Psalm 121
Lent 2A
Fondren Presbyterian Church
March 12, 2017
The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
Does Psalm of Ascent mean it is a Psalm that references a high place or climbing to a high place as a means of communing with God? There is ample biblical witness to the importance of high places and their role in both divine presence and human devotion.
Perhaps it means ascent to heaven. Here too we have ample witness to the idea that heaven is somehow located in the heavens where God looks down with interest and devotion to creation.
There is no way to know exactly what these designations mean.
One persuasive case is made for an interpretation that captures several meanings for these Psalms. This school of thought views the Psalms of Ascent as Psalms sung during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
What little internal evidence there is would seem to support this idea. Psalm 120, the first Psalm of Ascent, is clearly written from a perspective outside Jerusalem and Psalm 122 is clearly written from an insider’s context of Jerusalem. If we take those two at face value, Psalm 121 is likely a Psalm of the journey to Jerusalem.
Jerusalem itself was a high place. Whether its relative elevation was greater than your home didn’t really matter. The journey to Jerusalem was always up. Like the old hymn says, “We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful, Zion. We’re marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God.”
And the pilgrimage to get to Jerusalem would lead the pilgrim past many high places. The roads of the Ancient Near East most often followed valleys both for ease of travel and the probability of finding water. So there were literal high places to encounter on the pilgrim journey to the metaphorical high place in God’s holy city.
Most of us are familiar with this particular Psalm of Ascent by its first lines and more particularly from the traditional King James translation of those lines. “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Rendering the psalmist’s words as a declaration, the King James translation begins the Psalm with a bold statement of personal faith. I lift up my eyes to the hills because I know that my help comes from there.
Perhaps a more faithful rendering of the psalmist’s words would phrase that first verse like a question; “I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come?”
It is a question we have all asked in times of fear or uneasiness; in times when we feel threatened or lonely or adrift in our souls.
The psalmist poses this familiar question and then, in the next verse in fact, answers it.
“I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.”
Whatever the danger- physical, emotional, spiritual- our help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. There is no question to the psalmist that God is keeping a watchful eye over him and over us in body, mind, and spirit.
That is perhaps the most important thing we can take away from this Psalm. God is watching over us even when we do not know it or see it or feel it, God is always fully even painfully aware of our lives and is always keeping a watchful eye over us.
“I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.”
“The hills” or the high places were not always encountered as the dwelling place of God. Often the hills would hide dangers on the road. Think about the story of the Good Samaritan who comes along to find a man beaten and robbed lying in a ditch. Bandits and robbers lurked among the craggy rocks of “the hills.”
So when the Psalmist says, “I lift my eyes to the hills.” It is just as likely that the looking was done out of an abundance of caution as unquestioned devotion.
I doubt the man who was robbed and left for dead thought that the help that would come from the maker of heaven and earth would arrive in the person of the Samaritan. As we know from countless sermons and storytellers, Samaritans were not known as good or very respected people. Part of the miracle of that story is that the lowly Samaritan was the one to stop and help.
That is often how God works in our lives. God looks out for us in unexpected ways and, in the case of the Good Samaritan, God’s watchfulness over the physical wellbeing of the traveller was found in the generous hands of a stranger.
“I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.”
Sometimes God’s watchfulness comes closer to home.
In Jonathan Safron Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Oskar Schell is a nine year old boy whose father has been killed in the 9/11 terrorist attack in the Twin Towers. Understandably, Oskar is deeply disturbed by that terrible loss. So when he finds a key in his father’s closet, hidden in an envelope marked “Black,” he is more than interested. He sets out to find the lock that the key will open, convinced that it will tell him something important about his dead father.
So, all by himself, at nine years of age, he sets out to visit every “Black” in New York City. Consulting his telephone book and a map of the city, he goes out to meet total strangers in search of that lock. As we read the book, we are worried for him, wondering how he can do such a thing all alone. And we wonder with more than a little disgust where on earth his mother is in the whole thing.
Finally, by a convoluted set of circumstances Oskar learns that it wasn’t his father’s key after all. It was simply a key hidden in a vase that Oskar’s father had bought at a rummage sale. Angry that his search was in vain, Oskar destroys everything associated with his search. But that’s when he discovered that his mother knew about his activities all the time. In fact, she had contacted everyone in New York with the name Black, telling them what Oskar was doing. All of them knew ahead of time that he was coming and, thus, gave him generally friendly receptions.
She gave him the freedom to conduct his search alone, but she was watching over him all along by going ahead of him and setting up his appointments. Oskar had to go alone to accomplish his mission, but she prepared the way so he was safe. (1)
“I lift my eyes to the hills. From where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.”
These stories of a man helped by a stranger in first century Palestine or a fictional tale of a young boy coming to terms with the loss of his father illustrate the careful watchfulness of God, but God’s work is not kept in the distant past or the pages of a novel. We too lift our eyes to the hills and ask, “From where will my help come?”
The psalmist answers that question in great detail. After proclaiming that our help comes from the Lord, the psalmist elaborates and says:
“He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and forevermore.”
These words of multiple assurances remind us that as we set our feet on the pilgrim journey, whether the physical walk to Jerusalem or the spiritual walk to Golgotha, God will guide our feet and watch our every step.
In a repeated cadence that drives home the point, the psalmist reminds us over and over again that we do not journey alone. And who is with us? None other than YHWH. In fact the name YHWH is mentioned six times and the phrase “watch over” is mentioned five. This is a song about God’s watchfulness.
Years ago Bette Middler sang a song entitled, “From a Distance.” The refrain of the song said, “God is watching us, God is watching us, God is watching us…from a distance.”
When we seek to bring this Psalm home and draw it’s bold assertions of God’s presence and care into our own lives, it is easy to fall into the trap of our modern skeptical age and say, “well if God is watching, she is watching from a distance.”
There is something that feels a little intellectually dishonest or, heaven forbid, overly churchy to talk about God right here right now with me, but that is in fact what the psalmist claims for us. Not that God watches from a distance but that God is right with us, close enough to guide our very feet.
Right here and right now that help comes and though we may be tempted to claim just the cautious confidence of our age, we are called today and every day to the bold confidence of the Psalmist.
And when we do, when we do claim that bold understanding of the God who is watching over us right here and right now, we will know the hope and confidence in that old hymn “Why should I be discouraged, why should the shadows come, why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home; when Jesus is my portion? My constant Friend is he; his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.”
Let us pray.
God of watchfulness, make yourself known to us in this place. Fill us with bold confidence in your promises so we too may know what it is to look to the hills and find our hope. Amen.
1.This sermon illustration is taken from Stan Mast’s notes on this text included in the weekly lectionary notes from the Center for Excellence in Preaching at Calvin Theological Seminary for the week of March 12, 2017.
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