Psalm 116 begins with some words that do not
often fall from the mouths of us Presbyterians. Very confidently and with much celebration
the Psalmist says “I love the LORD.” Hmmm. That's
something those hand-waving, guitar-playing charismatics say who just haven't
figured out just how Stoic and aloof the old man upstairs really is. We Presbyterians, now, we’ve got that
one figured out real good and so we're more reserved in our expressions of
faith. I've run across many a
Presbyterian for whom God is the Creator and Provider who is concerned for the
most part only about moral order and would be satisfied if we just be good
citizens of the land in which we live.
We would get quite uncomfortable if someone stood up in our midst and
simply said "I love the LORD."
That's just doesn't fit with us.
It's simply too emotional.
Nevertheless, passionate spirituality is biblical and love for God is
something we should feel. So maybe we
should stretch ourselves and ask what possibly could have made this Psalmist
make such a passionate statement?
Well, the answer to that question
is quite straightforward. The Lord heard
his voice. Heard his prayers and
acted. God heard his crying for help and
got really involved in the Psalmist's life and saved him. The LORD heard and acted to save him and from
there arose the Psalmist's love for the LORD.
Love for God is rooted in God's listening and responding to us. It is very difficult to love someone who
doesn't listen you. I don't think I
would be out of line here in saying that our having love for God directly
corresponds to how much he has made us to know that he actually listens to us
and acts for us in our best interest.
How can I expect my wife to love me if I don't listen to her and act for
her in her best interest? So also, if
God expects anything more from us than irrational fear and duty, then he better
be listening to us and making it known to us hat he has heard.
I think the Psalmist here in 116 is
testifying that in fact, God does listen.
The image that the Hebrew language portrays of the LORD's hearing him is
that the LORD bent down to hear him. I
have to do that quite often with my kids.
Sometimes there are things they want to say or need to ask but the
situation is too embarrassing or too scary to say it out loud so I have to lean
in to hear them. That's how the Psalmist
experienced the LORD's hearing his prayer.
The LORD God loved him enough to lean in to him to hear his rather weak
prayer because for some reason it was just too much for the Psalmist to scream
it from the rooftops.
The Psalmist doesn’t say exactly what his situation was other than death had surrounded
him. He found himself powerless before
the one thing he could not save himself from—death and its friend fear. That’s a scary place, a humbling and
humiliating place, a brutally painful place.
Death is no friend. Even in times
when it seems that dying is the better alternative to living, when death is a
relief, death still is no friend. Death
is not a friend in any case. My father
died of cancer. There were times in his
last few weeks when we all wanted him to die.
We were ready for his suffering to end, but death wouldn’t come. But then it did and with
the exception of the occasional dream when Dad shows up, my father is
gone. Death comes and it is to us for
now so final.
For the writer of this Psalm death
was coming to him and there was nothing he could do about it. He was powerless over it. All he could do was cry out to the LORD, “Save my life” and the LORD did.
The LORD heard him, heard his cry for help, inclined his ear to him and
so he says, “I love the LORD.” Love in this context isn’t some sort of sappy praise song thing where we’re all supposed to feel like Jesus is our boyfriend. It has more to do with faithfulness. The LORD was faithful to the Psalmist in this
matter of death. Therefore, the Psalmist
would now be faithful. He would tell God’s people what the LORD had done for him.
He will worship. He will give his
thanks. He will love and serve the LORD.
Well, that’s the Psalmist who found himself mightily saved - spared from his
enemies, spared from death. When I read
this Psalm, I read it in several ways and my reactions are bit mixed. Of course, I read it like a preacher. You know, what preaches here? What’s the message? What can I say “Amen” to? What can I
get you to say "Amen" to? But,
then there’s that side of me that’s just simply a person, a person
like any other, a person whom death has hurt and angered, a person who has more
than a few lingering "why's".
That side of me wants to say to this Psalmist, “Well, good for you. But, why didn’t the LORD spare my father from
death? Why didn’t he answer my family’s prayers and spare him over a few
more years?” The Psalmist
says that the death of the LORD’s faithful ones is precious in his
sight, but to me that sounds a whole lot like colluding with death. I think it should rather read “costly in the eyes of the LORD is the death of his saints.” The faithful one's are precious, but their death is
costly; costly to the honour of God.
When death comes I can’t help but feel that God’s reputation of being a steadfastly loving and faithful God is on the
line. Why does the Psalmist get a
reprieve on death and not the dozens of other people that I have personally
prayed for their lives and they not live?
I can say, “Psalmist good for you, but can you
throw me bone on why my dad can’t be here to meet my kids. Why he couldn’t be here when I got married? Then there has been a couple other things
that I’ve been through the past few years that with him being
my dad and me being most like him of all my family, it sure would have helped
to have him around to help me sort me out, but…that’s death. That’s death. That’s death and death is no friend.
But friends, death has no final
say. Something else happens when I read
this Psalm. Ever since Jesus and Easter,
his being raised from the dead and all that, I cannot help but read Psalm 116 as being about him, that he is in fact the Psalmist. Sure, a few millennia ago a Hebrew priest had
a brush with death and it turned out well for him and so he wrote a psalm about
it. But, at a closer look this Psalm
reflects the experience of resurrection, of someone having actually died and
come out the other side raised to new life.
This is certainly the way the church has read this Psalm ever since the
first Easter. If this Psalm is about
Jesus, indeed from Jesus, then we must prepare ourselves to accept that death
has even come to God himself. Jesus, God
the Son became human, lived, suffered, and died and his Father, God the Father suffered his
death. In some way that is way beyond
our comprehension the Trinity himself now knows death personally as we do. But, and praise the Lord (can I say that
here?), by raising Jesus from the dead God has set in motion death’s utter destruction. Death is not
the final say for us. Resurrection
is. It will be as Paul says, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but
we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and
the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For, this perishable body must put on
imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on
imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that
is written will be fulfilled: ‘Death has been swallowed up in
victory.’ ‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death is your sting?’”
I apologize if I sound crazy here
but I really do believe this is the truth.
God has done something about death: in, through, and as Jesus Christ God
has put death to death. We will be
raised. Death will have its own
end. We in Christ who have the Holy
Spirit dwelling in us now know this for certain. Nevertheless, it still appears to us now that
God hasn’t done what we in the immediacy of grief and the fear
of death would hope he would do right now.
I have my list of people that I would rather have alive right now and if
God were to cater to me they’d be alive right now. But, that’s thinking small, thinking small
when the scope of what God has done in, through, and as Jesus Christ is the
delivering of this whole universe from sin, death, and indeed evil. The Psalmist prayed, “deliver my life" and God did.
Now, in, through, and as Jesus Christ God has delivered, is delivering,
and will deliver all of the creation.
Since this is the case, what can we
do now? Keep praying, keep crying
out. Our heavenly Father does indeed
hear us. That being the case let us live
for the Lord doing things that will endure, things that are not in vain. Let us give testimony to one another when we
know God has heard and acted. Paul tells
us to pray without ceasing. That's a
sermon for another day, but one thing is for certain the more we discipline our
minds to the work of constant prayer, the more we do begin to see the steadfast
love and faithfulness of God everywhere around us and truly life becomes and
answered prayer. We've got 2,000 years
worth of Christian writings on prayer that say precisely that. In prayer our hope is made effective. So, pray, friends, God is indeed
listening. Amen.
