From the Abyss (Psalm 130, June 24, 2012)

From the Abyss

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 130
June 24, 2012

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

Many of the Psalms are poems of grandeur and beauty. They inhabit (or create) worlds of wonder and joy. When we read them they summon us to praise God for who God is, especially who God is revealed to be in the way the world is made. In Psalm 8 it was the objects in the night sky and even our own bodies that were the reason for our praise. In Psalm 119 it was the moral order of the universe that rewards the wise, the good, and the just and frustrates the foolish, the wicked and the unjust.

These two psalms and others like them reflect or fashion a world in which everything is orderly. In that world everything unfolds just as it should. Right effort is always rewarded. Wrong effort is always punished. This may not happen immediately. It may take some time for the accounts to be squared. The righteous may suffer for a while. The wicked may get away with it for a while. But sooner or later everyone will get what is coming to them. It will all come out in the end. What goes around comes around. Or, to put it in a single Sanskrit word: ''karma.''

The psalmists who wrote these psalms and the people whose lives were reflected in them lived in a stable, safe and predictable world. Lucky for them. One of their number put it this way:       
     I have been young, and now am old,           
          yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken          
          or their children begging bread.¹

And I always think to myself (and sometimes out loud), "You don't get out much, do you?"

There are certainly times when we do experience the world as stable, safe and predictable. But anyone who "[has] been young, and now [is] old," who "[has] not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread" has lived a sheltered life. They have lived a sheltered life and they have been very, very lucky. There is no reason why they should not thank God for their good fortune. There is no reason why ''we'' should not thank God for our good fortune.

But for most people some of time and for many people most of the time, life is not like this. For most people some of the time and for many people most of the time, the world that we live in is unstable, dangerous and arbitrary. There are people--invisible to the psalmist who has never "seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread"--who live, as Howard Thurman writes, "with their backs against the wall."²

Every society has its marginalized. It was true in the psalmist's day and it's true in ours. Some of these were born marginalized: the teenage boy growing up on the north side of Omaha who can't get to school because getting to the bus stop requires him to cross the territory of a gang that has threatened to kill him if he doesn't join them; or the little girl being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend who falls through the cracks because a social worker missed the signs that will be clear in hindsight but who in the present is overwhelmed by a caseload that is just too big because politicians can only hear the drumbeat of "cut taxes" in their heads.

Some of the folks who have their backs to the wall become marginalized along the way: the sixty year old factory worker whose job was sent to China and who has been looking for work for going on two years and is a long way from collecting Social Security but virtually unhireable; or the twenty-five year old college graduate with a mountain of student debt who wanted her life to matter and had planned to teach special needs children but is now working part-time as a barrista in the local coffee shop.

In the midst of a world that might be stable, safe and predictable there is an abyss that people fall into. It's not just the permanently marginalized who find themselves there.

Sometimes it's just ordinary folks like you and me who fall into the abyss, people whose sights aren't set too high, people whose goal in life is to work hard doing something we can at least take some pride in if not always enjoy, to raise a family, to see our children grown and our grandchildren growing, to enjoy our retirement years. Like the people driving down a street in Duluth this week who suddenly found themselves at the bottom of a sink hole, we are living life according to the rules as we understood them, the rules that should gain us the rewards we have earned. And suddenly there is an abyss, a pit, a deep hole, that swallows us up.

Maybe there will come a time when we can look back on it and see it as a glitch, but that time is not now. A pink slip, a call from the doctor's office, a housecall from a military chaplain and we land at the bottom of a very dark and very deep hole.

Being the folks that we are we have a number of ways to respond. Some of us will assume that there is a rational way to deal with our situation and will set about charting a rational course out of it. This usually involves the making of lists. When that doesn’t work we will get depressed. We’ll feel inadequate to deal with the crisis and we’ll seek advice. We’ll note that we aren’t really coping very well and we’ll search out a therapist. We may apply to the appropriate governmental agency for assistance. Let me just say that, depending on what sort of abyss it happens to be (and the psalmist is not very specific), these are all appropriate ways of responding to finding ourselves in the abyss. For us, you may note, there are two “things” involved in our situation: there is us and there is the problem.

When things go wrong for us modern folks there are only two places to look for the problem and the solution. Either something is wrong with us. Or something is wrong with the world. For the psalmist it is always about more than that: There is us. There is the world. There is the God of the covenant. For the psalmist it’s always about the covenant. It’s always about the relationship between the psalmist and the God of the covenant. The heart of the covenant is that God has called the covenant people into a relationship with each other and with God so that a genuinely human life in community becomes possible, a life that goes under the label shalôm, a life of just and peaceful abundance. God provides the conditions under which shalôm can happen. The covenant people orient themselves to God, the universe, and each other so that they don’t put any obstacles in the way of that shalôm.

When shalôm is breached—when there is strife, violence, oppression, or scarcity—the psalmist knows that this breach is rooted in a rupture of the covenant. Most of the time, the psalmist looks at the situation, looks at her own behavior, and sees that the disaster seems disproportionate to whatever covenant failure she might be guilty of. Therefore, she concludes, while there may have been lapses on her part, the basic problem lies with the God of the covenant. God hasn’t been paying attention. God has failed to provide, failed to defend, failed to protect. So God must be recalled to the terms of the covenant.

Most of the psalms that scholars call laments are psalms in which the psalmist summons God to remember the covenant. But not all of them. Sometimes, after all, the fault is ours. Not often, but sometimes. When it is our fault, then a special kind of lament is called for: the prayer of confession. These are pretty rare, actually. Out of the eighty or so laments in the Psalms, only seven are what we call penitential psalms, prayers in which the psalmist names the situation, owns that the responsibility is hers, and summons God to respond with forgiveness.

We don’t know what difficulty the psalmist faced, we only know that out of that difficulty the psalmist cries out to the God of the covenant.

We don’t know what the psalmist's covenant failure might have been. We only know that the psalmist knows that the covenant is in trouble because of her actions. She doesn’t name them. But she knows what they are. And God knows what they are. And so God must forgive them.

God must forgive them because life without forgiveness is not possible: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord who could stand?” If God does not choose to forgive, well, God is free to do that, I suppose. But if that is God’s choice then it will mean that God has no covenant people at all, because there is no one who can live in the covenant without occasional failure. God can have a people who stumble or no people at all; that is the choice that the psalmist lays before God.

Having made her case, the psalmist waits for God’s response:
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in [God's] word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
Notice how this psalm has moved. The psalmist began by locating herself in an abyss, an abyss that is essentially one of her own making. She called out to God. She owned that her problem is one of her own moral failure and called upon God to forgive. Now she waits for God’s response. She has created the rupture in the covenant, she admits that and owns the responsibility for it. But only God can act to restore the covenant relationship. Until God does that she must wait the agonizing last hours of the night watch until the sun dawns on a new day. That sun will not rise for her until God responds to her cry and acts.

I note finally that this psalm was used as a processional psalm as the covenant community, now the worshiping community, makes its way up to the top of Mount Zion to God’s temple in Jerusalem. The very personal matters of the psalmist's covenant failure and the abyss into which that failure threw her are not in any way private. They are a matter with implications for the whole community. Her experience is shared as testimony: the God of the covenant can be trusted. The peaceful and just abundance of the covenant is possible because God is willing to restore the covenant even when we break it.

What would it be like to live in the strange and wonderful world of this psalm? The things that we think are important about religion would recede into the background and other things would become important, things that, well, are more than a little scary. In the world of this psalm beliefs about God are no longer what matters. Being nice is not what matters. Being “good people” is not what matters. Certainly being people who show by our comfortable lives how much God must love us doesn’t matter.

What matters is living our lives, facing our own abysses, from within our relationship with the God of the covenant. What matters in this psalm is relational honesty between us and God. What matters is our willingness to own the responsibility for our own covenant failures. What matters is our recognition that the power to restore a damaged relationship with God is not within our power, but it is within God’s power. What matters is that God is able to act. What matters is that God does act.
Out of the depth have I called to you;          
O God, hear my voice;          
let your ears consider well the voice of the my supplication.     
If you were to note what is done amiss,          
O God, who could stand?     
For there is forgiveness with you;          
therefore you shall be feared.     
I wait for you, O God; my soul waits for you;          
in your word is my hope.          
My soul waits for God,          
more than sentries for the morning,          
more than sentries for the morning.     
O Israel, wait for God,          
for with God there is mercy;     
With God there is plenteous redemption,          
and God shall redeem Israel from all their sins.³
 

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.

1Psalm 37:25

2Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 11.

3Psalm 130, Order of Saint Helena.