Inescapably Yours

Psalm 139

July 18, 2020

William G. Carter

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

  You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.

     Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

     Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

     if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

     even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,”

     even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day,

     for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

     I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

     Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.

My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.

     In your book were written all the days that were formed for me,  

     when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

     I try to count them, they are more than sand; I come to the end, I am still with you.

O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—

     those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? Do I not loathe those who rise up against you?

     I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

            See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Here is one of the awkward truths of life these days: there is nowhere to hide. Everywhere we go, somebody is watching.

Back when security cameras were rare, we knew we were being tracked inside the local bank. Now the unseen eyes are everywhere. Silent cameras track us on the highway, in stores, stadiums, and elevators. Above our heads, there are satellite cameras with the ability to zoom in and see the pigment of a fruit fly’s eyes.

More and more of the planet is being mapped, so it is increasingly difficult to get lost. When my friend Louie moved to South Carolina some years ago, I was curious about the kind of house he bought. So I looked up his address on Google Maps – ever do this? There was the town, the street, and a picture of the front of his home, a nice ranch home. And on the day that camera car from Google drove by, there was Louie, waving from the garage.

I was intrigued to hear accounts of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British heiress. She has been accused of some terrible crimes. The FBI found her in the woods of New Hampshire after a year of hiding. Actually, they have known for a while where she was hiding. Nobody noticed when she bought a log frame mansion for a million dollars cash, but the authorities were watching.

There is not a lot of privacy anymore. Not a lot of anonymity.

When we record these worship services, if the organist plays a piece that somebody else has ever recorded, our software program dings, and we are evaluated for a copyright violation. Somebody just knows.

Do you order any books on Amazon? Amazon tracks every order and suggests similar books. They are watching, in order to make another sale.

Maybe you remember the Jason Bourne spy movies. The spies chase after Jason Bourne, the brainwashed assassin. Lot of action in those movies, but the primary theme is surveillance. There are cameras in London train stations, a bank in Zurich, a street corner in Manhattan. And these are old movies. Just think how many unnoticed eyes caught us on the last trip into town.

Our neighbors installed a security camera and pointed it at our house. I thought they knew our kids have grown and moved out, but maybe they aren’t watching our kids. Every Thursday night, when I take the garbage cans to the curb, the floodlight comes on, the red light on the camera flares up. So I turn to the camera and wave, sometimes creatively. I might as well give them a good show – they are watching. 

All this can sound intimidating. Somebody watches us. They track how we spend our money. They watch where we go. They anticipate what we are likely to do.

So it may be no great comfort to hear the Psalmist declare that God is watching, too. In fact, God is the Original Surveillance Officer. Adam and Eve were hiding in the Garden. God said, “Where are you? Where did you go?” Pretty soon, you realize that is a set up question. God knows. God already knows.

Abram and Sarai are told they will become parents for the first time. They are sufficiently ancient that Medicare is picking up the tab. A baby? Sounds like a ridiculous promise, so Sarai bursts out laughing. God’s angels say, “Why are you laughing?” She says, “I wasn’t laughing.” God says, “Oh yes, you were. I saw you. I heard you.” (Gen. 18:15)

Sometimes God’s observation is a good thing. God speaks up from a burning bush and says, “Moses, I have watched the misery of my enslaved people in Egypt. I have heard their cry. I have seen their suffering.” Moses is relieved to hear it, I think; God has taken notice. Moses is curious; God has noticed, so what will God do? And God says, “Here’s what I will do about the suffering I have heard and seen: Moses, I am sending you to contend with Pharoah.” Freedom happened because God knows. God sees. God hears everything.

Sometimes that is a spooky thing. Like all those resurrection stories in the New Testament. A stranger catches up with a couple of sad friends who grieve the death of Jesus and the loss of all their hopes. The stranger says, “What are you talking about?” He already knows. Yes, he knows. (Luke 24:18-27)

Or Doubting Thomas, that dim bulb among the disciples. He exclaims, “I’m not going to believe until I can stick my pinky in the nail holes.” So what does Jesus do? A week later he appears inside a locked room while they are hiding, and says, “Hey Thomas, here are the nail prints on my hands. Put your little finger here.” The Lord has been listening the whole time. He heard it all. He has seen it all. (John 20:24-27)

This can be intimidating. To realize God sees what we do, that God sees the dark thought, the foul deed, the shady deal. Nothing lies beyond the observation of our Lord.

Like King David, taking advantage of his royal privilege, to add another beautiful woman to his bedroom and kill off her husband in a useless act of war. The king thought he got away with the scheme. She was pregnant. He was the king. He plotted a cover up, probably paid some hush money. And the whole time, God was watching. So God sent the prophet Samuel to tell David what David had done – because God knew. God always knows. (2 Samuel 11:27)

There are no secrets if there is a God who sees us. No shadows in the presence of the light of the world.

This divine characteristic – omniscience, we call it – that God is all-knowing, has often prompted a lot of moral policing and finger-wagging, especially in the church. By the tenth century AD, the church had written a prayer that some of you know. This prayer for purity begins, “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” God searches our hearts; the Psalmist knows this.

Yet the Psalmist knows something more. The God who watches our deeds and knows our thoughts is the God who knows “when I sit down and when I rise up.” That’s the language of a Good Parent. Every good parent tucks in the children at night and listens for when they wake. Every attentive Parent pulls back the curtain late at night and watches for the teenager to get home. My sister and I joked that, when we were out late at night, our mother slept with one eye open. She is a good Mom.

Psalm 139 says there is nowhere we can wander that God does not watch, nowhere we can go that God cannot get to us. “O Lord,” prays the Psalmist, “where could I ever get away from you?”

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

     if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

     even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

It isn’t because God is nosey, it isn’t because God is controlling or manipulative, it isn’t because God is poised to pounce if we have a wayward word or deed, it isn’t because God is neglecting the asteroids. God watches because God cares about us. Whether we know it or now, we are in a relationship. God sees us because God has already claimed us. Life began with God, says the Psalmist, and all the way through and to the end, God leads and holds… because we are loved, because we are claimed.

The invitation is to trust this until we know it.

Did I ever tell you about my friend Carol? She is really something. We have been friends since the eighth grade. These days she runs a coffee shop in my hometown, and I like to visit when I can.

Some years ago, she started making the headlines on the sports page. She played some sports in high school, but that was high school. Some time in her late twenties, she started to jog, then run. She ran 10-K fundraisers and 26-mile marathons. I was curious about that, so she told me the story.

She was married and they had a little boy. The marriage had its bumps, as many marriages do, but both of them loved little Joey, provided for little Joey, until that one terrible night when little Joey died. It was a horrible thing, about the worst thing that could ever possibly happen to young parents. He wasn’t breathing. “From that point,” she confessed, “my life fell to pieces.”

Depression hit hard. Her husband was no help. The marriage came unraveled. Nobody could find a way to assist. To handle her own stress, Carol started to jog. No reason, really. It seemed the thing to do.

She said, "I'd get up in the morning, and the first thing I'd do is put on my sweats and start running. Maybe it was from shock more than anything else. I just needed to be moving. Months went by and I kept running. I don't know why. Was I running away from something? Running to find something? I don’t know.”

And then, one morning, she ran around a bend on a country road and she saw a church. Suddenly, she said, “in a flash I knew I was running away from God. I wanted nothing to do with God. God gave me a little boy, and I lost my little boy. God gave me a marriage, and I lost that, too. It was so unfair. What did this happen?”

Standing in the middle of the road, she said, “I let God have it. I yelled. I screamed. I told God, I’m not going to let you off the hook. The tears were in my eyes, as I started to jog, and then run. And the whole time, I had the strangest sensation. It was as if Somebody was listening. As if Somebody was running beside me. So I ran faster to get away, and he kept up.”

“When I got home, that feeling was still there. When I want for a run the next morning, I had the sense Somebody was running by my side. And then the profound realization came: God had been with me the whole time, with me for my whole life. His presence was inescapable and now I know it. My son is with God, and so am I.”

I said, “Is that how you will all those races?” She laughed and said, “Nah, it’s something to do on weekends.” She paused to make her point. “What really matters is that once I ran to get away from God; now I run to pray. Once I ran away from terrible pain; now I run to see God in all things.”

As the Psalmist sings, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” Wherever I go, you are there.

This is the difference between a surveillant society that merely wants to consume us and an ever-present God who invites us to belong as beloved children. God was, God is, God ever shall be. God comes before, God follows after us, and all the while, God is with us to guide, challenge, and comfort.  

In one of his essays, Thomas Lynch reflected on the challenges of his work as a funeral director in Michigan. His work brings him into contact with people in the worst of circumstances. Earlier in his life, he confesses, this did a number on him. He would come home from a demanding day and worry about his own family. But even if he peeked through the bedroom door at night, he had to ultimately close the door and entrust his family to the providence of God. As he writes,

But faith is, so far as I know it, the only known cure for fear – the sense that someone is in charge here, is checking the ID’s and watching the borders. Faith is what my mother said: letting go and letting God – a leap into the unknown where we are not in control but always welcome.[1]

We are not in control but always welcome. We are known and loved by a God who pays attention to each one of us as a Parent loves the child. God’s providence surrounds us, and we can never outrun it. And no matter where we go, wherever we find ourselves, God is already there. So we pray for the eyes to see and pray for the heart to know.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

Thanks to Thomas G. Long, whose article "Psalm 139 and the Eye of God" (Journal for Preachers, Pentecost 2020) shaped the thinking of this sermon.

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[1] Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (New York Norton, 2009) 50-54.

More Than We Need

Psalm 65

July 12, 2020

William G. Carter

Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion;

and to you shall vows be performed, O you who answer prayer! To you all flesh shall come.

When deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions.

Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts.

We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.

By awesome deeds you answer us with deliverance, O God of our salvation;

you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.

By your strength you established the mountains; you are girded with might.

You silence the roaring of the seas, the roaring of their waves, the tumult of the peoples.

Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs;

you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy.

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water;

you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it.

You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, 

softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.

The pastures of the wilderness overflow, the hills gird themselves with joy,

the meadows clothe themselves with flocks, the valleys deck themselves with grain,

they shout and sing together for joy.

When we updated our television some time back, I began to ask around about good programs to watch on a TV that now had a laser-sharp picture. Many of you offered great suggestions: a concert where the rock star Sting sings with a full orchestra, some reworked Alfred Hitchcock movies, and remarkable entertainment from all kinds of places.

By far, the best suggestion was a series of nature shows that we had missed when first broadcast on a channel we didn’t know about. The series was called “Planet Earth.” There were eleven shows, all about an hour long, each one narrated with the flawless diction of Sir David Attenborough. Sir David took us on a tour of the whole planet.

We climbed the Himalayas to see the snow leopards and descended into the caves of Borneo to see the bats. We recoiled at the six-foot-long salamander in Japan and the piranhas of Brazil. We flew from mountain peaks to desert sands to coral reefs off Australia. The aurora borealis glimmered over northern Scotland while the winds blew through the savannah grasses of Africa. The series is stunning, and so are the sequels.

These days, we can flip through the National Geographic channel or watch a veterinarian do surgery in the Yukon. But what was so powerful of “Planet Earth” was the ability to scan the breadth, depth, and diversity of this entire planet in about eleven hours. It was far more interesting than watching an old movie. There is power and majesty when we encounter this entire planet.

The poet who gives us Psalm 65 is well acquainted with the world. He didn’t have high definition cameras at his disposal. Nor could he travel very far. Yet in this song of praise, it is clear to him that God is making all of it, that God is the inventor of meadows and hills, the Giver of grain, the Source of water and wind. The seas roar like lions. The waves smash against the rocks. By their sheer size, the mountains call us to lift our praises skyward. And when the rains fall, as they fell so abundantly on Friday night, the whole creation is renewed.

God stands behind all of this, says the poet. The magnitude of creation is overwhelming. Certainly, it proceeds from the imagination of a Superior Being. To see the world, in all its size as well as its intricate smallness, is humbling for us, who think we know so much yet are unable to manage so little. The poet looks toward God and declares, “By awesome deed you answer us, O God; you are the hope of the ends of the earth.”

It was John Calvin who said it well: “There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world, that is not intended to make [us] rejoice.”[1] Calvin didn’t travel very far to observe that. Like the ancient psalmist, he stuck close to home and simply paid attention. Yet each of them experienced enough of God’s creation to hear the invitation to rejoice and welcome God’s rule over it all.

The hallmarks of God’s rule are creativity and abundance. There is so much to see, so much to taste, so much to embrace and learn and enjoy. Even if we sit on the porch, as some did during Friday’s storm, we see the rain dance on the sidewalk and renew the soil. Pretty soon, everything will sprout up even higher. There is so much, and it’s all a gift from the Creator. Even when unwanted dandelions pop up, or that runaway spearmint threatens to conquer the flower garden, or better yet, those fresh strawberries that my wife just made into jam – it’s all good, and there’s so much of it.

The Bible is not bashful about the creation. As one Bible scholar notes,

The Bible starts out with a liturgy of abundance. Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God's generosity. It tells how well the world is ordered. It keeps saying, "It is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good." It declares that God blesses -- that is, endows with vitality -- the plants and the animals and the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the creator as saying, "Be fruitful and multiply." In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God's creator spirit. And as you know, the creation ends in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, "I've got to take a break from all this. I've got to get out of the office."[2]

There is so much. The psalm for today looks around the field, and bursts into song. “You crown the year with your bounty; your wagon tracks overflow with richness.” God creates more than we need.

Yet here is the question: if there is so much, why do some folks think there is so little?

Perhaps they grew up in constricted times. The long-experienced ones of our acquaintance grew up in economic depression. Banks failed. Jobs disappeared. Three slices of bologna had to feed five people. It’s hard for younger folks to even imagine, especially when so many of us have convinced ourselves that luxuries are necessities. Like that cell phone, which would have been deemed a waste of money twenty-five years ago. Or that big TV that I convinced myself that we had to have; everyone else has one, I reasoned, so why not me?

Decisions like this were absurd to my grandmother, who was born in 1914 and raised in rural simplicity in a time of widespread poverty. Whenever I would phone her, she said, “You better hang up; this call is costing you an arm and a leg.” One time I told her she was worth the double amputation, so she hung up on me. In her generation, you didn’t waste money because you didn’t have any enough to go around. You cleaned your plate because the next meal was uncertain. You never bought more shoes than what you needed.

The lesson was instructive, and it went like this: simplicity, out of necessity. Grow your own food. Make your own clothing. Walk on your own two feet. Live modestly.

By contrast, remember back to the initial days of this pandemic. Those who had the means hoarded all the toilet paper and stockpiled the Lysol and paper towels. What was that all about? Fear, of course; fear that there wouldn’t be enough to go around. “I need mine, even if that means you don’t get yours.” And who was doing all the hoarding? The people who could afford it! Those who had to have what their neighbors couldn’t have. My hunch is they haven’t begun to use all that they have stockpiled.

So let’s set all this in the context of Psalm 65. God creates an abundant world, teeming with life and resources. There is plenty for everybody. Yet the recurring human response is the fear of scarcity. That’s the issue, isn’t it?

Not that God creates abundance, but that there isn’t enough to go around. Abundance or scarcity? That’s the choice.

Walter Brueggemann, the Old Testament theologian, points out that the fear of scarcity led to the Egyptian enslavement of the Hebrew people. God creates an abundant earth, a Psalm 65 earth. But in 47^th chapter of Genesis, Pharoah dreams there will be a famine in the land.

So Pharaoh gets organized to administer, control and monopolize the food supply. Pharaoh introduces the principle of scarcity into the world economy. For the first time in the Bible, someone says, "There's not enough. Let's get everything." … Because Pharaoh is afraid that there aren't enough good things to go around, he must try to have them all. Because he is fearful, he is ruthless. Pharaoh hires Joseph to manage the monopoly. When the crops fail and the peasants run out of food, they come to Joseph. And on behalf of Pharaoh, Joseph says, "What's your collateral?" They give up their land for food, and then, the next year, they give up their cattle. By the third year of the famine they have no collateral but themselves. And that's how the children of Israel become slaves -- through an economic transaction.

By the end of Genesis 47 Pharaoh has all the land except that belonging to the priests, which he never touches because he needs somebody to bless him. The notion of scarcity has been introduced into biblical faith. The Book of Exodus records the contest between the liturgy of generosity and the myth of scarcity -- a contest that still tears us apart today[3]

Is there enough? Or not? Psalm 65 says there is plenty, an abundance to go around, a world teeming with God’s generosity. But some of us aren’t so sure.

Sometimes the matter is translated into moral terms. The apostle Paul had to address the lazy people in one of his churches. Apparently, some of them were sitting around, doing nothing, waiting for the Lord to come. In a moment of frustration, Paul said, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10)

By contrast, Jesus, on more than one occasion, fed the multitudes because they had no food. These were the poor, plundered by an occupying army. Jesus collected the little bread that they had, broke it, and there was plenty to go around. More abundance than they could imagine! (Mark 6:44, 8:9) He is the Sower who throws more seed into the field than it can ever use.

The early church followed after Jesus. In the book of Acts, they shared everything they had and gave to those in need (Acts 4:32-35). Yet in one tragic tale, two church people – Ananias and Sapphira – sold some real estate and held back some money for themselves. Saint Peter confronted each of them and it didn’t turn out well.

Why do people do this? Why do some share and others clutch? Picture two brothers: one gives freely, the other hunkers over his stuff. How can that be? They are raised in the same home, fed from the same table, given the same opportunities, loved equally by the same parents. Yet one lives out of abundance. The other fears scarcity. How can this be? I don’t know.

What I do know is that God creates a world of abundance. There is more than we need. There is plenty for all. Whether it is human fear, or the perceived inequality of everyone treated fairly, or good, old fashioned greed, we continue to have a distribution problem. What’s more, no matter how much some of us have, we want more. Especially if we can get more than the person next to us.

Ultimately this is a matter of the heart. And everyone must decide: are we going to live with the assumption of abundance or out of the fear of scarcity? And if there is an abundance, what are we going to do with it? Hoard or share?

While we decide, Psalm 65 celebrates the God who goes on giving. When the earth runs dry, God sends the rain. When the birds and beasts are hungry, God provides the food. When we find ourselves in trouble, God gives us help. When “deeds of iniquity” twist us out of shape, God sets us free with forgiveness to start afresh. Every single day, every lonely night, God provides an abundance.

And we can spend a lot of time wondering, is this the way God is?

We can wonder all we want. For what the Psalmist declares is what I say to you all: abundance wins. Abundance always wins. Our lives depend on God’s generosity.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] John Calvin, quoted in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (Oxford, 1988), pp. 134-135.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, “The Liturgy of Abundance, The Myth of Scarcity,” The Christian Century, March 24-31, l999

[3] Brueggemann, ibid.

Dealing with Disquiet

Psalm 42

July 5, 2020

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night,

while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul:

how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God,

with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

My soul is cast down within me;

therefore I remember you from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.

Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts;

all your waves and your billows have gone over me.

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,

and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.

I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”

As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me,

while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?”

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

Well, here it is: a psalm fit for a pandemic! We don’t know the original setting of its composition. We have no access to the specific circumstances that prompted this poetic prayer. But we resonate with the emotions.

The psalmist says, “I remember processing into the house of God. There was a crowd in the sanctuary. Everybody was singing. Everybody burst into songs of thanksgiving. There was a multitude. I remember that.” But looking around this sanctuary, there is a smattering of saints, all six feet from one another. A few here, a few there. If there is a multitude, it is the dispersed community in Internet Land. Hardly anybody is singing.

We are living through a disruptive and awkward season. Jobs have been lost. Vacations are canceled. Loved ones have to remain a safe distance apart. One of the married couples in our church family is already split between two cities in two different states. The ruling has just come out: if she comes home from Tennessee to spend some summer time with her husband, she must first be quarantined for fourteen days. So the psalmist says, “My soul longs for you.”

Writing about the psalms, someone has said these are “prayers meant to be overheard by others.”[1] Think about that for a minute. A lot of us say our prayers as if they are ours alone: my concern, my worry, my words. But the psalms belong to all of us. And when we don’t have the words for prayer, the prayers are given to us. When we come across a psalm that stands some distance from our experience, it is still a gift. It reminds us of what other people are praying. The words are waiting for us, available for when we need them.

So today, here is Psalm 42. It comes as a stanza and a refrain, a second stanza and the refrain. Originally it was probably united with the next one, Psalm 43, which comes with a single stanza and the identical refrain. Yet whoever split them into two made a good decision. Psalm 42 stands on its own. The governing theme is sadness.

Life is not as it used to be. What we thought we could count upon has been disrupted. All the old certainties are now questioned. The familiar rituals and routines have unraveled. The poet describes the impact: “tears are my food, night and day,” “my soul is downcast,” and “as I remember the happy songs of the past, my inner being is disquieted.”

That’s not a word we use every day, but we know what it means. The prefix sounds like disturb, disgust, and disappointment. Disquiet is the opposite of quiet. Not noisy, so much as anxious, unsettled, uneasy. Disquieted – do we know how that feels? I think we do.

And let me point out the awkward truth: Psalm 42 doesn’t give any quick answers. No simple fixes. No rushing to resolution. The poet beckons us to hope, to hope in God. I agree with him or her, whoever this is, but I can’t help but wonder if the poet is trying to convince his or her own soul. Most of this psalm speaks of a longing in the heart, a thirst not yet quenched, a hope not yet realized.

In the meantime, what do we do? If the psalmist has no quick answer, neither do I. I admit this is unsatisfying.

Some years ago, we put a literature rack out in the narthex and filled it with brochures. It was intended to be helpful, offering tips on getting through the loss of a loved one, what to do if your teenager got mixed up in trouble, things like that. One brochure was titled, “Your Negative Emotions.” Someone saw it there, grabbed the whole stack, and knocked on my door.

“We can’t put this out there,” she said. Why? “Because it’s so…so negative.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “Well, uh, I think it gives the wrong message,” she declared.

I responded, “But do you think any negative people ever walk into the door of our church?” She sputtered, “Oh, um, yes, I suppose they do. But I think we need to be preaching positivity. We need to lift people’s spirits, not let them stay negative.”

It was at that point I shared with her a statistic that I had heard. It came from a psychological study of church music. The context was those congregations that fired their organists, got rid of the choirs, and brought in guitarists playing soft-edged songs that were perpetually optimistic. In those congregations, said the study, the rate of clinical depression was twice the rate of churches that sang songs in a minor key.  

The point: if you shove down the negative emotions, if you gloss over them, if you pretend they are not there, you might be creating even more damage, both in others as well as yourself. The church is not called to speak of plastic optimism. The church is called to speak the authentic truth.

“We preach Christ crucified,” is how the apostle Paul put it. There is the hope of resurrection, the hope of God restoring what has been broken, but that is something we wait for God to do, not something we manufacture through razzle-dazzle light shows and preachers in white shoes.  

So while we wait for God to do what we hope God to do, what do we do with what we feel? I’m talking about the stewardship of our emotions. We know about the stewardship of our money. We are called to a stewardship of nature and the environment. Let’s talk about responsible stewardship of what we feel.

That well-intentioned deacon who wanted to hide the brochure about negative feelings was doing something that our culture has trained us to do: to shove whatever is going on inside of us even further down. Don’t let anybody see what’s going on in you. Maintain the stiff upper lip. Big boys don’t cry. Strong women keep their hearts to themselves. This is the recipe for greater harm.

What our colleagues in the healing arts have told us is that if we don’t work through the pain, we will inflict it on others. As one said it simply, “Hurt people hurt people.” The first person that I harm, of course, is myself. But it doesn’t stop there, as you know. Have a difficult day, come home, grouch around, yell at the dog, kick the people you love. Hurt people hurt people.

Fortunately, there are professionals trained to help us. There are friends, too. The first tool in their kit is the gift of listening, of coming along side with an open ear. They don’t try to fix anything. They don’t have quick answers. They listen and wait long enough to hear what’s going on.

When Parker Palmer, the spiritual writer, was diagnosed twice with clinical depression, he says the worst visitors were those who said, “I know exactly how you feel.” He says he heard nothing beyond their opening words. “I knew it was a falsehood,” he says. “No one can fully experience another person’s mystery.” They offered sympathy out of their own anxiety. They pretended to be experts as a way of avoiding the pain.

By contrast, he names one friend who asked if Parker would allow him to come and sit with him. Just sit. It was a special, Christ-like love, he says. “He never tried to invade my awful inwardness with false comfort or advice; he simply stood on its boundaries, modeling the respect for me and my journey – and the courage to let it be – that I myself needed if I were to endure.”

This kind of love was not expressed in pious words or empty cheerleading, as if nothing good can happen unless we make it happen. Rather this love was patient, kind, not insisting on its own way. This is the love that endures, for we were created to endure. And we are created to love one another, to “share the sympathizing tear.

That is one of the clues in Psalm 42. After each stanza is a repeated refrain: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God. These are words to repeat together. They are personal words, but shared words. If we are in pain, we are part of a community in pain. Others are struggling, too. In suffering, there can be solidarity. That’s the first lesson. Nobody needs to suffer alone. We don’t need to suffer alone.

A second lesson is right in front of our noses: the psalms are a gift from God through a three-thousand-year-old community that has endured plenty of suffering. The psalmist weeps when he hears the mocking voices around him, “Where is your God?” That’s what they said to Jesus on the cross, as well: “Where is your God?” Yet rather than give in and join the chorus, the faithful response is to make this a matter of prayer.

In the words of Psalm 42:

I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”

The answer does not come right away. The answer hardly ever comes right away. But the question must be asked. And the writer Kathleen Norris reminds us of the paradox. In one breath, we conceive of God is “my rock,” and in the next, “Why have you forgotten me?” One asks, “Why are you cast down, my soul?” and the other responds, “Hope in God, my savior and my God.”

She writes,

Who has not heard these voices within, at one moment expressing hope and joy, and in the next reflecting doubt and sorrow? This psalm challenges me, even is it allows me a safe harbor where I might remember and give thanks for all the good gifts that bring both joy and pain. The two cannot be neatly separated in grief, or in life itself… the tears work best with praise and affirmation…Sorrow without thanksgiving would be despair; thanksgiving without repentance would be a presumptuous illusion.[2]

So we pray the whole jumbled mess, voicing both “memory and desire, stirring dull roots with the spring rain.” The psalms are scripts for our souls, a way to stay in communion with God even when we are disquieted.

Speaking of God, the answer for our questions lies with God, and God alone. What we are learning all over again is that human progress is always compromised by human weakness. Human wisdom is always undermined by human foolishness. This weekend, we sing Happy Birthday to a single nation that is torn into pieces by selfish individualism, without any regard for what is good for all the people in our nation.

Why are we cast down and disquieted? Let us count the ways. So we pray and wait for God. And we remember what kind of God we have.

To give us another text, I found a few words from W.E.B. DuBois, the eloquent thinker who truly believed that all people are created equally in the image of God. In voicing his own disquiet as an African American, he pointed ahead to the final justice of God. He could hear it in the Christian spirituals, what he called the “Sorrow Songs” that emerged from authentic human pain. And he says:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond.

He took a breath, and then he added:

If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, then (shortly) in His good time America shall rend the veil and the prisoned shall go free. Free, free, as the sunshine trickling down the morning into these high windows of mine, free as yonder fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below – swelling with song, instinct with life, tremulous and darkening bass.[3]

With DuBois, we trust in the ultimate justice of things. So we pray,

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.

And we leave the door open for hope to come home.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Gerald Sheppard, “Theology and the Book of Psalms,” Interpretation 46, April 1992. 145.

[2] Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008) 279-280.

[3] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994) 162.

Questions to Ask When Nobody is Watching

Psalm 13

June 28, 2020

William G. Carter

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Years ago, thanks to this church, I reclaimed a piece of my spiritual heritage. At the time we had an organist who traced her roots to the country of Wales. She was delighted to learn that a thin slice of my ancestry also originated in the green valleys of her homeland. And when I discovered that she spent her spare time traveling around the region to lead Welsh hymn festivals, I asked her to do that here.

She pushed back and said, “This is not a Welsh congregation.” “No,” I replied, “but for one Sunday afternoon, we could become Welsh.” She agreed. We set the date, secured the funding, started making the cookies.

When the day arrived, the first man in the door was short with craggy features. He had wisps of hair coming out of his ears. Bent over, hobbling with a cane, he seemed to have more than his share of physical infirmities, yet he was determined to arrive early and get a good seat. When the music started, he leaned forward, sat up straight, and began to weep.  

In a biography of Dylan Thomas, someone described “the strange, yearning, overpowering emotion at the heart of Welsh hymn-singing” this way:  

Like the wind gathering in a howl, came the slow, unearthly cadences of a hymn…The hymn was beyond the choir, beyond them all. It was like some dark, clouded flame, leaping up in its somber beauty, remote and pure.[1]

Listen, I bring this up, because a lot of the ancient Psalms – including this one – share some of the same qualities with Welsh hymns. They do not move quickly. Nobody is in a hurry. The music is infused with deep passion. The singer embodies the pathos of living on earth while aiming toward heaven. And a good measure of the music inhabits a minor key.

Even if we do not know much about music, we can recognize when a tune is in a minor key. A minor key signifies clouds, not sunshine; tension, not resolution. A minor key expresses sadness, not happiness; yearning, not completion; pilgrimage, not destination. The plain truth is life is hard. We can put on a happy face and manufacture some happiness, yet when nobody is looking, when nobody must be convinced otherwise, the honest questions bubble up.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

My friend Martin Tel is the lead musician at Princeton Theological Seminary. A tall, thin man of Dutch descent, he was raised in a church that sang the psalms. Not just the happy ones, not merely the psalms that sing, “Praise the Lord, God’s glories show,” but the psalms that emerge from a broken heart.

When his father was a child, the Nazis occupied their city in the Netherlands. Sermons were monitored for subversive messages, but the singing was not. In the morning, his father said, they might sing from Psalm 68, “Let God rise up, let his enemies be scattered, let those who hate him flee before him.” At evening vespers, the church would sing from another psalm, How long, O Lord? Save those doomed to die, repay the people who are doing this to us.”[2]

These were the “necessary songs,” Martin says. The Dutch people found the psalms were a gift to voice their fear, doubt, and sorrow. As such, they were more than expressions of emotion. They were a serious lesson in the school of prayer.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

These are the questions that begin Psalm 13. They remain unanswered. The first is a personal question, “Lord, will you forget me?” The next is directed directly to God: “will you hide your face?” The third question expresses the emotional effects: “pain in my soul, sorrow in my heart.” And the fourth names an imbalance that causes pain: “How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”

How long? How long? How long? How long?

For us, this is a psalm that needs no interpretation. Not under our circumstances! By my count, we are seventeen weeks into a pandemic. Seventeen weeks of separation and isolation from one another. “How long, O Lord?” How much longer? We do not know.

Is the pandemic winding down? Some people think so. They refuse to wear masks. They behave like they always did. They believe the whole thing is a media scam, even though 128,000 neighbors have died. Others ask, “How long, O Lord, do we have to live with fools like those?” If the pandemic has exposed anything for the past seventeen weeks, it is the truth that Americans don’t like being told what to do, even if it is for their own well-being.

“How long, O Lord,” indeed. The psalm reminds us of what we might be afraid to say. So let me say it: the eternal God is not always in a hurry. The eternal God rarely works according to our plans. You can pray for a sunny day, but you get what you get. You can pray for a happy life, but happiness must be pursued. You can pray for good health, but that prayer is always conditioned by human weakness. God rules the universe. We do not. And the psalms recognized there is a distance what God promises and when we receive it.

When we forego patience and step into the perceived vacuum, that is when we set ourselves up for trouble. So

Jesus tells a parable about a householder who takes a journey to a far-off country but promises to return. He leaves his servants in charge and doesn’t return right away. In fact, he takes his sweet old time. And in that absence, the servants get into trouble. They believe they can do whatever they want. They grab whatever they wish. They justify their whims with their own words. When the boss finally returns, he has a real mess on his hands. (Matthew 24:45-51)

What was the issue? Too much time on their hands. A destructive form of idleness. Rather than live in trust, rather than live in peace, rather than live in patience and perseverance, neighbors become enemies. Smart people do stupid things. Those who could be building begin destroying. It is all in that question, “How long?”

What makes this question a matter of prayer is how we address it: “How long, O Lord?” We recognize the gap and we give it to God. And not just any god, either! The psalmist prays to Yahweh, the God who brought us out of Egypt, the God who is bound to us through covenant, the God who declares, “You people are my children. You belong to me.” It is because we claim that relationship that we can pray our discontent and call out for help.

By analogy, I think of a young adult whom I know pretty well. Years ago, she did some babysitting. There was one family with three kids. She was out with them one day and thought it might be fun to introduce them to the two dogs who lived in her home. So they paid a visit, and these very attentive dogs were extremely interested.

The babysitter was talking with the oldest child and answering a question from the youngest child. Suddenly she saw the middle child stood frozen in place. Both dogs were right on him, sniffing away. He would not move. Didn’t know what to do. He didn’t have a lot of experience with very attentive dogs. Time froze in place, until he murmured, “Katie, a little help here please.” She snapped her fingers and the dogs backed off.

That is why the prayer of Psalm 13 is not “how long” but “how long, O Lord?” We are calling out to someone we know. Someone we trust. Someone who can break through the frozen moment and provide the assistance we need.

“How long, O Lord? How long? How long?” The psalmist says, “Consider me. Pay attention to me. Look at me. You don’t want my enemy to say, ‘I’ve won.’ You don’t want my foes to sing because I’m shaken up.”

This is daring prayer. This is Moses coming down from the mountain after a long delay, discovering that in his absence the Israelites forged a golden calf. In the absence of Moses, the people stepped into trouble. They melted down all their earrings, fashioned an idol, and started dancing around it. God is understandably upset, and ready to blast them all into the sand.

But Moses says, “Lord, these are your people. They belong to you. You went to all that trouble to free them from slavery in Egypt. Now, you don’t want the Egyptians to make fun of you, and say, ‘Look, God freed the slaves only to let them perish in the desert.’ Consider them, Lord. Consider what people are going to say about you. You do not want the Egyptians to say, “We have prevailed.” God heard that prayer. While anybody else might have said, “how long,” Moses called on the relationship God had with the people.

According to the Bible, it is OK to pray this way. Not only OK, but highly recommended. If we belong to God, if we have been claimed in the waters of baptism and named in the name of the Trinity, we can lean into that relationship and ask for our lives to be given back to us. Remember the Welshman who sang the slow, minor-key hymns, waiting for his redemption. The Dutch family during the war prayed for the enemies to be scattered. The families afflicted by covid-19 pray for the end of illness and disruption.

All our prayers are lifted into the mystery of the will of God, the God who desires that every one of his children will flourish. Every single one. No matter what it takes. No matter how long until it happens.  

One of the blessings of this congregation is that people want their preacher to be as helpful as possible. So much so that they will send along material that could improve his sermons. Maybe they are the ones who have been praying, “How long, O Lord?”

In any case, this week someone sent in a story about a preacher who attended a men's breakfast in the middle of a farming community. The group had asked an older farmer, decked out in bib overalls, to say grace for the morning breakfast.

"Lord, I hate buttermilk", the farmer began. The preacher opened one eye to glance at the farmer and wonder where this was going.

The farmer loudly proclaimed, "Lord, I hate lard." Now the preacher was growing concerned.

Without missing a beat, the farmer continued, "And Lord, you know I don't much care for raw white flour". The preacher once again looked up to glance around the room. He saw that he wasn't the only one looking uncomfortable.

Then the farmer added, "But Lord, when you mix them all together and bake them, I do love warm fresh biscuits. So Lord, when things come up that we don't like, when life gets hard, when we don't understand what you're doing or what you are saying, help us to relax, be patient, trust you, and wait until you are done mixing. It will probably be even better than biscuits. Amen."

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] John Ackerman, Dylan Thomas: His Life and Work (Springer, 2016) p. 11

[2] Martin Tel, “Necessary songs: the case for singing the entire Psalter,” The Christian Century, 8 January 2014, p. 20.