I’ve told you many times that the Psalms is perhaps my favourite part of the Bible. They are a glorious set of 150 prayers, with honest words for every human emotion. In my life they have kept my spiritual flame alight in hard times. When I’ve not had the words to pray, I’ve found listening to the ancient people of God praying, has joined me to them. I am a keen recipient of Anglican Evensong. It’s been so sad to have arrived in a cathedral city and to receive an invitation from the Dean last September to use the cathedral as my safe me and God space, that I’ve not been to Evensong once since we arrived. To place your day, your life, where you are, to the story of the people of God and to hear every night in the Psalm that God is always present even in the mess we find ourselves in, is a wonderful thing. I love that Evensong doesn’t ever leave out the horrible bits of the Psalm, so we are reminded even in the darkest place, God can be found. The Psalmist is good at crying out, and his or her prayers are raw and speak of the reality of life, that let’s face it, life can be shitty!
Psalm 130 is the Psalm for this Sunday. Here is a desperate cry to the Lord. The Psalmist is in a low and deep place, crying to God: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; 2 O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry.” (Psalm 130:1-2)
The depths here portray a place very low down. It’s a water image, a picture of the ocean depths. There is similar imagery in Psalm 124, in one of the earlier Psalms of Ascent: “The flood would have engulfed us … the raging waters would have swept us away.” (Psalm 124:4-5) This speaks of when you hit rock bottom and you realize you can’t fix this on your own. The Message version says: “Help God – the bottom has fallen out of my life!” The depths can be a place of deep and personal pain.
But even in this place we can praise God.
Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II Germany for hiding Jews in her home. Corrie said: “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.” And we need to remember that when the bottom falls out in our lives, God is still there. When we cry out to him from the depths, He will hear and He reaches into these depths because His love is deep. And his love reaches out to us wherever we find ourselves.
The overwhelming experiences of bereavement and isolation that many have endured during the pandemic have added a new poignancy to the first verse of this psalm: ‘Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord.’
Many people reach out to God especially when they are at their lowest ebb, and it’s wonderful that we can do so. But I found this in a commentary: “We should not just file away Psalms like this for a rainy day. Lament psalms, although very common in the Psalter, are perhaps not made as much as they should be as a general resource for prayer. This might be because we believe that feelings of negativity should have no place in the life of faith, and we think it somehow unseemly to seem vulnerable before God.”
I’ll always be grateful to my Old Testament tutor at Hartley Victoria College, David Wood, who taught us the importance of lament in the worship and prayer life of God’s people. Aren’t there times we come to worship after being in the depths all week? Aren’t there occasions in life, we just want to look God in the eye and say “it’s not okay today.” Isn’t there a need for us to place where we find ourselves before God, honestly. We don’t do honesty. It’s all about this not wanting to appear vulnerable or weak, so when someone asks us how we are we say “I’m fine” even though we aren’t. Yet God unlike those around us who run away when we need to share our rawness, mysteriously comes to our cries and in his time cares for us enough to bring us out of the depths and back to life in all its fullness and joy.
Jonathan Aitken was sent to prison after some dodgy dealings in public life. While in prison he found a faith, and after release studied theology and is now an Anglican priest. He wrote a lovely little book called “Psalms for People under Pressure. Here’s an extract:
“There was an incident right at the end of my prison sentence that served as a good illustration of the universality of the appeal in the Psalms. My friends in our prayer (or fellowship) group, as it began to be known, asked me to give a valedictory talk on Psalm 130 two weeks before my release date. The event was advertised on various notice boards. As a result, the attendance swelled beyond the usual Christian suspects. Indeed, there was a general astonishment when just before I got up to speak, we were joined in the prison chapel by no less a personage than The Big Face. Every prison has among its inmates a head honcho called “The Big Face.” The term originally derives from the time when notorious criminals had their faces plastered on “Wanted” posters. Nowadays, it was for the most feared and ferocious prisoner in the jail. Our Big Face was an old style gangland boss, coming towards the end of a lifer’s tariff for a string of revenge killings. As the old Wild West saying has it, he was not a man to go to the well with. His unexpected arrival at our fellowship group made several people distinctly nervous, not least the speaker.”
“I began my address by saying that this Psalm had made a great impact on me throughout my prison journey. I had come to believe that it might have a great message for anyone suffering in the depths. I mentioned that it was not only my favorite Psalm, it also happened to be the favourite Psalm of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. The Big Face nodded gravely at this. Towards the end of my exegesis, I noticed that The Big Face was visibly moved. Tears were trickling down his cheeks as he listened in deep concentration. As I finished with a prayer, he joined in with a booming “Amen.” A few moments later, he drew me aside. “John-o,” he said, “That there Psalm was beautiful, real beautiful. Got to me ‘eart, it did. And I want to ask you a favor. Do you think you could come over to my cell on a wind tomorrow night and say your piece over again? I’ve got a couple of me best mates it would mean a real lot to.” I may have looked a little anxious at the prospect of spending an evening in the company of The Big Face and two of his closest associates. Sensing my hesitation, he enlarged his invitation. “And, John-o, to make yourself feel comfortable, why don’t you bring a couple of your mates along with you? I mean, how about bringing those geezers you said liked the Psalm so much? Augustus, and What’s-it, too, if they’re friends of yours in the B-Wing.” Although I was unable to produce Augustine, Calvin, and Luther as my companions, Psalm 130 went down well second time round in The Big Face’s cell. Although this surprised me at the time, the more I’ve come to know the Psalms the less they surprise me in their power to speak to a wide variety of people and situations. How I wish I had discovered their spiritual riches earlier in life.”
Remember despite where he finds him or herself, the Psalmist is confident that God will do something. So what’s the next step after venting of the spleen a bit, it is waiting. Waiting here is not negative or wasted time, it is an intentional time of focus towards God. It is a deliberate reliance on the power of God to sort this out this horrible place I find myself. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” It’s quite interesting actually: in Hebrew the word for wait and hope is the same word! It’s the same: you can’t wait unless you’re hoping for something, and if you don’t hope you give up waiting. If there’s nothing to hope for, I stop waiting! But if there is something to hope for, then I can wait. And I can wait because I’m waiting on the Lord. It’s what prayer is. We listen from where we are for the voice of God leading us to where he would have us be. That’s what God is like! So let me end with a verse of a hymn which I’m beginning my service at Sawley chapel with on Sunday afternoon. The God the Psalmist knows comes into the depths and turns our disorientation and despair into direction and hope.
“For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind. And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.”
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