Scripture: Psalm 88
Sermon: The Edge of Darkness
Topics: darkness, lament, brokenness, cross, silence
Preached: March 25, 2012
Rev. Mike Abma
Psalm 88
A Song. A Psalm of the Korahites. To the leader: according to Mahalath Leannoth. A Maskil of Heman the Ezrahite.
1
O Lord, God of my salvation,
when, at night, I cry out in your presence,
2 let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry.
3 For my soul is full of troubles,
and my life draws near to Sheol.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
I am like those who have no help,
5 like those forsaken among the dead,
like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
for they are cut off from your hand.
6 You have put me in the depths of the Pit,
in the regions dark and deep.
7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
and you overwhelm me with all your waves.
Selah (sigh)
8 You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a thing of horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
9 my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call on you, O Lord;
I spread out my hands to you.
10 Do you work wonders for the dead?
Do the shades rise up to praise you?
Selah
11 Is your steadfast love declared in the grave,
or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
12 Are your wonders known in the darkness,
or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?
13 But I, O Lord, cry out to you;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 O Lord, why do you cast me off?
Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Wretched and close to death from my youth up,
I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.*
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
your dread assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
from all sides they close in on me.
18 You have caused friend and neighbour to shun me;
my companions are in darkness.
OR Darkness is my only companion NIV
OR my own translation:
You have caused friend, neighbor and companions to shun me:
now only Darkness.
This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
Early this past week our family was sitting around the supper table, and my kids asked, “How’s the sermon coming, dad?”
“It’s not,” I replied.
“Why not?” they asked.
“Because, I’m avoiding it.”
“Why are you avoiding it?”
“Well, read Psalm 88 and you might get an idea why.”
Psalm 88.
It is sort of hard to say “Thanks be to God” after reading that psalm.
Here we have a heart-piercing cry to heaven.
It is raw.
It is dark.
It is difficult.
And it is also one-of-a-kind.
It is the only psalm that has
no words of praise,
no words of hope,
no words of thanks,
no promise of justice.
Verse 1 opens with the cry,
“O Lord, God of my salvation when, at night, I cry out in your presence,
2 let my prayer come before you;
incline your ear to my cry..”
And it is pretty well downhill from there.
18 verses of unrelenting pain and complaint,
without a hint of an answer; without a whisper of hope.
The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, calls this Psalm an embarrassment – an embarrassment to conventional faith.
In a way, this psalm is like that Edvard Munch lithograph that is on the cover of our bulletin (The Scream). I wouldn’t doubt that some of you grabbed your bulletin this morning, saw the cover, and the first thing you thought was, “Who in their right mind put that on the cover?”
The same can be said for this Psalm. We read it, in all its painful prose, and wonder, “Who in their right mind put that in the psalter?”
A PSALM OF BROKENNESS
We really do not know who wrote this psalm.
We do not know why it was written.
We do not have a story to go with it.
But whatever the story was,
it must have been very Job-like because everything in this person’s life has gone wrong; everything is broken.
BROKEN BODY
Whoever wrote this psalm believed she was dying.
We do not know why – was it an injury, an illness, was she a prisoner whose life was being threatened?
We do not know. But we know she believes death is near.
The psalm starts in verse 3 by saying,
“my soul is full of troubles;
My life is drawing near to Sheol.”
There seems to be little hope for recovery.
She writes:
I am like those who have no help,
5 like those forsaken among the dead
Anyone who has been in a hospital bed for days on end knows how hard a place this can be. The bed can begin to feel like a cage.
The hospital room, like a prison.
And feeling somewhat normal, like a distant memory.
This is a hard place to be.
It is also a hard place to visit.
How many of us don’t avoid hospitals – we don’t like them.
We don’t like how they look,
how they sound,
how they smell.
Everything about them reminds us of …..death.
So there is physical brokenness in this Psalm – being cut-off from life.
BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS
There is also the brokenness of relationships with others.
Again and again, this psalm mentions
friends who shun her
companions who avoid her
and neighbors who turn away from her.
Whoever wrote this psalm feels isolated and alone.
And we know that loneliness makes suffering that much more painful.
We learn this early in life.
I remember my first day in first grade.
My older siblings had paved the way for me.
They had already graduated from pencils to pens.
And I wanted to show how ready I was for school.
So I brought a pen.
The teacher saw me using a pen rather than a pencil.
And she said, “Mike, go stand in that corner.
Right in the corner, with your nose touching the wall.”
I was embarrassed.
I was hurt.
I was also angry at the injustice of it all….
But worst of all, I was standing there in that corner alone –
shunned, abandoned, forgotten.
We learn the pain of loneliness early, and it never gets any easier.
That is the pain of the relational brokenness of this psalm.
This person has been cut-off from love.
BROKEN RELATIONSHIP WITH CREATION
I think this psalm also speaks about a broken relationship with creation.
I say this because of how many times this psalm mentions going down to the Pit,
or down into its close cousins: to Sheol, to Abaddon, or to the land of forgetfulness.
The Pit is where you threw people you wanted to get rid of;
people you wanted to silence;
people you wanted to forget about.
Think of Joseph’s brothers throwing him into a Pit.
Think of the prophet Jeremiah being thrown into a Pit by his enemies.
Being in a Pit not only cuts you off from other people.
It also cuts you off from creation.
From inside a Pit
You cannot smell the freshness of green grass;
You cannot hear the peacefulness of a trickling waters;
You cannot see the brilliance of a spring day.
That is the pain of the creational brokenness of this psalm.
Being in a Pit cuts you off from the beauty of creation
and any solace that might give.
BROKEN RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
And finally this psalm speaks of the pain of a broken relationship with God.
Clearly the psalmist does not want this relationship to be broken.
She prays to God at night.
She prays to God in the morning.
Every day she calls out to the Lord.
She even bargains with the Lord.
Verses 10-12 are a string of rhetorical questions all saying to God basically the same thing: “Lord, I want to praise you, but how can I do that if I’m in the grave?
How can I do that if I’m dead?”
And what does she get from all her praying?
Silence. Only silence.
So she cannot help but wail WHY?
Why do you cast me off Lord?
Why do you hide your face from me?
When we feel as if even God has abandoned us,
When we feel we are cut-off from his light and his grace,
Then we really feel like we are totally in the dark.
And that is the last word of this psalm – darkness.
When our body is broken with no hope of healing;
When our relationships with others are broken, with no hope of love;
When our relationship with creation is broken, with no hope of beauty;
When our relationship with God is broken, with seemingly no answer to prayer;
Then we are left with darkness.
That is a hard place to be.
I want to go back to the Edvard Munch bulletin cover.
It is called “The Scream” – and it isn’t exactly easy to view either.
“The Scream” raises more questions than it answers:
Who is the person screaming – is it a man or a woman?
Why are they screaming?
And does anyone hear the scream?
I tend to think not.
Look at the lithograph closely.
There are people in the background walking.
There are boats on a lake floating.
The world around the scream seems to be going on as if everything is normal.
But the one screaming has been cut-off from normal,
And her scream seems internal, trapped between her hands:
She screams – and no one hears;
She weeps – and no one cares.
That is part of the pain of this Psalm:
it is such a lonely pain;
such a private hurt;
it is a weeping in the dark.
WHAT DO WE DO WITH PSALM 88?
So what do we do with Psalm 88?
I think there are pastoral lessons in this psalm.
Imagine, for a moment, that someone came to you,
and actually spoke to you in the language of this psalm:
that their health was the pits,
that their friends never called,
that the television was their only companion,
that nothing was right in their life,
that they prayed but it hadn’t done a wit of good.
What would you do?
What would such a person need?
I do not think this person needs our explanations for why they were so miserable or why things are all wrong in their life.
I do not think this person needs to hear our advice — about how we had an aunt in Iowa who was depressed too, and this is how she got over it.
I do not think this person needs our impatience — how their list of complaints is too long, and their pace of improvement is too slow.
I do not think this person needs us to be endlessly chipper and cheery, all in an effort to try move them away from their pain..
What this hurting person needs is for us to be still and to listen.
To be still, to listen, and to enter into their pain.
Not to be afraid of the silence; not to be afraid of the pain.
But simply to be still….and to know that God is.
PEOPLE OF THE CROSS
Ideally the church needs to be a place for this to happen.
It needs to be a place to bring our brokenness and our hurt.
The poet Emily Dickinson, in her own wonderfully succinct way,
Put it like this: “Pain – is missed – in praise.”
As a body of believers, we are a community of praise.
But it cannot all be praise.
We also must be a place where people can bring their pain.
We already live in a world that avoids pain,
and a culture that detours around every form of discomfort.
But we are different – we are people of the cross.
The cross is central for us because it is a constant reminder
of what Jesus does
with our pain and our hurt,
with our brokenness and our darkness.
He never avoids it.
He never detours around it.
No, he steers right toward it,
right toward the center of it,
toward the epicenter of it.
He steers toward it, he enters it, and he takes it upon himself.
On the cross we see all our brokenness displayed
* there in his broken and bleeding body
* there in his being despised and rejected by all
* there in creation turning away in darkness
* there in even his Father hiding his face from him.
There …on the cross
Jesus goes all the way down into our deepest darkness
He goes all the way down into death and into hell.
And in that moment when he breathes his last,
In that pregnant silence
God finds a way to heal all that is broken in our lives;
A way to heal all that is broken in our world.
There in that silence,
Is the beginning of all that is new.
There in that silence
we see that the Light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it.
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