Psalm 30
2/15/09 KUMC &Bethel
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
I suspect I am like many of you: I cut my religious teeth on these wonderful gospel stories of lepers healed, the blind made to see, the lame suddenly walking, or as we sang last week, “Tell me the stories of Jesus, I’d love to hear, things I would ask him to tell me if he were here.” I might even boldly declare that the trust we have that everything is going to turn out alright in the end depends, finally, on our belief that these and similar stories are not make-believe but embody truth with a capital T. Pick most any gospel story and the message is the same: love, whether in the form of healing, exorcism, or upsetting the status quo, will finally be triumphant in the end.
But I have also found that sometimes, instead of me choosing a text that illustrates that love, that, instead, a text chooses me; such has been the case with this week’s lectionary texts and the particular text that seems to have had my name written on it: Psalm 30.
If you’re like me, there can be no doubt that the Book of Psalms, the Psalter, has a special place in the life of faith and devotion. If fact, considering all the hundreds of literary genres contained in the Bible as a whole, I think it’s safe to say that the poetry, hymns, wisdom sayings, enthronement rituals, the personal narratives of rescue and deliverance from illness and danger, that all that and much more collected within the pages of these 150 Psalms might well be the single greatest collection of devotional treasures ever assembled.
The Psalmist is the great poet of the soul, the one who has a special gift for photographing the inner geography and landscape of the heart’s desires, the genius of sketching the mystery of our humanity, then simply putting those pictures on display to speak their thousand words to generations like us. Some Psalms, we know, were written in the royal court; others were sung as part of a temple ritual; perhaps composed by or for beloved king David or his son Solomon, but most of the Psalms remain anonymous artistic creations.
What they represent for me is testimony to the universal search for God and for peace in the soul undertaken by every age of seekers.
We know little, for instance, about the gender, age, social standing, family status of the person who wrote Psalm 30. Yet, for anyone who has gone through a time of physical illness or spiritual anguish, there can be such a personal connection, such powerful kinship with the Psalmist, who writes of lingering darkness and waiting for recovery and joy in the morning --- that his experience becomes our experience, too.
We might read Psalm 30 as a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the personal healing experienced by the Psalmist.
We don’t get much detail about what has gone wrong in his life, only that it appears that the Psalmist was near death at one point, for he bargains that there will be one less person to praise God if God should now allow the Psalmist to die. But there’s no detail about his symptoms, his prognosis, his vital signs or other such details that consume us in today’s medical world and our own conversations around the bed of someone we love who is sick.
Today, of course, the world of medicine and doctors has an authority all its own; and perhaps it’s not unfair to say that we, at times, place our highest trust in what the medical establishment promises and often is able to deliver. The world of medicine and doctors and specialists and tests can provide so much detail about our physical and mental health that some of us perhaps feel the need for the aid of a personal assistant to keep track of it all: I think of my own case of cancer and the reams of paper and computer memory space it must require to track the information all my doctors and technicians have gathered in attempts to find a cure and improve quality of life.
And I thank God every day that my life has been extended because of grace, yes, but also because of what medicine has accomplished.
We may slip up and fail to be as grateful as we should, but deep down, we must know how incredibly blessed we are in our world of medical knowledge and skills!
But there was none of that “extra stuff” for the ancient Psalmist. Little stood as buffer between him and death. Most any illness, I suspect, quickly turned his mind to thoughts of mortality.
What we do know is that before he became ill, the Psalmist felt almost perfectly secure, overly confident, but when illness struck, he comes to his senses and realizes how utterly and wholly dependent upon God he is.
It appears that, once he became sick, he kept meditating: “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning . . . Lord, your anger is but for a moment but your favor is for a lifetime.” Over and over those words must have passed through his consciousness till he knew that his very life depended on their becoming true.
What seems to be missing from the Psalmist’s experience, at least here in Psalm 30, is the question why? Why me? What did I do to deserve such suffering, such pain and anguish, why this near-death experience?
It’s not that biblical writers don’t struggle with the why of suffering or the meaning of illness and death. There are actually all sorts of responses to the question of suffering in the Bible. The prophets, for instance, say that suffering is a punishment for sin; the book of Job says that suffering is both a test and a mystery beyond comprehension; Ecclesiastes says that suffering is simply in the nature of things and we should just accept it; and all the various apocalyptic texts, Revelation being a prominent example, says that the unjust suffering of the righteous will eventually be made right when the end comes and the wicked will receive their eternal punishment
But for our Psalmist, aside from a little bargaining with God to keep him around, the “why me” question doesn’t seem to be on his lips. Even though the very earth is shifting and cracking beneath him, there is no sense of being the victim or a scapegoat for someone else’s wrongdoing; there is no apparent correlation in his mind between a wrong deed and the onset of illness.
Illness just is. A crisis hardly desired, but Psalm 30 leaves no hint that illness comprised a part of God’s plan or will or purpose. Illness just is.
You may know that the Chinese ideogram for crisis juxtaposes two word-pictures: danger and opportunity. In other words, danger and opportunity may be seen as two sides of the same coin. Most all of us know that serious illness is, certainly, a crisis that presents the danger of mortality. But how often do we often view illness as a unique opportunity: the opportunity to see self, others, God, our spiritualityin a new light?
I want to suggest that the beauty of Psalm 30, -- maybe even why it resonates so much with my own experience of cancer -- is precisely because it both validates my weeping in the night over that which I cannot control, the longings and desires that may or may not be because I just don’t know, but also because it promises that joy, hope, fresh light, comes with the morning. In other words, both the dark night and the morning light, together, form that essential mystery and paradox that makes us human and give our souls the capacity to wait on God.
I want to offer you several reflections about why I trust, why I have hope that weeping will give way to the joy of morning. And why that is true for all who long healing. I do so, first of all, because the Psalmist sees himself in a communal context. It’s a very personal word he shares; his struggle is in many ways private and unseen. It is his own tears, his own cry for mercy. Yet, through it all, he knows he doesn’t face illness by himself. He thus invites all the faithful to praise God for his deliverance from his near-death experience. The community has been with him and will continue to surround him.
I remember awhile back writing about my own experience with cancer and how I found myself at times unable to pray, unable to communicate (maybe a better word, commune) with God, but that the great mystery of those moments was that I just knew, deep down in my own soul, that others were praying for me when I could not pray for myself. That’s the church, really, at its finest when we have such solidarity and love that others can sustain us with their prayers when we’re unable even to pray for ourselves. And I believe that now even more than I did then.
As one minister writes: “Whenever a trapdoor swings or the roof caves in, don’t ask “why?” Why will get you nowhere. The only question worth asking is “Where do we go from here?” And part of the answer must be “together.” Together, we kneel. Together we walk, holding each other’s hands, holding each other up. Together we do love’s work and thereby are saved.”(Forrest Church, 82).
I know that why questions have their place but I believe that final answers to ultimate questions lie far beyond the reach of human understanding. We keep asking, of course. It’s in our nature to ask, and I believe God honors such honest seeking and questing. I like this image: “We keep climbing up to reach the stars even as God comes down to share our tears, each to the other like a vanishing pot of gold at tewo ends of a rainbow. The mystery is, by reaching for God . . . . we can in fact be changed, even saved. Humbled. Brought to life (Church, 25)
The psalmist never stopped trusting that joy would come with the morning. And neither should we.
A second truth about illness when it involves weeping and waiting for morning’s joy, is that as we wait, prayer can itself become a kind of sacramental gift, a doorway, even an icon, into the full mystery of our creaturely dependence on our merciful creator.
Late in life I think I am beginning to learn just how marvelously diverse prayer can be and how prayer can represent so many wonderful things to so many people of so many varied religious traditions and spiritual temperaments. I was struck, I particular, by the list of things prayer has come to mean to a Jewish woman and cancer survivor, who put together a Shacharit service or healing time through the renewing power of bathing in water that had been blessed in a special way by her friends. Here are a few of her thoughts on prayer: a
Prayer puts into words my fears and my hopes.
Prayer is a poetic reminder of where I want my soul to live.
Prayer reflects the yearnings of my deepest desires.
Prayer asks me to turn past myself for help and support.
Prayer is a metaphor of the thoughts I might not otherwise express.
Prayer is conversation and communion with God, connection with the
World of the spirit . . . .
I pray for courage, strength, understanding, and generosity of spirit.
I pray for quiet and peace in my soul (Life, Faith, and Cancer, 108).
It seems to me, whoever the ancient Psalmist was, whatever sickness he struggled with, that prayer somehow kept him believing, hoping, that “joy comes with the morning.”
Illness can be a harsh but forceful reminder of just how much we need to take a Sabbath Rest in order to live the life the creator intended. Even without illness, we can become so exhausted, so rooted in anxiety, that we come to mistrust the abundance God has promised since the very beginning when God gave us one day in seven for worship and leisure and renewal.
At the heart of Hebrew theology is the idea of rest. While different illnesses will have to be treated in different ways, perhaps our own confrontation with sickness will give us a renewed desire to reenter the space and time of God’s new creation, to feel the divine breath renewing body, mind, and soul. Surely, the Psalmist knew that God desired wholeness of body and spirit, and he must have believed that even illness itself could ultimately to be the scene where healing and holiness would come together and dance as one.
And finally, I believe that Psalm 30 has something profound to say about the time when God may seem hidden, and even more, the time when God seems silent in the face of our suffering and illness.
In one of those little quotes that make the email rounds, I agree with the musician and composer Mozart’s statement that “the silences between the notes are as important as the notes themselves.” Silence is what frames, gives meaning to sound itself.
Questions and wonderings, my fears and hopes, about the silence of God is by far, for me, at least, the most intriguing and perplexing of all theological and spiritual realities and mysteries, but perhaps there is even something in the silence associated with the weeping of the night that prepares one to hear God in a new way when the joy of morning comes.
I, for one, am not sure how healing and silence go together, but something tells me they are integrally, profoundly, intrinsically related, if for no other reason than that to learn silence is finally really to learn the first step in the dance of how to listen to the divine, and that sometimes, ironically, the darkness is when God’s silence can be the most audible.
In her book on preaching entitled “When God is Silent,” written about 10 years ago, Barbara Brown Taylor wondered “about the place of listening in the preacher’s life. Just where do you go to listen for God’s silence and for God’s speech?” She poses a profound question. “Too often,” she continues, “preachers get into the business of giving answers instead of ushering people into the presence of the God who may or may not answer . . . when God falls silent, we too often compensate by talking more, which may be the very worst thing we can do. Who are we, in fact, to insert ourselves between God’s silence and those for whom the silence is intended? . . . . by addressing the experience of God’s silence in scripture and in our listener’s own lives, we may be able to open up the possibility that silence is as much a sign of Gd’s presence as of God’s absence.
I want to believe that in as much as the Psalmist and his experience of illness was similar to my own or might even be similar to yours, that he found a way, whether inside the darkness and or the light, to reverence the silence.
That’s our job, too, to reverence the silence.
At first, when cancer came several years ago and took my voice mostly away, I had to wonder about the divine irony of calling someone to preach without much of a voice. And now that that voice is back, so is the cancer, and I realize that even more than before, I need to learn and to receive the grace of listening to God, even through the silence.
Hope is what we all finally have to hold onto, the hope that even in the night’s lingering darkness or the times when God seems silent, that yes, joy will come in the morning. Whatever else, come what may, joy comes in the morning!
So let it be. Amen.
