Psalm 40 (The Message) 9/29/2024
This morning, we begin a new series, one where we’ll consider King David as poet, singer and song writer. Pastor Don will be taking us through various places in David’s life that show him living out a vocation as poet and song writer. Today we focus on one of the many Psalms that name David in the title. That’s nearly half of the 150 poems that make up what we call the Psalter.
When you think of poetry, what comes to mind? Childhood contains a great wealth of poetry. In fourth grade, my teacher asked each of us to pick a poem, any poem, memorize it, and share it with the class. If you ask me to, I can still tell you about Dorothy and the Mortifying Mistake (Anna Maria Pratt) she made while trying to learn the multiplication table. The Walrus and the Carpenter (Lewis Carroll) entertained both me as a kid and my kids after me; if you know the poem, you’ll recall that duo wept to see more sand on the beach than seven maids with seven mops could clear up, even if they kept at it for half a year! Fog may come in on little cat feet, but if Carl Sandburg’s talking about our cat, then the fog thuds!
We grow up, and poets accompany us on the journey. Robert Frost was Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in freshman English and later helped me consider which diverging road to take when I was not long out of college (The Road Not Taken).
As a rule, we tend to think of poetry, and the Psalms in particular, as inspirational literature meant to lift our hearts and encourage us to be better people than we are. We like a lot of the Psalms for the soaring themes and words of comfort, encouragement, praise and thanksgiving. Some psalms certainly fit this.
But as a whole the Psalms are grown-up poems. Many of them are hard prayers, full of difficult emotions and wild and even painful imagery. Perhaps it’s because David fought so many battles and killed so many people; so many in fact that God refused to let him build the temple, the place where God would live among his people. David’s wasn’t the typical resume of a poet.
Did you ever stop to ask why poetry and not prose? David could have written vast histories of his exploits and God’s work, like Moses and Samuel did. He could have prayed in long journal entries like many Medieval saints. He could have shared what he learned about God in essays and letters, like Paul and John. He could have written books, like many theologians. But David prayed in poetry. Why? Was it just because he liked poetry? I don’t think so. David prayed in poetry because it is heart language. What do I mean by that?
First, poetry is relational. In the Psalms, David laid out his life before God, in all its messiness. He waited for God to do something. He listened and watched for God.
Poetry is responsive language, the language of lovers. It unhooks from the brain as the primary means of processing and from information as the primary focus of the processing. It moves to more primal ways of processing – gut, emotion, facial expressions, pictures.
We spend so much of our life thinking. We reason through arguments. We plan. We explain. We organize the world into meaning. Poetry bypasses the realm of reason. Poetry is the language that connects hearts.
Think of a parent and baby. The baby watches Mom’s delighted face and smiles back. He isn’t thinking, “Hey, Mom is smiling so she must love me.” Baby’s smile directly bypasses rational understanding.
Interestingly, the Psalms were written in the same language people used with their kids, their friends, the merchant who sold them vegetables. They weren’t written with a special kind of high, formal, spiritual language. It’s the reason I chose The Message version this morning for our reading, because it’s written in plain, common language. The use of regular words for prayer reveals how David and the other psalmists approached God – not by trying to be spiritual, but by being in a relationship. Instead of talking about God, David talked with God. Instead of talking “at” God, he listened to God.
Doing something for you, bringing something to you—
that’s not what you’re after.
Being religious, acting pious—
that’s not what you’re asking for.
You’ve opened my ears
so I can listen. (Psa. 40:6)
Psalm 40 shows how David lays his life before God, with honesty and simplicity. He feels stuck in the mud. He sings praise songs and shouts out loud what God has done. He’s swamped by guilt, miserable because of how some people are treating him. He’s happy to belong to God; he feels like a needy mess. It’s all there, life in all its contradictions and difficulties. And every bit of it lived in relationship with God.
The Psalms weren’t written to teach theology. They were written to help us be in relationship with God, to teach us how to pray. David doesn’t want to know about God nearly as much as he wants to know God.
We’ve been exploring one reason why David and the other psalmists chose poetry for their prayers, which is that it’s the language of lovers, of relationship. A second reason is that poetry grabs hold of the faucet of my brain and mouth, the faucet that gushes words, and reduces it from a torrent to a trickle. The Psalms remind us we are in the presence of mystery, of what we cannot control.
As Psalm 40 says, “The world’s a huge stockpile / of God-wonders and God-thoughts.” (v. 5) I’m afraid I am guilty of talking way too much, most of the time! Our world is full of noise, and a lot of it comes out of our mouths. Poetry invites us to delete 95% of our words. When we stop talking, it’s easier to listen, to pay attention to those God-wonders and God-thoughts.
When Eugene Peterson (translator of The Message version) uses the phrase “enter the mystery,” he translates a phrase that is used often in the Old Testament, including the Psalms: the “fear of God” (v. 3). It’s very hard for us to get this idea right. What does it mean to fear God? Should we be afraid of him? Avoid him? Mind our P’s and Q’s so we don’t tick him off?
Peterson pushes us to see, through the poetry of Psalm 40, that God is mystery. We can’t comprehend him, let alone control him. What a contrast to false gods, “what the world worships.” We make idols; but God makes us. Mystery. Fear. Awe. “…they enter the mystery, / abandoning themselves to God.” (v. 3)
One of the surprises of the Psalms is this: some fit our ideas of what spiritual poetry and prayers should be. They inspire and uplift. But there are large swaths of the Psalms, and good chunks of even the pretty ones, that are uncomfortable and even disturbing. Some are full of complaining. Some are dark and despairing. Some pray for revenge on enemies. Psalms like these don’t seem very spiritual.
Turns out that “being spiritual” is a rather pagan concept, one where we talk ourselves into certain feelings that we think are more acceptable and religious than others. When we try to be what we consider “spiritual,” we deny whole parts of the human experience. All is not love and light in the world. Real life is full of enemies, failure, sadness, and anger, just to name a few. To only pray about beautiful things ignores the reality of our broken world.
Let’s talk for a minute about enemies and evil, something Psalm 40 and many other David psalms do. You probably wonder how we can pray for our enemies to be “heckled, disgraced, booed and jeered without mercy” (13-15) when Jesus told us to love our enemies?
The Psalms challenge our mistaken ideas about what it means to be a Christian, that to be spiritual means we should be nice people. The Psalms show us that prayer means laying out the ugly as well as the beautiful. The psalmists often pray over the evil in the world; you might even say they rail over it, but they do it before God! They find evil lurking in themselves (sin). They find it in their neighbor (who can at times be their enemy). They find evil in institutions, governments and (yes) politics. They even pray about evil in the assembly of God’s people.
David prays strong words about evil. Jesus does, too. When Jesus told us to love our enemies, he didn’t tell us to love evil.
The Psalms recoil against evil in visceral terms. Listen to some of these David prayers:
May the evil plans of my enemies be turned against them.
Do as you promised and put an end to them. (Ps 54:5 NLT)
Let death stalk my enemies;
let the grave swallow them alive,
for evil makes its home within them. (Ps 55:15 NLT)
But you, O God, will send the wicked
down to the pit of destruction.
Murderers and liars will die young,
but I am trusting you to save me. (Ps. 55:23)
Harsh!
The songs we sing in church rarely if ever include thoughts like these! When we read the Psalms, we prefer to skip over the hard parts so we can get to the inspiring ones. But here’s the thing. When we recoil from the language of the poet-psalmists like David who pray against evil, then something’s wrong, and it’s not with the Psalm. It’s on us to shake ourselves awake, because we need to learn to recoil against evil, right along with them!
The language and imagery of poetry, especially in the Psalms, develop in us a healthy response to evil. And what is that response? Contrary to what we might think, it’s not railing at people! Not posting on FaceBook or writing opinion pieces. The healthy response is praying it out before God.
Psalm 40 turns us to face God, in all the circumstances of our lives, to God as mystery, as the God who will not be controlled by our small-minded ways. Psalm 40 shows us God is magnificent and awesome, yet he cares for me. That he speaks truth and acts in patient love, even toward unformed and unspiritual people like me. God is the One before whom I dare to lay out my life, the One with whom I can speak honest words, the One who gives me ears to listen, the One to whom I can abandon myself in trust.
More and more people are seeing this:
they enter the mystery,
abandoning themselves to God.
Blessed are you who give yourselves over to God,
turn your backs on the world’s “sure thing,”
ignore what the world worships;
The world’s a huge stockpile
of God-wonders and God-thoughts.
Nothing and no one
compares to you! (Psalm 40: 3-5)
As we go through this David series, you might try reading some of the Psalms along with it. Maybe pick a Bible with language that is less familiar to you, less formal. And try praying it rather than just reading. Let’s let David help us, not to know about God, but to know him.