Sermon-of-the-Month for March, 2008
A MEDITATION ON PSALM 130
1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.
2 Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
3 If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
4 But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
5 I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
7 O Israel, hope in the LORD!
For with the LORD there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
8 It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.
The season of Lent, which we are moving through in these weeks leading up to Easter, is, along with Advent, called a penitential season in the life of the church. The word penitential is likely problematic for many of us, reminding us of words like penalty, penitentiary, or penance – so it is easy to think of Lent as a season that robs us of the joy and laughter of life, a time for morbid introspection or obsessive dwelling on the sufferings of Christ. It is indeed a season that graciously invites us to look honestly at our lives and confront the broken places there that keep us from living in the wholeness and spiritual well-being that God intended for each of us. But the invitation is always issued in the assurance of God’s mercy and the hope of transformation, just as our weekly prayers of confession are never prayed apart from an assurance of God’s pardon. The Psalm designated for the 5th Sunday in Lent is Psalm 130, which is one of the church’s seven penitential Psalms, and I think there is no better reflection on the meaning and message of Lent than this brief hymn from the Psalmist.
It begins in a mood of near despair and self-contempt. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord...” We don’t need Lent to find ourselves cast down and shamed by the brokenness of our lives; we don’t need a faith that knocks us down because we already live too much of our lives in great pain and restlessness, beaten down by our inability to attain the longed-for perfection in our life, by the old compulsions won’t let go and by our self-disgust that destroys our joy and courage. Not all the time...but enough of the time that the Psalmist speaks for us in crying out from the depths for relief and renewal. Some might say that the basic human problem is that we love ourselves too much; but I think the greater problem is that we love ourselves too little and therefore have too little love to share. The depths in Hebrew poetry have always symbolized the chaotic forces that threaten us with devastation and death; they are like water because we can drown in our own brokenness.
But the Psalmist knows enough even in such depths of despondency to know that God is near, just as the Psalm of the 23rd Psalm knows that in the deepest valleys “thou art with me.” So the Psalmist does something...he cries out in anticipation of being heard; we’re never so overwhelmed by sinfulness that God can’t hear us. Ann Lamott says in her writing that she really only has two basic prayers: “Thank you” and “HELP!” This is a “HELP!” Psalm, a cry of lament but at the same time a cry of hope because of who God is.
The Psalmist knows that God is not a God whose resolute mission with us is to watch for our failures and catalog our iniquities. God is not the “gotcha” God that haunts so many people, like a neurotic parent who takes delight in catching children in their naughtiness. No – if that were the case, there would be no hope for anyone. “If you marked down iniquities Lord, who could stand?” – we’d all be “up the river.” But no, the basic disposition of the Lord is to forgive, not condemn: “There is forgiveness with you” – “and that’s why you're worshiped.” What an erroneous understanding of God burdens so many people who can’t get beyond their self-loathing.
There is a strong measure of realism here, however. Life seldom gets transformed immediately. We’re rightly suspicious of remedies that promise overnight success; spiritual healing usually takes time. Faith is more a traveling than an arrival; panacea believers who want quick fixes and instant answers and immediate relief of all struggle need to hear these next words of the Psalmist; “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” Waiting and hoping are two great expressions of faith. You need both because waiting without hope would be a hell of futility. Waiting doesn’t mean calling a halt to life and sitting in our despair until “something happens.” It’s been said that when you’re going through hell, the best thing is to keep moving. But as we move we pray the “HELP!” prayer and we live in hope, awaiting the transforming love of God to deliver us from our captivity to despondence. We “watch for the morning” to break upon the darkness that has enclosed us. It will come.
And there is a certainty in which we live and move: God is a God of steadfast love and great power to redeem...and God will redeem Israel, will redeem all of his children, from our iniquities, our battered and broken lives. It will happen, and because that final word is a word of mercy and love, not condemnation and separation, we live in the hope of that fulfillment and the knowledge, in Paul’s words, that “nothing in all creation” – and that would include our self-destructive compulsions and our contemptuous self-assessments – “nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Yes, we can see how this Lenten Psalm points us to the kind of love we have seen in Jesus on the cross, his own experience of “the depths,” where God was present to turn the place of human sin at its very worst to the place of God’s redemptive love at its very best. Amen.
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