WADING RIVER CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH

SERMONS IN PRINT

Peter Vibert September 4, 2005

Psalm 115 Not To Us

There is a story that at the end of the battle of Agincourt, fought on St. Crispin’s Day, October 25, 1415, when a small British force inflicted more than 10,000 casualties on the French and suffered only a handful themselves, that King Henry V declared that there should be no boasting, but rather that all should sing the words from Psalm 115: “Non Nobis, Domine” – “Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us but to your name be the glory.” Shakespeare preserved and embellished the story, and it is wonderfully depicted in Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 movie version of Henry V, as after the battle the English and Welsh bowmen sing as the camera pans over the mud- fields of the French dead.

“Not to us, O LORD, not to us, but to you be the glory.” Simple words, but bearing a depth of meaning that for three thousand years has resonated from Israel to England to the European Reformers and around the world. Words that speak to our ever-present temptation in every generation to think of ourselves as the ones who make things happen; to rely on ourselves, to glory in our own achievements. Although they speak of the need for humility in a moment of victory and achievement, these words also speak volumes about the limits of our abilities, about the way hubris inevitably leads us into a disaster that reveals how weak in fact we are, how even our greatest achievements can be swept away in a moment.

You do not have to look very far to see how easily we fall into the trap of pride. A sudden storm, and half a million people are homeless and a major city is rendered unlivable for months or perhaps years. Whole communities are quickly swept away by rising waters. Our confidence that we can build anything, anywhere; that we can conquer nature, that we can defy the odds of building on the beach indefinitely, is suddenly shattered. Our hearts break for the wounded, the bereaved, the sick, the dying, the homeless; we are dumbfounded that all our great achievements can be swept away in a few hours. We are appalled that five days later bodies are floating on the streets of a major American city. We suddenly realize that nationally, we are too proud, too ignorant, too lazy, too preoccupied; we lack common sense and common purpose, our priorities are wrong, we discover the fabric of our society is easily torn. We pull off some great thing and then think we can do anything. “Not to us, O LORD, not to us be the glory.”

The Psalms, and so much of the Bible, are there to make us acknowledge that we are very small – in every possible way – compared to God’s world and to God himself. We have no room for pride. But from our earliest days we have held too high an opinion of ourselves, and our pride has been our downfall. We think we know better than God, are more moral than God, are more powerful than God. In our busy modern technological world, we declare that if God ever existed, he has become irrelevant to our lives and our plans today. Then we are shocked when things go wrong: when flying pieces of foam bring down a billion dollar spacecraft, or the electricity grid for half a nation fails, or a levee around a city collapses! Who would have thought it! Are we so stupid that we now imagine that we and our computer power make us “masters of the universe”?

The Psalmist knows that we have no reason for pride; that any good we may have done, any achievement we may have had, are the result of God’s grace, God’s mercy, God’s gift. It is brute ignorance to suppose we have done it all ourselves, and to say “Where is this God?... I don’t see him, and I don’t need him.” God is still there, and he still rules from on high, whether we like to admit it or not. But because we don’t see him, we put our faith in things we can see, things we think we can control, things we have made ourselves; we worship our ability to make things, and to make things work. We are practical (if not theoretical) idolaters who love above all else the things we have made– our beautiful homes, our cars, our electronic gadgets, our technology, our weapons, our great buildings.

But these are “dumb” things, with no ability to self-generate or re-generate. When the electricity goes off, they don’t work any more; when the gasoline runs out, they don’t run; when a storm or flood comes, they are swept away. They are like man-made statues that cannot hear or see or speak or move. They have no life in themselves, and it is senseless to trust ourselves to them, because one day they will fail us. What is worse, according the Psalmist, is that those who worship these dumb things become like them. If technology is our god, then we shall become like machines ourselves. If mastery over nature is our god, and bio-medicine is our savior, soon we are talking about spare body parts, spare embryos, spare genes, and no living thing has any intrinsic value.

If we trust in things we have made, we become dependent upon them and we become like them. We lose sight of who we really are, creatures of our God our Maker, children of our Heavenly Father. “O Israel,” says the Psalmist, “trust in the LORD.” Do not trust your armies, your chariots, your weapons. God is “your help and your shield.” Weapons may win some battles for you, but ultimately they will fail you, and you only have to lose once to lose everything. You can win a thousand times and kill a thousand others, but you only need to lose once and you’re dead.

“Trust in the LORD,” because in his steadfast love and faithfulness he knows and remembers who we are, and what we need. He is able and willing to bless those who trust him and not themselves. Here is a great divide: God cannot help those who only want to help themselves. Although millions of Americans still believe that “God helps those who help themselves,” that was Ben Franklin and not the Bible. Scripture says that God does not help those who rely on themselves; he helps those who trust him!

Trust God, because he is the living God who knows and cares for his people. Trust God because he is the one who has made you, and given you the earth to inhabit in his way and in his time; who gives you abundant things of earth to enjoy, but always with the warning that if you abuse the gifts he has given you, if you turn away from him to pride and arrogance and self-reliance, then he can and will withdraw those gifts until you learn once again to trust and to thank him for all his goodness to you.

To act as if there is no God – even to ridicule his apparent absence from your life; to get all the glory you can for yourself, to admire and worship the things you have made and achieved, is a recipe for disaster. Everything may seem to go well for while, but to reject God means eventually to die alone and to fall into the pit of silence; the home of the dead machines, the vast worldwide ash-heap of discarded computers and TVs and cell phones and assorted useless hardware.

Nobody praises God from the grave, says the Psalmist. Don’t slide down there in pride and ignorance, never seeing that the world is a wonderful place to live because God has made it and sustains it, and that it is only by his grace that we live from hour to hour. It is not our cleverness, not our ability, that makes us succeed: in reality it is God who treats us much better than we deserve, and our role now is to thank him daily for his goodness, to trust him and not ourselves, and to ensure that he gets the thanks, the praise and the glory when things go well. Live by what you know of God!

Soli Deo Gloria: “To God Alone Be The Glory” became the “battle cry of the Reformation.” It is the positive expression of Psalm 115: “Not to us, O LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory.” Every time we are privileged to “do something good” we ought to emblazon across our hands and our hearts: “Not to us, O LORD, not to us...” Non Nobis, Domine.

Let us pray...