Summer in the Psalms: A Prayer for Deliverance
Summer in the Psalms: A Prayer for Deliverance by Rev. L. John Gable
August 15, 2021
As we make our way through our year-long study of 50 Great Passages some of you may remember that I came up with this idea during a particularly slow point in a Presbytery meeting over 30 years ago. Looking for something to do, I began looking at the materials in the pew rack and found that church’s list of 50 Great Passages, so I quickly copied them all down. Then through the years I have collected other similar lists, and last year as we read through the Bible together I started creating my own list.
I have to confess, Psalm 56 didn’t make my list of 50. It didn’t even make the cut of the original 164 passages I chose as possibilities. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I had ever even read Psalm 56 before, which of course I knew I had, likely many times, but nothing in it stuck out to me. But it made our list of 50 Great Passages because it appeared in nearly every other list I collected through the years, so I figured others were seeing in it something I had not yet seen, so I added it, and I’m glad I did. I think you will agree.
In our mini-series of Summer in the Psalms we have talked about the Psalms being the hymnbook of the Second Temple, a collection of songs and poetry used in worship. Much like the collection in our hymnals, there are various kinds of hymns with different moods and meters, tempos and themes. Psalm 56 is a lament, a plea for help, a cry from the depths, and the laments comprise the vast majority of the Psalms. The Psalmist David, in this case, speaks of being surrounded by his enemies, people who trample on him and foes who oppress him. The Psalmist is vague and ambiguous when he describes those enemies and foes; he doesn’t explain in any detail who they are or what they are doing, which make the laments wonderfully helpful to us as they give us language to use in our worship and prayer life. We too have anxieties and fears, concerns and threats, which we can easily plug in to David’s lament.
The psalms of lament are not just complaints, not just “woe is me”, “poor pitiful pearl”, pity parties, but are honest confessions to God, honest cries to God from the dark and difficult places of our lives, particularly at those times when we feel as though God is absent or hidden or not listening to us. Invariably, however, the laments end with an expression of trust and confidence and praise.
The lament style of poetry was commonly used in the ancient world and it typically followed a stylized form. Psalm 56 doesn’t follow it exactly, but we can see evidence of the pattern which can be helpful to us as we pray. A lament typically begins with an address of praise as the Psalmist calls on God to hear his prayer, followed by an explanation of his complaint which is often accompanied by an expression of his own innocence. Having made his plea the Psalmist then declares his faith and trust in God and makes an appeal for God to hear him and answer his prayer. The Psalm then ends with an expression of confidence that God has in fact heard his prayer and is trustworthy to answer it. Can you see how helpful that simple pattern can be for us? A lament seems to be a perfectly appropriate form of prayer for us in this time and place. When we don’t know how to pray or what to pray or what language to use in our prayers, we can simply use the language of the Psalmist, inserting our own petitions and concerns in place of his.
So, consider for a moment: what is it that is causing you concern or fear or anxiety right now? What is it that is tormenting or troubling you? What are your “enemies” to use David’s language? Is it virus or violence? The threat of disease or disaster, even death? Something concerning yourself, a family member, a friend, this church, this community, our nation, the nations? Whatever those things may be consider naming them and inserting them in to Psalm 56, not merely as a complaint but as a confession of faith; not as a cry into the void of a dark and empty universe, but as child’s cry to a loving parent, as a believer’s cry to a God who knows us and loves us, to a God who hears us and has come to save us; to a God “who holds our tears in a bottle”. What a tender image that is. That cry may well be the starting point of prayer.
Author Harold Hazelip describes a “cold morning” in the childhood of novelist and Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner when he realized life would never be the same for him again. He recalls playing with a toy in his room as his father went by, then hearing him go down the stairs and out the door. Suddenly there was commotion unlike he had ever heard before. There was a shout, and then the sight of his mother and his grandmother in their robes running out the door…As he looked out the window, he saw his father lying in the driveway. He was dead.
It was several days before someone in the family found a note scribbled on the last page of a copy of Gone with the Wind…The note was addressed to Mrs. Buechner, saying, “I adore and love you.”’ Then came the words, “And I am no good…give Freddy my watch. Give Jamie my pearl pin. I give you all my love.” Buechner’s father had fallen on hard times. A series of financial losses had resulted in a losing battle with alcoholism. It all ended with suicide and the words, “I am no good.” Buechner later said that it was many years before he understood the nature of his loss, but “if anybody ever asked me how my father died, I would say heart trouble. That seemed at least a version of the truth.”
Years later, he wandered in to a church in New York City. He doesn’t know why he did having rarely ever darkened the door of one before. Yet what he heard there kept him coming back. He heard there the Good News of a God who aches Himself with the aches of our hearts. He heard of a God who works creatively through the failures and redemptively beyond the tragedies of our stories. He heard of a God who has blessed His beloved with thousands of tiny miracles of grace and with the grand mystery of utter forgiveness. Reflecting on that experience, Buechner writes, “I am left with no other way of saying it than what I finally found was Christ. Or (rather) I was found. I met Him among confession and tears and great laughter.”
That story captures what I believe to be the beauty and the power of the laments, David’s and our own. Through our confession and our tears and our honest cries from the depths we meet a God who hears our cries, who collects our tears, who listens and answers. The laments are not pitiful complaints, as we too often make them out to be, but confessions of our faith in God, even when it seems He is hidden or we believe Him to be absent.
After expressing his concerns and making his petitions the Psalmist, twice in these short 13 verses, says, “O Most High, when I am afraid, I put my trust in You. This I know, God is for me! In God, whose word I praise, in the Lord, whose word I praise, in God I trust: I am not afraid. What can a mere mortal do to me?” From the depths, seemingly still surrounded by whatever it is that is troubling him, the Psalmist expresses his confidence in God. “In God I trust; what can mere mortals do to me?”
Recall your church history. The year was 1517, the place was Wittenberg, Germany, and the focus of attention was a young monk named Martin Luther. Luther was a fire brand; he was a man of action. He was a man who struggled with faith, with God, with the Church. Assuming that others wrestled with the same kinds of questions as he, he nailed his now famous 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral in an attempt to start a conversation, with no expectation that he was about to start a new church movement. Today he would have been a blogger. Well, his act of inquiry was taken as an act of defiance by the Church. His 95 questions touched off a firestorm of discussion and debate and revolution.
When it all came to a head and Luther was called before the church council at the Diet of Worms, he was threatened with excommunication, even imprisonment and death if he didn’t recount his Protestant heresy. “Tell me”, demanded Luther’s enemies when he stood in front of his accusers, alone and facing the power of the empire and the church. “Tell me where will you be? What will you do, Luther, when all the world turns against you? When church and state and people and princes raise their hands against you?” That sounds like the stuff of a lament to me.
“Where will I be?” replied Luther. “I’ll be right where I am now, in the hands of God almighty, because Christ was raised from the dead and I may trust that same God to raise me also.” It was then that he uttered these now famous words, “Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” Standing still, holding fast, while his world shook and crumbled and fell around him was an act of faithfulness and trust that God was somehow present and at work in all of it.
Now lest we idealize Luther or glamorize his decision as being too much a fore-drawn conclusion, we should note that before he uttered this now famous declaration he first asked for 24 hours to reconsider his position. Standing still, standing firm, even on the promises of God, is not necessarily the easy way, yet it always is the faithful way.
The Psalmist states it simply, and firmly, “In God’s word, I put my trust.” What of us? In what words of God, what promises of God, do we put our trust? What promises of Scripture can we call to mind and lay claim to when our 2:00am fears and anxieties keep us awake? Consider these:
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble. Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46
“Fear not, I am with you.” Isaiah 41
“I will never leave you or forsake you.” Deuteronomy 31
“Though you walk through the fire I will be with you. I have called you by name, you are mine.” Isaiah 43
“If God is for us, who could be against us? (for) nothing will separate us from the love of God which is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8
“Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Matthew 28
Fear and concern and anxiety are not indicators of an absence of faith. There is much in our world, in our lives, to be fearful of, concerned about, anxious over. But these need not consume us, define us or defeat us, rather they should call us to faith. John Calvin writes, “Fear and faith may seem opposite and incompatible affections…yet the latter (faith) never comes in to full sway unless there exists some form of the former (fear).”
The Psalms of lament give us language, and permission, not just to complain to God, but to express our confidence and faith in God, to lay claim to the promises of our faith, such as we hear in Psalm 56, this Psalm which we now add to our list of the 50 Greatest. “This I know – God is for me. O Most High, when I am afraid, I put my trust in You.” And may it be so for us.
Borrowing a prayer from John Calvin Reid’s book Prayer Journey Through the Psalms, let us pray: “I cannot understand the mystery of affliction and pain, O God, but it is a great comfort to know that Your last word for Your children is not suffering but salvation. Give me grace then to draw no final conclusions about Your providence until I have read the last page of Your redemption. May our faith and steadfastness be such that we shall not turn aside from the path of trust and obedience, no matter how steep and rough, how deep and dark, it may be before we come to the last turn in the road and gaze upon the streets of Your eternal Kingdom.” Lord, hear our prayer.
Rev. L. John Gable
Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
Indianapolis, IN