This week, worship service on Sunday at 11 am, and Food Pantry open Tuesday 5:30 to 7 pm. All welcome!
https://youtu.be/rOFl6MXPDa0
Call to Worship; Psalms 62:5-9
5 Yes, my soul, find rest in God;
my hope comes from him.
6 Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
7 My salvation and my honor depend on God;
he is my mighty rock, my refuge.
8 Trust in him at all times, you people;
pour out your hearts to him,
for God is our refuge.
9 Surely the lowborn are but a breath,
the highborn are but a lie.
If weighed on a balance, they are nothing;
together they are only a breath.
Invitation, Tithe, and Prayer Concerns; Father in Heaven, author of all that is good, wholesome, and holy. Lord we come to you today asking for your blessing in our hope of serving you in this hurting world. Father we ask that you show us the way to your solitude and peace as we reflect on your greatness!
Amen!
Message Reading; Matthew 6:5-6
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
Message: “The Sound of Solitude”
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again “The sound of Silence”
According to Wikipedia; Garfunkel once summed up the song’s meaning as “the inability of people to communicate with each other … emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.”
That was over 50 years ago. Today our message is intended to be more personal and focusses on our necessity to converse, love, and grow in God and each other. On a positive note, perhaps a new twist on the lyrics might be;
Hello Solace, my old friend
I’ve come to bask in you again
To lose myself of worntorn’s day
Malice was my life’s interlude
Now redeemed in Solitude
In this my Lord I pray
The World is in flux. We have witnessed the breakdown of essential services in some of our largest cities and some of the smallest communities, From New York to Portland and Seattle, Minnesota, Ferguson Missouri then on to Wisconsin. This week its Kentucky. Mayhem is documented on the evening news. (Which in its own right has become a vantage point of bedlam and misrepresentation) Just when you begin to think “awe that’s it”, we just hit rock bottom on the plummeting of our culture’s ethics, no. Our society repeatedly sets a new standard for vulgarity (common behavior), ever diving deeper into the baseline of social acceptability.
With all of the churn and upheaval, it seems everyone is conscious of the increasing community anxiety at play in our own lives and during these times of apprehension. We need our Lord and indeed, each other more than ever.
Today I am excited to spend a little time talking with you on a topic that hits hard on me, and I think I am not alone in believing that we must all find time for a remedy. Relief from all of the calamity going on in our world right now. A means of temporarily easing the ongoing assault that our senses, emotions, and our very souls are subjected to on a daily bases.
I guess I’m excited because I think (at least in my own case) I see light at the end of the tunnel, or at a minimum a momentary reprieve from the constant onslaught of modernity. Also, my excitement builds because I have been given the opportunity to share my thoughts with you, and I know that I will not be able to be content or find peace in my own soul unless I have discovered these things, shared these ideas, with you my family in God.
It’s like that with God. Once you have discovered that you are not really complete until you have found the Lord, by inviting Him in. Then He walks with you and you with the people He has placed in your life. Then you are on your way to completion. And probably not the initial tranquility you might have expected. Because many times the people that help to complete us along with the sovereign Lord Himself, seem to actually add to the turmoil in our lives as they make it better and complete.
So many times in life before we can begin to experience relief from what ails us, we need to shake things up. What many of us we least want to do when hoping for solace. Whatever that word or words solace and solitude mean. Those concepts and what they represent is a little baffling for me to grasp at times.
Maybe to make more sense of all of this, we need to identify just what kind of solace or solitude I am talking about. When in doubt the easy and in my case lazy way to get a quick idea of a definition on something is to go on-line. There is the Google definition:
Solitude, isolation refer to a state of being or living alone. Solitude emphasizes the quality of being or feeling lonely and deserted: to live in solitude. Isolation may mean merely a detachment and separation from others: to be put in isolation with an infectious disease.
Well my disease is me, and the cure ongoing, so let’s move on. Maybe there is more than isolation that I am looking for. Because when it hits, I am looking for relief from the troubles of this world. Our next Google definition is for solace;
Solace, comfort or consolation in a time of distress or sadness.
Bingo; that’s what I am looking for when I feel like I have been gob-punched in the throat, and kicked in the stomach by life. Please Lord, give me Solace, refuge and rest! That matches up to today’s “Call to Worship” reading, with David informing us in Psalms 62:5-9
5 Yes, my soul, find rest in God;
my hope comes from him.
6 Truly he is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
7 My salvation and my honor depend on God;
he is my mighty rock, my refuge.
8 Trust in him at all times, you people;
pour out your hearts to him,
for God is our refuge.
9 Surely the lowborn are but a breath,
the highborn are but a lie.
If weighed on a balance, they are nothing;
together they are only a breath.
God is my refuge and is there consistently. Not like the things of this life that are here today and gone latter in the afternoon.
Our passage from David puts everything in perspective, especially by what was communicated later in the passage; the “lowborn” people like you and me in the scheme of things are just a vanity or a breath in time, and the highborn; people of nobility are still just people. Combined all of us are a flash in the pan, and that our true hope and trust lays at the foot of the Cross. Where in the midst of celestial turmoil, God redeemed us. Died for us, to reclaim us, His creation from our own arrogant selfishness. Hence providing solace and refuge in the very presence of cosmic upheaval, this very real battle we find ourselves in, of good and evil. For it resides within!
The Psalm is hard won testimony from a man who knew what it was like to live in the center of a whirlwind life. When events were not conspiring to assault David, he self-inflicted his own strife by willingly sinning. Case in point; his Adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband Uriah. David sent him into the worst part of the battle to get rid of him, and leaving Bathsheba free for the taking. And he did!
(On a side note, you can review his repentance to God in the 51st Psalm. Which the English Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon called “The Sinner’s Guide”, as it shows you and I, how to return to God’s grace.., and is your homework assignment for contemplation this week!)
My thought, David’s greatness is his habit of always coming back to the Lord after blowing it, sinning, and missing the mark, by trusting in God’s forgiveness, and not giving up. Coupled with other literary masterpieces from the Psalms that show human beings at the lowest of points and then soring to the heights of the angels. Then you see why God through David inspires reflection and thought.
Indeed, David’s own life like yours, is a series of ups and downs sometimes high highs, and low lows, were his reality. And like you, when it is all said and done, Our Lord is the one constant that will remain there with us at day’s end. To walk with you with solace in your solitude!
Through his own hard earned life experiences, David is consistently instructing us to rely on our Lord throughout the Psalms. Psalms 46:1, 8-10; reflects another example of His reliance on God for refuge and solace;
1 God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble…
…8 Come and see what the Lord has done,
the desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease
to the ends of the earth.
He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
10 He says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
Again towards the end of this passage, there is Manna for the sole. Here is the fundamental statement for me; “He says, “Be still, and know that I am God”…
But how do we get to that point? Where do I find that stillness to be able to think straight? A point where we are away from all the distractions of competing forces of ego, fears, selfishness, and petty needs of the moment?
As always, it is our Lord’s example and instruction that rescues my troubled sole. His instruction from the “Sermon on the Mount”, and our reading for today’s message in Matthew 6:5-6, show us the need to go off and to be alone with your God!
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.
I believe the idea is this: It is great to be together when we pray, and worship, this brings great value to our lives because it helps to equip us with the skills to walk with God outside this room. What Christ is teaching is that we all need times when in order to really find the solace that we desire, we also need the solitude described in today’s first Google definition;
Solitude: The isolation that may mean merely a detachment and separation from others.
Perhaps Solace and solitude are mutually supporting aspects or points of our being. To find one, we often need to be experiencing the other point in reality.
The goal I believe is that when we remove ourselves from others we are available to give “our all” to being with God. Not for show, and not for other people’s reflection, but our one-on-one discernment of where the Spirit of the Lord is leading you. There are times when it is just very important to be alone with God to understand that we are not really alone, but in fact plugged into something greater than ourselves.
Then at some point we will be ready to return to our family in God in order to share and glean from each other in even deeper discernment in Scripture and the Spirit.
Returning to our look into solitude, the Lord is repeatedly shown in scripture to remove Himself away from the others at times to be in communion with the Father. We can only speculate on what it must have been like at the junction of the Godhead; Father, Son, and Spirit.
During times of great stress, before making major decisions, in day to day living, or after great efforts, scripture shows Christ going off or getting up in the middle of the night to be alone in prayer. This solitude is reflected in advance of the Lord selecting the Apostles from His followers the disciples in Luke 6:12-13;
12 One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. 13 When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles:
And through this selection, the world would never be the same again! Did God need to do anything in order to prepare to make a solid decision? No. The Lord was living by example and continually instructing us how to go about life, even when in the turmoil of storms. It is when we are in the midst of the storm that many of us need to make time (even in the middle of the night) to remove ourselves from all the stuff in life and be available to commune with our Lord!
Jesus shows us in scripture that this was a way of living for Him in His earthly walk. Even while in the center of His fame, the Lord understood that it was import for all of us to take time away for prayer and reflection. We have Luke’s recollections of Christ that reflects in Luke 5: 15-16; that even with crowds seeking Him out, there still needed to be time dedicated to solitude;
15 Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. 16 But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
I believe what Jesus is demonstrating to us is that people need down time to reset, re-evaluate, and retool for the ongoing events that life brings. Often the quality of the time spent alone with the Lord will determine the quality of the time we spend with others in a group. Also, you can be in a lonely place and not be alone!
Oh, and I think it’s important to note, When it is all said and done, one size does not fit all. That there is no one way to be alone with the Lord. Some of us can not break free or are too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything. There are people that are in a state of prayerful reflection all day long. Indeed there are people who once they have found that solace in the Lord, can bring their solitude with them into the very crowds in which they thrive.
Please remember, our experience does not have to be exactly like anyone else’s. In fact if we are striving for someone else’s faith understanding, maybe we are on a wrong course. I guess it’s my hope in today’s message that we remember to try to connect with our Lord in a way that works for you.
With today’s focus on solitude with the Lord, Scripture study could easily be forgotten on the side. Scripture is fundamental. Coupled with prayer it’s essential for our better understanding of where our solace resides. This is the roadmap that all of us in our Faithwalk hold in common. You have to do the heavy lifting by praying and studying scripture alone with the Lord and then together with others in your Faith Family.
I think that’s the template on finding the sound of solitude in our Lord. Once I have had time alone with the Lord (solitude), it is essential that we find others to worship, study, grow, and serve with. This is where we find completion (and even more Solace) in our Lord. As we complete each other in Him. This enables us to take the next step and that is to bask in the community of others, while holding His Solace and Solitude
I started with kind of a poem in this message, so let me share a quick ode from a Rabbi that I respect, agree and disagree with, and love to learn from;
I looked for my God that I could not see,
I looked for my Soul that eluded me,
I looked for my Brother and found all three.
Thank you Rabbi Golub for your 2020 message on the High Holidays. In the days ahead, I would like to share with you how I think the Rabbi’s words also apply in our own Christian Faith Walk.
It is my hope and prayer that as you begin your quest for solace and solitude, solitude and solace, that you find the right mixture that works for you, and then bring your discoveries the Faith Community where you reside, for all of our enrichment. That you will discover the sound of solitude, and its sound delivers you solace, filled with peace and repose. As you forge ahead with your family in our Lord. Amen! Benediction; Numbers 6:24-26