Today I am going to take a somewhat different approach to the reading of the Scripture and the way I will be preaching on it. And in fact I hope this will make it come alive for you and will enable you to follow the thought of the Scripture writer as well as my own thought. What I plan to do today is to do a reading and commentary/or proclamation around what I see as the natural turning points of the Scripture. That is, instead of reading the Scripture and then preaching on it and making continuing references to the text as I usually do, I am going to read a few verses and then attempt to show you what is going on, what is happening in the heart of the Psalmist, and then share a few more verses, verses which teach us something more about his spiritual pilgrimage, and so through our text.
The text I have chosen for today is lengthy, for one thing, and it is complicated, for another. It is without doubt one of the most probing, the most agonizing passages in all of Scripture. If you can read or can hear the words of the 22nd Psalm and not feel something; if you can live into the dark night of this soul and not sense its pain, then I suspect you are just not breathing, you are just not alive. It's just that pointed and just that profound.
I hope that if you have Bibles with you you will turn to the 22nd Psalm and that you will keep the Bible open to that spot, because that will help you to live into these words, these frightening words, these engaging words, these words of a soul deeply troubled.
For you see, Psalm 22 poses a new departure for us. It poses a basic and ultimate issue for us. The issue for this ancient man or woman of faith is this: what if God is absent? What if God is absent, what if God has just not shown up? That's not something you might expect to find in the Bible, not something you might normally expect to find posed in church, but here it is, right here in the Scriptures. Here it is, I would say, because it's a part of life. It's a part of human reality: the absence of God.
Every Sunday since the beginning of Advent we have talked of nothing but the God who is present, the God who is with us. We have sung about and spoken about Immanuel, God with us. We have been glib and ready with our greetings, "God be with you, God be with you." God is present, God is our companion. Maybe some of us have even indulged in a little playing around with the notion of God as our buddy, God as a cosmic bellhop who is always available when we summon Him up. There is nothing in Christian worship more common than the idea of the presence of God; there is nothing more well-established among Christians than the belief that God in Christ has become present to us, that God in the Holy Spirit is a constant companion. That is clear and plain and definite, isn’t it?
But here is the Psalmist, crying out in anguish with an altogether different word. Here is one who bares his soul and shouts to the world, no, shouts to the God who seems not to be there to listen, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?" Why hast thou forsaken, why are you absent, where have you gone? The absence of God; can the human mind imagine anything more distressing? Can the human heart contemplate what this really is? The absence, the utter absence of God.
In all honesty, I do not know that I could ever echo the words and the feelings of this Psalmist. I do not know that I could ever say, in public, with this depth of feeling, that I knew only the absence of God. How do you admit, how do you confess to yourself that you know God in his absence only? How do you say to a waiting world that the God whom you have proclaimed and served and worked for, that God whose name you have bandied about with such reckless abandon, that God is absent? How do you say that? But this the Psalmist did; this confession he made, and I would suggest to you that as he did so, right then and there he began the process which would finally allow him to find God present again.
Are you hearing what I am saying? I am saying that even at that moment at which the most difficult of realities comes crashing in on us, even at the moment at which we finally come clean and say it, come clean and cry out that God is absent, God has abandoned us – that is the moment at which healing begins: That is the moment in which the spirit is so laid bare that God in his mystery can begin to work with us and can begin to heal us. But more of that later.
The first thing to establish is this: that despite all of our bravado, despite all of our pious protestations to the contrary, there are times when we feel as though the heavens are closed and we are alone in the universe, times in which we experience only the absence of God.
And in those times we cry out, we must cry out: My God, why? Why hast thou forsaken?
But now watch, watch the mood and the tone of the Psalm change a bit. Watch how the Psalmist reaches back into the reservoirs of his faith and his heritage. He has the right instinct. Am I the only person this has ever happened to? Am I alone in this?
Have you asked that question of yourself sometimes? Have you started out with this sneaking suspicion that nobody, but nobody else in all the world was having this agony of soul, nobody else was torn like you are torn?
22:3-5
Everybody else seems to know something I don't know: that's the essence of what the Psalmist is feeling here. I look out across the congregation of God's people, and do they ever look fine! They come to church, they wear big smiles, they shake hands and some of them even hug, they are having a great time. And some of them even talk glibly about having a great time in the Lord. Lord, am I the only one? Am I the only one here who still feels only your absence? "In thee our fathers trusted; they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. To thee they cried, and were saved; in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed."
And so this tortured soul arrives at a conclusion. You may think that the conclusion is unwarranted, you may think that he's being too hard on himself. You may suppose that this is sick, sick language, and that if he were around today he'd be a good candidate for the psychiatrist's couch. But all right. Let's just listen to the human heart, and let's hear something telling us how profoundly destructive it is to feel that God is absent, absent no matter how much we have cried out for Him.
22:6-8
"I am a worm and no man. " I am vermin, I am scum, I am nothing. Sick language? Pathological? Ready for a padded cell and the men in the little white coats? Maybe. Maybe so. But there is something here we don't like facing. There is something here which is unpleasant to face. A few years ago they brought out a new edition of the Hymnal, and when they did you found out the words to one of the hymns had been changed. It took a while, but I finally got used to singing, "At the Cross" with the line in it that now says "Would he devote that sacred head for sinners such as I?" But do you remember what it used to read, do you recall how it used to go? "Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?" And we changed that, rightly so, I believe, because we said God does not think of us as worms, as vermin, as wretches. God has a better opinion of us than that. And so we took that out of the hymnal.
But you see that’s not the whole point; that’s not the whole problem. The point is, the problem is that that is sometimes the way we think of ourselves. The issue is not only what God thinks of us; the issue is also what we think of ourselves. And if I hear the testimony of the Psalmist, when I see nothing but the absence of God, when I look around at the clutter of my life and find no God, then I think of myself as a work, as a nothing. I see myself as useless and at wit’s end. "I am a worm and no man."
And to make it worse, to cap it off, the psalmist finds himself surrounded by mockery and insult, dogged by sarcasm and venom. "He committed his cause to the Lord; let God deliver him." Well, well! That's what the world still says to us, doesn't it? What good is all your praying and groaning and crying out? You experience only the absence of God and you know it. And the anguish of his soul is sharpened infinitely by his tormentors; they add to his sense of aloneness. They make him feel even more lonely. I cannot imagine, can you, how anybody could get much worse off? I cannot feature how anyone could survive all this: feeling the absence of God and then experiencing this self-rejection and this biting sarcasm from everyone else. Have you heard enough? Is this sermon too depressing by now?
Stay tuned. Stay tuned, because there is another shift in the mood. There is another turn of events.
22:9-11
If I were to take an eight-ounce glass and set it up here, and if were then to pour four ounces of water in it, and if I were then to ask you to tell me what you saw, what would you say? How would you describe an eight-ounce glass with four ounces of water in it? Well, a good many of you would say, "That's a half full glass of water." But just about as many would say, no, "That is a half empty glass." A half empty glass. Both groups look at the same thing and see it in entirely different ways.
I think that's what's been happening in Psalm 22. He has looked at the misery of his life, he has taken a spiritual inventory, and he's come up short. He sees a life half empty, well, maybe almost entirely empty of God. But now, all of a sudden, he seems to see it the other way. Now it strikes him that there are evidences of God in his life, there is a presence of God in his life. "You took me from the womb, you kept me safe upon my mother's breasts." God, you've been there all along in the ordinariness of life, and I never even saw you. You've been involved in my life in all those everyday garden-variety ways, and here I am looking for something spectacular. Here I am waiting for the lightning bolt to strike, but you've been the energy of my life all along. Here I am crying out for some evidence of your care for me, and all along every day, you've cared and cared and cared. But I didn't see it, because it was so ordinary.
Isn't it like that sequence in Fiddler on the Roof in which the old Jewish man asks his wife of many years, "Do you love me?" And she snorts and snarls at the question, but he persists, "But do you love me?" Her reply is a classic: For all these years I've darned your socks, fed your meals, cleaned up after you, mended your clothes and on and on and on, and if that's not love, what is? You see, the ordinariness of her love he'd missed, the everydayness of it escaped him. Do you love me?
And also the psalmist. Oh. Oh, I see. You have kept me safe all along. You've been there for me and I could not see you. I think you are absent. But you are not absent, God. You are there in the everyday things. You are there in the sun that arises every morning. You are there in the rain that waters and refreshes the earth. You are there indeed.
And there is the point, I believe, at which the floodgates broke open and the psalm writer was able to tell the Lord all his troubles. There is the point at which healing began to take place. It's not that the troubles ended and its not that the world got rosy. Not at all. Quite the opposite. But it's as if the anger and the frustration, the pent-up emotion and the hurt all came tumbling out like a veritable Niagara of pain; he opened up to the healing of the God who had seemed to be absent. Listen. Listen to a man whose spiritual ill had become so violent that even his body rebelled. But listen also for the cry of faith, the cry that sees the presence of a caring God.
22:12-18
Still a terrible picture, yes, but now the cry of faith, the prayer of anguish and yet of hope.
22: 19-21
The story is told of the pious young preacher who was assigned to a church in the back country of Australia, way, way into he outback where the weather gets dry and conditions are harsh. He was visiting on s sheep ranch during the driest of dry seasons, and the sheep were suffering terribly from lack of water. Their bleats and their bawling were terrible to hear, and the preacher listened as long as he could and then he came up with the answer. Let's pray, he suggested. Let's pray for rain. Why haven't you prayed for rain, what's wrong with you people and what's wrong with your faith? To this one of the ranchers replied, Listen to the sheep, listen again to the sheep. A God who cannot hear a prayer like that is not worth praying to.
Well, the psalmist discovered that God does indeed hear the cry of desperation, he does indeed have ears for the prayer of anguish, no matter who says it or how it is formed. And it may even come out of the experience of the absence of God, for a while, but that prayer is heard, and the day of praise will come. It will finally come.
Catch the mood now:
22: 22-24
Back in the 1880's Pastor Jeremiah Rankin, pastor of the First Congregational Church in downtown Washington, the church which today stands at 10th and G Sts. – Pastor Jeremiah Rankin lost his son Andrew to a terrible and sudden disease. Without much warning, with little time to do anything or to adjust, the young man was gone. And Jeremiah Rankin, pastor, preacher, man of supposed faith, found only the absence of God. But while we do not know all we'd like to know, perhaps, about Pastor Rankin's spiritual pilgrimage, while we are not sure how long and how much h experienced the absence of God, we do know the final outcome. We do have a record of the outgrowth of his faith. And to this day every Sunday the choir ends the service at the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel on the campus of Howard University with Jeremiah Rankin's great benediction:
"God be with you till we meet again. By his counsels guide, uphold you. With his sheep securely fold you; God be with you till we meet again.
God be with you till we meet again. Keep loves banner floating o'er you, Smite death’s threatening wave before you; God be with you till we meet again."
