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!
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