Epiphany 7/Ordinary Time 7
Preaching
Hear My Voice
Preaching The Lectionary Psalms for Cycles A, B, C
Object:
This psalm is often identified as a prayer of individual thanksgiving but it reads more as a plea for help. The prayer comes from one so sick that his continued survival is in jeopardy. We cannot help but wonder, however, if his illness has made the psalmist somewhat paranoid (see vv. 5-9).
Yet, whether the machinations of enemies were actual or the product of feverish imagination, the psalmist's feeling that his life was threatened was no doubt real enough. Serious or prolonged illness can have that effect on any of us. An upbeat young woman I know who has nothing of the hypochondriac in her, but who has been afflicted by one real illness after another, tries to live her life positively, giving no quarter to the diseases. But recently, after an injury from an ordinary fall drifted into a rare and thorny complication, she said, "Okay. This is enough! Why am I being singled out?"
If we believe that God is actively involved in the nitty-gritty of our lives, then that is a fair question. It's unanswerable, but fair nonetheless.
This psalm could be the basis for a sermon that acknowledges not only how helpless illness and other vicissitudes of life can leave us feeling, but also how they can make us feel persecuted. There is an old Yiddish proverb addressed to God that says, "Thou hast chosen us from among all the nations -- what, O Lord, did you have against us?" On a personal level, a lot of us feel the same.
Is there a way we can help people acknowledge their paranoia about God without leaving them feeling condemned for it? Rather than try to argue such feelings away, we may do better to accept them as reasonable, and then talk about how faith operates in that circumstance. I no longer remember the title, author, or plot of a spy-thriller I read some years ago, but one scene has stuck with me. The protagonist is visiting in a private residence in Moscow, in what was then still the Soviet Union. While he talks with the woman in the home, the woman's aged father is over in the corner praying. The novelist said something to the effect that the old man prayed every day to the God whom he blamed for everything, but whom he trusted implicitly.
In his book, A Room Called Remember (HarperSanFrancisco, reissue edition 1992), Frederick Buechner writes of the great pain he feels because of the illness of someone he loves, and moves on to share what it might be like to truly love God:
I loved him because there was nothing else left. I loved him because he seemed to have made himself as helpless in his might as I was in my helplessness ... so the farthest reach of our love for God is loving him when in almost every way that matters we can neither see him nor hear him....
-- S. P.
Yet, whether the machinations of enemies were actual or the product of feverish imagination, the psalmist's feeling that his life was threatened was no doubt real enough. Serious or prolonged illness can have that effect on any of us. An upbeat young woman I know who has nothing of the hypochondriac in her, but who has been afflicted by one real illness after another, tries to live her life positively, giving no quarter to the diseases. But recently, after an injury from an ordinary fall drifted into a rare and thorny complication, she said, "Okay. This is enough! Why am I being singled out?"
If we believe that God is actively involved in the nitty-gritty of our lives, then that is a fair question. It's unanswerable, but fair nonetheless.
This psalm could be the basis for a sermon that acknowledges not only how helpless illness and other vicissitudes of life can leave us feeling, but also how they can make us feel persecuted. There is an old Yiddish proverb addressed to God that says, "Thou hast chosen us from among all the nations -- what, O Lord, did you have against us?" On a personal level, a lot of us feel the same.
Is there a way we can help people acknowledge their paranoia about God without leaving them feeling condemned for it? Rather than try to argue such feelings away, we may do better to accept them as reasonable, and then talk about how faith operates in that circumstance. I no longer remember the title, author, or plot of a spy-thriller I read some years ago, but one scene has stuck with me. The protagonist is visiting in a private residence in Moscow, in what was then still the Soviet Union. While he talks with the woman in the home, the woman's aged father is over in the corner praying. The novelist said something to the effect that the old man prayed every day to the God whom he blamed for everything, but whom he trusted implicitly.
In his book, A Room Called Remember (HarperSanFrancisco, reissue edition 1992), Frederick Buechner writes of the great pain he feels because of the illness of someone he loves, and moves on to share what it might be like to truly love God:
I loved him because there was nothing else left. I loved him because he seemed to have made himself as helpless in his might as I was in my helplessness ... so the farthest reach of our love for God is loving him when in almost every way that matters we can neither see him nor hear him....
-- S. P.
