The Grief and The Turn

Scripture: Psalm 77

Sermon: The Grief and The Turn

Topics: prayer, grief, questions, silence, surrender

Preached: May 5, 2013

Rev. Mike Abma

Psalm 77: 1-10

To the leader: according to Jeduthun. Of Asaph. A Psalm.

¹ I cry aloud to God,

aloud to God, that he may hear me.

² In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord;

in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying;

my soul refuses to be comforted.

³ I think of God, and I moan;

I meditate, and my spirit faints.

Selah

⁴ You keep my eyelids from closing;

I am so troubled that I cannot speak.

⁵ I consider the days of old,

and remember the years of long ago.

⁶ I commune^* with my heart in the night;

I meditate and search my spirit:<sup>*

7</sup> ‘Will the Lord spurn for ever,

and never again be favourable?

⁸ Has his steadfast love ceased for ever?

Are his promises at an end for all time?

⁹ Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has he in anger shut up his compassion?’

Selah

¹⁰ And I say, ‘It is my grief

that the right hand of the Most High has changed.’

This is the Word of the Lord,

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

I recently read Christopher Hitchens’ final book called Mortality.

Some of you may know Christopher Hitchens, and some may not.

For the last ten years or so, Christopher Hitchens had been one of the most articulate spokespersons against all religious faiths.

He had been one of the most winsome advocates for a humane form of atheism or “anti-theism”, as he liked to phrase it.

He is probably best known for a book he wrote entitled God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Born in the UK, Hitchens eventually moved to the United States, and became a prolific author of articles and popular speaker.

Then, in the summer of 2010, he suddenly felt a pain in his upper chest and throat area. He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He died in December of 2012 – 18 months after his diagnosis.

In that 18 months he wrote his final book Mortality.

In that book he assured his readers that there would be no final death-bed conversion, and even if there was one, it would not really be him.

He would face death without turning to the solace of religion.

What I was struck by in this book was how often he mentioned prayer.

Prayer clearly affected him.

He wrote that almost all the letters, cards, and emails he received said one of two things:

1. either people did not want to offend him so would not pray for him (although they wanted to);

2 or, they said as tenderly as they could that, his own anti-theism notwithstanding, they would nevertheless pray for him.

In fact some people went so far as to set up a Website that designated September 20, 2010 as “Everybody Pray for Christopher Hitchens Day.”

Hitchens was clearly astonished.

It also caused him to think about prayer.

On the one hand, Hitchens gave his stock answer.

There is no God, therefore prayer does not work. Heaven is deaf. If it makes you feel better, fine. But it changes nothing.

But he also, nearer the end of his book, seems to entertain the idea of prayer – at least just a little. And he wonders, “What God could ignore such supplications?” almost implying that he himself, in his critical illness, had raised these supplications, had prayed them.

PSALM 77: 1-10 QUESTIONS OF GOD

“What God could ignore such supplications?”

This seems to be the theme of the first part of Psalm 77.

Whoever is praying this prayer is fully into it:

The voice is loud;

The hands are stretched out;

The soul is restless;

And the prayers seem to be unceasing – day and night.

But God does not seem to be listening.

And that leads this prayer to ask questions,

Questions of God

Questions clearly as deep and profound as Christopher Hitchens raised.

For it is believers and unbelievers and everyone in-between

who struggle and can’t help but ask God questions.

The questions that this psalm raises are painful ones.

They are almost audacious ones.

Is heaven really deaf?

Has God’s love really ended?

Has the fountain of his mercy dried up?

Are we left to wither in a dry and weary land where there is no water?

How many of us have not asked those very questions,

struggled with them

wrestled with them?

After this barrage of questions, deep and difficult,

The prayer arrives at verse 10.

Verse 10 is murky.

The Hebrew is notoriously difficult to translate.

Our NRSV pew bibles put it this way:

It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.

The Jerusalem Bible puts it this way:

This is what distresses me: that the power of the Most High is no longer what it was.

Or the poetic New English Bible:

Has the right hand of God lost its grip?

Does it hang powerless, the arm of the Most High?

However you want to phrase it,

the grief of God’s absence, his distance, his apparent deafness

is there, in all its pain and turmoil.

We are going to sing that pain and turmoil.

John Bell has written a setting of Psalm 77 that both tonally and textually expresses that grief, and pain, and turmoil.

77B: I Refused to Be Comforted Easily

Stanzas 1-3

The tune will be new to us, but hopefully we will be able to pick it up quickly.

PART TWO

Psalm 77: 11-20

¹¹ I will call to mind the deeds of the Lord;

I will remember your wonders of old.

¹² I will meditate on all your work,

and muse on your mighty deeds.

¹³ Your way, O God, is holy.

What god is so great as our God?

¹⁴ You are the God who works wonders;

you have displayed your might among the peoples.

¹⁵ With your strong arm you redeemed your people,

the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.

Selah

¹⁶ When the waters saw you, O God,

when the waters saw you, they were afraid;

the very deep trembled.

¹⁷ The clouds poured out water;

the skies thundered;

your arrows flashed on every side.

¹⁸ The crash of your thunder was in the whirlwind;

your lightnings lit up the world;

the earth trembled and shook.

¹⁹ Your way was through the sea,

your path, through the mighty waters;

yet your footprints were unseen.

²⁰ You led your people like a flock

by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God.

PART TWO — THE TURN

How much time elapses between verse 10 and 11?

Is it a minute,

An hour

A day

A week

A month

A decade?

For me, I think we need a degree of silence between verse 10 and 11.

It is both the silence of grief,

but also the silence of surrender.

There needs to be a clear break

because the prayer in this psalm takes a dramatic turn in verse 11.

Verses 1-10 are dominated by “I” verbs:

I cried, I seek, I meditate, I question, I am so troubled….

I, I, I….

The verbs dwell on our troubles, our questions, the needs that drop us to our knees.

The whole first part of this psalm is basically,

“LORD, I have all these problems,

Why are you not coming to help me?”

Verse 11 represents a dramatic change, a shift, a turn.

The turn is from oneself to God;

The shift is from our present and personal troubles

to God’s past and decisive triumphs.

The verbs may be similar to the earlier part of the prayer,

Verbs of remembering, musing, meditating

But now the focus is on GOD:

What God has done;

What God’s strong arm has wrought.

In Christopher Hitchen’s book Mortality, he wrote something quite interesting about prayer.

As an “anti-theist” he wrote that prayers do not work because there is no one to hear them.

But then he mused to himself.

He wrote that if there is a God,

and if this God is all-wise, and all-powerful,

then who are we to tell God what to do?

Isn’t it rather presumptuous that we mere humans can advise the Divine?

You know, I think Hitchens is on to something here.

Part of the problem with prayers that are overly self-concerned,

is that we are tempted to think our efforts or skill at prayer

will make all the difference –

all we need to do is pray louder, or longer, or harder, or with more skill and technique.

But this goes against the essence of prayer.

The essence of prayer is simply to turn to God.

The heart of prayer is to give ourselves,

And our lives

And our troubles

And our joys too

To him – and that is sometimes something we do

with moans and groans

that the Spirit conveys with sighs too deep for words (Rom 8:26)

Prayer is about surrendering ourselves, as best we can,

to allow God to work his will and his way in the world

and in our lives.

As such, prayer is more God’s work than our own.

Prayer is remembering God’s faithfulness in the past,

trusting his love in the present,

and anchoring our hope in him for our future.

That is why even the Lord’s Prayer both begins and ends with God:

Holy is his name

His kingdom come, his will be done…

And it ends

For his is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.

Because prayer is about aligning ourselves to God and his work

prayer can never fail or be a failure;

It can never be empty or without fruit.

God is AT WORK bringing forth his Kingdom.

What is the business of his kingdom?

It is his burning desire for us.

It is his one purpose to love us into the perfect fulfillment of his kingdom.

Psalm 77 ends with recounting God’s rescue of his people from the Red Sea.

In our own prayers, this side of Easter,

we can recall the day when the earth trembled,

and God made his way through the tomb

when his path led through death itself

And how he calls us to follow him from death into life.

Sarah Coakley is a woman who was studying theology at Harvard a number of years ago. She was troubled that all these theologians seemed to have no interest in actually leading a Christian life.

So she began praying.

She spent 20 minutes every morning

and 20 minutes every evening

in silence, in prayer.

It had a profound effect on her.

She came to realize that the heart of prayer was all about

surrendering control to God,

of submitting to his will.

She realized not only prayer,

but her whole life,

her whole academic career

had to be more God and less self.

That is when she ran into trouble at Harvard,

because Harvard was a whole institution and culture

tilted the other way – more self and less God.

Now she is a theologian who teaches at Cambridge University in England,

But she is also an ordained pastor in the Church of England

Dedicated to keeping the academy connected to real ministry

Dedicated to praying with people

In hospitals,

In prisons

And in addiction facilities.

Why?

Because in the end,

Sarah came to realize something everyone who prays comes to realize:

We all need less self and more God.

None of us can fix ourselves.

We all need God, through Christ,

to redeem us,

To rescue us,

To make us whole.

Amen