L.D. 36, Psalm 99 "Helping People Sing" Scott Hoezee

For just over 100 years in Ireland, the Catholic Church operated a number of institutions known as The Magdalene Asylums. When these institutions were first started in the nineteenth century, their aim was to provide a place of rehabilitation and spiritual renewal for prostitutes on the model of the way Jesus forgave and restored the prostitute Mary Magdalene. By the mid-twentieth century, however, these institutions were filled not with prostitutes but with ordinary young women who had fallen under suspicion of sexual-related sins. Women who became pregnant out of wedlock were often sent to the Magdalene Asylums for punishment and spiritual cleansing. But many of the young women who ended up in these places were sent there for no more reason than being so pretty and attractive that their families feared they would become a snare for young men.

As depicted in the film The Magdalene Sisters, but as corroborated in even more chilling ways in a real-life documentary that interviews former inmates of these asylums, what happened within the walls of these places was often diabolical and cruel. The institutions were funded by large laundry operations that provided laundry services to surrounding villages. So the young women who were placed in the asylums were forced to work six days a week, twelve hours a day, fifty-two weeks a year doing laundry work for which they were never paid a red cent. They were literally prisoners in the asylums, sleeping in locked dormitories and existing within the confines of the larger asylum that was ringed by tall walls and locked up behind towering wrought-iron gates.

Although there has been a lot of controversy as to how widespread certain other alleged abuses were, it is clear that in many places the priests and nuns who ran these institutions were very cruel. In addition to being slave drivers who permitted no talking among the women over the course of their gruelingly long days of work, there were many reported incidents of the women being forced to parade naked in front of nuns who hooted and jeered at the women as well as not a few reports of sexual advances made by certain priests. Corporal punishments of canings and whipping with leather straps were also doled out for infractions of the rules. Not surprisingly, a number of the women interviewed in the documentary said that they no longer go to church and cannot stand the sight of any clergy persons or nuns or anything else that smacks of religion. At the end of the film The Magdalene Sisters, one former inmate who had escaped spies two nuns on the street one day and instantly her faces drains of color as she is clearly cascaded by terrible memories.

Typically when we think about the third commandment's rule about not taking God's Name in vain, we immediately think about swearing, coarse language, and the use of God's or Jesus' name as a flippant expletive or an angry invective. As we will see this morning, that is a major component of what the third commandment warns against. But I opened with this story about the Magdalene Asylums to broaden our thinking and to deepen our understanding of the essence of blasphemy. Because at bottom, blasphemy is a kind of theft, a form of stealing from the sacred that wrecks a havoc from which it is difficult to recover.

As we have said in the past when looking at Lord's Day 36, all of us are protective of our names. Why is it, as Frederick Buechner once asked, that when you mispronounce my last name, you who made the mistake feel less embarrassed than I do? If I am introduced as Rev. Scott Whooo-Zee, I feel sillier than my introducer who actually made the error. And who among us would ever want our name associated with something scandalous? Certainly CBS news anchor Dan Rather never wanted to hear the now-common phrase "RatherGate." Where can you go and what can you do if nothing short of your very name becomes synonymous with something unhappy and sad?

Certainly God has some of this same sensitivity. When he gave out his personal name of "Yahweh" to Moses at the burning bush, he clearly wanted that divine moniker to be used reverently, carefully, and in a restricted way. Now that our Savior bears the personal name of Jesus, we can assume he feels the same way about that name. But unlike the rest of us, there is more at stake where the names of God are concerned.

Maybe that is why flippant people have turned the name of Jesus into an expletive in a way no one ever uses other historical names. No one who hits his thumb with a hammer ever cries out, "Caesar Augustus, that hurts!" You never hear someone try to insult another person by saying, "Oh for the love of Buddha, you are so stupid!" Even stating these examples seems absurd. And it is absurd to use someone's name like that. Yet every day stand-up comedians invoke our Lord's name in exactly this manner but not only do those who hear it not find it odd, they roar in laughter. Could it be that it is precisely because there is more at stake with God's Name that people are so tempted to abuse it in a way they would never think to do with any other name?

All names and all words are, of course, symbols. The combination of the letters C, H, A, I, R form the word "chair," and when you see that in print or hear me say it, instantly the image of a four-legged piece of furniture pops into your mind. If I said the word "Stuhl" or the word "cathedra," most of you would not think of anything at all. But to a German-speaking person it is the word "Stuhl" that conjures up that piece of furniture on which you can take a seat, as does the Latin word "cathedra" for those who know that ancient language. Words are symbols that point beyond themselves. The word "chair" is not the same thing as a physical chair--you can't sit on a series of letters, after all--yet there is no denying the instant connection you make between that verbal symbol and the physical object to which it points and on which you can take a seat.

Names do the same. The association of the words "Scott Hoezee" to a very definite person is instantaneous for all the people who know me. The connection is very tight--you hear my name, you think of me as a person. Because our Lord God is a divine being whom we apprehend by the gift of faith, we come to know God almost entirely through our encounter with sacred symbols, starting with the very names of God but extending to also the symbol of the baptismal font that we visited this morning, the communion table where we celebrate the Holy Supper, the cross of Jesus, and a welter of other symbols that we associate with God. We approach God, and we envision God's sacred nature, through a bevy of such images. Indeed, we cannot understand God without the help of the way he has chosen to reveal himself to us in his Word and gospel.

As we thought about two weeks ago, the ancient Israelites were scrupulous to avoid making any physical images to represent God. Still, even something like Psalm 99 shows that the Israelites had certain mental images through which they imagined God's holy grandeur. Yahweh is said to enthroned between the cherubim, an image of which was cast into gold on the top of the Ark of the Covenant. God was envisioned as sitting upon a resplendent throne that had a footstool before which the nations could bow in worship. They remembered God's symbolic presence through the fiery pillar and the pillar of cloud.

All of these images are sacred symbols to connect us to the God whom Psalm 99 identifies repeatedly as "holy." God is holy because he is the reliable standard for all our living. He is the only source of true life. He is the only hope we have now or will ever have. He is the Creator who alone knows how we creatures can get along best in the world he made. He is the Redeemer who alone has the power necessary to forgive sin and set everything to right again.

More than anything, the third commandment is meant to head off all forms of blasphemy that obscure the holy goodness of this great God. Because whether we are thinking about God's Name or any other of the symbols that point to God's holy righteousness and justice, what blasphemy seeks is a corruption of the images by which we apprehend God. That's why I opened with the sad story of the Magdalene Asylums and particularly with the women who now state that they cannot view a cross, a church, a priest, or a nun without being filled with sorrow and horrible memories. What happened to these women? They were robbed of something. Specifically, someone stole from them their access to God. Blasphemy always messes up and corrupts the very words and images that are supposed to conjure up hope and love in our hearts. The devil steals these good and holy items, twists and perverts them, and so in this way robs us of our chance to know God.

So when the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on someone's front lawn, what they are doing is stealing an image that is supposed to be radiant with compassion, sacrifice, love, and mercy and they twist it into a symbol of hate, into something that is supposed to invoke dread in your heart. But once they have blasphemed the cross, how can God ever get through to you with the goodness of Jesus that was expressed supremely on the cross?

When we survey the wondrous cross, when we contemplate that sacred head now wounded, we are supposed to be filled with such love and longing that we say with the hymn, "What language shall I borrow to thank thee, dearest friend?" But when the cross, or the name of the Savior on that cross, becomes blasphemed, then things get turned on their head. What language can God himself now borrow to get through to us with the gospel's good news when his chosen way to communicate with us is blasphemed to the point that it produces revulsion instead of love? Blasphemy robs God not of his holiness (which cannot be corrupted) but of his ability to display his holiness in the way he prefers to do.

You see, viewed from the proper perspective, the third commandment is only partially about the way we speak of God as individual Christian believers. This commandment has just as much to do with how we present God to the people around us. Does our conduct as believers open up the beauty of God or throw up a roadblock? What associations do we create in people's minds when it comes to the name of Jesus, the symbol of his cross, and the imagery of the Christian church just generally? By how we act and witness, will the people around us be led to feel positively about the Christian faith or will they come to associate it with hatred, intolerance, and a harshly judgmental spirit?

I would hope that most of us do love our God in Christ enough that we would not use the holy name as a swear word or in some frivolous oath. Of course, we do need to guard against this. Even so common a phrase as jokingly saying to someone, "It's true, I swear to God!" can trivialize sacred speech in ways we should want to avoid. But when it comes to the third commandment, that's the obvious part. The more serious nature of this law ties in with our avoiding anything that would rob God of his ability to use the cross as a way to generate love in someone's heart. All through Psalm 99 the poet is urging everyone around him to exult God, to praise God's name, to worship before this God who is so supremely merciful and good. That is what we want for all people in the world. Worshiping and adoring the God who made us is our proper vocation as creatures. We want people to sing.

But we get to know this God, and we become acquainted with the reasons as to why God deserves such adoration, through the language of Scripture and all the symbolic ways that the Bible's truths have been conveyed through the church. As much as we need to rebuke those outside the church who use the Lord's Name in vain by making it a profane swear word, we within the church need to make very certain that whenever we ourselves invoke God's holy name, whenever we display the key symbols of our faith, we do so in ways that are consistent with the gospel's core of grace, love, mercy, and compassion. We want people to sing. So we constantly show them why.

Of course, even if we do this, not everyone will believe our testimony. There will always be those who reject the gospel no matter what we do. But as we have said before, we need always to make sure that it is the gospel itself that gives offense to some people, not those of us who present that gospel. When we ourselves are offensive, cruel, or abusive, then like some of the nuns associated with those Magdalene Asylums in Ireland last century, we will blaspheme our God and violate the third commandment just as surely and just as devastatingly as if we regularly used the precious name of Jesus as a way to cuss and swear.

Among other things, this may mean that we are cautious in how we speak of God. In the wake of last month's horrible tsunami, it seemed like the whole world was asking "The God Question." Where was God in the tsunami? Did he send it? Couldn't he have headed it off? Let's admit that this is a natural question to ask. Yet it is such a dangerous question. How a lot of people will think of God from here on out will depend on what kind of an answer they hear from us Christians. We want people to sing. But they won't want to sing if our words cast God into an awful light.

The third commandment tells us that we must not misuse the Name of the Lord our God, and one thing this means is not speaking of God if we are not sure what the answer to a hard question is. Cynical people might feel triumphant if a Christian can't answer a given question. But most people are not that way. Most people will respect you if you are honest enough to say that there are some things you do not know and so you will speak only of what you do know; namely, that despite the tragedies of this world, God is love and this love comes preeminently through Jesus. Better to profess a measure of ignorance than to give an answer that could permanently sour someone on God.

But the aftermath of a global event like the tsunami is just a magnified example of a situation that we face all the time: namely, how to help others think about our great God in Christ. A little farther along in the Heidelberg Catechism when commenting on the commandment about not bearing false witness against our neighbors, the Catechism will say that instead of telling lies about our neighbors, what we really should do is "guard and advance our neighbor's good name." As it turns out, the same can be said about the Name of God. We must guard and advance God's good name.

Compared to the grand God of glory that Psalm 99 so well displays, we are such small creatures. Compared to God's power, we are but a breath. None of us would ever be so foolish as to say that we have any power over God. The third commandment, however, reminds us that we do have power over how God is perceived. It's a power we should tremble to exercise.

The third commandment says that God will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. The stern nature of that warning is not designed to make us worry about ourselves first of all and whether God will forgive us. The warning is so stern because God cannot tell others about his forgiving grace if we rob God of the very language he needs to tell the world of his love. If we to do not misuse God's name, we can then help others to use the Name in the best way possible, and that is in songs of praise to the God who truly is holy. We want people to sing. Our careful witness to God is what keeps the cosmic choir growing! Amen.