One of the great strengths of our Anglican worship is the continuous repetition of the psalms. If you turn to the Daily Office Lectionary in the Book of Alternative Services, you will see that there is a provision there to recite at least one psalm every morning and every evening of the year.
That is a practice that has always lain at the heart of Anglican worship, right back to the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Of course that book was only carrying on a tradition dating back to the earliest Christian liturgies. And they in turn were borrowing from Jewish practice that had gone on for a thousand years before that. So when we recite the psalms, we are not only joining with our fellow believers around the world. We are engaging in the continuous worship of three thousand years!
For quite some time now, one of the habits I have engaged in my own personal devotions is to read from the psalms every day—and I almost invariably find myself enriched by the practice.
The marvellous quality about the psalms is that they give voice to the whole range of human experience. There is joyful praise. Think, for example, of Psalm 95—what we call the Venite, with which we open Morning Prayer: “Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation…” Or the Jubilate Deo, Psalm 100: “Be joyful in the Lord, all you lands; serve the Lord with gladness and come before his presence with a song.”
At the other end of the spectrum there are psalms like Psalm 55, so magnificently set to music by the composer Mendelssohn: “Hear my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my petition… Fear and trembling have come over me and horror overwhelms me. And I said, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest…’” Or the chilling psalm that Jesus quoted from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Like those two psalms that I have just quoted, the psalm that we have read together this morning, Psalm 80, is one of what are known as “psalms of lament”. Each of these psalms in one way or another expresses sorrow, pain and discouragement—we might even say disappointment with God. In all, there are over fifty of them, more than any other category of psalms in the Bible.
So for the next few minutes I want us to take a look at the psalm we have just read this morning—and I hope that you may find it speaking to you in a new way.
He looks around
The psalm was likely composed some time after the year 722 BC. That was the year when the powerful armies of the Assyrian Empire finally crushed the northern Israelite kingdom centred in Samaria. The Assyrians had gradually been gaining control of Israelite territory for a dozen years. And it was after a three-year siege that the northern capital of Samaria itself eventually fell. As was the practice in those days, the city was leveled to the ground and its citizens deported to serve as slaves.
As I read this psalm, I imagine the psalmist having made the journey back to Samaria. He wanders through familiar streets and alleyways where houses and shops and the king’s palace once had proudly stood, now reduced to piles of rubble. Perhaps it is a herd of sheep grazing on the tufts of vegetation growing up through the tumbled stones that prompts him to cry out, “Hear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock…” Or maybe it is the familiar words penned centuries before by Israel’s greatest king: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”
In the silence of the deserted city he cries out, “Stir up your strength and come to help us!” And then for the first time we hear the sorrowful refrain that is repeated three times in the course of the psalm: “Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” Behind those words we can detect the faint echo of the blessing that Moses’ brother Aaron had given to his sons and the priests that would follow them:
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you,
and give you peace. (Numbers 6:24-26)
Whatever the case, the psalmist is not afraid to vocalize his disappointment with God:
How long will you be angered,
despite the prayers of your people?
You have fed them with the bread of tears…
and our enemies laugh us to scorn.
A hundred and thirty-five years later, following the destruction of Jerusalem, it would be another psalmist who wailed,
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion…
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
Kate Bowler is a Canadian author and blogger. As a young mother in her mid-thirties and having just completed her PhD thesis, she was met with the devastating news that she had been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Almost immediately well-meaning friends and acquaintances began to attempt to comfort her with thoughts like, “This is a test and it will make you stronger,” and, “At least you have your son. At least you’ve had an amazing marriage.” But what she really needed was time to grieve, time to be angry, time to be depressed, as she faced the terrible reality of her situation.
I believe that this is exactly what we find happening in the early verses of this psalm. The poet makes no attempt to gloss things over or to look to a brighter future. He is bluntly realistic with God. And I believe this can act as a model for us today when we stand in the face of disappointment or tragedy. We need make no attempt to hide it or disguise it. Instead we can be open about it. We can be honest. Because we have a God who invites us to cast all our anxieties on him, because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).
He looks back
So the psalmist looks around. He is bluntly realistic about the situation he is facing. But then in the second part of the psalm (in verses 8 to 11) he looks back. He remembers God’s faithfulness to his people Israel—all the way back to their escape from centuries of slavery in Egypt, to the settling of the Promised Land:
You have brought a vine out of Egypt;
you cast out the nations and planted it…
You stretched out its tendrils to the Sea
and its branches to the River.
He thinks back to Israel’s establishment as a prosperous kingdom under David and Solomon—the envy even of the Queen of the faraway kingdom of Sheba!
At the same time there was a problem, and the problem was this: the people had invested their hope in the wrong place. They had been blinded by the false pleasures of wealth and prosperity and of military might. And it was not as though they had not been warned by prophets like Amos:
Alas for those who are at ease in Zion,
and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria,
the notables of the first of the nations,
to whom the house of Israel resorts! …
Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory,
and lounge on their couches,
and eat lambs from the flock,
and calves from the stall;
who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp,
and like David improvise on instruments of music;
who drink wine from bowls,
and anoint themselves with the finest oils,
but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away. (Amos 6:1,4-7)
When things seem to have turned against us, we can sometimes be inclined to look back to the “good old days”, when everything was so much better! Of course we know that that is a mirage, that the prosperity that so many of us became accustomed to came at a tremendous cost—a cost to people who were often ignored or trodden under foot and the destruction of much of our natural environment, which it is unlikely that we will ever be able to rectify.
At the same time, the Bible calls us to look back—not to the good old days, not to some imagined golden era, but to one specific day: to the day when darkness covered the whole land, to the day when the sun’s light failed, the earth shook, and the thick curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.
In a few moments’ time we will take the bread in our hands, we will bring the cup to our lips, in obedience to the one who said to his disciples, “Do this in remembrance of me.” As we go through those familiar actions once again, we remember. We remember the ultimate example of self-giving love. We remember the one who took all the ugliness and cruelty of our sin upon himself. We remember the one who suffered defeat, so that we might share in his victory over evil and death. “Do this,” he commands us, “in remembrance of me.”
He looks ahead
It is only once he has looked back and recalled God’s faithfulness in the past, that the psalmist is able to look forward—and to look forward in hope. And so, as the psalm draws to a close, he prays,
But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand,
the one whom you made so strong for yourself.
And so we will never turn away from you;
give us life, that we may call on your name.
As he sets his sights on the future, he recognizes that, while Samaria and his life of the past may lie in ruins, he is not alone. There is a strong hand that is grasping his.
Centuries before, as the people of Israel stood on the edge of the Promised Land and were preparing to enter it, their leader Moses encouraged them with these words: “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8). And our Lord Jesus says the same to us as he promised his followers as the time of his ascension, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor who vehemently opposed Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. Just before his works were banned from publication, he wrote a little book about the Psalms. Here is what he had to say about the psalms of lament:
“[These] psalms have to do with that complete fellowship with God which is justification and love. But not only is Jesus Christ the goal of our prayer; he himself also accompanies us in our prayer. He who suffered every want and has brought it before God, has prayed for our sake in God’s name… For our sake he cried on the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Now we know that there is no longer any suffering on earth in which Christ will not be with us, suffering with us and praying with us—Christ the only helper.”
The psalms are intended not just to be read, but to be prayed. And as you learn to pray those psalms, may you know the presence of Jesus, our Great Shepherd, praying alongside you, and the light of his countenance shining upon you.
