Psalm 80
“Song of Salvation”
December 19, 2010 - Fourth Sunday in Advent

         A year ago no Christmas cookies were baking at our house. Some of you remember that our oven quit working near the beginning of December. We pay for a home warranty that covers our appliances, so I called them up. Their dispatcher listened and said she would send a Sears service tech. I thought that was just fine. We have a Sears range. They sell it, they ought to be able to get it fixed. That’s much the same spirit in which Israel called on God in our psalm this morning.

         Psalm 80 is a prayer that addresses God first as “Shepherd of Israel,” then as planter of the vine which is the people He brought ought of Egypt. Under both images comes the impassioned plea, “Restore us!” Looking to their origin and source, God’s people looked for Him to come and fix their problems, to save them.

         The tribal names used in verse 2 show that this is a prayer song for the northern kingdom of Israel. It was written in the late eighth century B.C. as those ten tribes were being overrun, dismantled and dispersed by the Assyrian empire. These words of petition were likely the work of a sympathetic psalm writer in the southern kingdom dismayed at what was happening in the north.

         There is a great confidence here, both in God’s responsibility and in God’s ability to save His people. He’s the Shepherd, sitting on a throne of cherubim. He has angels at His command. He’s the Gardener who brought his vine out of Egypt and planted it in the Promised Land. He has the power to overthrow nations in favor of His people. It’s His responsibility to save us. And He can. It’s as simple the phrase that’s repeated three times in this psalm, “Make your face shine on us, and we shall be saved.”

         There’s great confidence here in this psalm, but there is something else. “How long will you be angered?” they ask God in verse 4. Then thinking of the shepherd who feeds and waters His sheep, verse 5 imagines that instead of good green grass and clear water, God fed them bread soaked with tears and gave them bowls of tears to drink. Despite their calls, despite God’s power and strength, the Assyrians were overrunning them. Verse 6 says that both their enemies and the neighboring countries were laughing at them.

         God did not show up when they called. God did not save them. This is a prayer of faith, but it’s also a prayer of frustration. When I got the promise that Sears would fix our oven, I initially had confidence that our problem would be quickly resolved. That quickly became frustration. Sears did not show up for six days. Then they didn’t have the part they needed in stock. What should have been a fifteen minute repair dragged out for weeks, clear through Christmas.

         Israel’s frustration with God’s salvation was dragged out for a couple decades as their enemies did what we read metaphorically in the second part of the psalm. The vine that was the progeny of Joseph, started out so well, says verses 10 and 11. The tribes that were the children of Jacob’s wife Rachel spread out their territory like vine branches growing tall and shading the earth, extending influence and power from the cedars of Lebanon in the north to the mountains of Palestine in the south, then west to the Mediterranean Sea and east to the great Euphrates River in Mesopotamia.

         Yet verses 12 and 13 picture the walls that guarded this great vine broken down. Passer-bys pluck off the grapes, and both wild and domestic animals trample the plants and eat the fruit. Verse 15 sees the conquering Assyrians as finally doing what the keeper of a vineyard does with ruined vines, burning them like rubbish.

         In those weeks around Christmas, I kept calling about our oven. Is the part in yet? When will another service tech show up? What’s the problem? Is anyone even paying attention?

         In the middle of their destruction and frustration, the northern tribes of Israel kept calling to God. Verse 14 is an expression of hope and faith that even now God can save them. “Turn now, O God of hosts, look down from heaven.” They seem to think that maybe God isn’t paying attention. If He will only look, they will be saved. They kept calling.

         Finally, after three weeks, a package appeared on our doorstep. It was the part needed to repair our oven. So I got back on the phone, waded through all the “Press 1 for English, press 3 for service, press 2 for home appliances, press 0 to talk to a real person” business and explained that the part had arrived and please send a tech to install it. “We can have someone there on January 4,” I was told. We were going to wait another ten days without an oven because there was no one available to make the repair.

         Israel’s frustration was that they were also waiting for someone. Verse 16 calls Him “the man of your right hand,” the “son of man you have made so strong for yourself.” They didn’t know it, but they were waiting for the Man about whom the rest of our texts are telling us this morning.

         Our passage from Isaiah 7 comes from about the same time as Psalm 80, except that it is clearly addressed to the king of Israel’s southern half, a man named Ahaz. He’s worrying that the troubles in the north will spill down into his territory. Alliances are being formed and King Ahaz fears an alliance between the north and another nation will swoop down and destroy and divide his kingdom in the south. So he’s looking for assurance from the prophet Isaiah.

         Like his northern neighbors, King Ahaz was also frustrated with God. Like my phone calls with Sears, Ahaz was just getting promises, nothing solid like some reinforcements for his army. So when Isaiah invited Ahaz to ask for a sign, he responded cynically, out of his frustration. He refused to ask God for anything. That’s when this petty, foolish little king received the greatest promise the world ever heard, “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”

         The baby promised to Ahaz in the south was the same as the man of God’s right hand they looked for in Ephraim and Manasseh. He would be a long time coming. God’s people would wait through the destruction wrought by the Assyrians in the north, through an exile created by the Babylonians in the south, through long centuries of frustration and pain. Yet the promised was fulfilled.

         In the first verse of the psalm we heard that God leads Joseph like a Shepherd and that He sits on a throne of cherubim, a throne of angels. In Matthew 1:20 we read how God finally, hundreds of years later, sent one of those angels to a man named Joseph to tell him that the waiting was over. What was promised to Ahaz seven hundred years earlier was going to be fulfilled through the woman Joseph was engaged to marry. Though still a virgin, Mary was pregnant with a baby conceived by the Holy Spirit, by God Himself. He would be called “Jesus,” which means “God saves.”

         All those prayers for salvation, in this psalm and in many more like it, in Israel and in the hearts and minds of men and women of every race and nation, all those prayers for someone to come and save us were answered in that Baby announced to Joseph. This “son of man” was also the Son of God, as we read from Romans 1 this morning. Paul says that what was promised through the prophets was fulfilled in this birth, in the coming of Jesus into our world.

         Israel and Ahaz and you and I often forget the true nature of this salvation that came to us in Jesus. When the psalm was written, God’s people clearly wanted a king, a man who would lead them to victory over their enemies from the north. That’s what Ahaz wanted. When Ahaz heard the promise of a baby, he must have laughed. Even if the boy were born the next day, the threats against his country would be upon him long before the child ever grew up. They wanted someone to save them from the immediate fear and terror of war.

         This Christmas let us remember what it is from which we really need salvation. As we hear news reports of threats of terrorist attacks during the holidays, we feel the need to be saved from suicide bombers and the like. As unemployment rates go up we ask to be saved from joblessness and a bleak economy. If you lived in or plan to travel through the Midwest, you would be asking for salvation from more snow and ice that’s predicted for next week. You might be asking God to save you or someone you love from heart disease or cancer or some other illness. Maybe you would just like to be saved from some loneliness or sadness or grief that will accompany your Christmas this year.

         On Friday morning I stood with about fifty people gathered at the intersection of First and Blair streets north of downtown Eugene. It’s a dreary, dirty industrial part of our city bumped up against concrete barriers and an iron fence lining the railroad tracks. It’s where Major Thomas Egan laid down and froze to death in a snowstorm two years ago. We were there for the second annual memorial service in his honor.

         One of Major Egan’s few friends at the end of his life stood to talk about him at that service. Unabashedly she talked about Egan’s struggles and alcoholism. Then she said, “Could Tom have been saved? That question haunts me.” I think that is the kind of question that haunts us all. It’s not really a question about being saved from cold weather, or from post-traumatic stress or from a life on the streets, but about being saved from the enemies inside which attack and destroy us.

         The greatest enemies of humanity, the worst enemies you and I face are not the terrorists being screened for at our airports. They’re not diseases being battled with surgery and medicine. They’re not natural disasters like winter storms and earthquakes. Our fiercest foes are things like anger that alienates and hurts our friends and families, lust that causes us to betray the ones we love, addiction that makes us eat or drink or inject stuff that ruins our lives, greed that keeps us buying more than we can afford, and pride that keeps us from asking for help. The real enemies are our sins.

         That’s why the greatest good news you will receive this Christmas is what the angel told Joseph about the baby to be named Jesus, “he will save his people from their sins.” Though they didn’t know it, that’s what the tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin and Manasseh were looking for in the psalm we read to day. That’s what they meant when they said, “make your face shine on us, and we shall be saved.” When the face of God actually did shine on this world through the face of Jesus Christ, they were saved, and we were saved.

         That’s why we sang a less familiar carol just before the sermon this morning. It plays off all the sweet and joyful scenes of Christmas against the more somber, but ultimately more important scenes of Easter. “Christmas has its cradle and Easter has its cross.” Jesus came into the world so that the light of God could shine on us through His face, but He also came to die so that we could be saved from our real enemies, saved from our sins.

         So through the warm, cozy light of Christmas shining in the dark of winter, I’d like us to catch a glimpse this morning of the brighter, stronger more intense light of Easter shining in the spring. Let’s not forget that the baby was born to be a Savior who would carry the burden of our sins to the Cross and let it be nailed there and defeated by His death. And then let us remember that sin was completely forgiven and defeated when God raised Him from the dead as the promise that He will raise us all.

         At the beginning of December, one of you came to me and said, “I have a strange question for you. After last Easter I took home one of the lilies we had at church. Now it’s budding and looks like it may bloom any time. Would it have any place in our Christmas decorating?” She and I agreed that we would wait and see if that plant bloomed and then maybe it could fit into Advent and Christmas worship somewhere.

         I called Barbara Friday morning and she told me the lily still had not bloomed, but it had really big buds on it. I thought about it and said, “Please bring it this Sunday anyway. It will still fit with what we want to remember then.”

         So here is this lily and we’re still waiting for it to bloom. Here was Jesus the baby lying in a manger and what He had come to do was still not done. The baby was the bud of the full flower of a Savior who died and rose to truly save us, to save us from our sins.

         Those lily buds also remind us of what the Advent season teaches us, of what Israel felt hundreds of years before Jesus came, that waiting is part of spiritual life, that God will truly save us, but that we must often wait, as frustrating as it is.

         My prayer today is that everyone here will call on God and ask for the salvation that He is truly offering through Jesus Christ. Let us ask to be saved from our sins. First of all that means asking for forgiveness. The first step is to admit that you are a sinner and to call on God to save you by forgiving you. But the second step is to keep calling on God to save us from our sins by changing our hearts, by making us into people on whom those sins have less of a grip. Being saved from sin is not just getting forgiven, it’s getting transformed into a person who lives a new and different life.

         Advent and our psalm remind us that salvation is a process, a process that lasts your whole life from the moment you first ask to be saved. It can be a frustrating process. Sometimes it feels like God is angry or not listening. Sometimes we feel far from God and deep in all those ugly sins we thought we left behind. That ugly habit starts up again. We say things we regret. We neglect all the good we meant to do.

         Yet just like Israel we keep asking to be saved. We keep trusting that God’s face will shine on us and we will be saved. We believe that the Baby has been born and that He became the Savior who died and rose to save us from our sins. The bud was formed and the bud broke open in beautiful flower. So will our buds. So will yours.

         I invite you to ask Jesus to save you today, for the first time or the thousandth. Ask Him to forgive your sins and to make you new. He will. The promise is true. The Savior has come and He’s coming again. His face will shine on you and He will save you.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj