Right in Front of My Enemies (Psalm 23, July 29, 2012)

Right in Front of My Enemies

Psalm 23
9^th Sunday after Pentecost
July 29, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

It takes a lot of chutzpah to preach the twenty-third psalm.  I’m not the first one to notice the difficulty.  One author says,

Deep familiarity with any text--including and perhaps especially this one--can insulate us from being touched by its eloquent message.  To preach on such a foundational text is to run the risk of either trivializing the sublime, of turning the sermon into an autopsy on a beloved passage, or of trying to do too much to wring some new profundity from the text.[1]

This psalm is familiar and beloved.  If there is one extended passage of the Bible that we can quote from memory, it is this one.  Even in a congregation that has had little to do with the Bible or with the church—and this happens sometimes at funerals or memorial services—all I have to do is to give people permission to join in and launch off with “The Lord is my shepherd,” and they will join in.

If only for its role in sustaining us through death and grief, Psalm 23 would have a special place in our hearts.  The measured cadences of the King James Version translation connect us to a deep tradition of piety at one of the few times in our lives when we actively seek to be sustained by that tradition.  

Artists have painted this psalm.  Preachers through the centuries have preached it.  Expositors have expounded it.  Poets have poeticized it.  What could I possibly say that would render this psalm in any way new and fresh?  What could I say, that is, that would not “trivialize the sublime” or try too hard to wring something new from these old words?

Maybe nothing at all.  Maybe that’s the better option.  After all, the psalm has done a pretty good job of speaking to our hearts all on its own, as I suspect any text so long used and so well-loved would do.

On the other hand, just because this is a well-loved text does not mean that is a well-known one.  The psalms in general are under-known in the Christian community and this one is no exception.  Perhaps we can appreciate it a little more when we come to know it better.  I hope so, since Psalm 23 is a remarkable achievement that will not be any less so for our understanding a little better how it achieves what it does.

I can at least share a few things that I have learned as I have prepared for this sermon.  The psalm is just six verses long, but it manages to move quite a distance.  It begins in a pasture and ends in the Temple and moves by way of a banqueting table.  Along the way it takes us through the “valley of deepest darkness” and right under the nose of an unnamed enemy.  At the beginning we are being led along by a shepherding God.  By the end we are being hunted and pursued by that God’s goodness and mercy, like deer being chased by a pack of hounds.

It covers this distance using two metaphors for God.  God is named as a shepherd and as a host.  One struggle we have is that neither of these metaphors is very familiar.  Even if we know something about sheep we are not likely to know much about shepherds, at least not the kind of shepherd the psalm knows.  This sort of shepherd lives with the sheep twenty-four seven, through fair weather and foul.  This sort of shepherd leads from behind the flock where he can keep an eye on it and direct the dogs who do most of the actual work.

If God is shepherd then the psalmist is a sheep that trusts the shepherd to do this well, leading where there is rich fodder and fresh water by paths that are true.  Are these “paths of righteousness” as the King James Version has it or simply “right paths”?  The word could be translated either way, depending on the context.  Does the context her require the moral overtones of “righteousness”?  Probably not, so “right paths” is probably a better translation.  On the other hand, justice (the other way to translate tsedek) is a sort of path, and a good one at that, even if it doesn’t really fit the shepherd/sheep metaphor.

These true or right paths might lead through some really dark places, even the darkest valley.  Here is another translation question, since the King James has “shadow of death” where most modern translations have “darkest.” I prefer the modern translation. The “darkest valley” covers a lot of spiritual and emotional real estate, not just those times when we or the people we love are in danger of dying, though it certainly covers that.  

But whether it is in the “darkest valley” or in the “valley of the shadow of death,” it is precisely there that the turning point of the psalm is reached.  Up until that point the psalmist has been talking about God:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. 

² He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters; 

³ he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

But in the darkest valley—the valley where those right paths have led—the psalmist stops talking about God and, for the first time in the psalm, speaks to God:

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,

I fear no evil;

for you are with me.

“You are with me!” In Hebrew it’s just two words: ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me.”  Here is the moment that changes everything.  Up until now, the psalm has been very fine theology, done poetically.  Everything that has been said up until now is perfectly true, but it’s all outside the speaker; it’s objective; it’s at arm’s length.  With these words what has been true but exterior to the speaker is now internalized.  The psalmist has left speaking about God and now speaks from inside her relationship with God.  The psalm has moved from theology to prayer and this is what transforms her situation.

Over the years I have learned to pay attention to the little words in a biblical text, the words that connect one phrase to another.  Those little words make all the difference.  Here the words “even though” are the ones I mean here.  The psalmist is led through the darkest valley.  That should be a cause for alarm; she should be afraid.  But she is not.  Why not?  Because ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” It is the “You are with me!” that puts the “Even though” in front of the darkest valley and allows the psalmist to move without fear.

The valley is still there.  It’s still dark, darker, darkest.  But it causes no fear.  Because “you are with me!”

And, just in case we haven’t gotten the point, the psalmist changes metaphorical horses in the middle of the stream.  Now God becomes a host.  This metaphor, too, is mostly strange to us, because we have a weak notion of hospitality.  If we invite someone to share a meal with us, we are obligated to provide food that they can eat.  If, for example, our guests are Muslims, we won’t serve them pork.  If we know that they are lactose intolerant, we will take measures to make sure that our guests don’t have to choose between offending us by refusing our food or offending their bodies by eating what is harmful to them.  If we serve alcohol, we will make sure that they are safely sober before they leave or we will make other travel arrangements for them.  Our rules of hospitality are significant, but they are not extensive.

In the world of the psalmist, however, the notion of hospitality was much stronger.  If we invited someone to dinner we were not only obligated to feed them, but, the instant they came under our roof, we were obligated to protect them from anything or anyone who might threaten them.  In fact, there were some circumstances under which a mortal enemy could become our guest and, if that happened, we might have to defend them against their enemies who might happen to be our friends.

Hence the power of the newly introduced metaphor:

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

The enemy is still there, but like the darkest valley, poses no threat.  There is nothing to fear: “You prepare a table before me.” You are my host.  You will defend me.  The enemy is powerless to harm me.  The situation is transformed because “’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” 

’Attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” is the good news of this text.  It is the gospel of Psalm 23, but it is not the gospel proclaimed.  It is the gospel embraced and accepted.  This is evangelical religion in its finest and truest form —not that corrupted version of it that people claim for theological and political advantage.  This is truly good news.

But it doesn’t end there.  The prayed exclamation ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” doesn’t end with the psalmist and God permanently locked in a mystical union or some kind of Vulcan mind-meld, impervious to the outside world, oblivious to the rest of life.  In the psalm it leads to the Temple or, more correctly, to “Yahweh’s house.” 

The metaphor of the host/guest relationship continues.  The psalmist will become Yahweh’s permanent guest.  God will act as host for as long as the psalmist lives.  And while that relationship continues, the psalmist will be—not followed, which is far too weak a translation—but pursued, chased, even hounded, by goodness and mercy.

The metaphor continues to govern the relationship, but with a difference, since the scene has shifted from an imaginary table set in an unspecified place, to an actual building in a particular place that you can point to on a map and go to in person.  Yahweh’s House is not an abstract idea.  It’s a building made of stone.  It is the place where the covenant community gathers and worships.  It’s a building that is often filled with people, not all of whom have bathed recently.  They rattle their bulletins.  They make comments during the sermon.  They have bad breath.  They sing out of tune.  And they, too, are guests of the same host and so the laws of hospitality require us to treat them as if they were our guests, too, even though we didn’t pick them.  Remember, we do not get to pick whom God invites.

So, ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” leads us to God’s House.  And there it leads us to address each other in the same way: ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!”  So maybe the reason that we are able to eat right in front of our enemies without being afraid is that we have both been invited to the same table by the same host and our enemies are obligated not to harm us.  And maybe they feel the same way about us because they, too, have had a table set before them.

God’s hospitality transforms our enemies into dinner companions.  And without enemies, we can no longer fear the darkness.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Rolf A. Jacobson, “Psalm 23,” in Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary, edited by Roger E. Van Harn and Brent A. Strawn (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 101.

Mourning into Dancing (Psalm 30, July 22, 2012)

Mourning into Dancing

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 30
July 22, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

In the grammar of the psalms, the past tense of lament is thanksgiving.  In the grammar of the psalms, the past tense of lament is thanksgiving.  Nowhere is this clearer than in Psalm 30.  In fact, we could pretty easily construct a typical lament from Psalm 30 simply by changing some verb tenses.

Psalm 30 has, “Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.  O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, brought me back to life from among those going down to the Pit.”  The lament would read: “Lord my God, I cry to you for help; heal me.  Lord, bring up my soul from Sheol, bring me back to life from among those going down to the Pit.”

In a lament the psalmist promises that she will give praises to God, if she is healed.  On the other side of deathly illness and recovery, she keeps her promise and invites the whole community to join her: “You who are faithful to the Lord, sing praises to God; give thanks to God; give thanks to God’s holy name.  God’s anger lasts only for a second; but God’s favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay all night, but by morning, joy!”

There are even some sections of the Psalm 30 that could be dropped into a lament with no change at all.  The psalmist describes the complacency that characterized her life before the crisis: “When I was comfortable, I said, ‘I will never stumble.’ Because it pleased you, Lord, you made me a strong mountain.”  And then the hammer fell: “But then you hid your presence; I was terrified.”  The psalmist found herself on the brink of death and cried out, “What is to be gained by my spilled blood, by my going down into the pit?  Does dust thank you?  Does it proclaim your faithfulness?  Lord, listen and have mercy on me!  Lord, be my helper!”  All of that could have been drawn from a lament word for word.

The literary relationship between laments and psalms of thanksgiving has long been recognized among scholars.[1]  But I’m more interested this morning in what makes them different.  How is it that the psalmist can move from lament to thanksgiving?

We can see exactly where the move takes place.  It’s right between verses 10 and 11.  Verse 10 reads, “Lord, listen and have mercy on me!  Lord, be my helper!”  She has been reduced to complete dependence on God for any reversal of her crisis.  If she is to live at all, it will be because God acts and only because God acts.

Then in verse 11 we read, “You changed my mourning into dancing.  You took off my funeral clothes and dressed me up in joy so that my whole being might sing praises to you and never stop.”

She cries out for God to act.  And the next thing we know, she’s dancing for joy.  And in between, what?

It’s possible that all that was needed was for the psalmist to admit her dependence on God for her to find herself restored from the self-sufficient complacency she expressed when she said she would never stumble to the covenant faithfulness of the one who offers praise at the end.  She has certainly changed her orientation toward God and toward her own life in the course of the psalm.

But I suspect there is more to it than that.  Her problem wasn’t just that she needed an attitude adjustment and managed through the course of the psalm to talk herself into one.  No, she was also sick, at death’s door.  She describes herself as being among those who are going down to the pit.  She reminds God that, if God allows her to die, she will be nothing more than dust and therefore unable to offer the praise that God presumably wants.

No, something happened between verses 10 and 11: she got better.  The crisis abated.  The threat of death retreated.  She was restored to life.

I think something else happened as well.  I think she heard God speaking.  I think so because of the way the Bible’s central stories are put together.

Consider the story of the move from slavery to freedom.  Early in the book of Exodus, the Israelites are living in slavery, building warehouse cities to store the plunder of empire.  They are building the warehouses of sun-baked mud bricks that they must make.  They have quotas to fill.  They are driven to produce more and more.  When they organize a collective bargaining unit, their masters retaliate by requiring them to gather their own raw materials while meeting the same quotas.  In short, their masters oppress them. 

The Israelites have forgotten their own God and it was clear that an appeal to the Egyptian gods would be useless, so they cried out, not to anyone in particular.  They just cried out.  And the next thing you know they found themselves free and singing, “Sing to the Lord, for an overflowing victory! Horse and rider God threw into the sea!”[2]

Well, that’s true enough, isn’t it, but I left out some stuff, the things that came between crying out and singing a victory song.  And what were those things?  There were two that stand out.  First, God heard their cry, knew their suffering, and came down to save.  But that saving effort on God’s part came through human agency; it came through Moses.  God sent Moses to announce both to the Israelites and to their Egyptian masters that God was about to free the Israelites.  The Egyptians could cooperate or they could resist, but freedom for the Israelites was going to happen.

Moses announced this so that when it happened, Israel and Egypt would know who had done it and for what purpose it had been done.  It wasn’t just so that Israel could sing, Yippee, skippy! and go their merry way.  It was so that Israel could sing to God as only the covenant people can sing.

These are the two elements in the story that come between Israel crying out and Israel singing praise: God heard and responded; and, God sent Moses to announce good news.

Consider the second central story of the Bible, the story of exile and return.  In the fortieth chapter of Isaiah the exiled community of Judah is grieving in Babylon.  The next thing you know, Judah is back home in Jerusalem.  Well, not quite.  First, God notices Judah’s grief.  Second, God gives Judah a prophet to announce homecoming.  “Comfort, comfort my people! says your God.  Speak compassionately to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her compulsory service has ended, that her penalty has been paid…”[3]  Now, the text doesn’t say that God noticed Judah’s grief, but “comfort, comfort my people” wouldn’t make much sense if God hadn’t noticed. 

And the same holds for the third central story of the Bible, the story of death and resurrection.  The women were grieving Jesus’ death and had come to his tomb to prepare his body for burial.  Then, the next thing you know, they are dancing around and shouting, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”  Not quite.  First, God has acted—God has raised Jesus from the dead.  Second, God has announced this decisive action by sending two messengers who announce to the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”[4]

Here’s the pattern that we see in each of the three central stories of the Bible, the stories that shape our understanding of everything else: The people cry out, God hears and acts, God announces good news, the people give God praise in a dramatically changed circumstances.

These stories (or at least the first two) have become the template that lets the psalmist understand her experience of deathly illness and healing.  She was desperately ill.  She cried out to God.  God heard her cries.  God acted by healing her.  In some way she understood that it was God who had acted.  In response she gave God public thanks and praise.

This is all very nice for her, but so what? 

Well, in the first place, we could very well find ourselves in the psalmist’s place.  We can be going along, minding our own business, pretty well convinced that we’ve got life under control.  And then we, too, may discover with the psalmist, that we are not nearly as in charge as we think we are.  Serious illness is still a reality as it was then.  No matter how far advanced medicine is or ever gets, there will always be limits.  

When you’ve reached them, then what?

Well, then, if you’re like the psalmist, you cry out to God.  Now here is where it gets tricky, because while I’m convinced that God always hears our cries and always responds to them, the response is not always what we are looking for.  I will also say that, strangely, sometimes even those responses are found to be more than adequate to convey the depth and constancy of God’s love.

But sometimes, God’s response is restoration and healing and, when that happens, Psalm 30 gives us a pattern to follow: we can back to the congregation for whose prayers we asked and say to them, “Join me in giving thanks and praise to the God who has restored me to life!”

That’s one thing for us.  But there is another:

This Book is ours.  We belong to it and it belongs to us.  We have shaped it and it continues to shape us.  We are the people whose mourning is turned into dancing.  We are the people who know that God is able and willing to respond to the cries of all of creation, our own cries included. 

Friday we got the news of the mass shooting in Aurora, CO.  The reasons or motives may never be known.  There were fifty-eight people wounded.  Twelve were killed.  One of them was Matt McQuinn who was celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday.  He shielded his girlfriend and her brother with his body.  Veronica Moser was another victim.  She was six and had just started swimming lessons on Tuesday.  Her mother is in ICU, drifting in and out of consciousness.  She asks for her daughter, but she hasn’t been told yet.

What does the biblical testimony have to offer us and the survivors?  That is, beside its indictment of our culture’s love affair with violence and its refusal to know this about itself.  Psalm 30 tells us that our anguish is real, our grief is real, our sorrow is real.  Now is the night of weeping. 

But morning will come.  Not this morning, but it will come.  Morning will come when joy is reborn.  We are the people of hope.  We know that no situation is ever hopeless, even when it calls for resources that we do not have.  We do not have to resign ourselves to the inevitable. 

Beyond our resources, beyond our vision, beyond our understanding, out of sight, behind the scenes, God is at work.  The God who turns mourning into dancing is for us.  The God who sends joy in the morning loves us.  And there is nothing we can do about that.  If we have to resign ourselves to something, let’s resign ourselves to that!

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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[1] Claus Westermann, Lament and Praise in Israel (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981).

[2] Exodus 15:21b.

[3] Isaiah 40:1-2.

[4] Luke 24:5b.

Darkness Is My Only Companion

5th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 88
July 1, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

And here we are—back in the abyss! Like last week’s psalm, this one is located firmly in a pit. But things have gone from bad to worse. In Psalm 130, the psalmist understood that his suffering came from his own failure to keep covenant, he owned his guilt and he looked to God for forgiveness and rescue, confident that God would hear and respond. If this isn’t entirely comfortable for us—after all we are not fond of feeling guilty—at least we meet a familiar pattern. This is the pattern of the prayer for forgiveness and absolution. We meet that pattern in Advent and Lent and occasionally in other seasons. We recognize that we have failed to keep covenant. We name this failure before God and each other. We ask God to be restored to our covenant relationship. We then hear God’s forgiveness announced, both from the pulpit by the prayer leader and one-to-one as we share Christ’s peace with each other. We sin. We ask for forgiveness. We are forgiven. We go on. It is a clear—maybe the clearest—case of answered prayer.

Psalm 130 is a lament, but it has a happy outcome. About this the psalmist is completely confident. There is no such happy conclusion to Psalm 88. This psalm begins in the usual way. After you’ve read fifty or sixty laments you begin to see the pattern. This psalm begins with a cry to God, this one comes at night when all our problems seem bigger and our minds worry over them in circles without getting anywhere. The psalmist pleads for God’s listening ear.

Then, as we expect, the psalmist moves on to lay out the situation, the reason for the lament. The psalmist has a troubled heart, but perhaps there is more to it than that, although a troubled heart is no small matter. There is a great deal of death talk here: “my life draws near to Sheol (that was ancient Israel’s term the place of the dead where those who had died maintained a shadowy existence), I am counted among those who go down to the Pit...like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.” Is the psalmist sick with some deadly illness? Or is he “dying” in some other way, perhaps because he has for reasons unknown become a social outcast? We don’t really know. The psalms work because they are detailed without being specific.

After the usual cry to God and the description of how things are for him, we begin to see just how much different this psalm is from Psalm 130. There the psalmist accepts the blame for her situation. Here, however, it is not the psalmist who is responsible for the approach of death. It is God who has caused it, God who is responsible for it, God who is being held accountable for it:“You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.”

The worst of what God has done is to cause the alienation of the psalmist’s friends: “You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a thing of horror to them.”

Now, at this place in a lament we expect a shift: the psalmist should move on to make a request, listing the reasons why God should grant the request. And then comes a vow to offer praise and thanksgiving when the request has been granted. And finally, as if the request has already been granted, there is praise in the past tense.

But none of that happens in this psalm. Here the psalmist cries out again: “Every day I call on you, O Lord, I spread out my hands to you.”

Confronted with God’s silence, the psalmist doesn’t go away or—which amounts to the same thing—come up with all sorts of theological reasons why God won’t answer or perhaps already has. The psalmist can no longer afford polite conversation with God. The psalmist has cried out and God has not answered and when God does not answer, the psalmist calls out again.

This time it’s become desperate. There is time for God to act, but not much. A series of rhetorical questions makes it clear that if—or maybe it’s when—the psalmist dies, it will be too late. “Do you work wonders for the dead?” No. “Do the shades rise up to praise you?” No. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon?” No. “Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?” No.

No, if God is going to act, it had better be soon. Soon it will be too late even for God’s power to make things better.

But there is still no answer. So the psalmist cries out again and the kid gloves come off: “O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?...Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me....You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.”

That last phrase is sometimes translated as “darkness is my only companion.” Whichever it is, the last word in the psalm is darkness. I can’t help but be reminded of the darkness at the beginning of the book of Genesis, the darkness that was upon the face of the deep, the darkness that was dispelled when God spoke light into being. The psalmist has been returned to that primordial, chaotic darkness, before the world that could sustain human life was called into being. The psalmist has been unmade and no longer lives in the world that is home for the people of the covenant God.

Three times the psalmist has cried out to God, each time more urgently than the last. Three times the psalmist has been met with silence. The psalmist begins in the darkness of the abyss and ends in the abysmal darkness. The word of God for the people of God: Thanks be to God!

What is this psalm doing in the hymnal? To be sure, it’s not in our hymnal. It’s not in lectionary. But here it is in the Bible. What’s it doing there? It is after all, as Walter Brueggemann puts it so subtly, “an embarrassment to conventional faith.”1

He’s right. The conventions of faith are rather well established, if nowhere written down. That’s the thing about the things that go without saying: no one needs to say or write them. But we know that it’s not polite to address God as if we expected God to respond. It isn’t polite to address God with our raw and naked needs. It isn’t polite to bring our inability to manage without God’s help into the gathered assembly and lay it out in front of God and everyone. We feel a little embarrassed—or maybe it’s ashamed—about a breach of decorum of this magnitude.

We pray carefully. And if we are too overwhelmed to be able to pray carefully, we stay home, away from public worship until we get over it. We who would scream our lungs out at a football game or a swim meet, prefer our emotions in worship to be cooler and under our control. Yes, this psalm is “an embarrassment to conventional faith.”

But the psalmist doesn’t have time or space for worrying about conventions. The psalmist is not concerned with embarrassment, her own or anyone else’s. We know how much pain it would take for us to be in a place where we stopped worrying about convention or about being embarrassed.

The difference is, when the psalmist is in that place, he doesn’t dial 911. Or maybe I should say that he doesn’t just dial 911. He cries out to Yahweh. And when Yahweh doesn’t answer, he cries again. And when Yahweh still doesn’t answer, he cries yet again. He will keep crying until there is an answer. And silence is not an answer; silence is silence; silence is the failure to answer.

What’s this impolite prayer doing in the Bible? Well, to begin with, it’s telling the truth. Or at least a truth. Life is sometimes just like this. If you’re a seventh grade girl whose social life is subject to the strange winds that blow through middle schools and suddenly find yourself on the outside of every clique in school, the subject of chatter on Facebook, so that even your best friend is afraid to be with you, and you’ve done everything you know how to do and you’ve even prayed for things to change, but they don’t, then you know that this psalm tells the truth.

If you’re a man whose wife is dying of cancer, but the doctors make vague promises about new treatments, but they don’t work, and you’ve prayed, but she’s dying anyway, and your friends from the Thursday morning coffee shop group have stopped calling because they don’t know what to say, and you know that she’s dying and that you’ll dying with her, then you know that this psalm tells the truth. Biblical faith tells the truth, even when the truth is ugly. And sometimes the truth is ugly and the psalmist knows that it must be told.

But the psalmist also knows that this truth is not an abstraction and it’s not an objective fact. The truth isn’t just told; it’s told to someone. And the psalmist knows that the someone above all to whom the truth must be told is the covenant God of Israel.

Up against the wall, down a deep deep hole, on the brink of death, the psalmist knows that Israel always has to do with Yahweh, the people of God have to do with the God of the covenant, or, to move this to our own context, the Church of God always has to do with the God of the Church. Even when our backs are up against the wall. Especially when our backs are up against the wall, when it looks as though God has fled from us, forgotten us, or forsaken us. The psalmist does not have to figure it out. Sometimes, especially when the truth is ugly, it can’t be figured out. But even then, God can still be addressed, summoned, called and recalled into conversation.

Sometimes, when the truth is very ugly, and conventional faith has failed, and it’s time for impolite and desperate speech, the only faithful thing we can do, the faithful thing that we must do is to tell the truth of what it is like to be God’s people to the God whose people we are. And when that time comes, Psalm 88 will be here in the Bible right where it belongs. When that time comes, and we share the same anguish that led the psalmist to write it, it will become the vessel that holds our deepest pain and offers it to God. And then we will know why Psalm 88 is here and we will be able to say and from the heart,
The word of God for the people of God
Thanks be to God!

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.