PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Psalm 55:16-18, 22                                                                          He Will Sustain You

Sermon July 26, 2009:  People’s United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            Psalm 55 is a prayer for God’s help because the person praying has been betrayed.  Have you ever been betrayed, has somebody ever done something to you that completely destroyed your self-control—you didn’t want to be a good person for just a moment so you could take care of it?  When we have those feelings we remember what our mothers told us about “being nice,” and although we’re enraged we also begin to feel guilty.  We say, “I shouldn’t feel like hurting him back.”  The problem is, you DO feel like revenge—the feeling is just there.  So what do you do with it?  You’re at cross-purposes with yourself:  vengeance and “be nice” don’t fit together at all.  So this conflict of feelings causes anxiety and a lot of discomfort.  Sometimes the vengeance wins; sometimes “being nice” wins.  But it’s a hard-fought battle.

            What Psalm 55 teaches us is that God’s a big guy:  lay all that out before God.  In fact there are several psalms that become embarrassingly specific about what the injured party wants God to do to the betrayer.  In monasteries where they sing through the Book of Psalms every month, they manage to skip those psalms—like Psalm 109.  Psalm 55 is not as specific as that, but it teaches us that when those angry feelings come, the problem is not the feelings:  the problem is making a bad decision.  The singer of this psalm tells us that God can help us with that. 

Cast your burden on the Lord

   And he is the one who will sustain you.

            I made an assumption about this psalm:  I assumed that there is not one singer but several—maybe a whole choir.  And the choir is divided up into two groups.  On the right side of the sanctuary they sing the verses about a personal betrayal, an individual offense and how that hurts.  On the left side of the sanctuary they sing the verses about an enemy nation or group and the anxiety of invasion (as we talked about last Sunday).  If you divided the psalm up like that, there are a few verses that don’t fit into either category:  they seem to be the song of a soloist, speaking words of reassurance and trust in God, so that the ultimate message of the psalm is that whatever may be going on, you can “cast your burden on the Lord:  he is the one who will sustain you.”  You can almost see the great choir in the Jerusalem temple, half on one side, half on the other, and a prophet or a priest standing before the door into the Holy Place; and together they sing out their anxiety and their faith.  What an incredibly moving experience that must have been for the worshipers on those occasions. 

 

            So as we look at these words of hope, what kind of betrayal have you felt in your life?  —maybe it’s going on right now.  There’s a program on TV where they take videos of spouses obviously engaging in affairs, and then they show the videos to the betrayed spouse.  If you have gone through that kind of betrayal it probably wasn’t hyped up like that reality show, but it hurt just as much.  Trust is broken, and it’s hard to fix again.

The verses in Psalm 55 about a personal betrayal are for you.

            Or maybe what’s bearing down on you is that a friend you trusted has betrayed your trust.  Years ago I wanted to seek a call to a conference ministry position, and one of the people I asked to write a letter of recommendation for me was a denominational executive I had known for years, had been to meetings with, had been to parties with, had talked with personally as the church I was serving went through a difficult time.  He agreed to write the letter.  In the process of developing a ministerial profile  the minister gets to see the whole profile and the letters of recommendation, just to make sure everything is right.  When I read Robert’s letter, he had based his assessment of my entire ministry on my worst moments, on things I had said to him privately, and almost nothing good I had done.  I was able to get another person to write a letter for the profile, but it took me awhile to get over what Robert had said about me—realizing that this was probably the only side of me that he had seen for awhile.  If you’ve had an experience like that, Psalm 55 is for you.

            There are a lot of people nowadays who are feeling betrayed by the company they’ve worked for for many years, and now in hard economic times the company has eliminated their job—there’s nothing to go back to.  Ford Motor Company used to have a large factory in Cleveland that employed thousands of people.  About 1971 Ford closed the whole plant, eliminated all the jobs.  One man in the church I served near there had spent his whole adult life working there.  He was in his middle fifties, married with a son in elementary school, a mortgage, a car payment, and since there were thousands of others in the same situation he had almost no opportunity to get another job.  Now on the objective level we know that in an economy that’s based on a free market there are ups and downs, and this was one of those downs:  the company would be stronger for cutting its work force back.  But to this worker it was bald-faced betrayal, and he was about as angry as any man I’ve ever known.  If you’ve had the experience of this kind of betrayal, then Psalm 55 is for you.

            Sometimes the betrayal isn’t “out there”—not coming from somewhere else:  the betrayal is inside yourself.  She made an assumption about the way the world works, and she based her decisions on it, and she was mistaken.  But it feels like it’s the world that has betrayed her.  From the outside people see it and talk about “gullibility,” but to the starry-eyed who gets her illusions burst, it feels like betrayal.  Psalm 55 is for her. 

            And you’ve known people who have been angry at God because they feel betrayed by a God whom they had been taught is a “good God.”  If God is so good, how could he let my husband die like that?  Or my child?  Or my life’s dream?  In translating this verse, I found that the actual Hebrew word translated “your burden” also means “what he has put on you”[1]—who?  God!  And we remember Paul’s promise that:[2]

… God will not let you be tested beyond your strength,

but with the testing will also provide the way out so

that you can endure it.

But who among us has not gone through a time when we wanted to argue with Paul about that?  Psalm 55 is for you. 

 

            Now I said that part of this psalm is personal and part of it is national.  There are some betrayals on the nation-level that are whoppers.  It doesn’t really make any difference that the Japanese embassy in Washington had trouble decoding the last part of that 14-part coded message from Tokyo, and so the ambassador was late to Secretary Hull’s office to deliver the ultimatum of war before the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—no excuses:  we were betrayed into believing that the Tojo government was seeking a path to peace.  That’s what Psalm 55 is about.

            You probably know already that the only reason America is at war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is that when our government demanded that the Taliban government in Kabul arrest Osama bin Laden and turn him over to us, the Taliban refused.  The reason they refused is part of traditional Afghan culture.  The Afghan tribes have been at war with each other for centuries, and loyalties have shifted back and forth on the basis of cultural rules we in the West find hard to grasp.  After the Soviet military withdrew there were two factions of Afghans fighting each other, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance.  The leader of the Northern Alliance was a man named Masoud.  Masoud was pro-American, and he had the loyalty of his people and the political skills to defeat the Taliban and arrest Osama bin Laden.  One week before 9-11, one of bin Laden’s people murdered Masoud and left the Northern Alliance leaderless.  After that, the Taliban owed bin Laden, and so when President Bush made his demand for the arrest the Taliban could not do it:  it was against everything they understood to be moral.  It would have been betrayal.   Betrayal?  America felt betrayed in international law, and that was the beginning of the present war in Afghanistan.  Psalm 55 is for us. 

 

Cast your burden on the Lord

   And he is the one who will sustain you.

            I like that word “sustain.”  Psalm 55 doesn’t promise you the moon, only that you are not left alone with this anxiety in your betrayal.  It doesn’t promise to keep you financially comfortable, or healthy, or safe from the exigencies of life.  What it promises is that the Spirit of Christ will be there with you.  This was all the early Christian martyrs had—they lost everything:  not just their lives but their dignity, their ability to save their loved ones, their voice merely to protest.  But the Spirit of Christ did not abandon them to the stoning, or to the Roman arenas, or to immolation, crucifixion or beheading—God sustained them in their faith.  Jesus himself went that last mile and has been called a fraud ever since; but he went to that hill-top with faith in the One who sustains forever.  That is a pearl worth all that you possess. 

 

            Let’s do something this morning that may help us get a taste of how the ancient Hebrews experienced this psalm.  I’m going to read only those verses that speak of personal anxiety and betrayal, and I want you to read the verses of the prophet of hope.  We’re going to read these verses slowly, and as we do, remember—this psalm is for you.  I read the first verse.[3]

 

            Congregation                                                                            Pastor

                                                                                    Hear my prayer, O God

                                                                                      Do not hide yourself from my petition.

Fear and trembling have come over me,

  And horror overwhelms me.

And I said, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!

  I would fly away and be at rest.

I would flee to a far-off place

   And make my lodging in the wilderness.

                                                                                    Day and night the watchmen make their rounds

                                                                                                                                          Upon the city walls

                                                                                       But trouble and misery are in the midst of her.

If it had been an adversary who taunted me,

Then I could have borne it;

   Or had it been an enemy who vaunted himself against me,

   Then I could have hidden from him.

But it was you, a friend of my own heart,

   My companion, my own best friend.

We took sweet counsel together,

   And walked with the throng in the house of God.

                                                                                    But I will call upon God,

                                                                                       And the Lord will deliver me.

                                                                                    Evening and morning and at noonday,

                                                                                       I will complain and lament,

                                                                                       And God will hear my voice.

My companion stretched forth his hand against his friend;

   He has broken his covenant.

His speech is softer than butter,

   But war is in his heart.

His words are smoother than oil,

   But they are drawn swords.

                                                                                    Cast your burden on the Lord,

                                                                                       And he is the one who will sustain you;

                                                                                       He will not let the good person stumble.

I will put my trust in you.

AMEN