Sermon for CATM – April 13, 2008 – “Worship: An Act of Desperation - Psalm 142
I overheard someone ask someone else this very simple question recently: “What has been the saddest moment in your life?” I can’t recall the answer given, because as soon as the question was asked, my mind drifted to the saddest moment in my life.
That was about 15 months ago when I was with my birth family and Barbara at my brother’s home, and I was holding my brother as he died of cancer.
There just aren’t words to express the pain, the sorrow, the sense of loss that I and my whole family felt in that moment. We were all united in the same grief actually. Now all of my family shares in common our darkest day.
Usually we’re accustomed to coming to church and hearing upbeat worship and a fairly positive upbeat message or challenge. We focus a lot of the positive, because we believe in a Saviour who has won the victory for us.
Who has taken ultimate sadness and loss, experienced it Himself, and found a way to triumph over the darkest experience known to humanity…cold-blooded murder of an innocent. He triumphed over the grave and over sin.
Our darkest acts and imaginations and sins are taken by Jesus upon the cross. He becomes ‘sin’ for us.
And of course the bold declaration of Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday: He is risen. He is risen INDEED!.
We are not alone. God is with us.
Our darkest moments. Yeah…we don’t like to go there much. But you know, those moments are a part of life. A part of real life. And a lot of life is lament.
Something I’ve always found heartening and encouraging is the fact that other people of faith have gone through what I’ve gone through and worse, and have lived to tell of it and have lived to praise God.
The Bible contains all kinds of stories of peoples’ great struggles. Terrible tragedies, mind-numbing loss. Deep, deep frustration…but also faith. One of those people was David, Israel’s king who was a tragically flawed fellow, but who knew how to approach God in the midst of fear, deep shame.
Our key scripture today finds David in a cave. He was pursued there by Saul, the outgoing king of Israel, who resented David. David had been chosen by God to be Israel’s king, but he had waited a long time and honoured the fact that Saul was king.
David had been chased by Saul who wanted to kill him. Even when he had the chance to be free of the threat of Saul by killing him, David would not. Instead he allowed himself to be hunted and mistreated for a time by Saul. Living like an animal, in a cave.
So in today’s reading we find David in the cave, and when he was there, he prayed like this: [Reader]
Psalm 142:1 I cry aloud to the LORD; I lift up my voice to the LORD for mercy. 2 I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble. 3 When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way. In the path where I walk men have hidden a snare for me. 4 Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life. 5 I cry to you, O LORD; I say, "You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living." 6 Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me. 7 Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name. Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me.
First things first. Sometimes our traditions or our personalities can constrain us from addressing God in this fashion. We may be comfortable with polite prayers, genteel petitions or the well-formulated and organized thoughts we find in some written prayers. Those are safe.
Those feel safe. But if the Bible is to be our standard for how to talk to God, if it sets the benchmark for just how honest and real we can be with our Creator and Redeemer, we can see pretty clearly here that it’s ok to cry out to God.
Have you ever done that? Screamed out loud to God, wondering why such-and-such was happening?
Actually “crying out to God” is rarely a response to something that has just happened that has shocked us.
When something bad happens, we’re often in shock at first. In stunned disbelief. Just think of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Our hearts or minds may turn to God, but we’re just as likely to stare at a wall for a long period of time, just trying to understand what’s happened.
So usually when we cry aloud to the Lord it’s after we’ve sat with a situation for some time, after the adrenalin has left us, after the initial shock and once the pain has kicked in. In David’s case, he had been living for some time with the knowledge that he was God’s choice for a king over Israel, and yet he was being hunted like an animal by Saul.
At one point he has to behave as though he were insane in order to leave a sticky situation. He is humiliated. His calling, even though assured by God at some point in the past, is not being realized. He is wondering.
He feels alone. Cut off…but for the abiding presence of God who he still manages to remember even when buried in his despair.
So David cries to the Lord for mercy. You may have heard of one simple prayer that Christians have used for millennia called the Jesus prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner”.
That’s a very good prayer that can be meditated upon and repeated in a time of prayer, a time of need. A time when the mind is too baffled or confused or maybe even when the heart is too heavy to cry aloud to God. So David cries out for mercy.
2 I pour out my complaint before him; before him I tell my trouble. 3 When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who know my way.
Bartenders are interesting people. I’ve known a few over the years and from what they tell me, a lot of their job is listening. The art of listening is a discipline really worth developing.
Listening is actually the greatest gift one human can give another. Listening is simply being, and being willingly in the presence of one who is hurting. There’s a story of a family who lost their youngest child, and their friends and their church family would come by to visit.
Most would offer well-meaning platitudes: “It’s ok. She’s in heaven”. “God must have loved her so much He wanted her now for himself”. You know, the things we say when we don’t really know what to say.
Then an intern pastor came to visit the family. He walked in the room, sat beside the mom and dad, and cried with them. That was all. Some minutes later he got up and left. The family later said that those few moments of silence, those tears shed in empathy, were a critical part of the healing the family was to experience.
You know, God does that. He listens. With pure being, [remember He says to call Him “I Am”], God is right there with us.
We can call out to him when we’re in the muck and mire of our own sin, when we’re in messy relationships, when we’re feeling gutted and alone, we can call on Him.
Tim Huff, a friend to YSM and a key leader at Youth Unlimited, says that God is as much in the mud as He is in the clouds.
The incarnation of Jesus shows us that God chooses to be near, to enter places of sadness and sorrow. Grieving and mourning.
The invitation of this Scripture, in the words of the only person ever referred to in Scripture as a “man after God’s own heart”, in the words of David, is to pour out our complaint to God.
Sometimes in church a very young infant will start to cry. And when that happens you can always see that some don’t seem to notice, some seem mildly distracted and some people get really irritated at the sound of the child whining or crying.
But you know, God doesn’t get annoyed at our whining. When we carry on with our hurts and our frustrations and our pain, God doesn’t get even slightly impatient.
And when we lose our bearings, when the stuff of life just gets too hard and our joy grows faint, and we don’t know which way is up or down…has anyone here ever felt that way, or is it just me…when, as David says “My spirit grows faint within me”, what is our consolation? God knows.
He knows who we are and where we are and how we’re doing…but He also knows the way forward. And the way forward is always WITH Him.
4 Look to my right and see; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life.
Have you ever felt alone…I mean utterly alone. I was talking to someone from the community a few weeks ago and they said this: “I have 300 ‘friends’ on Facebook, but do you think one of them would be available to go for a coffee and just talk!?!”
Technology lies to us all the time. Online ‘communities’ that are not backed up by flesh and blood relationships just deepen the sense of isolation in life.
When we reach the bottom, our dark night of the soul, we do so in part because we’ve reached the limits of human companionship. and we realize we are alone.
I have a lot of friends. A lot of people that I truly love and care for in this community and in this church and elsewhere, but when the valley of shadows comes, when the dark night forces itself on me, it really feels like it’s just me and God.
That can be a lonely feeling. Despair, sadness, that empty feeling…can lead us in at least two directions. It can lead us to God, to thirsting for His living water, reaching deeper into His care, letting His healing touch do its deep and abiding work in our spirits. That’s one option.
There is another option, and unfortunately it’s a lot easier…despair can lead us to indulge our vices.
How many people do you know whose struggle with addiction of any variety is accelerated by hard circumstances? Who hit the bottle when the going gets tough?
Any area of weakness…and each of us has them…can become a minefield where we can actually add injury to our own pain, where we, in seeking solace or a numbing of our pain, lose control of ourselves and by indulging in our addictions and weaknesses can deepen our experience of brokenness.
Again, the problem is that indulgence is easier, or can be easier until by practice we train ourselves to run to God when life turns dark and painful.
That can be a lifelong process, but it’s worth every second invested. If you’ve ever tried to learn guitar for instance, you know that there’s a lot of finger pain involved, and learning that or any other instrument can be a slow and arduous process…but with time and stick-to-it-ofness, the instrument becomes an extension of ourselves.
Likewise turning to God with our despair can become, over time, with practice, more natural, more inviting than the alternative.
5 I cry to you, O LORD; I say, "You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living." 6 Listen to my cry, for I am in desperate need; rescue me from those who pursue me, for they are too strong for me. 7 Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name. Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me.
Now David’s was in a situation. No doubt about that. There were circumstances beating down on him; his life was in danger…but see how he encourages himself through this song. He does it chiefly by remembering.
He says: “I have no refuge; no one cares for my life”. Again, a terribly lonely statement that at that moment, he felt deeply.
But the thing about David, is that he always moved on…He wouldn’t keep up his complaint for too long before he turned to God saying: “I have no refuge… but… You…You are my refuge. You…are my portion”.
In his desperate need in this instance he chose not to turn to his vices (believe me, as we discover later in his life, David had his vices).
He turned to God who He knew…he knew from songs sung in the great congregation and he knew by reflecting on his own experience of God, He knew that God held the answer for Him. God was His way of escape.
And he kept looking to God. “Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name”.
Can you identify with David today? Is there any part of you that prays or longs to pray: “Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name”?
God answered David’s prayer of course, and he became Israel’s greatest king, while… still…being a deeply flawed person.
But David again and again throughout his life would call upon God, the Rock of his salvation. He would turn to God in repentance, in longing and in worship. That was the key to David’s character.
See, God apparently doesn’t have a huge problem with our flaws. He knows them, better than we do…He knows where we stumble, he knows that we will stumble and we will sin, but His hand is ever reaching out to us.
When we come to a place of recognizing our sin He simply says: “Go and sin no more”.
When we go through the brutal things that life throws us and our only honest response is crying out to Him, He hears our lament. He hears our cry.
He reminds us by his grace that we ARE NOT on our own. He is completely present to us at all times and doesn’t depend on our ability to recognize His presence in order to stay close. And he reminds us of each other. He reminds us of each other. On Easter we arranged for Ronda to come and dance to the song “My Redeemer Lives”. Many of you were here for that. It was amazing.
Now Ronda said she was happy to dance, but she wanted a crucial change to the lyrics of the song. So instead of the chorus lyrics that were written: “I know my Redeemer lives…”, we changed the words half-way through the song to reflect the fact that we are in this together. We sang: “We know OUR Redeemer lives”.
Why? Because the family of God is real. It’s a real expression of the life of God. You are never, actually alone in your suffering or your lament.
When you are sick and you let the church know…we pray for you. When you are suffering…and we know, the family of God responds in one way or another.
The key is this, like I said last week: The family of God is about knowing and being known. When we dare to open up our lives to one another, we discover the “our” that God means to enrich our lies through.
Jesus gave us words that are a model for prayer and a model for our relationship with God. I’m going to ask you stand, and if you want to enter in, to actually hold the hand of the person beside you as together we pray as Jesus taught us:
“Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen”.
Here’s a new song I heard this week for the first time.
“We Come” by Jim Croegart
http://jimcroegaert.com/listen.php
