"Faith Through the Eyes of Psalm 130:
Faith as Urgent Prayer"
Reaching out to God from the depths
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Text: Matthew 6:5-13
It was a hot Friday afternoon in the middle of August. I had driven some 10 hours from southern Massachusetts, right up to the tip of northern Maine, to cross the Canadian border into New Brunswick. It had been a difficult day in some ways. My heart was still heavy, for I had been in Massachusetts visiting my wife's relative who was very ill and we were deeply concerned for him. I'm pleased to say he is now doing well. Just as we were in one of those interminably long line-ups that seem to plague everyone crossing the border these days - two hours sitting in the car, idling, waiting; a real test of the patience of any person, especially a minister - the phone rang. It was a call from Ontario: It would probably be wise to get home soon, for our dog, Digby, was critically ill. He subsequently passed away - it was hard. As we crossed the border - finally - we did what I think all Canadians do when they re-enter Canada. We didn't sing Oh Canada; we didn't put our hands on our hearts and pay some form of allegiance to the Maple Leaf; we didn't go to Canadian Tire - we went to Tim Horton's. We are the greatest country on earth!
As I sat down and consoled myself with a double-double, feeling good to be back in my own country, even with a heavy heart, I looked over to the corner of the room. Sitting at an adjacent table was a soldier, wearing a Canadian Armed Forces uniform. I didn't know what he was doing in St. Stephen in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, but as I looked at him carefully I realized something: The young man was missing a limb, and as his face turned towards the sunlight streaming through the window, I saw a severe burn on one side of his face. What had happened to the young man I don't know. Why he was dressed in his uniform on that afternoon, in that town, I can only speculate - probably to be welcomed home after conflict. My heart was heavy and when I looked into his eyes, even though it was across the room, I realized there was a book behind those eyes. There was a story I would probably be scared to read.
That night as we got into our hotel room, burdened with a heavy heart, I sat down, pulled open the drawer next to the bed, and there was the ubiquitous Gideon Bible. I opened it to the Psalms, for they are always so clear. I went to one of my favourites, Psalm 130, and began to read. It is this psalm that I am going to dwell on over the next few weeks. It begins as follows:
Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord. Lord hear my voice and let thine ears be attentive to of my prayers. O Lord if you should mark iniquities, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness in thee, that thou may be revered. My soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope that with the Lord there is mercy and with Him there is plenteous redemption.
Suddenly, it seemed that the psalmist was able to say things that I was unable to say; to articulate the depths of my emotions, something I was not eloquent enough to do. “Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord. Lord hear my voice and let thine ears be attentive to my prayers.” Now, we do not know who wrote this psalm, or the occasion of its writing. We do not know what transpired to cause the psalmist to be so eloquent, so torn and yet so faithful. We can only speculate that it was a psalm used by him in a moment of terror or sadness. There is also a corporate sense that it reflects what had happened to the people of Israel. Clearly, there is some guilt, some remorse at the heart of the psalm, but we don't know precisely what it is. Yet there is also this tremendous fountain spring of forgiveness and hope in the midst of it all.
It is a glorious psalm; it tells us so much about God. It tells us, not about a God who is dispassionate, but about a God who is attentive, who listens. It does not speak about God like a lecture on religion; it is a psalm to God as a living being. It is not a psalm addressed to a general, infinite spirit; it is a psalm to a God with character. It is a psalm from the very depths of someone's soul to a God who he knows listens. As I look at this psalm and feel my way through it, it tells me so much about the power of faith and the urgency of prayer. But most of all, it talks about our prayers from the point of view of our inability. What is clear is that whatever happened that troubled the psalmist, he did not feel he had the strength to handle it. Something was shaking the psalmist's world, but we aren't sure what.
Not long ago, I was talking to a businessperson on a street corner in Niagara-on-the Lake on a beautiful day. I was delighted to see this person - a very successful man - and he was delighted to come across the street to talk to me. He said, “Andrew, I've sent people to Timothy Eaton Memorial Church to worship there.”
I replied, “Man, you really have poor judgment don't you?”
“Maybe so,” he said, “but nevertheless, it's good to talk to you.”
He talked about what he was doing in his life, and we spoke about success, failure and uncertainty in the markets. Then, with a smile on his face, he said, “You know, there is one thing I have never understood. You cannot appreciate success in life unless you have been forced to examine the depths of your need.”
There was a man who understood that, yes, he'd had successes in life, but he only really appreciated them in the light of the depth of the need that he felt. He bemoaned the fact that we sometimes live in a very shallow world that does not really wrestle and come to terms with the depths. The psalmist put it clearly: “Out of the depths I cry unto thee, O Lord.”
What is interesting is that the Hebrew word for “the depths” or “the deep” is tehôm. Tehôm is the same word that is used in the Book of Jonah when from the belly of the whale he cries out, “Lord, hear my cry from out of these depths.” The psalmist, then, has gone to that very same place. He wrestles with his depths, the hard places, and from those hard places he cries out to God. But, as my friend rightly said, when we come face to face with those depths, when we are willing to acknowledge the depths and cry out of them, it is amazing what good things can happen.
Just before summer, my doctor said, “You know, Andrew, if you want to trim down and lose some weight and need incentive to do so, you should stand in front of a mirror without your clothes on - sideways.”
Always listening to everything my doctor says, I went home and did exactly that. I closed the door, neither dog nor wife could see me, and there I was, thinking, “Oh, my Lord, he is absolutely right.” Then I went to my physiotherapist and asked, “Can you do anything to help me?”
She said, “You mean apart from pushing back from the table?”
I said, “Yes.”
“You need to do some sort of resistance training,” she said.
So I read about bands and resistance training, and in my studies I discovered something: The Russian cosmonauts who went up to the space station in the 1980s had problems because there was no gravity. Their bones and muscles experienced no resistance, so when they came back to earth many of them couldn't walk or breathe properly. They had lost their skeletal strength and power, and for many of them it took a month or even longer to get back to a semblance of normal. A year later, a cosmonaut went up for 350 days. He managed to come back fine; within two days he was okay. The difference was that, the second time around, the cosmonauts were given what is known as a penguin suit - a suit they wore all the time that had built-in elastic bands corresponding to every muscle in the body. Even though they were weightless, every time they moved the band provided some resistance so the muscles maintained their strength, flexibility and power.
In other words, by taking on this resistance, they found they were stronger in the end. Well, so it is with life and its difficulties. When we are willing to cry out and say, “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord,” we are actually recognizing the resistance of the difficulties we face in life. We are facing up to our own abilities, weaknesses and sin.
No wonder, then, that St. John Chrysoston, St. Augustine, Luther, Wesley and Baxter all said this was one of their favourite psalms. But that sense of out-of-the-depths crying is not just something done by people of faith. It seems to me to be universal. Homer wrote, “All men cry to the gods.” All people cry to the gods. Everyone faces some difficulty in life and even if they don't intentionally cry to the gods or to God, they do so. Much of the greatest literature deals with this crying out from the point of human need. Whether it is the existentialist like Sartre and Camus, the great 19th century writer, Dostoevsky, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series with its struggle between good and evil and finding the path through it, or so many of P.D. James's writings, all great literature contains a universal recognition of our weakness and head-on struggle with the depths.
But the psalmist is different. He says, “Out of the depths I cry unto thee,” but then he says, “Lord, hear my voice.” The distinguishing quality of faith is not that it avoids the depths; the distinguishing quality of faith is that it recognizes that from those depths there someone who hears his voice. There is one who responds from those depths.
In his recent book, The Twilight of Atheism, Alister McGrath writes about how many people question whether there is a God when they see suffering in the world. For many people, this creates a crisis. McGrath quotes 19th century writer, Annie Besson, and others as to why they don't believe in God. He suggests that many of the things that cause us crises are made as much by human hands as by fate. He suggests that people of faith need to have a new imagination, a new language to speak about the suffering in the world, and a new way to address those who have a real crisis when they face that suffering. As I read, I couldn't help but think, “Alister, the words are already there. The psalmist has already put it down.” The psalmist recognizes that there are the depths, but from those depths comes a voice that answers his prayers.
Haddon Robinson, one of the great preachers who I love to hear, is is a Gordon-Conwell seminarian in Massachusetts. When he had young children at home, he used to play a game with them. He put some coins in his hand, and the children tried to get them by pulling one finger away from his clasped hand. He said he practised the universal rule of finger-pulling: once they pulled a finger out, he couldn't put it back again. One by one, they pulled his fingers with excruciating tenacity until the coins in the hand were exposed, then grabbed them and ran away, happy that they had beaten Dad and won the game. It gave them the most incredible joy. Robinson said, “Of all the things we did, the most joy was found grabbing those coins from my hand. The simplest of games.”
Robinson says we are often like that when it comes to our prayers to God. We pull one finger away at a time. One finger says, “God help me in my work.” Another says, “God help me when I'm not feeling well.” Then, “God help me at tax time; God help me when I go back to school; God help me with the person I'm working with.” We pry back each finger, one after the other, and forget about the hand. We push the hand away, just like the children after grabbing the coin. Robinson says, “What matters is not each individual finger. What matters is not the coin. What matters is the hand, which is the source of grace. When we are at our depths, it is the hand we should be concentrating on. It is the hand that we should be reaching out to. It is the hand we should grasp.” Even in the midst of our difficulties, even in the midst of the depths, it is the hand we should hold.
There is something marvellous about that hand. Pascal used to say that God was speaking to him, saying, “You cannot search for me if I have not already found thee.” The hand - and this is faith - is outstretched always, even when we are in the depths. That hand is the hand of God's grace, and it's a powerful thing.
In our passage from Matthew, we read the wonderful story of the Lord's Prayer. We all know the Lord's Prayer. We all know to go and be quiet, not to say too many words and to go into a room and close the door. We all know that, but there is one line we often miss, and that is that God knows what you want before you even say it. The God who knows you're in the depths is a God who has already been listening and already understands. A person of faith is a person who can cry out: “Out of the depths have I cried out to thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my prayers. Let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my prayers,” knowing that he is.
The summer months are great, aren't they? They give some of us an opportunity to sit back, read, relax and reboot, to use computer language. One of the things I usually do during the summer is read the work of one poet - all his or her works if I can - to understand that poet better. This summer I read Milton, which couldn't have been a better choice. I didn't realize he had lived a sad life and gone blind at an early age. Even as a young man at Cambridge with a great academic career, he wrestled with himself, wondering if he was the man God wanted him to be. He talked about the great taskmaster, God; the one who wanted to keep pushing him to be better. Milton wrote:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arriv'd so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n:
All is, if I have grace to use it so
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.
I thought of that soldier sitting in Tim Horton's, and I thought of Milton and the fleeting way in which his early days were taken from him. I thought if I could talk to that young soldier, if I could run out to the parking lot and speak to him, what would I say? I would probably say what the psalmist said: “Whatever you have faced, out of the depths you may cry, but the Lord hears your voice and the Lord does answer your prayers. The Lord's hand reaches out to us if we will just reach out to God's.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.