Psalm 27
March 4, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The War in Iraq is now over 3 years old and the growing number of casualties suffered by the Iraqi people, the US and coalition forces as well as the militias in what now is appearing as civil strife continues to fill our news media every day with no exceptions. I confess that some days when I am reading the daily paper that I skip over the “world news” that are conveniently located all together in a section away from the common interests articles like science and our health.
When we see photographs of the badly wounded or the dead lying on the streets in pools of blood, smoke and flame rising from bombed out vehicles, food, products and body parts scattered everywhere from a marketplace bombing, we turn away from these horrible pictures. The terror of war and life reminds us of what the Psalmist says, “Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet I will be confident.” We wonder if the hope against terror that the Psalmist spoke about can soften the remembered images of war and violence in the world.
Psalm 27
On this second Sunday in Lent, we read from Psalm 27. If there was any of the Psalms that would fit into this season of preparing for the passion of Jesus, Psalm 27 would be most fitting. According to Psalm 27:12, the occasion that called for this psalm was this: the author was falsely accused by adversaries. The adversaries have called the integrity of the psalmist in question. In these days, such an accusation could mean the loss of honor or property. To compound the problem, the adversaries threatened violence. When this situation develops, it feels as though the psalmist is in war.
Whether we personally feel that we are under attack or that our entire country if not the whole world is at risk of losing the peace, we pray that we would not be afraid and that if whole armies rise up against us, we have confidence in God to save us in the face of mortal threats.
The Psalmist has a personal relationship with the Lord. The Psalmist says that the Lord is my light, my salvation and is the stronghold of my life. The Psalmist and God are no strangers. In this close relationship, God is the stronghold, a place for the Psalmist to be safe and have protection from those who would do physical harm. The threats that we see in words like, “evildoers, adversaries and foes and army” are expressions that the danger to the Psalmist is frightening real.
For the Psalmist “to be saved” is to be rescued from his present reality not to be postponed for some future life. Now is the moment for God’s saving intervention in the face of war and violence.
Our Own Mortal Threats
Psalm 27 is what we call a “lament hymn.” The words call upon God to act in some fashion in order to save humanity from famine, plague, invasion, and national woes experienced by the group or personal disasters that have fallen upon the individual. Often the language in lament hymns is strong, demanding God to act, even accusing God of causing the evil that has occurred.
As Christians, we often read those Psalms in our worship that emphasize our praises to God but rarely do we hear the cries of pain uttered in the lament hymns. There was a college student at a conservative Lutheran college in the Midwest who delivered a closing prayer at the end of a chapel service. The words in the prayer were particularly strong calling upon God to act for us as God had acted in the days of the exodus and resurrection. The prayer spoke about how we reached for God’s beard to grab it, but God receded into the cosmic distance so that we did not know whether God existed or not.
After the prayer you could have heard a pin drop in the chapel. As the chapel ended, the student found himself face to face with several faculty members who wanted to know where this prayer came from and whether he had the audacity to write it himself. He showed them a little prayer book, which when opened, disclosed itself to be a collection of Martin Luther’s prayers. What could they say; it was a Lutheran college after all.
In addition to the Psalms, other lament hymns are Jeremiah’s confession and the dialogues of Job. They offer us a model of heart-felt prayer. It’s a pity we don’t have more of the words of Jesus as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane; such words would provide us with a powerful model of prayer when we are troubled with disasters globally or personally.
Don’t we all have times when we grab at God’s beard and he seems to pull away from us? When we are sick or comforting a loved one who is very sick, we wonder where God might be. When our heads and hearts are crammed with questions and ambiguities and contradictions but with no clear solutions, we wonder where God’s truth is. When day after day, we hear updates of the lost lives from the war in Iraq in the media, we do wonder if God had receded into the cosmic distance. Do we have confidence that God is here?
Agnes Norfleet in a sermon she gave, A Psalm of Thin Places uses an ancient Celtic belief from the people who inhabited the British Isles. They believed that at certain geographical locations, one could experience an extraordinarily close encounter with God. They called them “thin places,” locales where the past, present and future were separated by only a thin membrane of perception. This unique sense of place included shorelines where water met land, lively rivers as they brushed by the shoreline, doorways that were meeting places of inside and outside.
These places embodied transitions from one state of being to another. Later, this concept broadened to include moments when the holy became visible to the eyes of the human spirit. In time, “thin places” also came to include memory and passages of Scripture.
Psalm 27 is one of these Scriptures.
The first part of the Psalm asserts confidence and trust in God, who inspired that confidence by past acts of faithfulness, and therefore, can be trusted to relate to us in similar ways in the present and future. When the Psalmist referred to God as “my light,” this conveys an especially intimate experience of trust in God. And when he cries out for help in the midst of his troubles, this is a moment of “thin places” where God and human beings have a close encounter together.
When we are suffering or lamenting because we are in trouble, we look for these “thin places” such as Psalm 27 to encounter God and for God to encounter us.
Ruth in her sixties is a quiet-spoken African American seminarian taking a pastoral counseling course. Ruth was asked by her minister to visit “Uncle Henri,” an elderly gentleman from the church who had outlived all his family. Uncle Henri was dying—dying all alone.
When Ruth entered the room of the care center where Uncle Henri was spending his few remaining days, she was surprised to find no patients in the other three beds that comprised his dorm. It took only one look to assure her that nothing she said or did would alleviate Henri’s physical condition.
“I could see that this skeleton of a man was waiting for his God to take him. So, I did the only thing I knew: I sat and held his hand and prayed silently.” After several meetings like this, Henri called Ruth to put her ear down to his lips. “Bring your Bible,” he whispered, “and read.”
“I am known as a reader in our church,” Ruth explained. “But I have never read to a dying man,” she said to herself. However, on her next visit she brought the scriptures. But when on entering Uncle Henri’s room she found it full, not only of other patients, but of their families.
It was Saturday and visiting day so the place was crowded and noisy. Perplexed as to how she could “read” amid such buzz, Ruth sat quietly until Uncle Henri opened his eyes, smiled and whispered one word, “Read.” “What shall I read, Uncle Henri?” Ruth asked. “The Psalms.” he gasped.
So, Ruth read, beginning with the first and continuing in a soft, almost humming voice. As Ruth reached the 23rd Psalm, she prayed, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want…” and then she noticed how her voice echoed in the room. She looked up to see all around them—patients, family, even staff, sitting or standing in prayer, heads bent, silent. Later that evening, shortly after Ruth left, Uncle Henri went home to God.
What Ruth created with her gentle word, her gentle spirit and the Psalms was a “thin place” where Uncle Henri experienced his present realty of being in the hospital with the future reality of being in heaven with God. This was a “thin place” where the veil between this world of pain and suffering was lifted up and all the people in that patient room were able to step through to be in the presence of God.
Confident in God
In the midst of our troubling lives, we can encounter God all around us, waiting to be experienced. These “thin places” don’t have to be at times of crises or emergencies. We may encounter God in our everyday life.
When your children come home from school, parents often ask their children, “How was your day?” only to hear the stock answer, “Not bad.” What if we asked a different question: “Where did you meet God today?” The answers you would get would be: a teacher helped me; I saw someone helped a homeless man; I saw a tree with lots of flowers; I helped my friend not get into a fight. Then you as parents can tell your children where you met God that day.
And before the children drift off to sleep their everyday experience has become a “thin place” and the stuff that makes up a good prayer. With some practice and intentionality, we can realize that places to encounter God are all around us. How about asking your loved one tonight, “Where did you meet God today?” We are confident in God to be there, waiting for us to experience him.
I know that there are personal tragedies that hit us and we wonder how we can go on. In the movie with Tom Hanks, Sleepless in Seattle, he was trying to answer the question “How do you go on?” after the death of his beloved wife. He says, “I plan to get up every morning, and breathe in and breathe out, until one day, I will forget about telling myself to breathe.”
As human travelers through this life, we will encounter enemies and challenges, which cause us to stumble and cry out in pain. But no matter where we find our strength and courage to go on, we are confident in God to be with us so that we may be in his everlasting arms.
Beauty in the World
In the midst of threats and in the face of adversaries and foes, the Psalmist says that we flee to God’s sanctuary grasping at the altar’s corners for asylum and protection. But the Psalmist also tells us about the sheer beauty or delightfulness of God’s world. When we see God’s beauty, this opens us up to new possibilities for being in the world. Aesthetics and ethics—beauty and being—are united and a new lease on life is gained.
Visions of divine beauty are for reorienting our lives to return to the world rather than for permanent retreat from life. The Psalmist asks God to help him go beyond the walled sanctuaries of safety, “Teach me your way, O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence. I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” (27:11-13)
When we encounter God—a mountaintop experience—it must inevitably lead us back to the level plains and deep valleys of day to day life. As God’s people, we belong in the world of the living to wait for the Lord.
In this season of Lent, we may not be certain about what will happen with Iraq or certain about how we may persevere through the struggles we are experiencing. But the one thing that we are certain about is that we are confident in God.
We are confident that Jesus was God and that God suffered on the cross for us in order to identify with the human condition. We are confident in Jesus that he provided a sacrifice for sin in order to inspire us to obedience or commitment to the will of God.
There will no doubt continue to be situations, events, and terrible things that would cause us to feel like grabbing the beard of God and he seems to recede to some cosmic distance. We may never completely understand why we suffer. But we are confident in God and although we may never fully understand, we can withstand all threats, all adversaries, all enemies, all violence; all war because Jesus Christ is standing with us.
Let us pray.
O God, we pray for the confidence to believe in you when crises and violence are upon us and we are disturbed beyond understanding. Reveal to us that you are with us all the time in our daily life. Reassure us that we may see you in our midst when we pray to you as the Psalmist did in chapter 27. And Lord, lead us to not retreat from this world but to become recommitted to your holy work for long-lasting peace for all your people. Amen.