July 26, 2026
Series: Dwelling in the Psalms
William G. Carter
It is a dark text for a sunny day. And it’s in the book. Therefore, it’s fair game. What did Psalm 69 stir up in your soul? Ever feel like you were up to your neck?
My first encounter with the text took place in a conference room near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Five of us were there, all clergy. We met once a month for a brown bag lunch to talk about life and church. It was Al’s turn to convene the group. Rather than share an article or discuss an issue, as the rest of us had done, Al said, “Let’s read a psalm.” This is what we read.
Now, I’ll let you in on a company secret. When ministers get together, the temptation is high for some of them to become experts. They say things like, “Well, the last time I preached on this passage, here is the glorious sermon that says everything anybody needs to say.” But nobody spoke up, because nobody had ever touched it.
Maybe, like some of you, I didn’t even know it was in the Bible. Or if I did, I ran past it as fast as I could. It was dark. Heavy. Over my head.
As he led the group, Al waited us out. Then he dropped a simple question in the middle of the circle, “Does any of this resonate with you?” Then he waited a little longer.
George spoke first. “It’s a hard one,” he said. “Definitely not one of my favorites. I suppose we have regular psalms that we return to, and this is not one on my list.” Take note that he didn’t answer the question. So, Al asked again. “Does this resonate with your soul?”
John stepped in. “Technically speaking, it’s a psalm of lament, a personal lament. The psalmist is expressing some discomfort with his situation. It sounds like he is in trouble. Maybe it’s trouble he stirred up, and it’s gotten out of hand. He can’t make it better. And he has made some enemies. We should keep people like that in our prayers.” Take note, again, he didn’t answer the question, either. Al heard the omission, smiled slightly, then waited.
Dave was next, always uncomfortable with silence. “Well, I don’t know what the poor guy’s problems were, but it’s good to keep a psalm like that around when somebody dumps their problems on us. We can tell them, “Here, read Psalm 69. Isn’t this how you’re feeling?”
Al said, “But Dave, do you ever feel like this?” He shook his head, “No, I stay positive. That’s why I never get overwhelmed. I’m perfectly in control.” George looked at him sideways and said, “I think control is your favorite word.” Dave shrugged it off and said, “We haven’t heard from Bill yet.”
They all looked at me, the young guy in the group. I was reluctant to say that psalm had hit me between the eyes. My first church was a tough church. Lots of critics, lot of differences in opinions, many of which rebounded off of me. I tried to start a Bible study, nobody came. We tried to start a youth group, nobody came. Then I walked into a choir rehearsal and heard them criticizing my wife. Did I dare go home and tell her?
As I mulled over my life, Al asked one more time. “Ever feel like you were up to your neck?” I didn’t say anything, just nodded my head. I felt like I was stuck, and I couldn’t fix any of it.
Now, I tell you this to remind you who is in the room. You may be having a good day, a sunny weekend. But that experience is not universal. Within ten feet from where you are sitting, somebody else is having a very different experience. It’s the nature of human life. Some may be OK. Others may be overwhelmed.
People have told me that this is their experience of sermons, too. One may say, “I enjoyed that sermon,” while the next person declares, “Well, I didn’t.” Is this a matter likes and dislikes? Are there varieties of emotional responses? Perhaps. Yet it could also be the work of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Holy Spirit connects a Bible text to somebody’s heart and misses others in the same room. It just wasn’t their day.
My hunch is that’s not a Bible problem, and more that a Holy Spirit problem. It can be an “us” problem. We come together from such varied situations. And some people are having a bad day.
A bad day. A bad day… this time through the psalm, I began to remember a pop song. No idea who sang it, so I began to ask Mister Google. Who sang about a bad day? The answer sprang up quickly: Daniel Powter, 2005. What was the name of the song? The title is “Bad Day.” According to Mister Google, it was a smash hit for Mister Powter. He sang:
Cause you had a bad day You're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know You tell me don't lie.
You work at a smile, and you go for a ride You had a bad day.[1]
The single went number one. It was a platinum hit in America, Germany. Ireland, and Powter’s homeland Canada. It sold millions of copies and landed on millions of phone ringtones. Advertisers used it for commercials of deodorant and Coca-Cola. Jon Stewart played it when a terrorist was taken out. “You had a bad day.” The video of the song has over 293 million views on YouTube. People may avoid Psalm 69, but apparently a whole lot of them are having bad days.
But that’s only part of the story. Daniel Powter was called a one hit wonder. Wrote a lot of other songs, but nobody bought them. And he made a lot of money – millions of royalties, in fact, all avoiding the fact he had fallen into serious drug and alcohol abuse. He was up to his neck. He sank deeply into the mud, where there was no foothold. He was in deep water until he got sober in 2010.
It all began with an enemy, a babysitter who damaged him as a young child in British Columbia. “I was ashamed of myself, too afraid to ever tell my parents.” He wrote the song out of years of accumulated pain. And when it hit the big time, there was the additional pain of having to sing that song over and over when he really wanted to move on and sing something else. It was years later when he could say, “I’m bigger than ‘Bad Day’ now.[2]
That’s not to say the bad days are not real. Of course they are. The Psalms remind us that life comes with a lot of trouble. Even our achievements stir up trouble. And our failures, faults, and difficulties can threaten to drag us down. So, the Psalm says it from the first line, “Save me, O God.” It ends the same way, “Let your salvation, O God, protect me.”
How did this poet get into trouble? Can’t say for sure. In the wisdom of Israel, many of the details have been sanded away. Not watered down, but no specifics are given. That is our access point. Here is what we know:
· The man has enemies. They hate him for no reason. They are out to destroy him.
·
He
has become a stranger to his own family. He fears that he will bring shame on those
around him.
·
The
neighbors are gossiping. The bar flies make up songs about him.
·
His
heart is broken. He calls on God to help.
Who could this be? Any one of us, I suppose. In fact, the Bible will go on to say, “This could be Jesus.” Did you catch what the psalm says in verse nine? “It is zeal for your house that has consumed me.” Remember when that verse will come up again? After Jesus rides into the city on a donkey, goes into a corrupted Temple, and chases out the sacrificial animals and those who are selling them for a profit. This is how the Gospel of John remembers that explosive moment: “Zeal for your house consumed me.”[3] Literally, it was eating me up.
Then did you hear that other line? It’s in verse 22 and reads, “For my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” All four Gospels tell us when Jesus was on the cross, the soldiers dipped a sponge in vinegar and lifted it for him to sip from the point of a spear.[4] Some would hear that and say, “The Old Testament is all about Jesus.” (It’s not.) It’s more accurate to say, “Jesus is all about the Old Testament.” For the psalm speaks how the righteous person is insulted, shamed, dishonored to the point of despair, and how he has a broken heart.
And Jesus takes all of that onto himself. Before the cross, on the cross, and to no small extent, after the cross, Jesus is hated without cause, condemned without a crime. Even his name becomes a swear word on the 13th fairway. He becomes Psalm 69, the Word in flesh.
In the last book he published before the German Nazis shut him down, Dietrich Bonhoeffer offered advice on reading these difficult psalms. If you read a psalm that doesn’t connect with you, try reading it as a prayer that Jesus prayed. For the psalms of Israel comprised his prayer book. Their words and phrases infused his words. And when the New Testament writers wanted to tell the story of Jesus, they drew on the psalms for their vocabulary. They came to believe he was all about the Old Testament.
Here is some of what Bonhoeffer
wrote:
It is the Incarnate Son of God, who has borne every human weakness in his own flesh, who here pours out the heart of all humanity before God and stands in our place and prays for us. He has known torment and pain, guilt and death more deeply than us. Therefore, it is the prayer of the human nature assumed by him which comes here before God. It is really our prayer, but since he knows us better than we know ourselves and since he himself was (truly human) for our sakes, it is also really his prayer, and it can become our prayer only because it is his prayer.[5]
This is deep water, indeed. Jesus prays for the same thing we ask, for holy justice. For God to come. For the Holy One to hear the cry of the needy and never abandon his own. This is our continuing reminder that prayer does not always fix a problem. Prayer participates in a relationship. And if a Psalm doesn’t speak for us, it does speak for somebody else. We can pray for them.
There’s one thing more. In the thick of whatever pain we carry, the counterweight is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Liam read it to us from Paul’s letter to the Romans at the end of that enormous eighth chapter. Let me wrap things up by putting the words in the air once more:
If
God is for us, who is against us? Who will
separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution
or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written (in the Psalms),
“For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to
be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than victorious through
him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate
us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
[1] See the video online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH476CxJxfg
[2] Daniel Prowter, The Canadian
Press, August 15, 2012, "Now-sober singer Daniel Powter over his bad days
with 'Turn the Lights On'".
[3] John 2:17.
[4] Mark 15:36, Matthew 27:34, Luke 23:35,
John 19:28-30.
[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms:
The Prayer Book of the Bible (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1970)
20-21.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment