Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC January 6, 1985
Well, Christmas is over, isn't it? Christmas is over and done with, except for a few remaining lights and poinsettias … over, done with, finished. It was great while it lasted, but Christmas is over.
How do you know that Christmas is over? How do you really know that yuletide is wrapped up and put away?
You know that Christmas is over when the kids' new toys are broken7 the batteries are all run down7 and the Cabbage Patch doll just looks like a cabbage, period.
You know that Christmas is over when the boss interrupts the holiday conversation around the coffee pot with a clearing of his throat and the terse announcement that it looks like it's time to get back to work.
You know that Christmas is over and done with7 when the postman brings no more hand-addressed Christmas cards but instead a computerized greeting, “You may have already won $2,000,000, signed, Ed McMahon. “
On the other hand, you know that Christmas is not quite over, not quite, when the postman also pitches in another kind of greeting from Visa and MasterCard and Woodies and Sears and on and on. Christmas is not quite over.
Or, again, you know that Christmas is over when the folks at church quit singing about angels and shepherds, when the preacher ceases to wax eloquent about babes and peace on earth, and they get down to budgets, buildings, Bible study, and all the usual stuff, all the ordinary, garden-variety, back-to-business kind of thing. Christmas is over.
And there is another sign. There is another signal that Christmas has disappeared. It's the weather. The wet, wet weather. Somehow for Christmas it's always glorious -- maybe sunny glorious, maybe white snowy glorious, but glorious just the same. But when Christmas is over, that's when you get wet: wet, wet, wet. Ice and wet. Snow that's wet. Rain, drizzle, dampness, wet. The backyard looks like a lake; the shoes are muddy, the newly cleaned up car quickly acquires a coat of gunk, because it's wet. Wet, wet, wet.
When I was a seminary student I had the advantage over my fellow seminarians, because I had grown up in Louisville where the seminary was located. I had grown up there and knew about the place and all of its peculiarities. I knew, for example, that every January, you could expect one thing, you could count on one reality: wet. Water, rain, sleet, slush, whatever, but wet. Day after soggy day, night after drippy night. Wet. And my fellow students, after two straight weeks of this, would consult me and would say, “Is it always like this? Is Louisville always this wet and cold and depressing?” They had come from Georgia and Florida and Texas and from someplace they pronounced Mizipi (which always sounded like a wet place to me … Mizipi), and they professed never, never to have seen anything like it. It was, well, it was so … wet, wet and watery and depressing.
Christmas is over when the weather gets watery. And the Christmas of the spirit soon passes when you think you are about to drown. The Christmas of the spirit is over when you believe you are about to be overwhelmed with all that is happening to you, with all that is going on around you. Do you know what I mean? Can you sense what I'm pointing to? Listen to the way the psalmist put it some three thousand years ago:
“My soul is cast down within me … deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts; all they waves and thy billows have gone over me.”
“My soul is cast down within me …”. If the psalmist were alive today, he would make his language contemporary: I'm depressed; I'm dejected; I've had it; I feel overwhelmed.
“Deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts …”. That is, there are powerful things going on all around me, and I have no way to relate to them. I can’t handle it all. It overwhelms me.
“And all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me.” I am washed away, Lord, by what is happening. I am drowning, just about drowning, in everything you've sent me. I have too many bills to pay, I am behind in my work, the kids are growing up too fast, I am getting old, the house needs painting, the car is making a funny noise, down at the church they want to know· if I'll teach a class, the boss wants to know where my report is. I'm drowning, Lord, I'm drowning. And Christmas is really over, because it's watery and wet. “Deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts; all thy waves and they billows have gone over me.” Water for drowning.
Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever come to the place where you felt as though you were about to drown in all the responsibility and pressure that was coming your way? Have you ever just felt as though you could not breathe, that there was so much on you that you were just going down for the last time? And that drizzly, sticky-icky wet and watery weather didn't help, either, did it?
If you've ever felt anything of that sort, you can certainly identify with this psalmist, then. And his depression was severely compounded with another element; there was another ingredient to his malaise: “My tears have been my food day and night, while men say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’" For him, the whole horrible situation was made infinitely worse because he was surrounded and wounded by the taunts of neighbors and co-workers, men and women who delighted in poking holes in his faith: "Where is your God?" "Where is your God? Why hasn't he lifted your burdens? Why hasn't God paid your bills? Why hasn't the heavenly wonder worker come through and solved all this for you? Surely there must be a great big word processor in the sky to write that report for you. Where is your God?”
Water for drowning; my soul is cast down, deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts, all thy waves and thy billows have gone over me. Water for drowning.
II
But, but, in the midst of all his depression, the psalmist remembers. In the midst of his quiet despair, groaning on the inside and trying to keep up a pretense on the outside, the psalmist remembers. He recalls something. He gets in touch with his deepest feelings. And God's great gift of memory comes into play.
“These things I remember.” he shouts, almost breaking the spell of despair that has been woven over him. “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.” “These things I remember,” says the psalmist, and for a moment at least his spirits are buoyed and his soul is lifted. These things I remember; I remember how I went with the throng and I went to the house of God and I sang and I shouted and I kept the festival. These things I remember, and that helps!
You see, much of our problem is that our memories can be very short, very brief and very selective. How quickly we dwell on what is wrong with our lives and how equally quickly we forget all the joys and the blessings and the positive things that have happened to us! How readily we fall into the trap of remembering only the devastating and damaging and forgetting the delightful and the delicious!
Speaking of Christmas, you probably saw just exactly that happen after Christmas. You had a wonderful time with family and friends, you got some exciting gifts, you saw a child's face light up with laughter, you saw a parent shed a tear of pleasure, and then you got hold of the sweater that was the wrong size. Rotten Christmas. You had to sweep up one million, three hundred thousand and fifty-nine pine needles. Christmas is a lot of trouble, a lot of bother. But what is happening? Selective memory! Remembering only the negative things, recalling only the problems and not remembering the thousand and one good things which give support and which affirm and which make life worth living.
So hear the psalmist; hear him and learn from him: “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.” Remember. Remember and hope.
And remember, too, the presence of God. Remember that God is, remember that God is present. Christmas may be over and the drowning days may be here, but God is still Immanuel, he is still with us, he has not failed us nor forsaken us. Now the psalmist, in a strange but beautiful way, teaches us a lesson about that too. In the midst of his depression the psalmist affirms, “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me.” That's a fine and strong statement of faith.
But then the psalmist, right away, cries out, “I say to God, my rock, ‘Why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?’" Did you catch the tension in that statement? Did you pick up on the apparent contradiction? The Lord gives me his love day and night, he is my rock; then why, O God, have you forgotten me? Why, O God, have you let me down? And the psalmist almost joins the taunts of his oppressors, “Where is your God?”
But I say that here is a beautiful if strange lesson about the presence of God. Our God is never closer than when we are crying out in despair to Him. Our God is never nearer than when we strangely feel him to be distant. Our God works in the anguished places of the heart to make His presence felt and known. And thus it is when you and I, like the psalmist of old, are bold enough to lay before the Lord all our agony, all our humanness, it is then that He becomes our rock and our fortress. It is then that He becomes most surely our Immanuel.
I remember a period of spiritual despair in my own life. I recall a time when I said, much as the psalmist did, thy waves and the billows have gone over me. I was working as a campus minister at a major university in another state, and, it seemed, all at once, everything hit. Two or three students who had never accepted me after the previous campus minister had left began a kind of smear campaign and began writing letters of complaint to my supervisor. I had gotten into too much debt, having made some bed decisions. To compound the whole business, I had told my wife less than the truth about our bills and our finances, but she had found out the truth. And my young son was going through some sort of temper tirades that seemed to be related to my not spending enough time or the right kind of time with him. If you were to have asked me during that time what my devotional life was like, I probably would have answered with a blank stare. There wasn't any. There wasn't any. And so I nearly drowned. Family, career, finances, sense of personal well-being: I had messed up the whole thing. Water for drowning.
And then some people reached out to me. A good friend, without knowing the details, saw something of what was happening and reached out to me, and gently and lovingly brought me back. He brought me back by helping me remember the good times, the positive things. He helped me remember students who had been helped by what I had done. He helped me remember that I did have a loving wife and concerned parents. He helped me recall that the same little boy who was giving me such fits from time to time would also crawl up into my lap and plant a slurpy kiss on my cheek at night. Remembering; and remembering, too, how our church had a way of affirming people, of making them feel special and wanted and cared about. Remembering the other side of the ledger.
And I learned again that our God is never closer than when I have supposed that He is gone, vanished far away. “By day the Lord commands his steadfast love; and at night his song is with me. I say to God, my rock ...” My rock, my dependable one; to such a one as that I raise my complaint, “Why hast thou forgotten me?” And he becomes for me Immanuel, my God who is with me.
Yes, you see, water is for drowning, but water is for thirst also. In the end what the psalmist wanted most of all was a living relationship with a loving Father. What would best drive away his fears and calm his anxious spirit was not to have all the problems solved, all the bills paid, all the answers locked in. What would finally matter is that the fundamental thirst of the human heart be satisfied:
“As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. “ My soul thirsts for the living God.” In the midst of the waters which would almost drown us, we long for another stream, another water, the living water of a relationship, a friendship with the eternal one. Not doctrines, not ideas, not church membership as such, not status, not achievement, not money or prestige, but relationship, belonging, knowing whose we are. “As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, 0 God. “
How do you know, really know that Christmas is over? When the weather gets watery, among other things.
How do you know that the Christmas, the Christ-presence, is gone from your life? It will seem that way, it will look that way, when the waters are about to drown you. But at that moment, remember. Remember all the grace-filled moments before. Remember the Christmases, the joy times of the spirit. And know that He is still Immanuel, know that the waters which threaten to drown may also call forth another water; as a hart longs for, thirsts for, flowing streams, we too are down-deep expressing an unquenchable thirst for the living God.
Drink deep, then. Drink deep, and when they taunt and say, “Where is your God?” you will know, for your Christmas will never be over.
