We don’t talk enough about the Psalms, so today we are going to talk about the Psalms. The Psalms are an important book in the Bible that are unlike any other. We read a Psalm every single week. It is the only book in the Bible that we do that with. We read a Gospel every week, but there are four of them to pick from. The Psalms, in their entirety, are found in the Book of Common Prayer. It takes up over 200 pages. It would be a lot thinner if we didn’t have the psalter in there. But we do because it is so important to our faith and to our worship.
The Psalms were important to Jesus. He quoted from them frequently, including on the cross. He very much understood his life in light of the Psalms. Many people throughout generations of the faith have found the Psalms the center of their spiritual life. Almost every monastic community, if not every single one of them, puts the Psalms in the center of their worshiping life. They have various cycles of how often they will read the Psalms that go anywhere from once a month to once a day. Can you imagine reading all the Psalms every single day? The Psalms are unique and special. They are sometimes called “the prayer book of the Bible.”
The Psalms also have a different place within the canon. We generally say that Scripture is about God speaking to us, that we are meant to hear the word of God through Scripture. That is a complicated sentence that we can’t unpack today. But we will say that generally God is speaking to us through Scripture. The Psalms have some element of that, but more than anything else, it is about us speaking to God. In the Psalms we will find people bringing the full range of emotion and experience to that conversation with God, from the lowest lows to the highest highs, from moments of elation and joy and celebration down to moments of despair and anxiety and fear and anger.
There is a group of Psalms called Imprecatory Psalms which are all about violence and bringing vengeance on people. Those are not meant to be a moral model for us, they are not aligned with God’s dream of a reconciled world. We don’t read them on Sunday, but they are there and they show us that we can bring our full selves, even those messy bits, to God. We don’t need to hide any of it from God. Every moment of frustration, anger, and doubt we can bring to God, just as the Psalms do.
The lead singer of the band U2, Bono, wrote an introduction to the Psalms in a book a couple of decades ago. He said that the Psalms are like the blues. If you know the blues, you know the Psalms, and you know Bono is on to something.
Our Psalm today is Psalm 40. Speaking of U2, there is a song called “Forty”, which is based on this Psalm. Psalm 40 begins by talking about this moment of despair, very low moments that the Psalmist has been through. It talks about it in the past tense, it talks in terms of having gotten out of it. So it is a celebratory way to talk about it, but in the way the Psalmist talks about it, we know it was a very low moment of despair, a moment of mire and clay, a moment of being in a desolate pit, and then being pulled up on to the highest cliff with sure footing. It must have been really bad, whatever the Psalmist went through.
In the very first line it says, “I waited patiently upon the Lord,” and I think it is a most misleading translation. It sounds like I’m patient, everything is fine, God can take all the time he wants because I’m a patient person. But that is not what this means. It is not what the Hebrew says. What we have here is a waiting that is very deep. One translation reads, I waited and waited and waited. I think that is a good translation.
The word patient also a sense of hope to it. The Jewish Publication Society translation says “I hope in the Lord,” which is a better translation than “I waited patiently.” Personally, I think we should translate it “I waited in hope for the Lord,” because it would bring out both elements of waiting and hope, although it doesn’t quite get to the depth of it. My preferred translation is “I hope beyond hope.” I think it gets to the depth of what the Psalmist felt, and God pulled the Psalmist out of that.
An interesting thing happens in Verse 5. “Great things are they that you have done, O Lord, my God,” and we think the Psalmist is talking about the great things that God did for him in the first four verses. But then it says “How great your wonders and your plans for us.” The Psalmist makes the transition from the individual experience of God pulling him up out of the desolate pit with its mire and clay, to understand it in a larger story of the ways that God has pulled God’s people out of mire and clay and set them on sure footing. The Psalmist is grounding the experience he has had in the greater story of salvation, the greater history of salvation that we read in Scripture. He is talking about the hope beyond hope that Sarah and Abraham had and the promise to give them a child. He is talking about the hope beyond hope that Jacob and his family had during the famine, and suddenly a long lost son and brother is able to pull them in, save them, and bring them into Egypt. Generations later, there is hope beyond hope in their enslavement when they were crying out to God for eighty years before Moses was sent. A hope beyond hope that God is faithful and true. And God comes through and pulls them out of the mire and clay of their enslavement, and brings them into the high, sure, safe ground of the Promised Land.
It is not just pulling out, but having the experience in life of going back and forth. We have many moments of mire and clay in the history of salvation, and in our own lives. But God is there in all of them, constantly working to bring us up out of it in alignment with his dream for this world.
I’m a little disappointed in the Lectionary reading for stopping at Verse 12 of this Psalm, because it makes it sound like all the bad stuff happened in the past and the good stuff is now. But Verse 13 of this Psalm says “for innumerable troubles have crowded upon me.” The rest of the Psalm is talking about how he is back in the mire and clay, and is again crying out to God to bring him up out of it. Back and forth.
It is the same for us in our lives, whether individual lives and individual mire and clay we find ourselves in, but also for us as a community. It is the same thing. We have moments of mire and clay, and yet God is in the midst of it bringing us up out of it. The Psalmist is doing an amazing thing as he keeps one eye on the past to remember the goodness of the Lord, keeping one eye on the future, knowing in hope beyond hope that God will come through, not sitting back waiting patiently. In the great depth of despair there is still the height of that hope that the Psalmist knows because he is keeping his eye on both the past and the future. He invites us to do the same.
Tomorrow is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day, and we can look at his story and see that he understood his life in the same way as the Psalmist. His life and work, and the struggles that he engaged in were part of this bigger story of mire and clay that the people of God have always found themselves in. Dr. King help hope beyond hope that there is a better way, a beloved community that he was proclaiming, that God’s dream for this world was something that could be realized and something that he could help proclaim. One eye on the past, one eye on the future. In all of Dr. King’s work, he understood that God is faithful, and God’s dream is sure, and we can trust in it.
One interesting thing about all these stories of mire and clay and God’s assurance that he will pull us out of it, is that it never seems to go in our time frame. Abraham and Sarah had to wait twenty-five years or so before their promise was realized. Eighty years between the birth of Moses and when he was finally sent, even though people were crying out that entire time. Forty more years in the wilderness. Hundreds of years on the issue of racial justice in this country, trying to create a beloved community, and we’re still not there. It is not on our time frame. Whatever challenges we are facing right now, it is not in our time frame. But God is in it. God is working to bring us up out of it.
So, my friends, do not despair. We have been there before, and God is with us. God is in the midst of it, and God, who is faithful and true, just and loving, is stooping down and hearing our cry. We will be taken up on that high cliff with a sure footing.
Keep one eye on the past to know the history of God’s faithfulness, and keep one eye on the future, hoping beyond hope.
AMEN.
