Depths

Psalm 130

Lent 3A

Fondren Presbyterian Church

March 19, 2017

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

            One of the great traditions in the church is setting the Psalms to music.  In fact, in Calvin’s church in Geneva the only music sung were the Psalms, though he did take some liberties! 

            Bach wrote one of the most beautiful settings of our reading today.  Known by its German title, “Aus Der Tiefen,” it is a cantata in five movements that seeks to capture something of the disturbing truth of this Psalm. 

            The music begins with just the oboe and bassoon accompanying the strings.  The music swells and recedes in a repetitive cycle that takes the listener to the brink yet never quite resolves.  Compounding this unresolved beginning, the meter of the piece alternates from ¾ to Common or 4/4 time leaving the listener in the midst of a swirling cloud of sound never offering balance, continuing to turn back on itself and refusing to move forward.  Listening to Bach’s composition, it is not difficult to imagine oneself rocking in the open waters of the ocean, bobbing in the waves, one after the other, with nothing in sight but more waves.  There is a sense of both loneliness and inescapability.

            Then, just as your ears are about to give up, the lone bass soloist intones those haunting words, “aus der tiefen” “out of the depths” followed by the lone tenor singing the same words.  And as you hear the two voices singing out of step each seeming to be oblivious to the other, you feel the depths- the loneliness- of the singers- of the writer- and get a glimpse of what kind of place this really is.

            It is a place of profound solitude.

            Psalm 130 is not about sadness. 

            It is not even about misery.

            It is about the crushing loneliness that comes when, even for an instant, we feel the profound absence of God.

            Aus der Tiefen,, out of the depths, I cry.

            It is a place familiar only to those of us who have ever drawn breath;  one of the few truly universal human experiences.

            This is a Psalm about those moments when the world’s trials and tribulations suck all the oxygen from the room and seek to bar hope from entering in.

            When I was about a year and a half out of seminary, I was called by the local funeral home and asked if I could help with a funeral for a family that had no church connection. The couple were from Romania, had grown up under Nicolai Ceausescu’s regime when religion was all but eradicated from daily life.  Consequently, when they arrived in Ann Arbor as graduate students with their two children and her mother, they had no church home.

            One January night, a faulty home heater started a fire and in an instant their excitement about starting a new adventure as a family became a depth greater than any parent or person should ever know.

            I met the family at the funeral home and as I waited on them to come in and as I stood by the two tiny coffins holding their 2 and 5 year old children, I remember thinking to myself, “They shouldn't have to make these so small.” 

            In that moment, those parents knew the kind of grief King David knew when he cried out to the heavens, “Absalom!  My son, Absalom!” pleading for some substitutionary intervention that would return his beloved son to him.

            As a pastor, I have the deeply mysterious honor to attend death.  Over my almost two decades in ministry, I have been at bedsides just before, just after and even at the moment of death for countless members of my various communities of faith.  I have seen death come as a thief in the night as it did for those parents in Ann Arbor and as a welcomed friend at the end of prolonged illness. 

            In those moments, platitudes die, textbooks wither, and the canned rhetoric of church work is useless.  In those moments when life and death intersect and our mortality is most vivid, all that is left is honest address to the maker and keeper of us all.

            When the illogic of our mortality and the frailty of the gift of life is most evident, the only place we can turn is to the wisdom of the ancient elders of the faith; to the ineffable words of those charged with voicing our common human cry from the depths and across time.

            There tossed about in the waters with loneliness and lament from every direction and no sign of help or rescue, the psalmist cries out his eternal words to God. 

            As so often happens in scripture and in our broader experience with God, there is embedded in this moment of personal and emotional desperation a kernel of great faithfulness.

            In these words of lament and pleading, there is a quiet beauty in this Psalm.  Not in the sadness or the desperate cry, but in the fact that even in his distress, the psalmist remains convinced of God’s goodness.  He is still convinced that God forgives rather than condemns.  That God is indeed the good God of the psalmist’s memory.

            In the moment when it is so tempting to lash out against God and cast blame on the LORD for failing to stop the calamity that left us in such a state or even worse blaming God for CAUSING the pain in life, the psalmist turns to God not in blame but in faith. 

            One of the most famous books on the subject of the human reality of the depths was written by Rabbi Harold Kushner.  Commonly misremembered as Why Bad Things Happen to Good People the actual title is When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  Kushner does not set out to explain the cause of bad things but to explore the character of God in those times when they happen. 

            In the end, Kushner comes to a similar conclusion as that of the psalmist.  Bad things happen because life and we are imperfect and in imperfection bad things happen and not because God somehow decided that we deserve calamity. 

            The psalmist knows the Lord well and knows that God does not keep score.

            Did you hear that, God does not keep score!

            Somehow the psalmist writing three millennia ago better understood the character of God better than many Christians today.

            After Katrina hit the coast, one of the most ludicrous assessments of the storm came from mega-church pastor John Hagee in San Antonio.  By his estimation the storm’s destructive power was caused because, “I believe New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that.”  

            One commentator pointed out that most of the destruction happened in the 9^th ward and other parts of the city where the most vulnerable lived while Bourbon Street, home to all night parties and the wilder side of Mardi Gras, was mostly spared.  “If the point was to punish sinners,” the commentator said, “God needs to work on his aim.”

If you kept track of sins, Lord—
            my Lord, who would stand a chance?
But forgiveness is with you—
    that’s why you are honored.

The witness of this Psalm reveals the lie of Hagee’s theology; T

the lie of the theology of the God of the balance sheet;  

the lie of the theology of the God who executes punishment in this life for infractions to the rule book. 

the lie of the theology of a God who is anything but always and everywhere generous, loving, merciful, and good. 

Those false theologies are the story of a god other than the LORD of life consistently witnessed to throughout scripture; the forgiving and loving God eager to show mercy and slow to anger. 

It always strikes me as odd how often modern fundamentalist Christians, like Hagee, fundamentally misunderstand God.

Whatever befalls us in this life- threat to life and limb or capsized and tossed about spirits- God, the psalmist reminds us, is not behind it.[i] 

Here in these ancient words, we see the psalmist clinging to this truth of his forgiving God.

And it is here that the Psalm takes an amazing turn. 

That memory that describes the character of God in the midst of the psalmist’s reality begins to change his very understanding of his reality.  Up to this point, the psalmist has given no indication of expectation for God to act on his behalf.   To be sure, the psalmist is clear that God is not behind this calamity, but there is nothing to say that God is somehow on the way to rescue him.

Until verse 5.

At verse 5 the psalmist says simply, “I hope, Lord.”

“I hope, Lord.”

There tossed about in the sea of his own loneliness, the dangers and toils and snares all around and no indication in the text that help is at hand, the psalmist says matter-of-factly, “I hope, Lord.”

This hope is far from fingers crossed hoping for a good outcome. The psalmist likens it to the hope the night watch feels when the first rays of the sun are anticipated in the horizon.  Finishing the night watch meant one more night of peace in the city so the night watch waited with more than eager anticipation for the morning light.  In the rays of the sun resided their hope for the coming day.

That is the hope that fills the psalmist even in the midst of the depths.

It is a profound hope that defies the darkest deepest places to which our souls may sink. 

So how did we get from the “I cry” in verse 1 to the “I hope” of verse 5?

What could possibly have worked in the psalmist’s heart to usher in such a change even in the midst of his crying?

Nothing short of the steadfast love of God.

Israel, wait for the Lord!
    Because faithful love is with the Lord;
            because great redemption is with our God!
He is the one who will redeem Israel
            from all its sin.

            The basis of the psalmist’s hope is the steadfast love of God.  In Hebrew it is hesed, in Greek it is agape, in every tongue it is the transformative love of God that finds its way into every heart, every depth, every dark and lonely place to bring the light of Jesus Christ.

            By the end of the Psalm, the writer has gone from a lone voice crying out to God from the depths to a brother reminding Israel to hold onto hope in God.  He has gone from a lone voice in the wilderness to a voice for the nation’s hope.  And the thing that intervened; the thing that drew him from despair to hope was the steadfast love of God.  It alone is able to lift him up and out of the depths.

            By the fifth movement of Bach’s cantata as the text makes its way to the end of the Psalm, the deep tones of the winds give way to the liveliness of the harpsichord and the full chorus joins the lone bass voice from the start and as the same minor key from the first movement is transformed and redeemed to something new, what began as ominous and unresolved takes on a melodic beauty that draws hope even from the depths of despair.

            So it was for the psalmist.  In his darkest hour, the hope of God would not let him go.

            So may it be for we who encounter darkness and echoing loneliness.  My we each know that the hope of God will never let us go.  It does and it will sustain us in this and in every day.

            Let us pray.

            Ever-present ever-loving God, we cry out to you from the depths.  In each of our lives, there are deep places; places of profound sadness and loneliness.  And from those places we cry out to you.  We cry out knowing that our pleas fall not on deaf but on loving ears.  So indwell our hearts that we forever know the presence of your love and the eternity of your care.  Give us each the courage to reach out from our deep places and, in your name, reach out to one another.  For when we are together in your name, we are never alone.  You in the person of Christ and the power of the Spirit are with us now and always.  Amen.

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[i] In fact the whole book of Job is a demonstration of what the character of God is NOT, but that is another sermon for another day.