November 1, 2020 – Psalm 42 & 43
Psalm 42 & 43
Longing for Worship
All Saints Day – November 1, 2020
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Stanza 1:
The person writing the Psalm is in some kind of exile.
He or she seems to be separated from the worshipping community, from home.
And being cut off from the worshipping the community has cut the writer off from God.
We don’t know exactly what the situation is.
Likely the writer has been forced to leave home because of a military defeat.
Cut off from home, cut off from worship, cut off from the community,
the writer feels cut off from God.
The writer thirsts for the experience of God in community like a deer longs for flowing streams –
but the only water source available is the tears that he or she sheds.
So the writer recalls happier days, when they were able to worship with their community,
and sing and feast together.
But the memory in this case is a source of pain.
It only seems to increase their thirst for being reconnected with their community,
and in so doing increases their thirst for being reconnected with God.
One of the lovely things about the Psalms is how the experiences they relate are so universal.
I mean, this was written almost 3000 years ago, and yet . . .
we can relate to this person’s experience!
We have been exiled from our worshipping community for 7 months!
We have been cut off from being surrounded by those whom we love and who love us.
We have been cut off from singing together and feasting together and praying together.
And we have been cut off from seeing each other.
For Christians, this is a hard thing.
Because for most of us, the presence of God is most powerfully mediated by one another:
we bear Christ to one another.
We incarnate Christ to one another.
The gathered community is the primary way we experience Christ, God-with-us.
I know I am not the only one who has longed – like the Psalmist –for the experience of God
that can be had in the community at worship.
We have been deprived, for too long, of that wondrous, mysterious feeling of being
Surrounded by and lifted up by the living God in worship.
We have been deprived for too long of that buoyant, hopeful feeling of being part of a
community of peace, and integrity, and love: the thing that grounds us.
Stanza 2:
Again, the writer uses memory as an aid against despair.
The writer remembers God, but the writer also remembers the songs that were sung in worship
and the prayers that were said.
And these things sustain him or her in their very dark place.
It is like receiving those links to beautiful performances of worship music by
Michael and Carolyn and being sustained by those for another week –
till the next ones appear.
Here, rather than causing pain, the memory acts as an encouragement –
encouragement to find again what is lost:
the presence of God in the worshipping community.
But it’s not easy, because at the heart of the Psalm is a deep, overwhelming despair.
Wherever the Psalmist is, far from Jerusalem, seemingly way up north at
the headwaters of the Jordan River near Mount Hermon which is covered with snow,
there are roaring waterfalls that plunge into deep, roiling waters,
waters that threaten to drown.
“Deep calls to deep,” says the Psalmist.
“The deep” is a terrifying word in Hebrew: tehom.
It occurs in the second verse of the Bible: darkness covered the face of the deep, the tehom.
It is formless and void or, in Hebrew, tohu bohu.
It is confusion and chaos, with no order.
It is water and earth and darkness all mixed up together, like a deep, dark mud.
This is what the writer is experiencing: being overwhelmed by this deep, dark, suffocating mud.
I know what this is like: to me this is what depression and despair feels like.
It is very like being submerged and caught up in the undertow of a huge wave,
where you don’t know which way is up, or which way is down, or where the surface is –
it’s terrifying.
You lose your orientation and you succumb to despondency and despair.
I know what that’s like.
The writer knows what that’s like.
And you know what that’s like.
For the writer,
being cut off from the presence of God in the worshipping community feels like that,
and as a result he or she is succumbing to despair.
They are overwhelmed by the deep, the tehom, the chaos.
Yes, the memory of God’s steadfast love helps;
yes: the remembered songs and prayers of the worshipping community helps,
but it is no substitute for the presence of God in the actual worshipping community itself.
And so the writer, struggling to remember as an aid to hope, at the end of the stanza,
feels forgotten by God.
Stanza 3:
The thing is: in Genesis, God’s presence, God’s Spirit, will take the tehom, the chaos, the mud,
the water, the earth, the darkness, and turn it into something amazing.
God turns the tehom, the deep, into a place where extremely diverse life forms can live together
peacefully and safely!
The tehom is for sure a place of darkness and despair and of being overwhelmed but
it is also a place of potential.
And so in the third stanza the writer is emboldened to demand that God vindicate them!
“I’m in a tough place here! You are God!
You turned the tehom into something amazing – so do something about my situation now!
Vindicate me already!
Send out a light that will guide me through the darkness to
the light of where your community worships!
There I will praise you and sing songs in the gathered community –
and there I will experience your presence again.”
This Psalm moves from private despair to a hope found in the worshipping community.
The despair comes from isolation, and fear comes from isolation.
But the hope comes from the yearning to be surrounded by one’s people,
by the worshipping community where God and good quality life can be experienced.
The worshipping community is where hope, and peace and love can be found –
none of these things can be found in isolation for the writer.
It is in loving community where hope, and peace, and love can be found.
Many of you have longed to be gathered by God again, here in this place.
In conversations I have had with several of you, you have told me how isolated you have felt,
how down,
and how much you have longed to be part of this worshipping community again.
You have felt overwhelmed by the pandemic, overwhelmed by isolation,
overwhelmed by change, overwhelmed by economic and social distress.
But you have longed to be here – and those who cannot be here this morning for whatever reason
also have that longing.
When I cautioned you in conversation that worship would not be like it was,
that it would be different,
that there would be many things – okay, the fun things – we could no longer do,
one of you said,
That’s okay. Even just to sit in the same room with everyone would make me feel a lot better. Just to be in the same room – together.
I get that. And I think the writer of the Psalm would get that.
We experience God best – in community.
Because we bear the image of God to one another, we bear Jesus and his love to one another,
We bear the Spirit of life to one another.
So just our presence gives one another hope.
The great good news in the Psalm is that both despair and hope can lead us forward.
Despair is likened to thirst, and thirst drives you forward, just like hope,
to find that cool water you know exists.
Friends, the cool water is here: drink deeply.
The cool water of God’s abiding presence is in this worshipping community.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ final words are: I am with you, always, to the end of the age.
In hope and in despair, I am with you.
In chaos and in community, I am with you.
I am with you, here.
So let us give thanks for one another, and let us have our thirst for God’s presence quenched.
For the communion of Saints we celebrate today is where we can experience God’s goodness and life and love.
Amen.
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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