The Pain of Betrayal

Scripture: Psalm 55

Sermon: The Pain of Betrayal

Topics: betrayal, curses, Marva Dawn, blessings, washing feet

Preached: March 1, 2015

Mike Abma

Preamble:

In this Lenten Sermon Series, we are learning to walk in the dark.

The dark and difficult Psalm for this morning is Psalm 55.

It was tempting to read just a bit of it, but that did not seem right.

So here is Psalm 55, in full.

¹ Give ear to my prayer, O God;

   do not hide yourself from my supplication. 

² Attend to me, and answer me;

   I am troubled in my complaint.

I am distraught ³by the noise of the enemy,

   because of the clamour of the wicked.

For they bring trouble upon me,

   and in anger they cherish enmity against me. 

⁴ My heart is in anguish within me,

   the terrors of death have fallen upon me. 

⁵ Fear and trembling come upon me,

   and horror overwhelms me. 

⁶ And I say, ‘O that I had wings like a dove!

   I would fly away and be at rest; 

⁷ truly, I would flee far away;

   I would lodge in the wilderness;

          Selah 

⁸ I would hurry to find a shelter for myself

   from the raging wind and tempest.’ 

⁹ Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech;

   for I see violence and strife in the city. 

¹⁰ Day and night they go around it

   on its walls,

and iniquity and trouble are within it; 

¹¹   ruin is in its midst;

oppression and fraud

   do not depart from its market-place. 

¹² It is not enemies who taunt me—

   I could bear that;

it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me—

   I could hide from them. 

¹³ But it is you, my equal,
   my companion, my familiar friend, 
¹⁴ with whom I kept pleasant company;
   we walked in the house of God with the throng. 

¹⁵ Let death come upon them;

   let them go down alive to Sheol;

   for evil is in their homes and in their hearts. 

¹⁶ But I call upon God,

   and the Lord will save me. 

¹⁷ Evening and morning and at noon

   I utter my complaint and moan,

   and he will hear my voice. 

¹⁸ He will redeem me unharmed

   from the battle that I wage,

   for many are arrayed against me. 

¹⁹ God, who is enthroned from of old,

          Selah

   will hear, and will humble them—

because they do not change,

   and do not fear God. 

²⁰ My companion laid hands on a friend
   and violated a covenant with me 
²¹ with speech smoother than butter,
   but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil,
   but in fact were drawn swords. 

²² Cast your burden on the Lord,

   and he will sustain you;

he will never permit

   the righteous to be moved. 

²³ But you, O God, will cast them down

   into the lowest pit;

the bloodthirsty and treacherous

   shall not live out half their days.

But I will trust in you.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION

The person writing this psalm is dripping with pain.

There is conflict.

There is treachery.

There is deep hurt.

They want to get away from it all –

O that I had the wings of a dove…

But the worst of the problem

are not enemies,

not strangers,

not the very people we might expect trouble from.

No, the worst of the problem

is that it is a friend, a companion,

someone close, someone trusted

has caused the hurt.

Some of you may know the name Marva Dawn.

She has come to Calvin College on many different occasions to speak.

She has written many different theological books –

Reaching Out without Dumbing Down

Or the book the campus is focusing on this semester

Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.

Well, in one of her books,

I’m Lonely Lord,

she spends two whole chapters on Psalm 55.

She calls it “her psalm.”

It is her psalm because it speaks to her personally.

You see, when she was first married, she and her husband did a lot of work among college students. She was especially close with one female student.

She and her husband spent a lot of time with her and her friends.

Then, suddenly, Marva’s husband was gone.

What happened?

He left her and ran off with that particular student.

Their marriage was over.

Marva was crushed.

She writes that the most hurtful thing was being betrayed by her two best friends:

by her husband,

and by this young woman in whom she had invested so much care and so much concern.

THE BETRAYED

Nothing is as painful as being betrayed by those closest to you.

By family,

By friends

By neighbors

By your church.

When the very people you trust the most betray that trust,

well, the hurt is deep and devastating.

Is it any wonder that this Psalm calls down curses on the betrayer:

Let death come upon them…

God, I have a suggestion for you….why not throw them into the deepest Pit.

Why these curses?

Because we cannot bear to see our betrayers,

to hear their voices.

We can hardly bear to think of them.

In Anthony Doerr’s recent novel, All the Light We Cannot See, a father with his blind teenage daughter flee from Paris to the Normandy coast when the Germans invade France.

This father and blind daughter find themselves in the French coastal city of St. Malo. When in Paris, the father had made a model of the neighborhood they lived in so his blind daughter could feel it with her hands, and that way get to know her way around.

Now that they are in St. Malo, the father decides to do the same thing – make a perfect to-scale model of the city for his blind daughter.

To do this, he goes, day after day, out into the streets, pacing and measuring,

from corner to corner, from building to building.

His neighbor sees this.

It looks suspicious.

What is he doing with all that measuring?

So the neighbor reports him to the Germans.

And before he knew what was happening, the father is arrested.

Betrayed, not by the enemy,

but by his own countryman, his very own neighbor.

The pain of betrayal.

My own father told me that during the German occupation of the Netherlands,

the greatest hatred was not directed at the Germans.

The greatest hatred was directed at the Dutch who collaborated with the Germans,

who told Dutch secrets,

and turned in their Dutch neighbors.

That is the truth of Psalm 55.

It is one thing if a stranger in our field

steals our ideas

or takes credit for our achievements.

But it is a much more painful thing

if the person stealing our ideas

and taking credit for our achievements

is the colleague who has an office right across the hall,

the colleague we have coffee with at 10 o’clock,

the colleague who comes to our parties,

the colleague we consider a friend.

No wonder we have that wonderfully graphic expression in English:

“stabbed in the back.”

We do not see it coming,

which is partly why it hurts so much.

THE BETRAYERS

We read this Psalm,

and it speaks to us.

Who of us has not been betrayed in some way

at some time

in our lives.

And yet, isn’t the opposite also true.

Who of us has never betrayed someone else,

never hurt someone by what we did or failed to do?

That novel, All the Light We Cannot See, basically follows the story of two different teenagers:

the blind teenage girl in France,

and an orphan teenage boy in Germany.

The orphan boy in Germany is named Werner.

Werner is a gentle, sweet, kind boy.

He also happens to be an engineering whiz,

a teenage MacGyver,

able to take apart and reassemble a radio with his eyes closed.

It is because of this skill that Werner finds himself in an elite boy’s school for

Hitler’s Youth Movement.

The school believes that only the fittest and strongest should survive.

It does not tolerate weakness.

Werner’s bunk mate is a boy named Frederick.

Frederick is a gentle spirit.

He loves nature and is an expert bird-watcher.

Frederick refuses to hurt others.

Frederick is considered weak – and ends up bullied and beaten.

And Werner does…..nothing.

Nothing to help his friend.

Nothing to stop what is happening.

That too, is a form of betrayal.

Jesus was intimate with both kinds of betrayal.

When Jesus was in the Upper Room,

he was surrounded by his friends.

But he was also surrounded by the very people who were about to betray him.

He was about to be betrayed actively,

by being turned in to the authorities;

He was about to be betrayed passively;

by his friends doing nothing to help him,

nothing to defend him.

What does Jesus do in that Upper Room?

RESPONSE TO BETRAYAL

Before answering that, let me tell another story.

This is a story Carol Howard Merritt tells.

When Carol was 15 years old, there was a crisis in the church.

That Sunday morning the pastor stood up in church,

and admitted to having an affair.

He said he was tempted, he was weak, and that he gave in to temptation.

But now he simply wanted to move on.

The congregation, however, was not as ready to simply move on.

They wanted to talk this through.

So that Sunday night the Elders and Deacons met to talk with the Pastor.

While that was going on, Carol was home with her mother.

Her mother suddenly grabbed some towels and a large basin and said

“Carol, get in the car.”

Carol and her mother drove to the pastor’s home.

The house was dark.

The curtains were drawn.

The pastor’s wife was inside

living out the agony of Psalm 55:

wishing she could just fly away

but having to do the next best thing – hide away.

Carol and her mother entered the house.

Without saying a word,

they filled the basin with warm water

took off that betrayed woman’s shoes and socks

and they started washing her feet.

In that action, they wanted to communicate that,

no matter what happened, she was loved.

Carol writes that her faith was formed that day.

Formed not by the bitter betrayal of a church leader.

But formed by the water flowing lovingly over those wounded feet.^[1]

CONCLUSION

Before he gave thanks and broke the bread,

Before he gave thanks and lifted the cup,

Jesus took a basin and a towel,

and he washed the feet of all his disciples:

the one who would betray him

the one who would deny him

and all the others who would abandon him.

They deserved curses.

But he gave blessings.

He washed their feet to show them

that he loved them, even them,

and that he would love them to the very end.

Amen

Prayer

Lord, as we come to your Table,

We come as the betrayed,

But we also come as the betrayers.

Lord, in your mercy, receive us we pray.

Amen

1. Carol Howard Merrit, “Tender Ministry” Christiain Century Oct. 3, 2012 ↑