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“Be Still…”
Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
A famous composer once said that the rests are the most important parts of any piece of music. The rests in music are those places where there is no music—or, at least, no music you can hear. What could the composer have meant? After all, music is sound, right? But there’s some logic to this assertion. The placement of those rests, those bits of musical silence, determines how a piece of music will ultimately sound. To place those rests anywhere else would, in fact, create a completely different piece, even if everything else remained exactly the same. And so, silence, the absence of musical sound, becomes equally important to, if not even more important than, the sound itself.
Through His Psalmist, the Lord admonishes us: “Be still and know that I am God.” This morning we remember Martin Luther and the Reformation he led. Psalm 46 has always been identified with the Reformation and Luther because his great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is our God,” draws its inspiration from the opening verses of the Psalm: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” But the Psalm also says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” These words seem to be uncharacteristic for what we know of Luther. The Reformation was not a quiet time; it was a time of frenzied activity, a time of violence and death and destruction. Luther himself was anything but quiet. He was bold; he was brash; he was, frankly, crass. He probably would have been cancelled today, because much of what he thought, spoke, and wrote was filled with what our culture would consider abuse. While he was deeply and pastorally concerned for the flock of God, he cared little about the feelings of the theologians who perverted the truth of God and the secular rulers who took advantage of the poverty and powerlessness of their subjects.
Even so, I believe these closing verses of Psalm 46, the admonition to stillness before God, are more descriptive of Luther and the nature of the Reformation than anything else. All the things that fill the histories of the Reformation—the frenzy, the activity, the writing, the theological confrontations—these things are not as characteristic of what happened in those days than the fact that Luther and his followers faithfully heeded these words of the Lord: “Be still, and know that I am God.” “How so?” you might ask.
Above all, Luther was a man of prayer. Philip Melancthon, his co-worker in the Reformation, tells us that Luther would spend literally hours a day in prayer, that his prayer was like a child in conversation with his father who loves and cares for him. This man of great spiritual power and towering intellect knew that all he might do would come to nothing without listening to the Word of the Lord and prayerfully seeking His blessing.
One of the reasons why the Church in our day seems so helpless is that we don’t live this way. We are guilty of telling God first what we think should be done, and then seeking His blessing on what we have already decided to do. My vicarage bishop, God bless his soul, once suggested that we should have a ten year moratorium, a complete stop, on new programs from the Synod, that those ten years would be better spent on our knees in prayer. The suggestion was not well received by his hearers.
But it raises an important question: What do we think about prayer? We often look at prayer as a sort of last resort, something to do when everything else has failed. We have been programmed to think of prayer as “inactivity,” of doing nothing, a way to flee obligation, a means of avoiding our spiritual responsibilities. Especially in our nation, we have a bad habit of thinking that the first responsibility of a Christian is to take action rather than listen to the Word of the Lord.
I cannot speak for you, but for me, prayer is some of the hardest work I do. It is spiritually taxing because Satan, “the old evil foe,” as Luther called him, doesn’t want me doing it and does all he can to stop me. I am sure he does the same to you. Prayer is the single most important thing we as Christians can do. Prayer is not fleeing our spiritual obligations nor avoiding responsibility for them; prayer confronts those responsibilities head on. I’ve heard people—even Christians—say that prayer is worth Nothing in times of tragedy and disaster, even mocking those who pray. Anyone who thinks that prayer spares him from real-world responsibility either does not really pray or is not paying attention. To pray is to confront head-on the tasks God would give us to do. It is to enter the battle, face to face, with the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh. “Be still,” the Lord says, “and know that I am God.” “Be quiet and listen to me, and I will make you ready to do battle for the Kingdom of God.”
Part of being still is remembering that we are first known by God. Indeed, He has known us from eternity; He was determined to make us His own by way of Baptism and the Holy Spirit, forgiving our sins and saving us for eternal life. He has called us by the Gospel to faith in Him, to know Him now and eternally as the One who has redeemed us from sin and death.
And so, to “be still” is to know that God can always be trusted, that we need never put our confidence in anything but His grace and mercy. It is to know that His love for us in Christ is a love that will have no end. It is to know that we have a God who will never leave us nor forsake us. As the Psalmist put it: “The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.”
So think of
those words we just sang:
nor any thanks have for it;
He’s by our side upon the plain
with His good gifts and Spirit.
And take they our life,
Goods, fame, child, and wife,
Though these all be gone,
Our victory has been won;
The Kingdom ours remaineth.
No matter the opposition we face—whether it’s people who hate the Gospel and deny the one true God, or the government as it infringes on our freedom to live and worship as we desire, or even the devil himself—we know that “the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Thanks be to God, for the victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil has been won in our Lord Jesus Christ! In the name of the Father and of the Son (+) and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus always. Amen.
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