(Psalm 40)
NB: the primary translation I worked with here, which was read in the service, was Robert Alter’s.
If you were here last week, I hope you remember Emily’s message, because I want to pick up roughly where she left off. If you weren’t (or if you don’t), I encourage you to take time later to listen to it, but you don’t have to go do that right this moment. (In fact, I would appreciate it if you don’t.) Here’s our point of departure this morning: as followers of Jesus Christ, we are called into the wild. That might be a surprising thing to say, but as Emily pointed out last week, we serve an undomesticated God. If that reality does surprise us, it’s because it disturbs our comfort, and so it tends to be something the church conveniently forgets, leaving it buried behind a pile of things like “Fifty Biblical Principles for Better Home Repair.”
To leave us without excuse, God keeps sending people to remind us. In the modern era, for instance, we have C. S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in Mr. Beaver’s description of Aslan: “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you”; and again, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.” The other Inklings understood this as well, though J. R. R. Tolkien expressed it indirectly and parabolically in his fiction, and Charles Williams is little read these days; and before the Inklings came G. K. Chesterton, most profoundly and unsettlingly in The Man Who Was Thursday. God is good, but he is not safe. In fact, he isn’t safe because he is good, for true goodness cannot be broken to harness by the mechanisms and techniques of this world. Not all wildness is good, to be sure—not by a long chalk—but if the one we serve is truly God, and truly good, we should not expect following such a God to lead us into our comfort zone.
Is that why God so often uses the wilderness to forge and build up his people? I think it might be. We really should never be surprised to find ourselves in the wilderness. Granted, it would be foolish to try to predict when God will lead us into the wilderness, or how, or exactly how he’ll use it, because God never does things the same way twice; but he does do things in the same places twice, and many times over beyond that. We may not like it, because the wilderness is not a comfortable place to be, but that just isn’t God’s priority for us. Comfort is pleasant, but it does not motivate us to grow and therefore bears little fruit. As I’ve told my kids many times, degree of difficulty counts. No gymnast ever won Olympic gold jumping in place.
Human religion is all about behavior control, for a couple reasons. One, the chief interest of the powers that be is in controlling the behavior of the masses; this is why Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the people.” Two, the chief purpose of human religion is controlling the behavior of the gods. The message is, you have to control your behavior, you have to do certain things and not do other things, because in doing so you obligate your chosen deity to give you what you want or do what you want. Paganism is vending-machine religion. It’s about guaranteed outcomes, and so as Skye Jethani said a few months ago on the Holy Post podcast, “It’s all predicated on fear and control, and the God of Israel comes along and said, for my people, these practices are prohibited because I am not someone you can control, number one. And number two, I have proven my love for you by rescuing you from Egypt and I have committed myself in covenant to you, and I will do good by you, and I’m inviting you to trust me rather than try to control me.”
We are summoned to live by trust in a God we cannot even predict, let alone control. This can be freeing and energizing—indeed, I think it should be. It releases us from the shackles of behavior control, freeing us to live on a different basis. Where human religion oscillates between squashing desire and turning it loose to run roughshod over us, God frees us to channel the power of desire as an engine driving us to seek him and pursue his holiness. Despite what many churches might lead you to believe, the Christian life is not about doing everything right—or about not doing anything wrong, which isn’t quite the same thing. It’s about following Jesus, letting him fill us with his life and lead us on his way. Holiness isn’t a checklist or a set of rules to keep, it’s an adventure.
That might sound appealing to you, and then again it might not. As I’ve said before, adventure can be defined as unpleasant things happening to other people far away. We might be tempted to call it risky and think it a risk not worth the candle. I don’t think we should call it risky, though, not because the adventure of holiness is somehow safe but because “risk” is not the right word. The adventure of holiness is perilous. The wild is perilous. I grew up near the mountains and the ocean, and I love them; a little later on, I learned to love the high desert of the Colorado Plateau with its mesas and its canyons as well. I love them, but I know never to turn my back on them, for they are always trying to kill you. It’s dangerous to stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or to go hiking in the Rocky Mountains; in our five years in Grand Lake, there were multiple people who died in the national park, and others who survived only by the mercy God shows the foolish and the naïve. But with the danger, there is great beauty that can’t be seen any other way—they are interwoven. The adventure of holiness is perilous, but the peril is part of the point; we are summoned out of our safe cocoons into the fullness of God’s life.
Leaving a safely domesticated religion to worship a God we cannot tame is perilous, and I think it’s perilous in two aspects, both of which we see in Psalm 40. One I’ve already mentioned, that a safe religion is a behavior-controlling religion. The substance of it is rules and structures and lifehacks to domesticate desire—or at least to shackle it. If that works for you (and it doesn’t for all of us), it helps you control the effects of your desire without having to wrestle with the thing itself. This can make you look holy on the outside, in your public behavior . . . but it cannot change your heart. God’s primary aim for each of us is to change our hearts—behavior change is the product, not the process—and so we cannot truly open ourselves to God and still keep ourselves locked down. We have to remove the controls and engage honestly with the reality of our hearts; and if you do that, you’ll find sin is a more visible power in your life than it ever was before. It won’t be a greater power, but it will be more visible. It will be easier to identify, and it will make us feel our need for deliverance more keenly, because the sins of desire are easier to see and feel more convicting than the sins of the colder passions. They are not, however, any more deadly. If anything, the opposite might be true.
I think this is the reality we see in verses 11-13 of Psalm 40. They may seem to sit oddly with the picture the psalmist paints in verses 6-10: “Your law is in my heart, and I proclaim your justice, your faithfulness, and your salvation, but I’m overwhelmed by the hugeness of my sin.” In truth, however, I think we see cause and effect. The psalmist is pursuing God, and as a result is having to face up to his own sin, and feel the greatness of it, in a way he didn’t before. Therefore he recognizes his need for deliverance.
At the same time, that pursuit itself is also a source of peril. A safe religion is conventional and predictable. It may be completely inoffensive, as many churches are. It may also be intentionally offensive, but only to “those” people who aren’t “us.” In either case, as long as you honor the conventions of the community and only say what people around you want to hear, you will be safe. Set those things aside, and you’re headed for trouble. Stand up in the great assembly declaring the justice of God and proclaiming his love and faithfulness without softening your message? It’s not if people will be mad, only how many. I believe we see this also in Psalm 40, and I’ll say more about that in a moment. The bottom line is—and more than one psalm wrestles with this—in this world, the peril of holiness is not less than the peril of sin, only different. If we open ourselves to the wildness of God, we will experience both, and we will find ourselves in need of deliverance as a result of both.
As I said a moment ago, I believe we see this mingling in Psalm 40, though it isn’t clearcut. My main reason for saying this is verse 15: these people who cry out “Hurrah!” or “Aha!” have clearly been looking for an excuse to tear the psalmist down. Why? Look at verses 8-10. In verse 8, the psalmist sets out his general orientation: “Your teaching has gone deep in my heart, and what I want is to do what pleases you.” Next, the psalmist declares, “I was the herald of your justice in the great assembly”—and then look at the affirmations that follow: “I will not seal my lips—Lord, you know I won’t. I did not conceal your justice. I proclaimed your faithfulness and your deliverance. I did not hold back from preaching your steadfast truth to the great assembly.” Stop and think about that: the psalmist repeatedly states his refusal to sit down and stop talking about God. Why would that be unless the great assembly wanted him to seal his lips, conceal the Lord’s justice, and hold back from speaking the truth?
The fact is, if you uncompromisingly proclaim the justice of God, if you unwaveringly preach his faithfulness, you will make enemies—even, some of them, in the church. They will try to take you down—by any means necessary, if you keep it up. To that end, they will most assuredly use your sin against you in any way they can. Is the psalmist being prosecuted for his sins or persecuted for his faithfulness in speaking God’s truth? Yes. I’ve been there. When I left the church in Winona, it was in part because of my own sin, I do not deny it. But for those who wanted me gone, if I had been leading the congregation in a way that suited their preferences and prejudices, they would have been perfectly happy to keep me around. The reality of the particular sinner that I am was a justification for their hostility, not the reason for it.
Now, sadly, in this season, we have to stop for a moment and acknowledge the ongoing roll call of fallen Christian leaders. It’s a long list, and keeps growing longer, and I want to make sure we’re clear on this: to use Psalm 40 to whitewash people who have been shipwrecked by gross moral failure would be a gross misuse of the psalm. Note well, the psalmist doesn’t minimize his sin, nor does he try to argue that he’s being falsely persecuted. To the contrary, he’s overwhelmed by a spirit of conviction to such an extent that his heart has failed him and he cannot see his way out; he declares his sins to be more numerous than the hairs of his head, using the same word as in verse 5 when he said God’s wonders were too numerous to count.
Here’s the key: in the midst of everything, the psalmist’s desire is not only for God’s deliverance, his desire is for God. He doesn’t declare himself beyond forgiveness and abandon hope in God, he throws himself on God’s mercy. He cries out to the Lord in agony and pleads for rescue. He names his own guilt, but he also asks God to bring down those who are trying to destroy him, because their hearts and their motives are not right. The spirit is the same here as in another great prayer for deliverance, Psalm 130:
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.
And he will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities.
You’ll note, though, that Psalm 130 ends with a statement of faith. Psalm 40 doesn’t. The author of this psalm closes with a plea for rescue and no resolution. We should pay attention to this, because there are those who claim the psalms of lament follow a formula beginning with complaint and ending with praise; they seek to domesticate lament, keeping it carefully restrained so as not to challenge God. That is the safe-religion version, insisting that even weeping and complaint must be neatly tied up with ribbon and a big red bow. There are many psalms which don’t fit that pattern, and Psalm 40 is one of them: it begins with praise to God for past deliverance and ends with a cry for help. The psalmist never seems to doubt God can deliver him, for he remembers how God has done so before, but it hasn’t happened yet and he feels no need for a Psalm 130 ending. Instead, he ends pleading, “My God, please, come quickly.”
What makes lament acceptable in God’s sight, what makes our urgent desire for deliverance right in his eyes, is not that we keep our words safe, not that we don’t go overboard, not that we are careful not to challenge or question God. Again, the key is that like the authors of Psalms 40 and 130, our desire for deliverance is rooted in our desire for God. We don’t need to pick our words carefully to avoid offending him or try to pretend away our emotions so as not to make him mad; that’s what you do if your primary concern is to get what you want from God. If our desire is for God, and if we know he’s far more than big enough to take whatever we can give him—and that he already knows all of it anyway—we can be completely honest with him (and ourselves) about what we’re thinking and feeling and ask him to save us anyway.
Now, this way of approaching God is largely foreign to 21st-century America; it feels more natural here at VSF than in any other church I’ve ever known, but even here, we can’t help but be affected by the broader American church culture and its completely dysfunctional view of desire. In response to that, I’d like to suggest, gently, that if we’re not sure how to speak to God about anything, if we don’t have the words or don’t know how to begin, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I know a lot of Christians believe prayer is only real and valid if it’s spontaneous, but I think the Psalms themselves give the lie to that; and beyond the Scriptures, we have all sorts of Christian brothers and sisters across continents and centuries who have much to teach us—about prayer, and many other things. They faced challenges we have not faced and so came to understand things we do not understand.
As such, I believe there is real value in using prayers written by other believers, as long as we actually pray them. Just repeating the words means little because there’s nothing magical about the words, but if we pray them as our own, they give us words where we have no words and teach us to pray with others in the people of God. If we take their words as a point of departure to write our own prayers, as Emily has encouraged us to do with the psalms, then so much the better, for then we make it a conversation.
For myself, I have a particular love for the Celtic stream of Christianity, which is beautifully, gloriously strange. In particular, Celtic Christianity had a strong tradition of prayer for protection and deliverance, and developed particular forms of prayer for the purpose. One was the caim, or encircling prayer; another was the lorica, or shield prayer—lorica is actually a Latin word for body armor, such as a breastplate. These prayers are notable for the breadth of their appeal to the Creator and to his creation. The most famous of them actually combines these two forms, though it is named a lorica—specifically, the Lorica of St. Patrick, or St. Patrick’s Breastplate. I’d like to close this morning, as the psalmist has given us one model of prayer for deliverance, by praying St. Patrick’s Breastplate together as another model out of another community of faith. I’ve asked several people to lead one section at a time, and when we get to the part in orange, please stand and we’ll all pray those words together.
Photo 2017, photographer unknown. Public domain.