PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 119:81-83                                                           A Leather Flask in the Smoke
Sermon June 21, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            Today the First Lesson was three verses from the longest of the Psalms—Psalm 119.  This psalm is divided into twenty-two strophes (sections), and in the original language the verses in each strophe all begin with the same letter—“A,” “B,” “C,” and so on.  In your Bible it may even give the names of the letters.  Every verse mentions the Law of God, so the whole psalm is a hymn of praise for God’s commandments, but the strophes don’t hold together very well—one commentator suggested that you could read the verses in reverse order and it would make as much sense.[1]

The phrase that surprised me in this reading is just a part of a line:  “a leather flask in the smoke.”  What an image!  The New International Version translates it:  “a wineskin in the smoke.”  Imagine an ancient Hebrew farm family living in a small mud hut with an open fire-pit for cooking and heating.  There’s a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, but the one room is always smoky.  When grandpa died he left his son an old bag made of goatskin with a leather strap to hang on your shoulder—sort of like a canteen, but  it was used for wine.  His son brought the wineskin home and hung it on a peg on the wall near the fire, and never used it:  it just hung there for ten years.  The leather absorbed the smoke and grew dark and hard.[2]  Cracks formed –lines running in all directions around the old flask, so it was no longer useable; but it belonged to grandpa:  he carried it with him when the Babylonian army marched the exiles out of Israel; so they kept it.  That  is what this phrase means—“a wineskin in the smoke.” 

            You’ve had things that ended up looking like this.  You left your baseball glove in the attic; it stayed there for years.  When you found it, it had a musty smell, it was all cracked and stiff.  Or think of a rubber band you wrapped around a roll of personal papers and put away for a year; and when you got it out, the rubber band had lost its elasticity and cracked and broken, and it just fell apart in your hand.  That  is what this phrase means—“a wineskin in the smoke.” 

            The singer of this psalm uses this image to describe himself: 

What does he mean?  He’s talking about how slow God seems to be in answering your prayers sometimes.  You pray and pray—for years you lay before God your heart’s desire, and the heavens are silent.  Still you remain faithful to the God whom you know is Love.  That’s what the singer is talking about.  The issue is the meaning of “hope.” 

            I am convinced that this psalm was written either while the Jews were in exile from their homeland in Babylon, in the fourth century BCE,[3] or soon after the first returnees came back with Nehemiah about the year 515  BCE.  During this period of Exile the scribes of Israel collected the psalms used while the temple in Jerusalem was still in existence, and they had written more psalms to be used in the worship in synagogues.  These psalms were later collected into what we now have as the Book of Psalms.  Many of the psalms reflect the way it felt to be in Babylonian Exile; and I think Psalm 119 is one of these.  And so it expresses feelings and prayers that connect with us in those times when life goes hard and cracks.

            Here is a family living in poverty, scratching out a living on a poor farm on the edge of the desert.  Grandpa dies, and the son hangs the old wineskin that he carried as a captive to Babylon; and over time the flask hardens.  Jesus once used this image in a parable:  if you put new wine in an old wineskin, as the wine ferments it will expand and burst the flask.[4]  So there it hangs, no longer used.  But this family is descended from one of the singers in the temple—a Levite assigned to the choir; literate, musical—and he’s still in touch with the group of scholars in the city who are still writing Hebrew psalms; so he writes this one and uses the image of grandpa’s old wineskin to describe the darkness of life as they were experiencing it.  This is how he feels.  They’ve been in exile long enough, and they have remained faithful to the living God.  When will God take them back home and relieve the darkness? 

            What good does this psalm do us?  How long have you waited for God’s answer in your life?  This psalm speaks what your heart feels about that.  In spite of all our contemporary electronic toys—MP3s and Twitter and Blueray, digital photography, high definition television, liquid-crystal TV screens—in spite of all the wonderful toys, there is a waiting and watching in our world.  We know our country is engaged in two wars, but there are other wars where we have troops involved, too.  The number of refugees in the world is the largest it has ever been, and we hear names like Darfur and Ivory Coast and Kenya.  The polar ice caps are melting, and that is changing our weather—like April rains in June.  The immigration flood has reminded us that racism has not gone away:  all that work our churches and moral leaders did in the 1960’s is having to be done again.  Just mentioning certain words thickens the clouds of our time:  the economy, health care, unemployment.  And if you’ve been watching reality TV, you’re also worrying about what’s going to happen to those eight little children of Jon and Kate—perhaps a publicity stunt, but we all know people whose marriage is in trouble.  It’s a smoky vision unlike the darkness we knew in the Cold War when the enemy was clear, you could count the bombs, and we elected leaders to protect us.

            And I think this psalm speaks to our personal obscure waiting, too:  growing older, issues of health, loneliness, restlessness deep in the soul, a rage swallowed for too many years.  Parents see a darkness coming over their children, and children see a darkness coming over their parents.

I am like a wineskin in the smoke.
(But) your statutes I have not forsaken.

            Is there any good news?  When God seems slow, where is our hope?  In the Second Letter of Peter[5] we find our anxiety addressed:

In the words of a hymn, the good news is that “God moves in a mysterious way, his purpose to fulfill.”  And that means in your life, not just in world history.  Yes, God does call us to responsible action—there are things we can do and need to do, for example, about making healthcare work better and work for more people.  There are things we can do about pollution.  But the God we believe in, the God who has breathed into our nostrils the breath of life, the God who has walked beside us, heard our prayers, provided for our blessing—our God is always near.  This is the “still speaking” God, if we’re willing to listen. 

            The good news is that you have hope—not just in the world to come, but hope in your life, hope in your blessing now.  It’s not all up to us—God is still with you. 

            I celebrate this image of “a wineskin in the smoke” when I think about certain men in my life.  My grandfather Griggs was already old when I was a boy—I was the youngest grandchild.  He was a farmer:  worked outdoors in the hot sun and in the driving rain all his life.  His skin was brown and hard; but he loved his family, and I have good memories of his stories.  His simplicity carried within it a spiritual and human earthiness, the wisdom of a man acquainted with the soil.  He left a large imprint on every member of the family—an imprint of love for family and service to Christ and to the church.  Here was a man who looked for all the world like “a wineskin too long in the smoke,” but who blessed me.

My father’s last days were spent in a hospital bed, with an oxygen canula because of his emphysema.  His body was withered and his strength was gone.  As a young man he had gotten married just in time for the Great Depression, and it shaped his life—his way of walking, his open-handedness, his appreciation for successful work.  He had spent his adult years in a church where everything was law and nothing was grace; but in that hospital bed he told my sister, “God’s better than folks.”  But he had known that for years—taught it to me in deeds more than words.  So at the end he, too, could say, “I am like a wineskin too long in the smoke”; but his hope was in the God of Love, and with that hope he blessed us all.

            We each know our own fathers in life, fathers in faith, fathers in work.  If we’re lucky we get to spend years with them, absorbing the reality of their own brand of hope, even in the pervading smoke of life’s struggles.  We give thanks for them, and we hope that we can do for someone else what they did for us.  When I finally come to recognize myself in the phrase “a wineskin too long in the smoke,” I hope I may rejoice to have walked in the footprints of my father and grandfather.  If your biological father was not such a man, then you had another father who was, or you wouldn’t be here today.  They are the people in your life, a man or a woman who has known, as you know, what it means to wait for God to answer, and to remain faithful in hope.  For such people, thanks be to God.

AMEN