September 20thPsalm #46
Now thank we all our God
Psalm 46 is a song-prayer of trust in the protecting presence of God. Try reading it as a hymn:
Refrain: God is our refuge and strength,
an ever present help in times of trouble. (v.1)
Verse 1: 2 So we will not fear when earthquakes come
and the mountains crumble into the sea.
3 Let the oceans roar and foam.
Let the mountains tremble as the waters surge!
Verse 2: 4 There is a river whose streams make glad the city of our God,
the holy place where the Most High dwells.
5 God dwells in that city; it cannot be destroyed.
From the very break of day, God will protect it.
6 The nations are in chaos,
and their kingdoms crumble!
God’s voice thunders,
and the earth melts!
Refrain: 7 The Lord of Heaven’s Armies is here among us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
Verse 3: 8 Come, see the glorious works of the Lord:
See how he brings destruction upon the world.
9 He causes wars to end throughout the earth.
He breaks the bow and snaps the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God!
I am/will exalted among the nations,
I am/will be exalted throughout the world.”
Refrain: 11The Lord of Heaven’s Armies is here among us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.
This is a psalm that begs to be retold in story so I offer three stories for your reflection.
A MIGHTY FORTRESS
For nearly a thousand years, much of Europe comprised the Holy Roman Empire. It maintained civil and religious authority over all aspects of life under its rule. In 1521 a young monk, Martin Luther, stood before a council (the Diet of Worms) to defend his views on the Christian faith and the nature of the church. When Luther refused to recant, the Diet issued a judgment that Luther should be arrested and punished. The Pope quoted Psalm 74: ‘Arise Lord, and Defend Your Cause.’
Luther, threatened with execution took his motto from Psalm 46 and wrote his famous hymn, ‘A Mighty Fortress is our God.’ He saw the world around him shaking and the nations raging, but he affirmed the presence of God with him and his cause.
China 1942
Arthur Romig was a Presbyterian missionary kid who grew up in China and returned as an adult to do mission work there in the late 1930s.
Early in 1941, his wife Helen and the children, along with many American missionary families, returned to the States. Art elected to stay behind to serve the Presbyterian church, school, and hospital in Hwaiyuan. Things were beginning to get difficult for Westerners, Americans, and American missionaries, particularly, in 1941. A lay teacher in the school was arrested and executed. The school library was confiscated. Then teachers were arrested, forced to drink gallons of water and then kicked and beaten unconscious. America was still neutral, but many Westerners decided it was time to leave. Art stayed. He and Helen exchanged wonderful letters—she telling him about the children and life in Wooster; he telling her, carefully, so as to avoid censorship, about his life and work in China.
And then on December 7, 1941, everything changed. The mountains shook, the sea roared, the earth itself forever changed. A Japanese officer knocked on the door and told him that Japanese forces had destroyed the American Navy, that Art was now an enemy and should report to the hospital for instruction. The year that followed was spent under guard, with little or no access to the outside, with rumors of torture and execution, the constant threat of death.
Art kept a journal and wrote in 1942:
These months are filled with tension and uncertainty. We never knew what the Japanese were going to do next. . . . The small amount of work we could do helped to relieve the tension, but I found other outlets that kept me sane. . . . I found a new interest in the psalms.
What sustained him during the most difficult times he wrote was, “Psalm 46. I read it every single day.” “God is our refuge and our strength.”
At the New Year, 1942, three weeks after Pearl Harbor, when the world became radically disorientated, Art wrote a prayer:
‘Lord God, we thank thee for the year just completed, for its joys and also its sorrows. . . . We thank thee for the storms which have given toughness to our spirits. Give us strength to travel the path of hardship, uncertainty, and fatigue. . . . Give us the courage to step forward along the path of faith. Give us, O Lord, thyself and we shall have all.’
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake. . . .
Be still and know that I am God. Amen.
[To Bend and Rise as the Bamboo: Letters from China 1931-1942]
ESCAPE TO CHINA
A psalm of confidence in an age of fear. Notice how our psalmist names cosmic (v.1-3) and political (v.5-7) threats to the community of faith. Those threatening however do not have the last word – God does!
In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Mennonites left in Russia were under severe strain. Stalin’s Five Year Plan decimated what was left of farms and livelihoods. In Siberia, Mennonites looked for ways to escape. Jacob Siemens, a former mayor of Schumanovka, capitalized on his popularity with local officials in order to devise a scheme of unprecedented bravado. Since the collective had easily delivered its grain quota and built a new flour mill, Siemens requested that the collective be allowed to buy sleighs and horses, ostensibly for forestry work nearby. In this way, plans for a massive escape began. On December 16, 1930, sixty sleighs (the entire village) left for the Amur River (the border with China). While temperatures hovered at -40C they safely passed a twenty-man Russian border patrol and crossed safely into China, the largest single group of Mennonites ever to do so. [Czars, Soviets, and Mennonites, 138].
A popular hymn sung by Mennonites escaping the Soviet Union was ‘Now thank we all our God.’