March 22, 2009 Des Moines

4^th in a sermon on the hymn, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing

TEXT:  Psalm 40

By Thy Help I'm Come

Tradition, we know, has tended to “pretty up” some of the messier parts of scripture, stripping away some of the rawness commonly there; smoothing over some of the rough spots. The oft-cited “patience of Job” is just one example: about a guy who, when you read the story carefully, exhibited very little patience and very much frustrated exasperation. In this case, the “prettying up” has occurred simply in our imagination – in the way the church has chosen to remember Job – but other times the cosmetology happens in the process of translation, itself.

Take, for example, the psalm we have just heard together – Psalm 40. The Revised Standard Version begins it all quite sublimely: “I waited patiently for the Lord.” It is an image filled with sunshine, the Sunday paper, and a fresh cup of coffee. But behind that rather inspirational translation lies a much earthier, more pungent original. Eugene Peterson gets much closer to the mood and spirit of the psalmist’s original expression in his version called The Message. According to Peterson, what the Psalmist actually wrote was: “I waited and waited and waited for God. At last he looked; finally he listened.” (emphasis added)

Now that I can relate to. There is no Sunday paper in that version; instead there is the constant up and down to check the window and its view of the driveway; there is the irresistible urge to glance at the clock and the nervous scouting around to find something else meaningless to do by way of distraction. “I waited and waited and waited for God. And finally something happened. That’s the kind of “patience of Job” that I know more about.

By contrast, I’m not sure I have ever observed anybody “waiting patiently,” myself included. My sense is that patience is a virtue rarely, if ever, mastered. The psalmist is more representative. We “wait and we wait and we wait,” tapping our foot, picking at loose threads, counting ceiling tiles, scrutinizing our finger nails – anything to keep our minds from settling on whatever the problem at hand, scanning the horizon for any sign of relief or appearance. That is more the color and tone of our patience...

...especially when it comes to waiting for God, for isn’t that part of our itch? Have you ever met anyone for whom God was ever “on time” – for whom God responded or acted or spoke according to their own sense of urgency or need? God, it seems to me, has an annoying habit of taking God’s own sweet time.

Sure, by faith we can eventually get so far as trusting and accepting that “God’s time” is the “right time,” but it rarely feels that way in the moment – when everything seems to be coming at us at once; when the spears and arrows of our detractors are inbound and whizzing perilously close to the vital organs of our souls; when the water – whether it is financial or professional or psychological – is deep and we have dog-paddled about as long as we can; when we are confused and maybe even lost but are being pushed – perhaps against our will, but almost certainly before we are ready – into choosing a direction. We wish that God would speak up – NOW! We pray that God would step in – NOW! Because it feels, for all the world, like tomorrow will be too late. We are in, after all, this “miry bog.”

Now, I’ve never been exactly sure what a “bog” is, let alone a “miry” one. The sound of it, though, is quite evocative, conjuring up all kinds of images – like the death-trap quicksand of children’s nightmares from which no mortal can get there in time to extricate you; or like the setting for an old radio broadcast of a Sherlock Holmes mystery: dark, it always is, and muddy and gloriously mysterious unless you are the unfortunate one to discover the body that has invariably been secreted there by whose knows what manner of nefarious malefactor (you know, “bad guy”).

Whatever they are, miry bogs never sound or feel like the kind of difficulty that can wait – that can afford the luxury of patience. God’s time is rarely “our time.” And yet, however many such bogs we have found ourselves in through the course of our lives, here we are to tell about it; here we are to bear witness to the psalmist’s own truth: that God…

drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.

It is a little embarrassing when you think about it: however much we give ourselves permission to complain about how long we feel like God keeps us waiting, how strung out God allows us to become, nonetheless we are here, after the fact, to offer our deepest grateful praise. Or, as the hymnwriter phrases it in the hymn that has been guiding us throughout this Lenten season, hither by thy help I’m come. It is only because of God’s help that we have the luxury of being here at all.

I observed with those who gathered for the midweek service on Wednesday that “faith tends to be a memory, while fearful terror seems always to be an experience.” Maybe it’s because our memories are short; maybe it’s because such deposits into our “faith accounts” don’t accrue very much interest and we find ourselves singing along with Janet Jackson:

What have you done for me lately
Used to go to dinner almost every night
Danced until I thought I’d lose my breath
Now it seems your dancin’ feet are always on my couch
Good thing I cook or else wed starve to death...
What have you done for me lately

Or maybe it’s because today’s problems always seem so much bigger and deeper and more intractable than the ones God led us through before. Whatever the explanation, our “thank you, thank you, thank you’s” tend to find themselves singing descant above a more dominant, more driving melody of “please, please, please.”

Even in the psalmist. Did you notice that even in this reverential hymn of thanksgiving and testimonial, it didn’t take too long before the “give” gave way to the “take”? Acclamation transitions into beatitude, followed by proclamation, and then, almost without taking a breath, supplication.

God heard my cry, and drew me up out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock. God put a new song in my mouth, and because of what God did, and because of how I’ve told everyone about it, many will see and fear, and put their trust in the Lord. Happy are those who trust in the Lord!

Now, God, I could use a little more help. Evils have encompassed me without number; they are more than the hairs of my head, and my heart fails me. Hurry. Don’t delay.

That's what I’m talking about: faith as a memory – a recognition of some act of grace, some movement of God, in the past. We can look back and draw some conclusions about what God did back then. But crisis – terror – is an experience of the present that unfortunately, yesterday's faith does little to inform.

I wonder what it might take for that to change. I wonder how we might go about unleashing our faith that has been built on yesterday's experience of blessing, so that it could stand alongside and indeed meet the threats and difficulties of today?

There is graphically gruesome image in the psalm that represents, I think, the psalmist's own recognition of the problem, and metaphorically at least part of its solution. He talks of God “digging him an ear,” which is, I’ll readily agree, a frightening sounding proposition; but if it is our faith that God never stops leading us, never withdraws God’s supportive hand, never stops calling our name, then maybe the problem is less with the difficulties circumstantially confronting us and more with our inability to hear God’s voice leading us through them.

There are, after all, all kinds of things in our ears that are crowding out the sound of anything holy. Fear. Anxiety. Conventional wisdom, punditry, platitudes and “expert commentary.” It just might be possible that we could do a better job of remembering the truth that the hymn writer acknowledges -- that it is “by God’s grace that we come” through the trials and conflicts and perilous assaults and consequences of sin – if we could do a better job of hearing God’s very present voice calling our name.

Even now.

Answering our call.

Dig us new ears, O God, so that something you say can get through.