Life as a Christian is great isn’t it? We Christians never have any problems…there is always enough money, our children are always obedient, when we go to parent/teacher conferences the teachers can’t say enough good things about our kids; that they are geniuses, leaders, very obedient and good. As Christians, we have perfect relationships with our spouses, our neighbors admire us and love to mow our lawns for free, we never make mistakes, never break bones that have to be repaired. We never say stupid or mean things we have to apologize for later, we never get angry but live life in a cloud of blessedness.

Our houses are always perfectly manicured and decorated. Our dogs always do their business outside, our cars are always up to date and fully functioning. Our prayer life is always awesome and the envy of others. And if any of these things should go wrong, it means God hates us, we have lost our faith, we have lost God’s presence in our lives that are now not worth living. If somehow things don’t work out how we think they should, it means we are cursed, way off track and on the highway to hell. Do any of us think like that? I know I do to a degree; I know with my head it isn’t true; that God loves me and is with me despite how I feel at a particular moment, but when I am in the middle of the messiness of life, of a car that doesn’t always work, kids that disobey, a spouse that doesn’t see the logic of the situation we’re in, like any other reasonable or rational person would, then things are awful and I’m stuck with a terrible, cursed life.

Psalm 121 is about life, it is about a life lived before God, it is about life lived within God, by pilgrims seeking Him.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
3 He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
4 indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
5 The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
6 the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
7 The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.

Let’s pray.

We’re going through the Psalms of the Ascent from now until a Sunday before Easter. The Psalms of the Ascent are numbers 120 through 135. These were the songs the Jewish pilgrims would sing on the road toward Jerusalem, traveling from all over the known world. Several times a year the Jews would travel to Jerusalem, to the one and only Temple of the Jews where God dwelt specially, deep in the Temple in the Holy of Holies. The Jews would travel to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices, to celebrate feasts and so forth. They would travel from the far parts of the known world, some of them. They had been spread out from Israel because of the Babylonian captivity and for reasons of commerce and business. So they traveled, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always sat on top of Mount Zion, which is higher than the surrounding areas. This is one of the reasons there is a city there; cities back then were built on the high ground so attackers would have a tougher time. Anyway, these pilgrims would literally and spiritually be heading upwards toward God, a metaphor that works for us as well. We too are going upwards, hopefully, in our pilgrimage toward God. I want to say once again that I have been influenced heavily in this series by a writer and pastor named Eugene Peterson. Many of his ideas will work their way into this series.

So here we are at Psalm 121, a song of protection, a song to buck up courage, a song to remember the promises of God. It is a psalm that puts to rest those feelings that when something goes wrong, God has abandoned us to our fate. When it all seems to go wrong, God is still with us, holding us up, holding us safe in His hands. This is a psalm we did as a devotion while we were climbing Kilimanjaro, lifting our eyes up to that hill as we climbed it. Heading upwards, but having to struggle to climb that hill on every step. Listen to how the psalm begins.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

Many of the Jewish pilgrims would have been traveling through lands where the people worshipped other gods, they would have traveled through lands where the people worshipped Baal, they would have worshipped using something called Ashara poles. And this worship took place on the hills, in the high places in the land. So as the Jews traveled toward Jerusalem, they would have passed by these places of worship up in the hills, they would have been able to see other people traveling up to the places where the false gods were worshipped. So when they would lift their eyes up to the hills, as the psalm says, they would see the false places of worship, places where the local folks would sacrifice to fertility gods to ensure a bountiful harvest, including baby calves and goats and sheep to make their lives easier. In some places there would have been temple prostitutes, offering through their actions fertile crops, fertile animals.

And in response to that worship of other gods, in response to living or traveling in a strange lands where the people worshipped false gods, like Baal, like the stock market or the fashion industry, the pilgrims reaffirm their faith and trust in God. Our help comes from Yahweh, the Creator who made heaven and earth out of nothing. We don’t worship fertility gods, we shouldn’t worship youth or image or money or anything else. Nothing else can protect us in a foreign, dangerous land like the one we live in like our God, who created and reigns on high. And it’s to him that the pilgrims were traveling in Jerusalem, it is to Him alone that we travel in this life, heading obediently on our journey further up and further in through daily devotions, through our prayer time, through our obedience to His will for our lives. Where does our help come from, nothing we do; our help comes from God.

3 He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
4 indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

Just so you know, the line that says God will neither slumber nor sleep is a direct swipe at Baal, who was often written about as a drunken, sleeping God. In fact, many of the Baal priests spent their time trying to wake Baal up so he might bless a worshipper. But our God neither sleeps nor slumbers; He is watching over us always. He is on guard.

The author of Psalm 121 mentions 3 things that can happen to someone traveling. The first is right here, your foot can slip. You can turn and ankle, you could stub a toe or step in something that punctures your foot. Let’s think about all the other stuff that can happen. A drunk driver can cross a little line on the pavement and plow into us. A gunman could rob a bank while we’re in it, or could burst into our places of work taking hostages. Terrorists can bomb our building. We can get a disease; cancer, a stroke, heart problems, memory or brain problems, we might get something for which there is no recovery. Just a living with it. Our cars might seize up and we might hurt someone else unintentionally. Anything might happen. We live in an unsafe time, and people are fragile. We are fragile. A foot problem might not kill us, we can survive an infection better than they could, but human life has always been tenuous at best. There are no guarantees of safety, of health, or of the perfect life.

But that’s not what the psalm says. It says our feet will not slip. Does this mean we have the perfect life, or should, but somehow its gotten messed up, either by ourselves or someone else? Have we gotten off the path? Have we walked away from salvation? There are some Christians out there who absolutely believe that if anything bad happens, it is your fault and it is proof you don’t have enough faith in God. Moses, in fact, is doing his PhD work on what we call the “Health and Wealth” gospel in Africa. It is ruining the spirituality of Africans who buy into that nonsense.

We’ll finish talking about that in a second. Not only can we stub our feet, but we can be attacked by the elements as well. Listen.

The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;
6 the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The world was a really dangerous place. In a barren land, a sun baked land, shade is important and too much sun can disorient, too much sun can dehydrate and eventually kill. The sun can harm by day, it can kill. And the night was dominated by the moon, and everyone knew that too much exposure to the moon could drive a person mad, which is where we get our word “lunacy”. Luna, moon-, driving someone crazy. This was a major concern back then. A crazy person had obviously gotten too much exposure to the moon. So both the sun and the moon were dangerous. Each day was filled with terrors, as was each night. The earth could be a dangerous place; your foot could slip, you could be attacked by the sun or the moon or both.

There are elements of this world that can strike us down as well. Through no fault of our own, we could get into real trouble. We can experience financial hardships, personal losses, betrayals of our trust; endless dangers because of the way the world just is. And yet, we are told that God doesn’t rest, that He protects us from the sun and the moon, and doesn’t allow our feet to slip. How do we reconcile what we experience with that? Jewish pilgrims and Christians have never read this psalm with a flowery, unreal view of life. Instead, we believe that no accidents, not problems of life, no diseases, no evil done to us will have power over us. There is nothing that will be able, without our acquiescence, to move us away from God, those problems in life have only the power over us we give them. Nothing in this life will be able to separate us from God’s love; not frustrating relationships, or problems with our children, or physical maladies, or the selfishness of others nor death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present or the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. None of that stuff has any power over us. The power that is over us, God Himself, instead protects us, and keeps us safe within Himself.

We live in the real world, with real hurts and real pain. We do not live in a fairy tale, like the one I described at the beginning of this sermon. Neither did the Jewish pilgrims live in a easy place of milk and honey, with neighbors that loved them and a complete lack of problems. But none of that is able, if we don’t let it, to separate us from God’s love and purpose for our lives. But there still is in the back of our minds the feeling like maybe God has forgotten about us. I worked under a pastor for a while who I think did believe God had forgotten about him. He was frustrated and angry; he lost his joy in anything that happened. His faith was reduced to academia. There was no joy, just the mundane hamster wheel of life, over and over, while inside he felt forgotten and abandoned.

That isn’t what we are promised. We aren’t promised perfect lives, we aren’t promised a lack of problems; we aren’t promised a fake life. We are instead promised real life; that nothing will be able to separate us from God’s love. We are promised that God knows us, and hasn’t forgotten about us. When we feel forgotten we need to be reminded our God knows us completely, and will not let us slip way from Him. We need to know that God is for us, and though it may not feel like it, we affirm with the people who have worshipped God for thousands of years that God knows us and our problems. He is our helper, our keeper, our shade.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.

This church is not a place where people are perfect. This is a place for real people, struggling with family problems, struggling with personal frustrations and setbacks, struggling to maintain morale sometimes. Don’t come here and pretend everything is all-right, that our life is so perfect that our neighbors actually do rake our leaves. The same God that watches over you today watches over you tomorrow as you struggle through work, as you struggle to be God’s servant wherever we find ourselves. Don’t come here, experience the freedom from sin that Christ brings through His death on the cross, and forget it all tomorrow. Don’t come to celebrate God’s love, and then think that God’s love might not be there tomorrow morning when co-workers dump extra problems on you. Don’t fear those sorts of things, because they won’t separate us from God.

Remember, we are working and living with the image of us being just like those Jewish pilgrims, traveling through strange and foreign lands heading toward home, heading toward God. We too are heading toward God, we too traveling in strange lands, our modern times are our strange lands. This place is not where we belong. There are people who worship all sorts of strange things all around us, and call out to us to worship their idols alongside them. Put your trust, they call to us, in something besides God. Put your trust in Baal, or in the stockmarket so we’ll always have enough money to buy food and toys, put your trust in medical advances so our bodies will never age and grow tired, put your trust in political causes that will finally make humanity achieve peace with itself and will achieve a higher plane of consciousness.

Psalm 121 says nuts to all that. Our trust is in Lord, always, forever. There is no one, there is nothing else that makes sense for the pilgrim than to trust God, though our feet slip we won’t permanently fall, we won’t be lost to God. Through the sun or the moon threaten to undo us, God instead is our shade by day, and our protective shelter at night. God watches our coming and going, and will forever and ever. As we head toward God know that despite outward appearances, you are protected, watched over, kept by God. He loved us enough to send His Son to die for us, so keep your trust in Him.

Let’s pray.