Sermon June 26, 2011

"God’s Lesser Children"
Psalm 13

(The Psalmist, perhaps David, first desperately pleads for God’s deliverance and then affirms his trust in God’s deliverance.)

Psalm 13’s six verses are divided into three sections of two verses each.

The first two verses have to do with the fear of abandonment.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?
   How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
   and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? 

Have you ever felt that you are one of God’s lesser children?  Were you somehow late to the endowment event where God passed out the looks, the smarts and the wealth, leaving you to cobble together a meager existence from the unclaimed bits?  Does your life feel like you’re staring into a nearly empty refrigerator trying to imagine assembling a half way presentable meal from the leftovers?  Has God pretty much ignored your physical and psychic pain, your work aspirations and your romantic inclinations?  Does God even know that you are here?  Does it seem to you that wars and evil and suffering go on and on in the world without God acting to do something about it?  Is God even up there?  Why me Lord?

These are similar laments in other psalms:

Psalm 10

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?
   Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Psalm 22

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
   Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
   and by night, but find no rest.
 

These are common concerns in Psalms because they are common concerns in people’s lives.  Even when God does respond, he seems to take his own sweet time about it.  Four times in the first two verses the psalmist asks in anguish, “How long?”  The all too human desire for God to provide us with what we think we need has turned into impatience.  Time during the balmy days of summer seems to fly, but the long winter of our soul seems to drag on and on. 

Psychologically, when we can see no end to our troubles, we are more likely to be sunk by them.  Think of road trips with your children in previous summers? Do you recall the questions,

"are we there yet?"  Or "how much longer?"
 Did you ever notice that those kinds of questions never come when the kids are having a great time?   At  Disney World, did they ever once ask "How much longer?"
"Are we done yet?"   "Can we go home now"?
It’s the same for us as adults.   When times are going great...we seldom ask, "How much longer is this going to last"?
But, when times are rough...they seem to go on and on and on.
We begin to wonder if it will ever end.  “How long, O Lord?”  we ask.

Verses 3 and 4 are a cry of prayer.

Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!
   Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,
and my enemy will say, ‘I have prevailed’;
   my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

If fear of abandonment resonates with you, you’re right there with the psalmist.  Now in verse 3 he cries out, “Give light to my eyes.”  More loosely translated this means, “Give me the strength and the will to live.”   It’s fear that makes us cry out like this, fear that we are not sufficient to meet the challenges of our lives.  But notice that the psalmist’s fear is not that God won’t listen, it’s that God won’t respond.  In that the psalmist’s fear is well placed.  God is not going to reach down and weed your garden or pay your bills.  That realization was a bitter pill to the psalmist, but there it is.  God does not exist to fulfill our desires.  Prayer is not a vehicle to make God useful to us.

A fundamental issue in prayer is that God operates on a different plane than we do.  Our wants and fears are not God’s wants and fears.  In fact God, we can suppose, is completely self-sufficient and therefore entirely free of any latent wants or fears.  If God wants it, God creates it.  If God doesn’t want it, God makes it disappear.  Furthermore, it seems likely that God’s perspective, horizons and purposes are quite different from our own self-centered ones.  True, we may feel forgotten by our God, but that has to do with our expectations or understandings of God, not with God’s actual activity or lack thereof.  As Paul reminds us in Romans:

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!

Staring into that empty refrigerator, feeling forgotten by God, does not mean that we are forgotten by God.  That’s just a feeling, not reality.  Our emotions are our business; God’s business is our long-term welfare.  Whether we can appreciate that what is going on in the world is really for our benefit, is a necessarily difficult question.  Indeed, if God really does exist on a different plane than ourselves, the likelihood of our understanding God may be pretty small.  We can pray for understanding, but it may be more likely to be effective if we simply pray for acceptance.

A pernicious myth exists that good Christians can handle anything; they are never down. Their faith never wavers; they can accept any misfortune. Many, therefore, suppose that it is a sign of weakness, of an inadequate faith, if we question and complain. But this is certainly not the case. In a world where there is so much hurt and pain we need to be able to express our feelings and be honest with God.  Besides, who do we think we are we kidding, God already knows our thoughts.

Even if God does not respond directly, it is still a good idea to cry out to God.  Getting our stuff out of our crowded minds and putting it out there in front of us in word form helps us to see it from a different perspective.  Therefore, seemingly unanswered prayer may still be productive prayer.  Putting our distress out there in prayer places us in a better position to see and deal with it ourselves.  As exercise brings benefit to the body, so does prayer bring benefit to the soul.  Perhaps this is the way God has set things up - so that our prayers in some sense are always answered. 

And let’s not forget how much worse things would be if there were no God to turn to in our time of need.

Verses 5 and 6 are the song of faith. 

But I trusted in your steadfast love;
   my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
   because he has dealt bountifully with me.

Still, we long to see God’s face, to feel God’s presence with us.  When we don’t have the experience of God, we have to deal with the double whammy of the worldly trouble itself, and added to it the perception of God’s lack of support in our trials.   Perhaps faced with a similar feeling of forsakenness in time of need, the psalmist in verse 5 cries out, “I trusted in your steadfast love.”  Ah, that’s it, trust, or rather lack of trust, is the underlying issue.  Lack of trust is the fear that God has forgotten us, or worse yet, never cared for us in the first place. 

There is no evidence of lack of trust on the part of our psalmist.  For him the clouds have cleared and the sun shines again.  In fact he may be happier than if he had not suffered in the first place.  Faith needs adversity to become evident in the same way that a motionless rabbit is harder to see than a moving one.  As the apostle Paul said, again in his letter to the Romans:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the psalm’s concluding line, faith has triumphed over doubt, even human nature, even our own human nature.  In faith we remember that God loves us and cares for us and wants only the best for us.  Therefore, whether or not it is evident to us, God has set up the world in a way that we may flourish in it.  This is the bounty of the final verse.  This is the cause for celebration, no matter what has or might go against our petty desires.  This is the reason to praise God even in apparent adversity.

God has no lesser children. God has plenty of children who face adversity in their lives.  Nowhere are we promised a life free of trouble and pain.  As a result, we sometimes have doubts, even about God. We are impatient.  We cry out for help.  On good days we remember our faith, and we sing God’s praises.  On all our days we are God’s favorite children.  Thanks be to God.

Amen.