpreter’s Anchor Bible

 

 

 

 

V.  Moving Toward the Sermon

A.  State the Claim of the Text Upon the Hearers:

            "In relation to those who will hear the sermon, what this text wants to say and do is[3]

              

B.  Focus and Function Statements

Focus Statement:

 

Function Statement:

 

VI.  Basic Form of the Sermon

A.  Tasks (based upon Focus and Function):

 

 

 

 

B.  Sequencing:

 

 

VII.  Illustrative Material:

Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

--Thomas Merton.

Sermon

“Restore us, O God: PEACE”

 

After a very long and boring sermon, the parishioners filed out of the church saying nothing to the preacher. Toward the end of the line was a thoughtful person who always commented on the sermons. "Pastor, today your sermon reminded me of the peace and love of God!"

The pastor was thrilled. "No one has ever said anything like that about my preaching before. Tell me why."

"Well," said the parishioner, "it reminded me of the Peace of God because it passed all understanding and the Love of God because it endured forever!"

 

Of all the traits of God in Jesus Christ that we celebrate throughout the Sundays of Advent, peace is, perhaps the most elusive. Hope, which we highlighted last week, must exist in some measure in our lives for us to even bother being here this morning. Without hope, we would still be in bed, and remain there.

Joy, which we will mark next week, can also be elusive. Still, all but a slim few of us seem able to have some degree or another of it in our lives now and again. Love -- which we will commemorate on the last Sunday of Advent – is sometime sadly rarer than it ought to be, but is not completely absent from our lives. For each of us who really know the grace of God in Jesus Christ has some inkling of what true love is.

But peace. . .peace is a different sort of matter.

 

Oftentimes we think of peace as the absence of a shooting war or of conflict on an interpersonal level. But the biblical concept of peace far exceeds these all too human limitations. The Hebrew word shalom which is normally translated as “peace,” comes from a root that implies well-being or prosperity.[4]  Clearly more than just a lack of conflict is meant by the word shalom.

The writers of the New Testament -- Paul, the evangelists, John of Patmos and the rest – often quote the Scriptures of the Old Testament in their writings. They do so from Greek translations of these scriptures that started to be made a few centuries before Jesus’ birth. These versions of the Old Testament texts would have normally used the Greek word eirene in place of shalom to denote “peace.”

Like shalom, eirene implies a lot more than lack of war or other conflict. The Greek word, like the Hebrew, connotes well-being and prosperity. But its frequent use by the Christian authors of the New Testament also extends to the idea of “restoring relationships (between God and humans and among humans individually and corporately).”[5]

 

So biblically speaking, peace is much more than a lack of conflict. And we see this in our Psalm this morning – yet another attributed to the guild of Temple singers known as the Korahites.

“Love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will embrace. Human loyalty will reach up from the earth, and God's righteousness will look down from heaven,” (Psalm 85:10-11, GNT) it reads in part.

 

 

Yet back at the beginning of the Psalm, they have already said: “ Lord, you have been merciful to your land; you have made Israel prosperous again. You have forgiven your people's sins and pardoned all their wrongs” (vv. 1-2).

What seems to be happening is that there is a looking back to look forward. In a fashion not unsimilar to our attitude at Advent, the Psalmist(s) were looking back from a time of relative prosperity to a time when the fortunes of God’s people were in question.

 

Over the ages many people have looked to Psalm 85 for inspiration. Its verses, especially vv. 8-13, capture “the reality that Christians already know and experience in Jesus Christ, but that exists among the ongoing brokenness of the world and the sinfulness of persons and of our society.”[6]

Two of those who, in the past have drawn heavily upon Psalm 85 for inspiration are instructive to us as we seek to understand the real meaning of peace in our own lives and during our own tumultuous era.

 

The first of these is Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland during the Commonwealth of the seventeenth century. Cromwell oversaw the beheading of King Charles I and the Settlement of Ireland by Scots and English which still causes trouble to this day. He was a strict, severe and humorless man, whom some have labeled a tyrant. Under his rule and the rule of his Puritan Parliament, all joy, love, hope and peace were systematically bled from the lives of common English, Scots and Irish folk as all dancing, games, plays and sport were prohibited. Catholics and traditional Anglicans were systematically persecuted and martyred.

When he died -- and in a fashion typical of his current heirs, handed his “ministry” over to his son -- even some of his supporters were ready to begin the negotiations which would return the crown to power in the person of Charles II

During Cromwell’s bloody and violent ten year reign, he is said to have found Psalm 85 “’instructive and significant’[7] as he proclaimed his intent that seventeenth century England embody the reign of God on earth.” Given the wording of the psalm, however, any of us motivated by such blind zealotry as Cromwell was, might be tempted to feel the same way about it. Verses 1, 9, and 12, for instance, contain references to “our land.” Like many since him, Cromwell would have taken such references quite literally, not seeing them in their original historical setting, but rather projecting them quite artlessly and unimaginatively upon his own time and place without reference to the central event of salvation history, that is: the birth, life, death, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ.

 

In stark contrast, a Dutch born Roman Catholic Carthusian monk and priest who lived two centuries before Cromwell seems to have perfectly picked up the important meaning in Psalm 85. In his classic of Christian spirituality The Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis draws deeply upon the wellspring of this psalm’s wisdom, especially in its third and central book.

“My child, I will teach you know the way of peace and true liberty,” he writes:

 

 

 

Seek, child, to do the will of others rather than your own.

Always choose to have less rather than more.

Look always for the last place and seek to be beneath all others.

Always wish and pray that the will of God be fully carried out in

  you.[8]  

 

What a difference from the approach that Cromwell and others motivated by the quest for political, religious, social and economic power take. Thomas, like the wise of all ages, understands that true peace can only come from submitting one’s whole being to the will of the One who will:

 

. . .feed his flock like a shepherd;

            . . .gather his lambs in his arms,

and carry them in his bosom,

            and gently lead the mother sheep (Isa 40:11, NRSV).

 

Earlier in is wonderful little book, Thomas writes a section on what the life of a human being living at peace would look like. He begins this section with a remarkably perceptive observation: “First keep peace with yourself; then you will be able to bring peace to others.”[9]

Extending Thomas a Kempis’ insights on personal peace, a modern heir, the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton reminds us that: “Peace is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.”[10]

 

In Advent we look for the signs and seeds, no, for the very existence of that peace which surpasses all understanding (Phil. 4:7). It is a peace which comes to us from God through Christ. The victory of this peace was won before Mary acceded to birth God’s Son into the world, before the coming of sin, even before the creation of the world.

All we must do to enjoy it is to calm our own fears long enough to accept it. No political movement can grant us this peace. No church or religious movement, doctrine or dogma give it to us. Only God can grant it. And indeed God has granted it to us through Jesus Christ in whom we find our restoration.

Thanks be to God!      Amen.  

 

 


[1] Adopted from Thomas G. Long, The Witness of Preaching (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989).

 

 

[2] Toni Craven, Walter Harrelson, text note on Psalm 85:1-3, The New Interpreter’s Study Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003), p. 826.

[3] Long., p. 77.

Commentary on Acts 4:5-12, Homileticsonline.com. Retrieved June 14, 2010 from  http://www.homileticsonline.com/subscriber/commentary_display.asp?installment_id=93040453&item_id=93051494

[4] Daniel O. Smith-Christopher, “Peace in the O.T.” The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2009), p. 423.

[5] Willard M. Swartley,  “Peace in the N.T.,” Ibid, p. 422.

[6] J. Clinton McCann, Jr. “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. IV (Nashville: Abingdon Software, 1996).

[7] Roland E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life and Experience (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1903), 76-77, 190, 196 in Ibid.

[8] Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Trans. Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004), p. 83.

[9] Ibid, p. 37.

[10] Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (Orlando: Harvest, 1981) originally (Harvest, 1953), p. 262 in “Restore us O, God: Hope,” Homiletics, 23:6, retrieved November 27, 2011 from http://www.homileticsonline.com.