June 24, 2007
TEXT: Psalm 42
Dry Praise
The theme song for this year’s
Vacation Bible School asserts, “If you wanna go swimmin’ in the river of
life, you gotta jump right in with all your might.” But is that always safe? What if the river is dry? What if instead of ripples and waves and
sparkling cool all that greets you are cracks and dust and weedy sand?
When we visited our farm in south
Texas over spring break, the “tank” – the small man-made lake carved out of the
pasture and fed by rain and well water that’s pumps into the hole a few hours
every day – was full and beautifully rippling in the breeze; good news for all
the minnows and bass fingerlings my brother stocked it with a couple of years
ago. But that hasn’t always been the
case.
Two years ago when we were there,
the half-acre pond had shrunk to the size of a small bucket. Rain had been in perilous short supply and
ants had shorted out the pump on the well.
As a result, the tank became just a scabbed over wound scarring the landscape. As if to punctuate the drought, a long-horn
steer that had, in recent days, broken through the fence in search of water had
fallen from the bank and now lay upside down, dead and decaying, one point of
its horn stabbed into the dry bed; a pained and anguished expression frozen on
its face. It was a gruesomely dry and
aching sight.
That’s the situation the psalmist
wants us to picture. Like a longhorn –
make that a deer – “braying over watercourses gone dry,” the psalmist aches
with a thirst for more than water.
Whatever the condition of his mouth, at this particular moment it is his
soul that is parched. And the situation
is critical. The soul can no more live
without God than the body can live without water.
It is impossible to know beyond speculation
what the writer’s specific problem or circumstance might be. It’s clear that the community around him is
less than supportive; they taunt him and jibe him over his pain. And though he longs to make a pilgrimage to
the Temple where he can experience, in as close a way as he knows how, the very
face and nourishment of God, he is prevented for whatever reason, reduced
instead to the thin comfort of memories from previous visits.
But for all the benefits of
memory, it has its limitations – just ask a widow, or a refugee, or anyone else
who has lost something or someone precious and now has only photographs and
memories. They are OK as far as they go;
they just don’t go very far.
As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
In the opening paragraph of his
classic book, Confessions, Augustine
observes that “the thought of God stirs the human being so deeply that he
cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and
our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.” Or as it has been otherwise rendered, “our
hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.” Or perhaps more to today’s point, “thirsty
until they quench their thirst in God.”
And at the moment, looking over
the arroyo that looks more desert than delight, the memory of water that once
raged between those banks offers the psalmist precious little consolation. And my guess is that few of us have any
difficulty relating to the feeling. We
know what it feels like to be spiritually dry – when our soul’s tongue and lips
stick together; when it seems as though the very core of ourselves will crumble
and scatter in the breeze – a long, long way from those halcyon days of church
camp or that magical candlelit Christmas Eve, or drinking in that Colorado
mountaintop vista. Oh! to feel afresh that powerful, drenching
presence! Oh! to drink again that Spirit. Oh! to
sing again instead of merely cough.
But the truth is, sometimes a dry
cough is all we can muster – a coughing remembrance, as the psalmist points
out, and a hope, for this isn’t finally a prayer of despair. Though what the writer currently feels is absence, such dryness shouldn’t
be confused with abandonment. This is
thirst, not desolation. The psalmist
trusts in the promise that Jesus would later make plain: that those
who hunger and thirst for righteousness are blessed, for they will be filled
(Matthew 5:6).
Finally, this is a prayer of trust
and anguished praise rather than panicked desperation. Even in the midst of emptiness lives a
confidence in something more.
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help
and my God.
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you
disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help
and my God.
Wet and flowing praise, even when
it’s dry. More than mere wishful
thinking or fantasizing about what will likely never be, “Hope is holding on in
the midst of desolate feelings to God's future in which praise will be the
final note of the living, ongoing relationship with our Savior, our help, our
God” (Richard Carlson, New Proclamation).
Spiritual droughts, the psalmist
is sure, will be broken. The Spirit of
God is present and moving, even during those times when we can neither see nor
feel it. But we will. The wide and empty banks will yet swell with flowing
praise. Which reminds me of another song
the kids learned this weekend – drawn from the assurance of the apostle Paul
who recognized that the truth of God’s loving grace is not always plain to the
naked eye – is not necessarily viscerally apparent.
We walk by faith, not by sight.
Through the day and through the night.
Every word of God is right.
We walk by faith and not by sight.