“Death Turned into Life” - July 3, 2016

Psalm 30

We include a selection from the Psalms in worship almost every Sunday, usually as the call to worship, but I don’t often preach on them, so I’m going to try to rectify that by a series of sermons on various psalms throughout this summer.  Even though they are all poems, there’s a lot of variety in the Psalms.  Some are meant as hymns and prayers for public worship, which is how we generally meet them.

“O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home…”

That is from Psalm 90.

“Have mercy on me, O God,
   according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
   blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
   and cleanse me from my sin. 

For I know my transgressions,
   and my sin is ever before me. 
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
   and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
   and blameless when you pass judgement.”

That prayer is from Psalm 51.

Some of the Psalms are private prayers.  Some reflect on God's work in the life of the nation of Israel.  Taken together, the Psalms lay out the human soul before God with profound understanding of life. They do not shy away from the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

The good:

"The Lord is my shepherd...";

"Bless the Lord, O my soul,

  and forget not all his benefits..." 

The bad:

"My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?";

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept..." 

The ugly (from the end of that same Psalm):

"O Babylon, you devestator,

  happy is he who dashes your little one against a rock."

Within all that, one recurring theme is God's faithful care in times of suffering and trouble, which brings us to Psalm 30, the Psalm that is appointed for today. It tells of how the poet experienced a moment of teetering at the edge of oblivion and how the Lord pulled him back. "Sheol" was the Hebrew word for the world of the dead, pictured not as heaven where God is encountered in a full and glorious way - that understanding would develop later - but as a land of purposeless ghosts drifting in darkness.

“To you, O Lord, I cried,
   and to the Lord I made supplication: 
‘What profit is there in my death,
   if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
   Will it tell of your faithfulness? 
Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
   O Lord, be my helper!’”

[Psalm 30:8-10]

The key there is proclamation of God's will to redeem the author from that.

“You have turned my mourning into dancing;
   you have taken off my sackcloth
   and clothed me with joy, 
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
   O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” [Psalm 30:11-12]

In fact, there is the implication that God's will is to redeem all humanity both as individuals and as a whole.

We need that. People go through times in their lives when sadness and struggle or maybe boredom wear them down until they are in danger of becoming ghosts of their real selves. They need to hear that there is more to them than that. They need to hear how God finds them and restores them and saves them.  And like the Psalms speak of both individual and collective experience, their message, too, may be collective because whole nations can fall into times when their sense of purpose is gone, and if they are not renewed with God's vision then unscrupulous and wicked people step in with their own version. 

James Weldon Johnson wrote a poem that expressed how both of those levels of experience came together for him as an African American who lived under segregation and as a believer in a Savior who “came not to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him.” [John 3:17]

"Stony the road we trod,
Heavy the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?"

Surely the psalmist who spoke of being brought back from the Pit would say, "Amen."

As for us, have we no stories of our own worth remembering and sharing?  Is there nothing of the psalmist in us, too?  The language of the Psalms is not always high and exalted.  Sometimes it is very down-to-earth and simple. 

“O Lord my God, I cried to you for help,
                         and you have healed me.” [Psalm 30:2]

Have we nothing to celebrate around the picnic table tomorrow?  Have we no message of how God has set us free that is worth a few sparklers?  Then

"Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring, 
Ring with the harmonies of liberty.
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea."