Michael DiStefano - Lockstep with the King Justice and the Christian Identity - Psalm 124

Lord, thank you that you are active among us. Thank you that you are reminding me to turn on my microphone. You hear us, that when the poor are plundered and the needy groan, you arise. So Lord, give us a vision for what it looks like to see the marginalized, the hurt, the lost, the forsaken in the world around us, and give us the courage to rise with you as you move towards them and love. God, give us a vision for that now we pray. And so Lord, I'm asking you to do something that's beyond my ability or any of our abilities in this room. I'm asking that you would speak to us, God, that you would teach us something here in this space. So come, Holy Spirit, we are yours and we want to be where you are. We pray that in Jesus' name, amen.

Well, several months ago, late June, early July, I set out to attempt to climb 25 mountains in five days—25 4,000-plus-foot mountains in a five-day span, so that was averaging five mountains a day. Spoiler: we didn't make it. Not sure that it was humanly possible. Literally on day two, one of the other two people that were with me just sort of looked at us and he was like, 'My muscles are shredded, my feet are torn, I've fallen a couple times. This isn't safe. You guys are crazy.' And he hiked out of there, which was concerning because he planned the trip. He just sort of gave us the maps and said good luck. But the only other person that was there with me was my youngest brother John, and we sort of looked at each other and we just said, 'You know, we didn't come here for vacation. We're not here for the sights. We stepped into this space to be a part of a movement, to call attention to this reality that right now there are millions of people around the world who are bought and sold against their will.' So we set our faces like stone towards that goal and we said, 'With as much strength as we have in our legs and as much time as we have before us, we will complete this goal by God's grace.' And by God's grace, there was lightning above ridgeline for two of the days, and I think that kept us alive. So we were able to hike for three days and we averaged a little over five 4,000-plus-foot mountains a day, and we did 16. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done. But all along the way, we were reading these Psalms of Ascent. It felt appropriate as we're ascending these mountains and praying for survivors at the top of these mountains. We were reading the Psalms of Ascent, and it was interesting how, as you're reading in motion with a mission, how these psalms would get in you. And I think that was meant to be the idea. There's some debate among scholars, but most scholars believe that the 15 Psalms of Ascent in your Psalter were canonized somewhere after the exile, though written throughout the history of Israel—some by King David, some by other psalmists. They were canonized in that moment such that the pilgrim people of God, when they journeyed towards Jerusalem year after year, they would sing these songs. They would get in them. There were these psalms that were so essential to their worldview that they came to shape not only how they viewed God but how they viewed themselves. 'This is who we are.' It was sort of like the Old Testament road trip playlist. It was the road trip playlist of the pilgrim people of God that they would sing year after year as they journeyed towards Jerusalem. So if you've ever curated a playlist for a road trip, you know there are certain songs that will take you right back to a very specific moment or space and time, no matter how far removed you are from that moment. So there are certain songs that will take me right back to the West Texas highways headed towards Big Bend National Park, or the Charles Bridge in the Czech Republic, or the road from Kathmandu to Pokhara, Nepal. Certain songs can come to define certain moments, and certain moments can come to define who we are. That was the idea: that as we stood in these songs and sang them in motion, that they would reverberate throughout the ages, even as they reverberate into this space now, reminding us who we are as the pilgrim people of God. And this psalm that Danielle read for us is a psalm about the intervening, redeeming nature of God. It's a psalm about this reality that God does not stand aloof from our suffering, but that He condescends, that He lowers Himself to get His hands dirty, to lift us up out of the ash heap. That we're the rescued ones, we're the redeemed ones. That God did not stand far off from our suffering, but He moved in. And they would have understood that if this is true of the behavior of the King, then it's true of the behavior of the citizens of the kingdom. That if this is true of my God, then this is meant to be true of me. That if God moves towards the world in love, if He is active in pursuit of the hurting, then I am meant to follow Him in that holy pursuit. If it's true of God, it's true of me. This is meant to be what we're known for as the people of God: that we would be active in love towards the world around us. This is supposed to be what we're known for. So we've all got something that we're known for. This works on a social level, right? So like the show Friends: Joey is the hungry one, and Rachel's the cute one, and Ross is the one that gets divorces. We've all got sort of something that you're known for. It works socially for each of us. For me, unfortunately, one of the things that I'm known for socially is saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. So if you've known me for a while, you know that there are like a canon of stories that certain people will not let me forget of times where I put my foot all the way in my mouth. I'll spare you most of those, but I'll tell you maybe the worst of them all, because it happened in my first week at Gordon-Conwell as a 24-year-old MDiv student. I had just come out of a two-year relationship, and unfortunately we didn't end it as cleanly as we should have, so there was still some open communication, which I would not advise. In my first week at Gordon-Conwell, we were still sort of kind of texting and communicating because we missed each other a bit over the distance. Then her birthday came around, and I thought it would be weird not to say something on her birthday, because we've been talking like that. That would just be rude. So I decided to send something that was platonic, not flirtatious, straight down the middle. The text that I sent her was '25 and still alive!' exclamation mark, send. But because I wasn't totally sure that what I was doing was the right thing, I typed it fast and sent it before I could rethink my decision, and I mistyped the word 'alive.' So the text that she received was '25 and still alone' on her birthday. And that was the wrong thing at the wrong time. But that provided all the closure that we needed. That was it. That helped to influence cleanly. And that may be the worst of them, but that's not all of them. I still get texts to this day with no context of moments that I've said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Unfortunately, socially, that's one of the things that I'm known for: putting my foot in my mouth. But that's true of all of us. We've all got something that we're known for socially. When your name comes up in conversation, when people think of you, when your name or your face enters into their mind, we've all got something that we're known for. So my question is: what are we known for as the people of God? What are we known for in the world around us? When our name comes up in conversation, when we enter into people's minds, what are Christians, what are the people of God known for? You could answer that a number of ways. It may depend on the group in which your name came up. But my question is: what are we meant to be known for? When people think of Christians, what does God want to come to their mind? Who are we? What's our story? What are we meant to be known for as the people of God? And the way that we answer that matters. It matters what we believe about ourselves and who we're meant to be. It matters tremendously.

One of the books that I started to read at the beginning of this year, in a New Year's resolution type motivation, was a book called 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear. He's an expert on small systematic steps that we take daily that lead to long-term success. One of the things that he says early on in the book that I found so fascinating was: 'You need good goals and you need robust systems. Most of this book will be about systems to achieve your goals. But ultimately, we don't rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our beliefs.' Ultimately, what matters more than your goals and your systems is what you believe to be true about the world and about yourself. So he said, consider if you arrive at a moment where you decide, 'I want to get healthy. I haven't been eating well, I haven't been exercising, I feel unwell, my heart is at risk. I want to get healthy.' If you set great goals and you've got a really good system to get there, but when you look in the mirror you think 'disappointment' or you hear a voice say 'I'm disgusting, I'm a failure,' it doesn't matter how good your goals are and it doesn't matter how good your systems are to get to those goals. Your goals will feel to your soul like fiction, and the systems will collapse under the weight of your self-loathing. That's what he says: that you will trend towards what you ultimately believe to be true about yourself. And so ultimately, success, whether professionally or personally, is more rooted in what our beliefs than our goals and our systems. Fascinating, because he's not a believer. He's not trying to sneak a faith system in under the table. He's not trying to bootleg evangelize. He's just looking at the data and he's saying, 'This is what the data shows: what we believe to be true about ourselves will determine the direction of our lives. Who we are determines what we do. Our identity determines our activity.' So who are we as the people of God? What is meant to be true of us as we enter into the world?

We see this reality play out all the time in the line of work that I do. I have the privilege of working for a remarkable organization, as Landon mentioned, called Amira. We exist to provide a refuge for women who are seeking to break free from exploitation and heal in community on their journeys towards lasting hope. That's who we are. We work with women who have been exploited and trafficked. We work to provide education to the general public, outreach to current victims, and then trauma-informed aftercare services to survivors of human trafficking. When women come to us, it's not every time, but it's not uncommon that a woman will have a tattoo forcibly placed somewhere on her body, like you would brand cattle. We work at the Department of Children and Families, and they said that they've had women come to them with dollar signs tattooed on their face, so that when they look in the mirror they see 'I'm just a way to make him money.' Or there was a trafficker in Bridgeport, Connecticut, that would literally put barcodes on his victims so that they would be reminded, 'You are property.' I don't want to create a caricature, because that's not true of every woman who's been exploited, and every woman's story is different, but it's not uncommon. It was just a few months ago that one of my friends within Amira, one of the women who's been trafficked, showed my wife and I her forcibly placed tattoo. Not that long ago. The idea is this: if I can distort your identity, I can control your life. If I can distort your identity, I can control your life. And so it is no mistake, it's no accident, that the name of our organization, Amira, means 'daughter of the king,' female royalty. So one of the first things that we want her to understand when she comes to us is: you are not who they said you are. You have dignity, you have beauty, you have value just by virtue of being created in the image of the King. That's who you are. You have agency, you have authority over your life. You are not who they said you were. You are Amira. And when they get that, when we get that, when we understand that we are not what they said we were, we are not what happened to us, our identity is defined by proximity to the King. That's the key chemical ingredient to a transformed life. When we really get that I was loved by God, created by God, made in His image, and then when Christ steps towards us in love and adopts us into the family, when we understand that at our core, that's the key chemical ingredient to a transformed life. And King David understood this. Most scholars believe that King David wrote this psalm, Psalm 124. So he writes this psalm about this reality. He says, 'If the Lord had not been on our side—let Israel now say'—it's a call and response psalm. 'Let Israel now say: if the Lord had not been on our side, we would have been in trouble. But blessed be the name of the Lord; He has rescued, He has redeemed.' And so this psalm that we're singing, that we read this morning, that we read in motion, is this song about the rescuing, redeeming, restoring, intervening nature of God. I think it's so fascinating that the Old Testament people, the ancient Israelites, as they sang this song, they were singing this song while literally in motion. They're singing this song about the rescuing, redeeming nature of God while in motion. And there's a truth that I want us to grab in that this morning, and it's this: true worship always involves action. True worship always involves action. True worship comes in motion. So Paul would say it this way in Romans 12:1: 'Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship.' And I think that's fascinating because he says 'in view of God's mercy.' What's he referring to? The incarnation of Jesus, that He would take on human flesh, that He would march towards the cross, that He would give Himself up so that sinners could be reconciled with the Savior. But recognizing that we don't have a gnostic gospel, it's not just spiritual only. He took on flesh, He took on a body, and He marched towards the cross so that we could be reconciled with God. And he says, 'In view of that mercy, offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. I want you to put skin in the game. I want you to move in love as I did. As the Father sent me, so I'm sending you.' So true worship involves action. There's a movement to it. And true worship involves empathy. So in Hebrews 13:3, the writer says, 'Remember those who are in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.' He says, 'I want you to so identify with the mistreated, with the exploited, with the hurting, with those who are in prison, that you would see their story as your story.' Because true worship involves action, and true worship involves empathy. And King David understood this. He writes this psalm about it. He understands it because it's been true of him that he was rescued from the hand of the lion, from the sword of Goliath. He understood it by virtue of being a member of the nation of Israel, because what was Israel but a nation of slaves who got rescued with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm? This is not just one person's story; this is our story. This is not just one moment in history; this is our moment in history. God is saying, 'I am on the move towards the lost, towards the hurting, towards the broken, and I'm calling you to move with me in this.' Because ultimately, worship is about proximity. And we need to understand that if we're going to be close to God, He's active and He's moving, so we've got to be ready to move with Him. And that's really good news. It's really good news because, as we've reflected on this morning, the world is broken. There is tremendous hurting, tremendous suffering in the world around us. And so, what are Christians known for in the midst of this suffering?