A
long time ago, when I was in high school, I remember an evening class
at our church led by the Senior Minister on the Psalms. The study
book he used was Bernhard W. Anderson’s book, Out of the Depths:
The Psalms Speak to Us Today, a book written for the Women’s
Division of The United Methodist Church for one of their annual Schools
of Mission which of course continue to this day.
I
still have the book, which is a good thing, because I frankly didn’t
retain a lot of the specifics of that study. But one thing sank in
and stuck with me all these years: I learned by studying the Psalms
how we people of faith are always in a relationship with God and God
with us that holds us through the heights and the depths of life.
The Psalms are a record of faithful people in honest relationship
with God. They’re a book of prayers that tell the truth about
our lives always told in conversation with God. Sometimes that means
that from our end, we are confessing to God exactly what’s going
on inside us. And sometimes that means that God is refusing to let
go of us, no matter how stupid and selfish and mixed-up and faithless
we’ve become.
Our
Psalm today, as we continue in our Summer Sermon Series on the Psalms,
is Psalm 30. It’s a psalm of Thanksgiving and Praise. And while
it celebrates God’s faithfulness, it also gives us a fascinating
look into the spiritual journey of the psalmist. And it just may be
that some of us, or many of us, will recognize ourselves in his ancient
words.
This
psalm comes in a classic form. It begins and ends with praise and
thanksgiving to God. But in between is the psalmist’s confession
of what has happened to plunge him into a state like unto death and
the assertion that through it all God has remained faithful. Praise,
confession, and more praise. Relationship, relationship broken, relationship
restored.
The
poetic words of Psalm 30 are intensely personal. They come out of
the life of one who has lived them. And so they come to us as a kind
of testimony, familiar to the early Methodists whose worship services,
called “love feasts”, which always included a time for
personal “testimony” and praise. This was a time in the
service when people would testify or witness to God’s grace,
to what God has been doing in their lives and in the lives of others,
and to the trust and hope they place in God for the future.
This
testimony would sound to our ears as old as the words of the ancient
Psalmist and as new as the words of the contemporary writer Anne Lamott,
whose memoirs frankly describe her struggles with alcohol and drugs
and the way she was drawn into church and Christian faith by the music,
standing Sunday after Sunday across the street from a small Presbyterian
church until finally the heartfelt singing of the people of faith
drew her in and helped love her back into wholeness.
“I
will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up and did not let my
foes rejoice over me. O Lord my God, I cried to you for help and you
have healed me. O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored
me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.”
Praise,
indeed. God has drawn the psalmist up, like drawing water up out of
the well. Same imagery here. It’s the imagery we carry forward
into the sacrament of baptism, as in the baptism of little Fox this
morning, in the prayer of thanksgiving over the font: “Pour
out your Holy Spirit, to bless this gift of water and those who receive
it, to wash away their sin and clothe them in righteousness throughout
their lives, that, dying and rising with Christ, they may share in
his final victory.” Like the psalmist, each baptized Christian
is drawn up through the water, is healed and given life and salvation.
No
wonder the psalmist invites everyone to join in the song of praise!
“Sing praises to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give
thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment; his favor
is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes
with the morning.”
Ah.
Beautiful! But what was it that caused God to be angry? What had caused
the psalmist to weep through the night? What had so jeopardized their
relationship that the psalmist felt as though he had gone all the
way down into Sheol, into the pit, into that place of desolation and
isolation in which there was no song, but only deathly silence?
It
might have been a serious illness, scholars say, but more likely it
was an illness of the soul. Pride. Self-centeredness. A life that
had forgotten to put God at the center. It’s there in verse
6: “As for me, I said in my prosperity, “I shall never
be moved.” Or as Eugene Petersen paraphrases these verses: “When
things were going great I crowed, “I’ve got it made. I’m
God’s favorite. He made me king of the mountain.” You
see, the psalmist had become, in the words of Psalm 14, the one of
whom it is said: “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.”
Or otherwise stated: “I have no need of God.”
The
predicament of the psalmist here, the spiritual crisis that prompts
this psalm, is as old as the Hebrew people and as contemporary as
all of us who are tempted to put our confidence in our own success
and accomplishments and in the things of this world, forgetting our
need of God. Hear how it is written in the 8th chapter of the Book
of Deuteronomy: “Take care that you do not forget the Lord your
God, by failing to keep his commandments, his ordinances, and his
statutes, which I am commanding you today. When you have eaten your
fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds
and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied,
and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting
the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of
the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrible wilderness…He
made water flow for you from flint rock, and fed you in the wilderness
with manna that your ancestors did not know, to humble you and to
test you and in the end to do you good….”
Our
honest psalmist lets us know that he did forget. In his prosperity,
he put himself first. He forgot his God. And his life became joyless
and purposeless and even death-like. All his prosperity and all his
riches could not guarantee his happiness or save his life. It comes
as a sudden revelation to him. It’s as if the psalmist wakes
up realizes what has gone wrong. The words at the end of verse 7 say
it all: "you hid your face [O God]; I was dismayed," I was
utterly shocked and dejected. In Peterson’s blunt words: “But
then, O God, you looked away and I fell to pieces.”
Remember
the subtitle of that little book on the Psalms by Anderson that I
read and studied more than thirty years ago? The Psalms Speak to Us
Today. In each age that we live and try to have faith, we must always
ask ourselves that very question: how do the Psalms speak to us today?
How do the Psalms speak to us in this time of rampant materialism
and consumerism, a time described by one commentator as one in which
the Trinitarian God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, has been replaced
by the trinity of money, power and pleasure?
Have
we become fools who live and act as if we have no real need of God?
Have we slipped into that death-like pit in which there is no singing,
but only silence?
The
psalmist takes stock of his life and repents. He turns back to God
and God’s ways. And God turns to the Psalmist and offers forgiveness
and salvation.
Relationship is restored. And so the Psalmist can sing: “You
have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy, so that my soul may praise you and not be
silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” Or
as the Jerusalem Bible translates it: “And now my heart, silent
no longer, will play you music. O Lord, my God, I will praise you
forever.”
Just
in the last couple years, we have begun to wake up to one way in which
our prosperity has blinded us to the consequences of our actions.
People all across our precious planet have woken up to the fact that
in our prosperity and our selfishness and our carelessness we have
been consuming the resources of this earth in ways that are killing
us. We have put our material comforts and ease at the center of our
lives in place of the life-sustaining God. We waste and pollute as
if there is no tomorrow and at the rate we’re going, tomorrow
could be grim, indeed. But new consciousness is dawning. We’re
going green in a big scale. Everywhere I go people are talking about
recycling and renewable sources of energy and hybrid cars and organic
food. And here at our church, our Trustees have renewed our conversation
about recycling, and recyclable products and the dream that when we
re-roof, this time we just might be able to go solar.
And
yesterday, music brought over two billion people together in nine
major cities on seven continents the 24-hour long sequence of Live
Earth Concerts in New York, Washington, D.C., London, Johannesburg,
Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Tokyo, Sydney and Hamburg and through the
internet. Two billion people. Most of them young. Twenty-four hours
of making music and of being educated and signing pledges about saving
and loving the earth.
I
was frankly sad not to see the faith communities as co-sponsors of
this great event. Can we not say as the people of God that if we have
let prosperity blind us to wastefulness and greed, we are ready to
confess and to change and to become the faithful stewards God intends
us to be? Like the psalmist, we wake up and we remember that we are
created for relationship with one another and with our Creator God.
Out of the depths of our wastefulness and greed, our hearts are crying
out for healing and release. God did not put us here to be king of
the mountain at the expense of all else. Prosperity is not given to
blind us to all else. What matters is the measure of our hearts--our
love of God and our commitment to be God’s faithful people,
in covenant with the God who created all that is, who redeems and
sustains all that is.
So
now, with the Psalmist, as the restored and redeemed people of God,
let us testify to what God has been doing in our lives and in the
lives of others, and to the trust and hope we place in God for the
future. And so our hearts, silent no longer, will play you music.
O Lord, our God, we will praise you forever.
Amen.
Notes:
Bernhard
W. Anderson. Out of the Depths: The Psalms Speak to Us Today. New
York: Board of Missions, United Methodist Church, 1970.
Eugene
Peterson. Psalms. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1994.
The
“new trinity” from a speech by Prof. Prabhu Guptara and
quoted on “The Gods of Business” on Speaking of Faith,
9/2/2004. www.speakingoffaith.org
Anne
Lamott. Her newest book is Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith.
New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
©Patricia
Farris, 2007. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
All other rights reserved.
Psalm
30: A Personal Testimony