2nd Sunday in Lent Psalm 27 February 28, 2010

       2Lent2010                                  Psalm 27 “Seen in Love’s Light”                      February 28, 2010
I’ve told several people we’ll be singing the Psalms in worship all through Lent and the consistent response has been, “O good!  I love the Psalms.” Many people’s favorite is Psalm 23 “The Lord is my Shepherd.  There’s cute story about Psalm 23 of a little boy who was supposed to memorize it, but he just couldn’t get the lines straight.  I get them confused myself sometimes.  When it came time to get up to the mic he boldly said:  The Lord is my Shepherd, and that’s all I need to know.”
Sometimes a few lines of the Psalm are all we can remember, and sometimes they’re enough.  That’s may be the case with today’s Psalm 27.  It’s a favorite too, even if all we know is: “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?” 
Not all Psalms are held equally beloved.  Some are downright confusing – like when they talk of dashing enemies against rocks. It helps to remember the Psalms grew out of specific times and places, from ancient people and views. It’s amazing, really, how fond people are of the Psalms, trusting them to be words for us!  And not only words for us, but words from us.
Psalms are a dialogue between God and us. The thing about God is that God isn’t stuck in one time and place. God stretches back through the ages and forward to this day and eternity. God is as living as we are and so are these words when they are taken into our lives.
When we speak, pray, sing the Psalms they express hopes and heartaches, anger and joy. And God listens. If there’s anything we learn from studying the Bible it’s that God is relational. God longs for us, as Jesus does in today’s Gospel: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” What a brokenhearted statement!  The Bible is filled with such pathos, especially the Psalms.   
Lutheran Pastor and Professor Claus Westermann was imprisoned during WWII.  During that imprisonment he had with him a book of the Psalms and they became very important to him. After he had been out of prison for a while he wrote this:
“Whenever people in forced separation praise God in song or silence, they are conscious of themselves not as individuals, but as members of the whole congregation.  Between interrogations, or as ones sentenced to death, they know they are born up by the church’s praise of God.” 
Westermann experienced in prison that people who are forced to be absent from the worshipping community, are nonetheless buoyed up by the community when they pray the Psalms. Dietrich Bonhoeffer discovered this too. The Psalms were his favorite book of the Bible. The last book he wrote was from prison and it was on the Psalms. He recognized that “prayer does not mean simply to pour out one’s heart. It means to find the way to speak with God, whether the heart is full or empty, [and the best way to do that] is to let Scripture be our prayer.” 
I don’t know about you, but if I first learn a Psalm in an old version like the King James, I still like that version best – like the 23rd Psalm.  Familiar words comfort the most. But sometimes fresh words make the Psalm speak to us anew – in ways it never has before.
Over the years, I’ve been blessed by the efforts of many who have spoken the Psalms in language that comes from their heart. The Lutheran Church and the world lost a great poet, theologian and lover of the Psalms when Herb Brokering died not long ago.  Among Herb’s many books is a 2004 collection of Dog Psalms. This is a part of a series Brokering created to help people see how intimate pray can be.  They are “prayers his dog taught him.” Here’s one:
“God, my spirit wiggles in me. I cannot hold my feelings still. You find the good in me.  You see me plead with all my heart. I am careless in asking favors.  I bury myself in you while you hold me in your eyes. I fix my thoughts on you until you capture me, quiet me, silence me.”

Leslie Brandt is another who saw Psalms as poetic dialogue between daily experience and God.  His Psalms/Now is a collection of his 1970’s version of all 150 Psalms in our Bible.  Brandt wrote them, “as if the psalmist lived in the 20th century.” A little dated, but Brandt’s Psalms are certainly newer than the 3000 year old originals. Hear Brandt’s opening lines for Psalm 27:

 “With the living, eternal God as my goal and guide, fear and anxiety preempt no place in my life. The very legions of hell lay siege to my soul only to be thwarted by a power far greater.  I have one primary, ultimate desire: to abide within the love and acceptance of God.”

Books on the psalms aren’t as vast as the stars in the heavens our Genesis reading mentions, but there are many.  Luther, C.S. Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Merton… have written on the Psalms. Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, composes Psalm Prayers – like this one based on Psalm 27:  
“I refuse, O God, to live fearfully or cautiously. I name my fears and turn them over to you, and find my fears simply trivial when set alongside you. I will live in your light and salvation.”

Contemporary artists have taken their turn with the Psalms and not least Psalm 27: 

    

In Psalm 27 the opposite of trust in God is fear of what people might do to us. The Psalmist says, “though an army encamp against me, my heart will not fear.  Though war rise up against me, my trust will not be shaken.” The Psalmist trusts God is stronger than anything. Perhaps that’s why this person chose Psalm 27 to have tattooed on his leg.

Perhaps that’s why Psalm 27 was formed into a necklace.  To put that on before heading out the door may be a tangible prayer: “Whom shall I fear?  You, God, are the stronghold of my life.”

Psalm 27 also speaks to the relationship between trust and need.  When we need something, we rarely ask for help from someone we don’t trust. The Psalmist knows that if we are to learn to call on God in our need we will have to learn to trust God.  Psalm 27 sees worship as the place where such trust grows. Verse 4 says, “One thing I ask of the Lord; to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life; to gaze on the beauty of the Lord.” Worship helps us trust God because worship approaches God relationally with heart, soul and mind, and often through the beauty of music. 
It’s been said, “There are two great days. The day we are born and the day we discover why we were.” We were born because God wanted us to be. Life is God’s gift not to take for granted, but to live in gratefulness.  Brueggemann says, “Praise is not only a human requirement and need. It is also a human delight... To return to the One who made us is to find our deepest joy.”
The Psalms help us taste this joy. I have been blessed by Nan Merrill’s paraphrases in Psalms For Praying.  Her way of expressing Psalm 27 is striking:                                                              “Love is my light and my salvation.  Love is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?  When fears assail me, rising up to accuse me, each           one in turn shall be seen in Love’s light.  Though a multitude of demons rise up within me, my heart shall not fear. Though doubts and guilt do battle, yet shall I remain confident.” 
And this is my favorite part, “For I shall hide in Love’s heart in the day of trouble, as in a tent in the desert, away from the noise of my fears.  And I shall rise above my struggles, my pain, shouting blessings of gratitude…” 
When our fears are taken seriously and seen in Love’s light – not belittled or ignored or shamed – then we can get away from the noise they create in our lives. 
In closing I want to share a brief entry in a Lenten Devotional from Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley.  It’s written by Professor Martha Stortz who writes,
“Every Saturday night, my father polished our shoes for Sunday worship.  In our children’s choir robes all you could see was the shoes. Sunday seemed to demand polish. Everyday messiness was stashed away. But Psalm 27 overturns that Sunday ritual.  The Psalmist shows up dirty, messy and terrified.  He boldly asks, “Whom shall I fear?” but inwardly he names his fears in numbing particularity: adversaries and foes, false witnesses and entire armies. He calls on God with equal particularity: “Be my light and my salvation, be the stronghold of my life.”               She ends with this prayer:
“Sheltering God, you heard the cry of the stranger in the land. Hear what we’re afraid of and hear what we’re worried about.  Be our light and our salvation, of Lover of us all.”           Amen
Like visual artists, artists of word and song also make Psalm 27 accessible.  Singing it makes it almost impossible to not carry it with us through the week.  So let’s sing a Taize version.
“God’s love is my light, my light and salvation.  In God I trust. In God I trust.”
                                         

                                                                                                                        Amen

   +Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, CA