"The Mature Response"
When Life Throws You a CurveRun, rage or trust?
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. David McMaster
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Text: Psalm 55
At the various places that I have studied, I have had several influential professors. While at Asbury Theological Seminary, the person who influenced me most was a man by the name of The Rev. Dr. Robert Lyon. Bob, as he liked to be called, was a professor who was interested in students. Every lunch hour he could be seen in the school cafeteria chatting with students or having lunch with one in particular. He was always verbally pushing, and prodding and encouraging people to think. I remember when I wound up in hospital as a result of a knee injury while playing on the varsity soccer team, he travelled up to Lexington to visit me. He was a great sportsman himself, and much to my chagrin, even at the age of 60, he could take on a 25-year-old and still claim victory on the racquetball court. Theologically, he was a tremendous mixture of conservative and liberal, traditional and radical. He constantly challenged students to be authentic, to move beyond a comfortable Christianity and into a life of being a servant of God.
Bob used to send out newsletters to his former students. A short while ago, I was re-reading one which contained the following:
The day of my son's wedding, I preached for my brother-in-law. As I sat in my place during the first part of the service, I looked out over the congregation. I thought to myself, “There are people out there whose marriages have come apart, whose children are getting into trouble, who have had a tragic death in the family, who have recently lost a job, teenagers who are confused and whose sexuality scares them, women who have been abused, aged folk who fear loneliness and declining health,” and I realized that God had called me to preach to them. What an incredible calling. What a privilege to generate hope, to offer them Christ...
He went on to encourage his readers, who were mostly preachers, to offer Christ, and to thank God for the opportunity. Well, this week, as I read again the 55th Psalm, I thought about how correct Bob was. Many Christians, beneath the painted surfaces of their lives, struggle with rot underneath. On Sunday mornings while we sit here in our Sunday best, many do a great job of hiding things that ail them. They conceal struggles and troubles. Our young people face pressures to become involved with drugs and alcohol abuse. We all face evil in the world and wonder why evil is so successful. Adults in the workplace are sometimes called to engage in practices that are ethically questionable. Some battle forms of persecution. Some battle abuse. Some face personal struggles with health - like a woman I know who because of her pain, just wants to end it all. Some battle grief, loneliness and problems in relationships. Some fight off depression, and some succumb.
In the midst of these all-too-real troubles that we face, it is sometimes fitting to ask, “Where are you, Lord? What are you doing?” It is also fitting to ask, “How does our religious experience help us in the face of struggles and difficulties?” Does Christianity, does God, offer us anything as we go through trials?
If you have ever read the Book of Psalms, you will be aware that many of the psalms deal with difficult experiences. The greatest number of psalms is classified by scholars as “individual psalms of lament.” That means that they are individual prayers to God during times of conflict or struggle. In the case of Psalm 55, the difficulties are of various kinds. We can read in verse 2 that the psalmist is distraught by the noise of the enemy, the clamour of the wicked who bring trouble and cherish enmity toward him. In verse 9, he alludes to social ills when he speaks of violence and strife within the city. There is iniquity (v.10), ruin (v. 11), oppression (v.11) and fraud in business (v.11). He goes on, and notes in verse 12 that his problem is not with some outside adversary, but with a close friend, someone whom he had been friendly with on an ongoing basis, someone he had even worshipped with in the temple. This friend had evidently broken a promise, according to verse 20, and did something fatal to another friend of the psalmist.
There is trouble all around him - deception, the demise of a friend - and the psalmist seems to fear for his own life. He speaks in very graphic terms,
My heart is in anguish within me.
The terrors of death have fallen upon me.
Fear and terror come upon me.
Horror overwhelms me. (v.4)
I wonder how often in our difficulties we feel this kind of anguish? How often, because of some serious problem, do our hearts just writhe within us, and, if we let the difficulty get the better of us, how often do our stomachs get into a knot? We don't eat; we worry. It happens to us, and it happened to the Psalmist. He cried out to God, “Where are you, Lord? What are you doing? I am being overwhelmed! What are you doing?”
Likewise, how often have we expressed those thoughts and wondered where God is. What is he doing when one of our teenagers, it seems, has moved to the dark side, gone with the wrong crowd? What is God doing when we have been wronged by a friend? What is God doing when we have been treated unfairly? What is God doing when someone asks us to do something unethical and our livelihood depends on it? What is God doing when we are in the midst of abuse, or grief, or pain or anguish? We would call out, like the psalmist, “Where are you?”
In this psalm, the psalmist has three basic responses to the trouble that he is in. Two of them are very human responses. It is the last that comes from a person who really knows God in a deep sense.
The first response goes like this: He has the idea of acting on his own. He wants to run away. “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.” His first thoughts are to get away from trouble and danger, to find a safe haven in some desert crag, a place where he can be safe.
When there is trouble around, that is often the human response. The human response is to get away, but that is not always possible. We can't always just get up and leave everything, disappear. Circumstances, whatever they may be, more often than not force us to stick around, to deal with things ... and so it was for the psalmist. His tone suggests that escape isn't a legitimate possibility; he has to stay. Yet there is this wish to “fly away.”
The psalmist's second response is also a very human response. He calls down curses on the enemy. In verse 9, he asks God to confuse their speech. Maybe he is thinking about what happened at the Tower of Babel. A little later, he wants them to die before their time. In verse 15 he says, “Let death come upon them. Let them go down alive to Sheol.” Maybe he is thinking about what happened to Korah in the Book of Numbers, in which the ground just opened up and swallowed this family whole because of their sin. What he is saying in modern language is that he wants these people to be in hell.
Of course, one of the problems with this kind of response is that we would look at it and say, “This isn't exactly Christian, is it?” It is not loving to curse someone. This passage adds force to the arguments of those who suspect that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are quite different. But, is it the God of the Old Testament who is different in this psalm, or is it the response of the psalmist that perhaps reflects an earlier age? I say “perhaps” because I am not convinced that this is entirely the case. In all ages, most people when they are abused, when they find themselves in some sort of difficulty, react negatively. Unless we are so spiritual that we can bless everything, and there are few like that, humanity gets the better of us, and we curse or wish ill on those who are against us.
One of the things that I like about the psalms is their sheer honesty. The psalmists come to us, and they don't seem to spiritualize everything; they bring us real life and real responses to situations. If someone is ill-done-by, he or she is not afraid to complain: Not afraid to complain to God, not afraid to wish ill upon opponents. Now, let's face it, we incur these sorts of thoughts.
I remember a time when I surprised myself with the negativity of my feelings over an event. I was in seminary at the time studying for the ministry - a little more than twenty-five years ago I am afraid to say - and I thought I had it all together spiritually. I loved everyone; I didn't hate anyone. Then, one morning, I learned from the radio news that an Irish paramilitary organization had shot and killed a friend of mine. He was a member of parliament in Westminster. Robert Bradford was a very gentle man, a good man, who was a personal and family friend. He had been a Methodist minister for a number of years, and in Canada that would have made him a United Church minister. I was absolutely flabbergasted when I heard this. He took seven bullets in the chest at a constituency meeting. I was filled with such utter rage that, for a time, I could quite easily have gone out and joined one of the opposing paramilitary organizations and got a little revenge. I was surprised at myself. Why was I, a Christian studying for the ministry, feeling this sort of anger?
Yet, if we are honest with ourselves, even after 2,000 years of Christianity, when we are really hurt, when we are really oppressed, or persecuted or down, we get really angry. In this psalm, the psalmist's expressions don't tell us so much that the God of the Old Testament is different from the New Testament, or that Old Testament religion is essentially different; they just tell us that the psalmist was in utter anguish. He is wearing his feelings on his sleeve. He wants vengeance! He wants God to do something. He wants the perpetrator of this evil to sink into the deepest abyss. Let's be honest. Sometimes we can think that way. Jesus might call us to rise above that - and in time, we may - but when the knife is in and when it is being twisted, it is very hard not to scream out, not to yell out in pain and agony.
The biblical psalms speak to us from the honesty of the human condition. These are the psalmist's responses to difficulty. First, he wishes that he could fly away. Second, he utters a curse that death would come down upon the wicked. But then, he seems to recover his faculties and another response comes out of his lips, although it is still mixed a little bit with that second response. In his more mature moments the psalmist turns his attention to God and decides, “I will put my trust there.” Verse 16 says: “But I will call upon God, and the Lord will save me.” A little further on, he says, “He will redeem me unharmed from the battle that I wage.” Maybe he is quoting another source or well-known hymn in verse 22 when he says, in the second person, “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you. He will never permit the righteous to be moved.” Then, in verse 23, after affirming that God will punish the wicked, he says, “You, Oh God, will cast them down into the lowest pit. But I will trust in you.”
There is something going on there, when you can move from sheer anguish and human responses to “I can trust in you.” Here he is feeling like the terrors of death have fallen upon him; he is in great fear and anxiety, but he says, “I will trust in you,” and leaves the problem with God. This is the sort of response that can only come from a person who really knows God, and knows God at a deep, deep level. This is the kind of response from someone who knows that we are not alone; someone who has experienced God. It is from someone knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is at work in the world and that his love is steadfast.
The problem with religion today is that so many folk never get to that level; they never make their religion, their Christianity, their knowledge of God a reality that affects their whole lives. Many hold to a Christian theism in terms of belief, but function as deists.
We have just been through another Easter, for instance, and we have continued to sing today about Easter: “Christ the Lord is risen today, hallelujah!” Have we really made that a part of our lives? It is easy to pay lip-service to it, but do we really believe it? Do we really believe that God raised Jesus from the dead? Do we believe it actually happened? Because if we do, and if we really ascertain the power of God in an event like the resurrection, it will change our thinking; it will change our theology; it will change our very lives. It is the discovery of the reality and the power of God that has built the church throughout the years, and it is the discovery of the reality and the power of God that allowed the psalmist to move from his angst into placing his trust in God. It is this same discovery of the reality and the power of God that will give us the wherewithal to move beyond mere human responses to trouble to a faith that God is working to bring about justice, and comfort and health, even in our lives today.
The psalmist is pointing us to God, and he is pointing us to a God that is able, a God who is faithful. He is suggesting that even in our greatest struggles, our greatest difficulties, our greatest pain, God is there; God is with us. I wonder if the difficulties that the psalmist spoke about remind us of some of our own struggles. Perhaps it is a great loss, a form of oppression, illness, depression, an ethical issue, a financial problem or someone opposing us. Whatever our problems are, our initial response can often be the desire to fly away. Or, it can be calling down curses on others. It can be anger; it can be rage. But when we know God as a great Creator, when we know God as the one who has brought a nation out of bondage, when we know God as the one who can raise Jesus Christ from the dead, when we know the God of the psalmist, there is great hope. Even in the midst of fear, and anguish, and despair, there is great hope, and you will be able to say with him, in your situation, “But I will trust in God. I will trust in you, O Lord.”
That hope, because God raised Christ, crosses the greatest divide that there is. We may not always understand the struggles that we go through, the troubles we go through. We may not always understand why this happens or that happens. But, one thing is clear from the psalmist: Even in the deepest things we encounter, God - the Lord of the Universe, the one who has eternity before him - is with us. If we get to know God as the psalmist knew God, then when troubles arise, in him we will have the power to overcome. We can say with another psalmist,
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadows, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
Amen.