The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost - June 19

The Journey from Despair to Hope

Proper 7

Psalms 42 & 43

Psalms 42 and 43 are printed as a single psalm in some early Hebrew manuscripts.  The lectionary assigns us both to read for this Sunday, which is what we did.  (I don’t know why our Scripture inserts present them as an either/or.)  They are definitely united by theme and content.

Psalm 42 is probably familiar to many of you, especially the first verse:

As the deer longs for the water-brooks,  

so longs my soul for you, O God.

It’s a popular psalm.  I think as we hear that opening verse it evokes a sense of peace, a pastoral or bucolic setting.  We picture a deer wandering by a babbling spring.  And we are comforted to think that we will find God in a setting like that, too.

But this psalm is a lament.  A powerful lament.

The image of that first verse is meant to bring to mind a deer braying in anguished thirst over a watercourse that once had held water but is now bone dry.

The psalm begins in despair.  The refrain, which returns several times in psalm 42 (and 43), gives voice to that despair.

Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul?  

and why are you so disquieted within me?

Despair, this heaviness of soul, is an apt description, at least for me, of this last week.

Like most clergy (at least in this time zone), when I left home for church last week, I didn’t know what had happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in the early morning hours of last Sunday.  I had seen the flash of an early headline online, but that was it.

Over the course of this past week, of course, we have all learned much more about the targeted killing of 49 LGBT folk at the nightclub.  Also over the course of this last week this event has been framed by our larger national political discourse.  And it has been placed within the sad context of our national history of mass killings.  This past week we also remembered the one year anniversary of the targeted killing of African Americans in the midst of Bible study at church in Charleston, SC, last June.

My soul is full of heaviness.  Like the psalmist, I find myself in a place of despair.

Despair.  I often find it interesting to look up the actual meaning of words.  Despair isn’t a thing.  Despair is the absence of hope. Not to be confused, I think, with depression.  Depression comes from within.  Despair comes from outside of us.  Despair is the hope we don’t see when we look out on the world.

I do not presume…  I cannot, speak for the perspectives of the communities that have been targeted by hate.  This week, the LGBT community.  Last year, African Americans.  I do know that these horrible crimes were just magnified examples of the attitudes that affect them—you, every day.  But I am not within those communities, so my lament is my own.

Commentators aren’t sure if the psalmist’s lament of despair in these psalms was the result of some individual crisis, or if the psalmist spoke on behalf of all Israel at a time of exile.

My own lament of despair is a mixture of individual lament, national lament, and Christian lament.

A lament of despair.

• Despair:  seeing no hope in the face of hatred and bigotry raging in our world, so often expressed in violence.
• Despair:  seeing no hope in a political system totally devoid of concern for the common good.
• Despair:  seeing little hope for my own ability to love the shooter or the hater or the bigot, as Christ calls us to do.
• Despair:  at my own lack of vision or courage to be the ally or a force for good in the world, that I would like to be.
• Despair:  hopelessness at our inability in this country to even have sensible conversations about ways forward.
• Despair:  that violence is done in God’s name, by people of many faiths, including ours.
• Despair:  at the church’s often seemingly ineffective struggle to be all that God calls us to be, bringers of God’s peace and justice to the world.

Depending on how you count 80 – 85 of the 150 psalms are laments.  That’s more than half.  Despair and lament are sadly not unique to our time.  And our time is not the worst.  That’s one thing that today’s psalm reminds us of.

But more importantly, today’s psalm reminds us that the root of all lament is the absence of God.  The source of all despair is the perceived absence of God.  No matter what the external circumstances, the root of all despair is the experience of God’s absence.

The psalmist says:  My soul is athirst for God.  God is the answer for despair.  The presence of God brings hope into despair.

The psalmist’s journey is from despair to praise of God.  The psalmist makes that journey within these psalms!  From the lament of the first verse to songs of praise with the harp.  And that journey takes place in worship.  The journey from despair to hope takes place in worship.  The way out of despair is corporate worship.

In his commentary on this psalm, Walter Brueggemann writes (Psalms, Walter Brueggemann, William H. Bellinger, Jr., New Cambridge Bible Commentary): 

The poet yearns to be surrounded by the believing and worshiping community:  to participate in the worship services of the Temple and to celebrate with the people the presence of God in their midst.

God’s presence is made known here.  In the worship of this believing community.

The poetic movement of the parts of this psalm takes the petitioner beyond a private grief to hope found in a worshiping community shaped by YHWH, so the psalm portrays the faithful person at prayer…  Much of the hope the petitioner finds in this psalm is tied to liturgy (the prayers we say together in worship).  It is the liturgy that speaks to the wilderness of divine absence and moves the inner dialogue to God and to the divine presence in the temple (and for us, at this Holy Table).  That worship makes possible the move from the poignant yearning in the psalm’s first line to the hope in its last line.  The hope is in the life-giving presence of God.

From the yearning of despair to hope in the life-giving presence of God.

Today’s reflection from the Brothers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist speaks to the same thing in a different way.  Brother Curtis Almquist writes today:

In the days ahead we will need one another to help us keep our own promises (our baptismal promises) and to receive the promises Christ makes to us to be with us always.  (We need one another to keep us aware of the promise Christ makes to be with us always.)  Without these promises made in the presence of one another, and without Christ’s grace mediated through one another, things could be otherwise in these days ahead.  We need one another.  We belong to one another.

The final verse of hope in Psalm 42 (and 43):

Put your trust in God;
for I will yet give thanks to him,
who is the help of my countenance, and my God.

Put your trust in God.  God is the help of my countenance.  God’s help is our hope.  God with us is our hope.  God’s life-giving presence with us overcomes despair.

Supported by one another, equipped through worship with the presence of God, we have hope and strength.

Hope to be voices of compassion and inclusion.

Hope to act for justice and peace in the world.

Supported by one another and accompanied by the life-giving presence of God, we have hope.  And the power to bring God’s love and presence to a world that desperately needs it.