Life Stories of Thanks

Psalm 66

Like many parents, we tell our kids stories before we put them to bed. Perhaps it’s a form of bribery to get our kids to go to sleep but it works and so we continue to do it. Kids love stories. Big kids (i.e., adults) love stories too! If someone gives you a list of words such as: water, people, desperation, and pursuit, we’re not too interested. It’s boring. The words are not connected in a meaningful way. But if someone takes these same words and tells a story, our attention perks up. The people came to a large body of water. They were in fits of desperation! When they looked behind them, they saw an army in hot pursuit. When they looked in front of them, they only saw impossibility. That’s the beginning of a story!

Our psalm today is a story in two parts. The first twelve verses tell us a story of Israel as a collective congregation. It’s a “we” story. And this “we” story begins with praise directed to God. Why are the people prompted to praise? It’s because of what God has done in the past. But you could also look through this psalm and see that the psalmist is prompting the people to find reasons to praise God for the present, and confidence that there will be reason to praise God in the future. William Scofield, a retired Baptist missionary to Zaire, writes that this psalm prompts us to be thankful in three tenses: past, present, and future.[1]

I wonder how many of us live lives of thankfulness to God in three tenses: past, present, and future? Is that your story? When you pick up the newspaper and watch the news on television, it’s mostly about what’s going wrong. It is easy to stay stuck in that mindset where we only see the problems. The psalmist reminds us that our collective story is one that should be focused on thanksgiving. We are to be thankful. It doesn’t take much work and faith to see all the problems: we’re not meeting our budget, we have a number of families who are suffering through the horrors of cancer, and how do we reach people in this community for Christ when so many only want to live here and not really be involved in the life of the church. It’s not hard to see the problems. But it’s never been hard to see the problems. That’s the easy part. The biblical world, and every generation since then, has had equally challenging, and sometimes far-surpassing problems than ones we face. The real challenge is always to say and see all the goodness God is accomplishing. Yes, the call collectively is for us to be thankful. Our story collectively is one of thanks.

If you’ve ever read through a psalm and seen the word, “Selah,” at the end of a line and wondered what’s that all about, today I want you to notice it. Three times it occurs in our psalm. One way to think about the “Selah” in a psalm is to see it as a signpost to slow down, maybe even stop for a few moments, and ponder what’s just been said. In the first 4 verses, the psalmist calls all the earth to praise God. Stop and ponder the magnitude of what that’s saying. Verses 5-7 recall Israel’s story of the past. God delivered them. God saved them. The psalmist wants the people to remember all they have to be thankful for. Stop and ponder that. And then verses 8-15 makes a transition from a “we” or “they” story to a “me” story.[2] Stop and ponder that.

Every night when we tell Ainslee stories, we always ask her for input as to what she wants her bedtime story to be about. And almost every night, she wants the story to be about either: (a) a story about when she was a little baby, or (b) a story about chipmunks who do something she has just done. If we’ve gone to the zoo, she wants her story to be about chipmunks who go to the zoo. If we’ve gone to get ice cream, she wants a story about chipmunks going to get ice cream.

I’ve thought about this and I keep wondering if this is a way that young minds help make sense of the world around them. Stories of the past help us to make sense of the present. Connecting with the world around us involves putting ourselves into a story. The story gives us a baseline from which we can judge reality. And story also helps us connect with God. If this is true for a 3-year old, it’s probably also true for us as adults as well.

This past week, I was reading a story about a woman named Olga Yaqob. She is an Iraqi Christian missionary. During the first Gulf War, she spent her days in the desert ministering to sick and dying children. As she carried their wounded little bodies she continually thought of the Exodus account where God says to Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one shall see me and live.”[3] She wondered how she could continue such painful work. She was having trouble with her story. But she says God gave her the strength to go on. And understandably it changed[4] her life. Olga Yaqob describes her own experience this way: “In that wilderness experience, I died and was born again into a new life. Indeed, no one can see the face of God and remain the same.”[5]

The psalmist is telling a collective and individual story of thanks. Collectively, the people encountered God in their story and were not the same afterwards. Individually, the psalmist is telling a personal story. And things weren’t the same after that encounter with God.

I wonder today what story you would tell of your faith. You’re part of Cane Creek’s “we” story. But you also have a “me” story. I know part of your story. It’s one of God desperately loving you in the past, present, and future. I wonder today as you might tell your story if the emphasis is on thanksgiving to God for what God has done? Is your story one of God finding you in lostness and rescuing you? The psalmist says in verse 16, “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.” What’s your story? Let’s hear your life story of thanks.

Amen.

[1] William A. Scofield, “Thanksgiving in Three Tenses,” Preaching, November-December 1994, Volume 10, Number 3, pp. 51-52.

[2] For another example of this transition, look at Deuteronomy 26:5-10.

[4] When Moses came off the mountain in the Exodus account, his face was shining. See Exodus 34:29ff.

[5] Olga Yaqob, “The Face of God in Suffering Iraq,” Theology Today, Volume 62, Number 1, April 2005, p. 10.