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Preaching Psalms in Lent
Mark Ramsey Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, North Carolina
During Lent two years ago, my colleague and 1 began talking about a sermon series for the following f^nt. We find talking about next year’s liturgical season during the current season serves as real time corrective to our more unruly ideas. We thought about a series on Parables, a focus on the text of Holy Week throughout f^nt, and then we briefly touched on Psalms – should we preach a series of Psalms? We came to no conclusion. A few weeks later, I was attending a preaching conference where Tom ﺎﻣ!ﺂﺟ began his lecture saying, “1 want to offer you a modest proposal to consider preaching a sermon series on the Psalms.” 1 didn’t think it was quite a Road to Damascus moment, but it was telling that he addressed some of our initial points of resistance to preaching the psalms. Are the Psalms even meant to be preached? Can we navigate our way through Psalms that have less than uplifting parts that we usually conveniently ignore? In response to this, we set the series with a few ground rules. We chose some that were not the usual “top ten” popular Psalms. We ended up choosing Psalms 1, 19,77,107, and 137. Each of these has challenges in structure and/or content. We also committed to preaching the whole Psalm, even the uncomfortable and unsettling portions. The sermon that follows uses Psalm 107 as its text. Psalm 107 has 43 verses about deliverance from trouble. The stanzas each describe a different situation of peril. In worship, we printed the entire Psalm and then had different parts of the sanctuary—choir, one side of the pews, then the other, then the balcony—read each particular “deliverance from distress” for which the Psalmist is giving thanks. One final note is that our congregation suffered a devastating loss days before the beginning of fx؛nt with the death of a young, beloved former pastor. Her colleagues, our congregation,and our community were still reeling from thatloss,and these Psalms of lament, complaint, thanksgiving, praise, and prayer seemed to provide vocabulary and theological undergirding for expressions of our individual and communal grief.
“Particular” Psalm 107 The late, great Tryon, North Carolina-born jazz, blues, and R&B singer Nina Simone used to perform to some of the most eclectic audiences anyone could gather. Some came drawn by her civil rights activism, others for the blues or jazz, and still others because she was a classically trained pianist and composer. But, inevitably in her concerts, Nina Simone would say to the assembled, right before performing the gospel song Children, Go Where I Send You, “¥ ’all ever been to a revival meeting? ¥ ٧٠don’t know what I’m talking about, do ya? Well, you in one now.” Psalm 107 plunks us right down in the middle of a revival. Testimony is being given. The Psalmist asks, “Can I get a witness?!” And folks from the balcony and the choir, from front and back, young and old, strong and weak, one after another after another cries out: “Let me tell you about my lift ؛oftrouble…and about the steadfast love of God!” However, as Nina Simone knew in her life, as you and I know in our lives, as the Bible shows and tells, it’s a long journey in any life to that moment of revival
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and testimony. This ?salm reminds us that God’s steadfast love is proven and experieneed in moments of desperation, peril, loss, anger, and disorientation. That is the real tronble with Psalm 107: we don’t like to think about it. We do not want to think of ourselves as suffering, even when we are. Suffering seems like failure, and we want to sueeeed. When someone is in distress and is offered help, what is offen our refrain? “Oh. it is not that bad. 1 will get through this on my own.” Did we cry out to the Lord in our distress? Not so much. Psalm 107 is a full-throated ery of those who need, want, and expeet God to come into their lives and put them baek on solid ground. Can we believe that God is really present, eapable of providing help in times of trouble? American society is addieted to the myth of personal responsibility and self-reliance. We trust in our own resources and put little faith in God’s capacity for deliverance. A eolleague tells about a eontentious ehureh finance committee meeting a couple of years ago. They were discussing what to do with an unexpected gift of $25,000. She remembered,
Most of the committee members wanted the money to go toward mission, but our viee-ehair was adamant about putting the money into our “rainy day” fund just in case our giving fell short. Another member countered, “Jesus did not say anything about storing up money for a rainy day. He calls us to sell the second coat and give the money to the poor.” The vice-chair turned and said, “Jesus does not pay our gas bills.” The other member looked at him for a moment and said, “Actually, he does.” Sometimes, this is where we are: faith is all well and good, but when it comes to the real issues of life, we are on our own.1
The New York Times reported that Gallup called 1,000 randomly selected American adults and asked them about happiness. Gallup inquired about their emotional status, work satisfaction, eating habits, illnesses, stress levels, and other indicators of their quality of life. The responses were plugged into a formula, and voila, they came up with a statistical composite for the happiest person in America. Gallup’s answer: a tall Asian-American male, an observant Jew who is at least 65 and married, has children, lives in Hawaii, runs his own business, and has $120,000 in household income.* Alas, happiness—or better said, well-being—is never a matter of formula, is rarely influenced by demographics, and is not built on avoiding low places, dark nights of the soul, or jarring events. The movie Up in the ‘//٨features George Clooney working for a company that other companies hire when the company doing foe hiring doesn’t want to do foe firing . In other words, Clooney’s job is to fire people he’s never met. Wheu making foe film, director Jason Reitman put out an ad for people who really had been fired in Detroit, in St. Louis, in Omaha to play parts of people being fired in foe movie. And foe response was larger than he had imagined. Using untrained actors in those roles, one of the things that stood out to Reitman was how honest and forthcoming foe real-life characters were. According to Reitman, these folks found it somewhat “cafoartie” to be able to say on camera in a movie that thousands of people would see exactly what it felt like to have their jobs taken from fitem.* Real life is hard and unpredictable and perilous, carrying with it capacity for sadness and for joy, for despair and for hope, ?salm 7 ﻫﻞis a psalm of hope and trust
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and faith, but آلtraverses authentieally rough terrain to get there. Those who do not know what suffering is eannot appreciate the truth of ?salm 1 7 . مThen again, we all suffer to some degree. We heard it around the room as we read the Psalm together; we all ean give testimony, every single one of us. The lectionary, the list of seheduled readings for every Sunday, guts the power of this psalm by giving us just one e x ^ le o ^ ffe rin g : ^yrieal hunger. But we just read all forty-three verses—you heard it. Here is suffering of every kind: those who suffer imprisonment, literally and figuratively; those who suffer physieal and spiritual siekness; those who are nearly lost in a storm; those whose suffering is eaused by nature and others by sin. Yet all of these people in great distress cry out to God and are delivered. This psalm, the “lectionary part,” starts out general and poetic, but the rest of it gets very specific. Testimony is like that. This Psalm names names and situations and perils and fears; it names our broken places. Somewhere in this we all find ourselves, like it or not.4 Richard Lischer has taught at Duke Divinity School for 30 years. He just wrote a book about the death of his son. He begins the account this way:
Seven years ago, on the thirteenth day of April, my son called to tell me his cancer had returned. He was a grown man, but he told me his news like aboy.He a id ,“Hey,Dd,where’^ o m ? ” Youwo^dhaveth^^ just put a dent in the family’s new car or failed a final exam. He might have been in a little trouble and wanted his mother to buffer the rough edges. He said they had found tumors in quite a few places….Then he asked me to come to him. And that was all. 1 was not expecting the call. But then you never are. You are never adequately braced with feet planted and stomach muscles clenched. A ^ o n a llfro m y o u rso n . fa m ilia r voice emerges from a piece of inexpensive black plastic. The voice has no body, and yet it makes a claim as firm and authoritative as flesh. It says “Hey, Dad” with an end stress on Dad that has always and in every circumstance meant trouble. “Hey, Dad,” and ordinary time stands still and the room begins to turn while you wait for foe rest of the sentence to do its work. “Why don’t you come over,” it says. The ruin in his voice becomes foe new truth in your life, and your old life, foe only one you’ve ever known or wanted, simply vanishes.5
If God’s steadfast love is to be trusted, if it is worthy of being called upon in this world, then God’s steadfast love needs to show up here. There has to be a voice of love that overcomes foe voice of fear. What testimony can we give to foe steadfast love of God in times of peril? I was in Los Angeles not long ago and had foe opportunity to visit Homeboy Industries, foe amazing ministry founded by Fr. Greg Boyle to help young women and men escape gang hfo and establish themselves free from that peril. I had lunch at “Home Girl Café,” the breakfast and lunch spot using only former gang members and those trying to be former gang members as staff. We werc led to our table by a woman whose neck was bandaged, covering foe painful and slow work of removing gang tattoos. Later I heard her talking with a colleague about how grateful she was to have that job and not, as she said, “to be working the streets.” The man who brought
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our order still had gang tattoos everywhere we could see and whose smile and direct eye contact seemed newly learned, but quite steady. “Is everything okay?” he asked before departing. He seemed to be asking himself as much as asking us. Finally, we left after lunch by way of foe store where they sold t-shirts and hats to support the ministry. The cashier was a young woman, again bearing foe signs of a former life in a gang. She said to me and to everyone around, “If you have questions, ask me anything. Ask me about foe shirts, ask me about foe hats, ask me about foe Home Boy, ask me about my life… ·Really, ask me about anything, rm telling you, I was gone, but I’m here.. . In that place, for those young women and men, those jobs represented foe particularity of God’s love to them. What testimony can we give to foe steadfast love of God in times of peril? Many remember “Mr. Rogers,” who had a children’s TV show for years until he died in 2003. Some years ago, Fred Rogers, who was an ordained Fresbyterian minister, was invited to Hollywood to receive a special Emmy honoring his lifetime of work. When Fred Rogers stood up to speak, he said that he knew foe room was filled with so many stars and celebrities, men and women who had achieved much. Rogers then took out a pocket watch and announced that he was going to keep thirty seconds of silence, and he invited everybody in foe room to remember people in their past—parents, teachers, coaches, friends, and others—who had helped them along foe way, who had paid the price for their success, who had made them into foe people they were today. It was a call to a particular testimony of steadfast love. And then Mister Rogers stood there looking at his watch and saying nothing. The room grew quiet as foe seconds ticked away, and before Fred Rogers tucked away his watch, one could hear all around foe room people sniffling as they were moved by foe memories of those who had made sacrifices on their behalf and who had given each of them many gifts.6 And in that glittering Hollywood setting built on so many false hopes and fake appearances, in their desert of hunger and thirst, they were filled. And in their gloom of self-promotion, they were freed. And in their storm of striving, everything was hushed as their silence gave testimony to their memory of a love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. What testimony can we give to foe steadfast love of God in times of peril? God’s promises are rarely offered to us in foe abstract. They are particular. God’s steadfast love doesn’t come sometime, somewhere. God’s steadfast love shows itself when you are in foe desert ofhunger, when you are parched with thirst for living water, when we sit in darkness and gloom, when something has imprisoned us, when we are sick, when we have made our life a mess, when our life has broken us, when we are caught in a storm, when the waters are about to overwhelm us. In these particular times, particular places, particular circumstances, particular relationships, we give thanks to foe Lord for God’s steadfast love which shows up right there, right then, and does not leave us lost and wanting. It’s like how we come for communion. We don’t just receive foe idea of sustenance ; we receive fois bread and this cup, at this table, with these people, on this day, in this hour, bringing with us all our particular hopes and tears. Into our particular circumstance, God’s steadfast love delivers us. We live in this particular today, and we live into foe promise of God’s steadfast love today, which will carry us to tomorrow . A colleague wrote recently that his wife’s father had died several years ago at
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this time of year, deep into f^nt. She sat by his bedside on toe last night, holding his hand. “What did yon do all night long?” he asked. “What did you say?” “1 !־an ont of things to say/’ she explained, “so 1 sang all the Easter hymns 1 could remember and said, ‘Easter’s eoming. Daddy, Easter’s coming.’”’ We live in this particular today. We live into toe promise of God’s steadfast love today, and toe truest word 1 can say to you by way of testimony is that love will carry us to tomorrow. Easter is coming.
Notes لShawnthea Monroe, Feasting on the W ord-YearA, Volume 4: Season After ?enteeost, ed. by David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, (WJK, 2011), 342-344. 2 Catherine Rampell, “Ameriea’s Happiest Man,” The New York Times, March 6,2011. 3 Anthony Kauffman, “Toronto Film Festival: George Clooney’s ‘Up in the Air’ Spotlights Eeonomic Trouble,” The Wall Street Journal, September 13,2009. 4 Shawnthea Monroe, Feasting on the Word, 344. 5 Richard Lischer, Stations ofthe Heart: Parting with a Son, (New York: Knopf, 2013), 88. 6 Tom Junod, “Can You Say…’Hero,”’ Esquire Magazine, October, 1998. 7 John Buchanan, “Easter’s Coming,” The Christian Century, March 20,2013.
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