Psalm 27

Psalm 27; Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Luke 13:31-35

About 20 years ago this Lent, I decided it was time to improve my prayer life from largely non-existent to well, something. I’ve never been good at meditation. I didn’t understand the Anglican Rosary. Doing morning and evening prayer from the prayer book seemed too complicated. But maybe…maybe I could just read the psalms for morning and evening prayer.

So I did. Read a psalm or two from the prayer book on my morning commute, and right before bed. And I fell in love.

Every possible emotional and physical and daily experience of life is in the psalms, a lot of it or a little. Joy, betrayal, grief, anger, humor, hope, dullness, doubt, assurance, pride, shame, celebration. It’s all there. All jumbled together in the poetry of our personal and communal relationship with God.

I fell in love particularly with Psalm 27, which we read together a few minutes ago.

It had me from the very first verse:
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?

I’ve never led a very dangerous life, but I have spent some quality time with fear. Some of it at 30,000 feet in airplanes, more of it on the ground in fear of failure, disappointment, loss or pain. Maybe you know what that’s like. Maybe you, too, long to be free of that constricting anxiety, to live in the place that this psalm starts: Light and salvation and nothing to fear.

Anyone?

I really want the confidence of protection, the promise of beauty, and of closeness to God that the psalmist sings about in this 27^th Psalm. 
Some days, it feels like I’ve got it. All that light, and the life-giving closeness to God, and the spacious joy of nothing to fear.

And other days, well, life is heavy. Lonely. Angry sometimes. Oh so busy, sometimes, as I juggle all my tasks, and the fear of failure and disappointing others, of losing people I love, or not being able to help.

Some days, when I turn on the news, it feels like there are enemies all around. Like death is winning. And “false witnesses, and those who speak malice,” as the psalmist said.

And on many of those days, I feel disconnected from God. Promises of salvation seem flimsy and far off when the plague of terrorism and violence breaks out again and again, when planes fall, when innocent people get sick and hurt and plans go wrong, or when it’s just a long dull slog in the here and now.  It can feel crazy to try to trust the unprovable existence of God. And that feels, well, unfaithful. Like my faith isn’t good enough to call myself a Christian, to be a priest, or even to spend time or energy on.

But the good news repeated over and over and in lots of different ways throughout scripture, from Genesis to Jesus and beyond, is that feeling disconnected from God does not mean being disconnected from God. Doubt and grief and anger and loneliness and fear are NOT unfaithful, but in fact are a fundamental part of our faith.

Abram – so full of faith that he launches himself and his wife into a brand new foreign country on God’s say-so – makes no bones about the fact that he has been waiting far too long for God’s promises of a family and a homeland to be fulfilled. God doesn’t scold or reject Abram for his doubts; God renews God’s promises to Abram with new assurances: with a vision that Abram can count on every night (unless it’s cloudy) and a ritual that binds God more tightly to fulfilling the promise of making Abram a home.

And Jesus, complaining about the tendency of Jerusalem to ignore and kill the messengers of God, doesn’t reject them for their fear and distrust, but renews his desire to gather and protect and nurture all God’s people.

Even in this psalm I love for its expression of confidence and fearlessness, there’s a picture of how it feels to be doubtful, lonely, disconnected, and fearful. And a picture of how it looks to be faithful in the middle of that. Not denying the fear, the aloneness, the doubt, but actually calling God’s attention to them: to our need for assurance, protection, direction, and response.

Right in the middle of my ordination process, when after years of waiting and longing, I was finally meeting with people to evaluate my call to the priesthood, the vivid sense of God’s presence in my life that I had started to count on started to dry up. So did my joy in the psalms and in the rest of scripture and in prayer. I felt alone, a bit abandoned. Tired and cranky and dull. Surely, I thought, this can’t happen to me now. Priests don’t have their faith fail like this. I kept trying to ignore it and press on.

But after a month or two, I finally confessed all that to the committee discerning with me. It was nerve-racking.

It turned out, though, that that confession was one of the things that assured them that God was, in fact, working with me, and that I could be a good priest after all.

And to my surprise, it assured me, too.

I don’t exactly like what I’m about to say, but I often need to hear it:
All that uncomfortable uncertainty, fear, grief, loneliness, impatience, or dissatisfaction I don’t want to feel – that I’d feel holier if I could ignore – may actually be essential in our relationship to God. In fact, when we deny our doubt, we deny the reality of our relationship with God.

A relationship with God would be much more comfortable if we got to arrive at that place of light and salvation and freedom from fear that I love so much at the start of this psalm, and to stay there.

But the psalmist – and Abram, and Jesus – model for us that to be in real, lasting, serious relationship with God – to have God as our light and salvation, our defender from fear – actually requires that we embrace, or at least accept, that we will feel, and sometimes get stuck in, those uncomfortable, dry, or painful places where we are full of doubt or surrounded by enemies – real or metaphorical.

And when we confess our doubts, fears, discomfort or distrust to God, that in itself can draw us closer to God. It does for Jesus, after he arrives in Jerusalem that kills the prophets, when he confesses his doubts and fear and loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane. If does for Abram, more than once, when his confession of doubt brings him a deeper assurance of God’s love and plans and promises for him.

Confessing my own doubts, my spiritual loneliness, and my feelings of unfaithfulness to my discernment committee did, in fact, draw me closer to God years ago, because it made me confess my need for God’s help. Taking the risk of accepting my discomfort and fear also made me take the risk of trusting God to heal that deep, nagging, pain and free me from that fear.

In confessing my doubts, I finally was also able to hear myself confessing my trust – not that it would work out later, but that God could be with me now, even when I couldn’t feel the connection for myself. That it might be okay, even an act of love, to feel doubt and fear, and to want – to need – God to heal those things I can’t overcome on my own.

I think we need to confess our trust just as much as we need to confess our doubts. To accept – in our hearts, and in public – that we risk depending on God for not just light and salvation, but to hold our doubts and anger, disappointment and grief, our dry and painful loneliness in God’s own powerful trust and love for us.

Because when we confess our trust, like the psalmist, we hear the assurance that we can go into every place of doubt and fear, grief and disconnection, protected from the fear that God will lose us, or that we will lose God, in those dry and lonely places that are part of every human life.

So the psalmist’s final words ring true in us, with gratitude and power:

What if I had not believed

that I should see the goodness of the LORD

    in the land of the living!

O tarry and await the LORD'S pleasure;

be strong, and God shall comfort your heart.