America's ownership of God

A few years ago, our church installed a new water cooler—not the kind with the clear jug on top but the kind that we used back in grade school. It's a rectangular prism that rises straight from the floor. When you press the circular silver button, water flows in a gentle arc so that you can lap the cooled water up into your mouth. (I had always called that a water fountain, but David, who helped us install it, taught me that a fountain is a landscape feature in your front yard.) We hadn't had a working water cooler at St. John's in a long time, and it was a welcomed addition.

When it was time to purchase the water cooler, David told me, "They come in any color you want...as long as that color is gray." The pause he offered in the middle of that sentence was long enough for my mind to picture a shockingly yellow or delightfully crimson water cooler standing proudly by the restrooms of our church building. When he completed his sentence, it took me a minute to come back to reality and realize that of course all water coolers look the same. It didn't matter what choice I wanted to make. That choice was already made for me.

I rarely preach on the psalm and hardly ever give it much attention, but the opening verse of one of the psalms for Sunday (Psalm 33:12–22) stuck out to me on Monday, and I'm still wrestling with it: "Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord! Happy the people he has chosen to be his own!" On the surface, it seems so simple and clear. But, like my friend's water cooler comment, I make it half way through the verse before I realize what it's really about. "Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord" tempts me to think that this is about a nation choosing the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to be its god, but, when I discover that "the people he has chosen to be his own" are the happy ones, I am reminded that we don't get to own God; God owns us.