Drinking Deeply from the Psalms: Psalm 13 - How Long?

I open most of our services with a Psalm. Usually it is one that calls us or reminds us to worship God or one that speaks of the wonders God has wrought on this earth, or the ways God has blessed us. The Psalms I read are always giving praise and glory to God. But perhaps in only reading these Psalms I am doing my congregation a disservice, because in doing so, barring that each one reads though the Psalms regularly,  they might come to an incorrect impression about the general nature of the Psalms.

Most of the Psalms are not Psalms of praise, they are not Psalms of thanksgiving. No, the vast majority of the Psalms are Psalms of Lament. Most of the book of Psalms gives voice to our anger, our feelings of betrayal, anguish and sorrow. There are far more Psalms that begin, “Out of the depths I cry to you. . .”  than the ones that begin with “Praise be to the Lord, our God. . .”

As I have said before, the Psalms are full of our words to God, ALL of them. And here on earth, in this broken and sinful world, we find that there is much pain and anger, sorrow and abandonment, loss and fear. And it is not uncommon that we want to turn to God and let God have it; let God know exactly how we feel; exactly how angry we are; exactly how much pain we are in, how alone we feel, and how much we truly and deeply hurt because of the situations we are in; because of the things that are happening in our lives. And since we live in this broken world, the Psalms are full of the words we say, when we come face to face with that brokenness and the ways it destroys our lives.

The Psalmist begins the Psalm we have before us this morning, “How long O, Lord will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?”

“How long?”

Forgive me if I pull back the curtain and expose a little of the process of how I sometimes choose sermon passages. I spend quite a bit of time each year praying and reading through a lot of scripture choosing what I will preach for the next year or so.  When I chose to do this Psalm series, shortly after I got back from my sabbatical last year, I chose to leave the lectionary and preach from the Psalms for part of this summer, mainly because I had never really preached from the Psalms, and I always like to challenge myself when preaching. I do this because I believe it is important for you all to hear from ALL of scripture not just the parts I like the best, or feel the most comfortable preaching.

For this particular series I used a website that is set up to help pastors create cohesive sermon series and since I knew little about the makeup of the Psalms, I greatly leaned on their suggestions when choosing the passages we would use this summer.  I may have tweaked the series a bit recently because I was suppose to start the series while I was still away, and needed to change some things since I will be gone the next two Sundays.

I say all this to let you know that I had no idea that I would be preaching this passage, a Psalm of lament today, exactly one month after the passing of my father.

Today, I am right there with the Psalmist. “How long must I. . . have sorrow in my heart all day long?” I know one month is not long, but it has been a long month. Actually it has been a quite a few LONG months. I can make a list of things that have gone on in my life, going go back to early April, when Stella and I got food poisoning. It has been one thing after another for months, the “highlight” being my father's death and it all culminating in me breaking my foot. I almost don't want to list that as the final thing, just in case there is one more thing. “How long?”

I feel forgotten. I feel like the face of God is hard to find right now. I feel like there is no end to the pain and the sorrow. “How long?”

I do not know if it is best practice to preach from RIGHT where you are when it comes to situations like this. But THIS is where I am and this Psalm is the Psalm I had scheduled as third in the series.

I will not lie to you. Today is hard, for more than one reason. I am sure we have Day's, even Sunday's where it would have been easier to stay home, avoid being with the people of God. Days when you don't want to sing the hymns of praise and thanksgiving; days when being there for those around us, who need us to rejoice with them, seems to be too much to bear. Days when you do not want to say, “Thanks be to God.” But, instead, want to cry out to God in your pain, in your sorrow, in your anger, to let God have a piece of your mind. And I am here to tell you that, that is OK. That whatever feelings of abandonment, hurt, anguish with which you want to lash out at God, are OK. Our God is a big God, God can handle whatever you want to throw. And it is not something God has not heard before.

Can't find the right words . . . there is a Psalm for that. Feel abandoned? Try Psalm22, “My, God, my God why have you forsaken me?” Feel like you are in a dark place from which you will never find your way out? Try Psalm 130, “Out of the depths, I cry to you.”  If you feel like God has turned away from you, like God has forgotten you, there is no end to your pain or to your sorrow, then today's Psalm is for you. You have something you want/need to say to God, there is a Psalm for you, you just gottta find it.

The vast majority of the Psalms are Psalms of lament both communal and individual. And it might be easy to wonder why so much pain, so much confusion, so much doubt in God's goodness, God's willingness or even ability to help us in our times of trouble are included in scripture? I think it is because it is all too easy for us to forget that these kinds of words, these kinds of cries of pain, are also a part of our faith speech. Lament is a language of faith.  Crying out to God and saying these things to God is an act of faith. Telling God that we feel God has abandoned us and has not done right by us is not blasphemous. No! Quite the contrary, they are words of faith. Anguished and sorrow filled faith but true words of faith none-the-less.

Anyone who has or has had a teenager (or perhaps remembers all too vividly what it was like to be a teenager), knows that when a teenager stomps up to their room shouting, “This is unfair, I hate you.” That the reason why the teenager is upset is because of some perceived unfairness in the system. They are really upset, they are really angry. But any good parent knows, that the teenager does not hate them. That the anger and hurt are spurned by their child's deep love for them, and their desire for all things to be good and right in their world, even when sometimes they are not. Sometimes the unfairness and the hurt is something the parent plays a direct hand in, and sometimes it is due to the actions of others and the general fallenness and brokenness in this world. Every good parent wants what is best for their child. Every good parent loves their child. But that does not always fix the rift that sometimes forms between parent and child. But the parent loves the child through it all, and even when things are at their worst, the child still loves and ultimately trusts their parent.

This is often the way it is with us and God. We may be angry, we may be upset, we may feel like God is doing nothing to relieve our pain, feel ignored and even abandoned by God. But in the very act of feeling all these things we are still showing, and expressing our faith in God.

It is hard to feel abandoned by someone who does not exist.  It is kind of crazy to be angry with or feel hurt by someone in whom you do not believe. The very act of crying out to God is an act of faith, an act of belief in God. In our pain, in our doubt in our anger, we are living out our belief that God it there. And since we are upset that things are not right, we, actually, still believe that God is good, that God is holy, that God is righteous. Perhaps, we are having a hard time seeing it at the moment, but even being upset that our experiences do not match up with our belief in the goodness, the righteousness, in the holiness of God, means that we do believe the God is good, and right and holy.

The psalm ends with a recollection of how we have been able to trust God in the past. God's steadfast love has been trusted and has been proved to be true at other points in our life. So now, when God seems so distant, when there seems to be no cure for the pain, the only thing we have is to rely on the God we have known in the past. The God who helped us through the dark times and the struggles we have experienced before. We have known God to be good. We have known God to be our strength, our help and our shield. God has always come through before. There is no reason to believe God has forgotten and forsaken us now, because we know God has never done so in the past.

And this is the hard part. This is the part that sometimes takes every tiny little drop of faith we have in us, and that is to still praise praise God in our darkness. To sing to the Lord, not because we today we know God's bounty; to sing to the Lord because today we know a rich harvest and know we can rely on God's provision, but to sing to the Lord to thank God because we have known God's bounty, God's love in the past and we know that it is unending. We know that as our Psalm said last week, “God's love endures forever, and continues from generation to generation.”

Now in the darkness, in the pain, in the sorrow, when we feel lost and abandon we must remember that God's love endures forever. And forever includes right now. It includes all the nows that could ever be. So we can trust in God's love now, right now, no matter what is going on in our lives, no matter how we feel, no matter how lost and alone. God's steadfast love endures even ‘til now, penetrates even to where you are in the depth of your darkness. And for that we can give praise, even in the darkness to God who has always dealt (and will always deal) bountifully with us.

Sometimes, it takes a long time to get there, the place where we remember where and how God has been there for us in the past. Sometimes, we sit in the darkness a long time before we recognize the light. Sometimes we know the pain and the sorrow far to long before the joy of the past can find its way back in. This is a fairly short psalm, but some are longer than others. Sometimes, it takes longer to get to the place where even in the darkness you are able trust and praise.

You might not be there now. And that is OK, continue to call out in pain until you get there. Continue to cry out, “How long.” Until your heart is bleeding and your voice is hoarse. Continue to reach out to God in the darkness and pain. God hears you, even when you feel forgotten and abandoned. Even when you cannot remember when it was that God was good, still know that God is good. And be angry that it does not seem that God is, right now, if that is where you are.

Keep calling until you can remember. Keep crying until you feel God's arm. Keep yelling, never stop, until you know once again that God's steadfast love can be trusted, that it endures forever, until you remember the bounty that once was and are able to at least know that at one point there was love and bounty. Praise God knowing that there is an end to the pain, the answer to, “How long?” is not, “Forever.” We can rely on the love of God, we can know in the barrenness of our seasons of winter, that one day we will once again know the bounty of the seasons of harvest.