Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 42.7 - 20 Dec 2007

"The Cry of the Heart"

A Sermon on Psalm 13

a sermon by Dave Van Berkel, senior Mdiv. student

When I was a kid Sundays were a special day because on Sundays we would go to church. Going to church was for the most part, a peaceful, ritualized habit---the same things would happen every Sunday---I’d wake up, put on special clothes, suffer through my mother’s grooming, sit quietly in the pew, sing some songs, drop a quarter in the collection plate, take a short nap through the congregational prayer, listen to some guy talk for half an hour, and then go to Grandma’s for cake and pop after. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday this was, for the most part, my experience. One particular Sunday however, the peacefulness of that constant ritual was blown apart-- right in the middle of the sermon...

A man named Andy, who came every Sunday, and knew the routine just like me--- suddenly stood up, right in the middle of the sermon, and shattered the peaceful stillness-- screaming, shouting obscenities and swearing at the pastor. He apparently had had an unsatisfactory visit with the pastor the previous week and took this time to express his anger and frustration. Gasps went up from congregational members, my mother clutched me close to her side, while my dad and several other burly policemen in the congregation promptly escorted Andy out of the sanctuary.

Now, while corporate worship is not the best place or time to publicly air frustrations— (especially when there’s a guest pastor)---the shock of that moment stays with me even today. The anger and intensity of Andy’s emotion, the fear and the drama of the whole event burned itself into my memory. Andy’s outburst was all the more shocking because that sort of thing just doesn’t happen in church---church is a quiet, peaceful place, where you typically sit calmly for an hour and the same thing happens week after week after week; it is a place of shalom.

Israel’s worship time however, looked much different than ours. Worship in the OT consisted of sacrifices, smoke and fire—their hymnbook was the psalms—and the constant, peaceful quietness that we sometimes associate with worship doesn’t fit with the tone of many psalms. The author of Psalm 13, for instance—like Andy—was certainly not experiencing a shalom state of mind.

God was, or so it seems, uncharacteristically absent from the psalmist’s life—and for a significant period of time. Four times he cries out, HOW LONG?!? Four times he calls out for God to answer and save him. Four times. And what I found somewhat surprising is that there’s no verse saying that God answered his prayer—there’s no testimony to God riding in like the cavalry and saving the day.

No, four times the psalmist receives the same answer—deafening silence.

What was wrong? Did the psalmist do something to offend God? Was some secret foul sin keeping God away? Perhaps he did not have enough faith? Maybe if he just prayed more, or read his Bible more, that would solve his problem...

Huh...if only it were that easy... Unfortunately, blaming the psalmist’s woes on an unconfessed sin doesn’t fit here in this psalm. This is not a psalm of someone struggling with sin (there’s just no mention of confession, and God certainly can’t be fooled). Rather, the psalm is simply a desperate cry for help from an anguished soul. It is a voice given to groan-filled suffering.

We aren’t told the circumstances surrounding the writing of this psalm, and I’m not sure how important that is here anyway. The psalmist wants us to know—or rather wants God to know —that the pain he is suffering is no small matter and that God’s absence has been a reality for a long time. Each day brings new--or rather, the same old struggles--each day his spirit is assaulted with challenges. HOW LONG? The troubles and anguish continually build up upon him, weighing him down under a mountain of despair and depression. HOW LONG, LORD? His life is in distress—the source of his strength, joy and protection seems to have abandoned him—and he is lost. HOW LONG, LORD?

With God apparently absent, where can he turn? No matter where he looks, he finds no relief, no help. In fact, instead of allies, all he sees are his enemies—waiting like lions stalking a wounded gazelle...

After his searching he is alone, with only tortured thoughts, and no one to help him. He tries to make some sense out of the trouble he’s facing. But that "sense" doesn’t come...there is no understanding that illuminates the situation. Much like Job, the psalmist is never told why these calamities fell upon him.

Our lives, too, are not insulated from inexplicable sufferings. Cancer takes away a father at a young age. Car accidents steal the lives of teenagers. 5 defenseless Amish girls are shot dead at school. Sometimes there seems to be no reason to suffering; not even God provides an explanation.

One thing we can learn from this is that in the midst of the tragedies of life, we too should be careful to not always try and come up with explanations, whether for our or someone else’s situation. Now I’m not saying we should stop searching for ways to end suffering. I’m not saying we need to accept a fatalistic view of difficult circumstances we experience. I’m talking about walking with people who are going through suffering. It’s easy to be Job’s so-called friends, who find reasons for Job’s suffering by blaming Job while ignoring his pain. But the reason suffering happens is not always simple or easy.

Yet we try anyway. We try to come up with explanations so we have something to fall back on: A reason for the suffering. We don’t like unknowns, we aren’t comfortable with unanswered questions, and finding out WHY helps to keep things tidy. When people find out about someone dying of cancer, they ask, "Were they a smoker?" Several weeks ago—with the story of the man who killed the 5 Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania— the news reports talked of unresolved issues from the man’s childhood, trying to make sense of WHY it happened. It seems like humans’ default position when faced with suffering is to seek out the why, as if understanding "why" will somehow take away the senselessness of it all.

This is not a recent development in the history of human behavior...

Jesus’ disciples were no different. John tells us in Chapter 9 of his gospel that, upon encountering a blind man, the disciples asked Jesus, "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Can you hear the why? "Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, cutting through the disciples shallow attempts, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life."

Psalm 13 doesn’t ask why—but how long? The psalmist knows that even though life is but a breath, life is hard. That’s nothing new to us. Everyone has gone through challenging times in life, whether the death of a loved one, financial struggles, depression...and too often we’ve heard "comforts" like "He’s in a better place"..."It’ll be alright"...or "Everything happens for a reason"... essentially telling us to just grin and bear it--that’s life!

Too often we try to ignore, hide or soften the painful realities of life. We’re very adept at giving the outside impression that everything’s fine, when inside we’re screaming for help. Instead of being real and honest about our weaknesses we are encouraged to simply swallow our pain—the problem is that that pain then turns into bitterness or depression, eating away like a disease at our soul.

Or maybe we find other outlets to deal with our pain—we turn to alcohol, drugs, sex—or we project our anger and frustration on unsuspecting family or friends. Or maybe we just turn ourselves off to the world, isolating and withdrawing from life and trying to deal with the pain by ourselves.

At the church I attended one Sunday, one of the worship leaders shared how he deals with his anger and frustrations while driving alone in his truck. He said he just lets it out, shouting and hollering if need be, giving vocal expression to the troubles in his heart and getting real with himself and God. When’s the last time you’ve done that with God? When’s the last time you’ve dared to pray a prayer like Psalm 13? Or perhaps, "When’s the last time you needed to pray a prayer like Psalm 13? And when you needed it, did you pray it?

I confess that too often worship services are guilty of ignoring pain in people’s lives. We want our worship services to be ordered and stable and full of nicely dressed people who know exactly what to do for the hour they are there. Too often, there’s no room for people like Andy—there’s no room for expressing Psalm 13—and we don’t want to admit that questions without answers exist. We don’t want to shatter the illusion that we know it all, and have it all figured out.

But worship doesn’t have to be that way. Church and worship can be a place of healing and renewal, of holy fist-shaking at God, and not a place to be ignorant of pain and suffering.

In some ways, the complaints of Psalm 13 echo Psalm 22, quoted by Jesus himself upon the cross. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!" Jesus, was a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering as Isaiah tells us.

Matthew Henry says that "The saint’s daily bread is sometimes the bread of sorrow." When we pray the Lord’s prayer and say "Give us this day our daily bread," what do we do with that bread if it turns out to be the bread of sorrow or pain? Are we willing and/or able to eat it? What will we do if (when?) that bread turns sour in our stomach?

Praying Psalm 13 is a daring undertaking. The writer of Psalm 13 was not afraid to voice the struggles of his soul. He let God have it—all the anger, frustration, and doubts—are thrown down before God. The psalmist puts on the metaphorical gloves and calls God into the ring.

This psalm allows us to be real about the painful realities of our lives before God. This is not a psalm for Disneyland, the so-called happiest place on earth. This psalm does not encourage us to "grin and bear it" or simply "be silent." This psalm allows and encourages honest wrestling with God—like Jacob, Job, and even Jesus, on the cross. This psalm is a blues anthem.

The psalmist is left to struggle with his doubts and questions before God, and yet, he is not left to ponder his situation without some comfort. His cries of "How long" would in fact be useless if no one heard them. But despite the apparent aloneness of the psalmist someone does hear. The psalmist’s prayer takes place within the context of his relationship with God.

The complaints of this psalm are not the result of a 911 faith—a faith that only calls on God in sudden emergencies. NO, this psalm grows out of a deep abiding trust in who God is and what he has promised.

Even in the midst of his suffering and anguish, the psalmist recalls who God is and what he has done.

I trust in your unfailing love...I rejoice in your salvation...and:

I will sing, for he has been good to me.

But wait just a minute you say, how can these words come off the same lips that a few moments ago were crying out HOW LONG? Is the psalmist bi-polar? Where’s the buffer zone, where’s the part where he first works through all of those angry feelings, where’s the therapy and medication to help him come out of his depression? Where do the clouds begin to break up and the sun come out? Where’s the journey OUT of the valley of the shadow of death? Where is God’s response that leads to the praise and rejoicing? Well we just don’t get it!

We don’t get any of that stuff because the psalmist is teaching us a deep truth about God, that in the very midst of suffering, that even in darkness, when our eyes can see no light and the "sleep of death" closes in on us, God is already there. More importantly than the why of suffering, is the under-girding reality of God in the midst of our suffering.

We can cry out and pray to God because God is right there beside us. The psalmist isn’t voicing his complaint to the air, he’s talking to God standing right beside him, and as he lays out the troubles of his life he grabs God by the shirt and says to His face "How long are you going to let this go on?!?"

We can fearlessly pray the words of Psalm 13 because God himself has given us the words. We can ask God for light for our eyes and for breath in our lungs because he hears us and he gives it. His very presence with us gives us the strength to cry out to him, so that even in the silence, the psalmist can sing, can rejoice, and can trust, despite the worst that life can bring to us.

In the spring of 1994, life threw its worst at Josephine, a 13 year-old girl from Rwanda. Josephine was forced to watch as her entire family was murdered before her eyes. After hiding in a hole under a bed with a nearby family for three weeks, coming out only at night for a little food and to use the bathroom, Josephine was forced to flee to the forest. God eventually led her to a missionary compound for orphan girls where she told me her story. And after finishing her story, with tears streaming down her face, she sang a song about the love of Jesus. Jesus hadn’t abandoned her; he had put his nail-scarred hand around her shoulder and walked one nail scarred foot after the other with her through her ordeal.

One theologian put it this way: "We are simultaneously people of the cross and the resurrection." We are simultaneously people who suffer and yet rejoice, sometimes defiantly in the face of suffering, that God is good. Martin Luther said that "Hope despairs and despair hopes at the same time." We are simultaneously people who grieve, mourn and wail, and yet sing, because God is with us and His salvation is as certain as the tears on our faces.

When suffering hits, and temptations to abandon faith come, God’s resurrection hope cries out. Hope that has endured 2000+ years of persecution around the globe, hope that continues to survive cancer and AIDS, hope that has endured genocide and world wars-- hope that triumphs over death and hell.

This hope is grounded in the resurrection. God’s proven promises cannot be destroyed, no matter what our circumstances. Our hope is based on what God has already done, and what he will bring to completion someday. He has not left us alone yet, and never will. Hope empowers us to cry out Psalm 13 to God—to shout to God "How long until our suffering will end?"

Psalm 13 gives voice to our pain, and also reminds us that the God of resurrection hope is with us always... AMEN.

Kerux will be featuring student sermons throughout the coming year. Please submit yours to letters@kerux.org.