Sermon Psalm 13; Romans 8:38-39 August 8, 2021
Hope
Despairs and Despair Hopes.
Who wants to
do that at church?
Church is a
place where we can appreciate one another and rejoice together in the truth of God’s
love. It is a place where we can sing joyous hymns and shout praises to the God
who gives us life.
Being at church is so important in the life of faith. It is meant to be the place where we grow together through sorrow and joy.
There are
times that the reality of the ambiguity of life and faith intersect.
We find ourselves in lament even as we praise God’s goodness to us.
We’ve all
experienced enough sorrow and loss through this past year and a half that we
really want to come to church and forget the painful parts of life. We want to
put a Band-Aid on our pain and pretend that we are all ok. We want to come and
leave the hard parts on the doorstep and walk into church with our masks on
pretending we’ve all got it together. We want to come to church with our false
selves because we think that being a Christian means we are cheerful and happy
all the time. If we show up hurting and exposing our real selves people will
look at us as if we don’t have enough faith. Jesus was always saying, “Oh ye of
little faith to his disciples” and we think he’s saying that to us too.
Rachel Held
Evans wrote a book called Searching for Sunday-leaving, loving, ad finding
church. I’m in the process of listening to it and so much of today’s thoughts
and next week’s thoughts are influenced by her story and her writing.
Listen to
David in this psalm.
He is down
there in the dirt from which he was made and is crying out to God.
He is
accusing God,
yelling at
God,
frustrated at
God and
naked before
God
with all his suffering and pain.
He wants God to act, to show up, to fix things.
That crying out to God is called lament. It is despair and sorrow finding expression. How long, is repeated four times. It’s confession to God of feeling abandoned, forgotten, dismissed is the depth of pain finding words and wanting answers.
David is confessing his inmost soul. He is unafraid to bare all before God. That is what confession is. It is to come unafraid and bare our soul knowing that the One who loves us bore us through the waters of baptism and claims us for his own. It is this one God who knows we are dust that calls us to confess everything.
Psalm 103
says, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion
for those who fear him. For he knows how we are made; he remembers that we are
dust.”
Reading the
psalms of lament makes us question the prayers we were taught in Sunday school.
They were prayers that said nice things to God. We were taught kind and
thoughtful and polite prayers. The psalms break that. They return us to the
truth of our origin. We came from dust and we were molded by the hands of God.
We were created from raw materials. This psalm of David returns to the recognition
of the ashes of sorrow and begs the question of how long does sorrow and pain
have to last.
It addresses
God as the eldest son in the parable of the prodigal son. I have done all
things right. I have lived a life of faith. I have been obedient. I have
followed through on every action. How can this happen to me? Where is your love
for me?
So, God, how
long? How much can one person take of things being given and then being taken
away? Do you have a remedy for this God or are they all cliché answers?
This psalm has
been said to be an example of our faith. We have faith. And then tragedy
comes. We wonder how long we must live with this. We pray to God to let us see
him in all of this. We call upon God to show us what it all means and to answer
our prayer. In despair we search for hope. And then through the process we come
back to the trust that God is there and we find hope in our despair.
In Job he
too cries out to God wondering what he had done to offend God to bring him such
tragedy. Yet, Job seems to find a place in his story that he is able to praise
God in the same breath that he laments. We may find an affirmation of our faith
as we witness that complaint and praise go hand in hand for the psalmist. We
can find comfort that in the seemingly contrary and contradictory actions of
our conversations with God we are in full presence of the One who knows every
hair on our head.
Church is meant
to be a place where no matter how imperfect we are, we know that we are loved.
We know that although we are still learning and growing, we have not and will
not reach perfection. Church is that place where we can scream our doubts and
holler out our despair and crisis of faith. Because at the core of confession
is the grappling of wonder if God really exists to hear our prayer and respond.
If we were honest with ourselves and each other about that one truth we might
all want to be at church together.
In church we
stand before God and one another baring our true selves and then realizing we
are already covered through God’s grace. And that truth gives us permission to love
on each other all the more. Really living as The Body of Christ.
If we reach
back to our early childhood faith we can remember being told the story of Jesus
sent by God to save the world from sin. We remember being in awe of the baby
Jesus. Our little hearts believed that Jesus really did love us. Faith started
to become real even as we prayed at mealtime and bedtime. We trusted our Sunday
school teachers who encouraged us to say out loud that we believed that Jesus loved
us and we loved him too. We said that we believed that Jesus died on the cross
for our sin. We prayed that Jesus would forgive us for punching our brother and
we wanted him to forgive us for pinching our sister. In those prayers our faith
grew. And finally we knew in our heart that we wanted to be an active part of
faith and join the church. We wanted to profess before everyone that we
believed in Jesus and were ready to make the promise to serve him forever. And
so we did. Those were years of comfort and belonging.
As rooted as
we can be in our faith and as grounded as we are in our confessions, we all
still have that place in life where we just walk away from all we know because,
to be honest, this religion of love and grace can be too hard to believe in
moments of crisis and despair. Especially when that despair won’t go away. How
can we believe in Jesus who fixes us when we are still hurting? How can we
believe in Jesus who forgives sin but we still sin? How can believe in Jesus
when we think to lack faith and to doubt and to wonder if God exists is a sin?
Jesus came
to save a sinful world. He came to bring wholeness and healing. He came to
bring truth and mercy. He came with compassion and grace. He came to a world
broken, messed up, cruel, conflicted, disrupted and destructive to offer
something it had not yet lived into-forgiveness and salvation. It’s time for
the church to remember that and be the place of sacred, safe, space again. It’s
time for the church to be reminded that the psalmist spoke the truth of his
pain and we can too. We can speak without judgment or fear or ridicule. If we
could be as honest with each other as they are in AA meetings we’d all be the
better for it. We need to let go of the idea that church is about perfect
casseroles and pretty outfits, just so makeup and quiet children. Our young
people today are not turned on by fancy screens and hip music or loud preaching
or jazzy youth programs. They can see through fake personas, and they are not
impressed. If we really want the church
of Jesus Christ to be real to the next generation we need to show them by
leaving our masks at the door and being as honest as the psalmist. Hold on to
the words of Psalm 13 as a reminder that no matter who or how we are God knows
our inmost heart. God loves us. God lets us be ourselves at all times.
It is so
true that our hope reaches points of despair. And in our life we discover that
despair returns to hope in great anticipation. Paul said, Rejoice in hope, be
patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. And no song says it better than, “My
life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation…
Amen.
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