Grace and peace to you.
One of the reasons I decided to teach about the psalms during this Eastertide is that the psalms give us language to share all of our emotions with God. Following the Revised Common Lectionary, we only hear or sing about two-thirds of all the psalms though, and most of those are the ones that offer our worship, thanksgiving or praise. But there are psalms of confession, there are psalms of persecution, pain and personal struggle and even of violence and anger. Like I said, all of our emotions.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says there are three types of psalms: psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation and psalms of new orientation. The psalms of orientation “express confidence and serenity while psalms of disorientation name the places where our human experience, life and the world differ or break from those neat and orderly plans. [i] And then the psalms of new orientation “bear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had been expected.” [ii]
The psalm from the exile lectionary that we heard today is Psalm 30, one of the psalms of new orientation. In this psalm or song of thanksgiving, which we often hear at Easter, the psalmist “tells the story of going into the trouble and coming out of the trouble.”[iii]
Although we do not know what the nature of the psalmist’s suffering was, verse 3 explicitly names Sheol and the Pit, synonyms for the place people went after they died. But life and death weren’t just biological functions; life encompassed abundance and vitality, and conversely, death was any loss that diminished a person’s capacity for life.
In the New Testament, life means being in relationship with God. And death is the separation from God and the absence or brokenness of that relationship. Martin Luther teaches that one use of the Law is “to convict me that my own righteousness is never good enough. I need the righteousness that comes from God as a gift.”[iv] It drives me to name my sin and bare it before God that I may know the joy of salvation, of being brought into right relationship, and given new life.
In Psalm 30, the psalmist bears witness to how God responded to him, and offers praise for the healing and restoration he has experienced. He doesn’t deny that God is angered by our sin, but he knows first-hand how much more God desires to be in relationship with us than execute punishment upon us.
In verse 5 he says,
5For his anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
A clergy colleague’s young son said after a particularly bad day, “Jesus forgot to help me today.” The psalmist knows that when we confront the places where we have done wrong, when we confess our sin, we can feel very isolated and God can feel very far away. But the good news is that God’s victory over sin, death and the grave by any name is complete and total. This is the Resurrection Promise we hold – that in Jesus there is nothing, not even death, that can separate us from God.
And in verse 11, indeed the psalmist declares:
11You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
The promise we hear is that with forgiveness and grace, the God who loves us restores us and clothes us in new life. A new life that lets us continue to bear witness to what God already has done in our lives, and to continue to be transformed by God’s love and grace.
As we enter our eighth week worshiping apart, may we name all the deaths that we have experienced from this time of quarantine and those that continue to diminish our lives. Remember the Psalms teach us that there are no emotions we cannot share with God. God’s love for us is big enough to hold all of our disappointment and grief. And then may we join with the Psalmist in celebrating the Good News that God brings us through all kinds of trouble and may we offer thanksgiving that our trouble will not last.
Thanks be to God.
[i] Walter Brueggemann. The Message of the Psalms. 25, 51-52.
[ii] Brueggemann, 123-4.
[iii] Brueggemann, 126.
[iv] The Rev. Brian Stoffregen
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