A Jew, Wiesel once said, can be against God, angry with God, disappointed in God but a Jew can never do without God.
I am as a Jew.
I love good honest "tell it like it is writing" and this guy hits it out of the park for me. He shares on King David's mind frame as he penned the Thirty-ninth Psalm.
Seven years ago I couldn't get away from that Psalm. I would open up my bible and it would fall there on the 39th. I would get online with my computer and it would appear over and over again. For months God stuck this most unusual Psalm in my face. At the time I was in the midst of suffering a great tragedy come to my life by way of another human doing me evil. And the 39th Psalm was my introduction to what would become a great wrestling match with a "Sovereign God" who controls evil.
Oh, I wanted to kill the cold hearted puke that had ruined my life and even when I was thinking about loading my gun for some pay back I would remember David's strange Psalm and in particular the 9th verse where it is realized God did the dastardly. The words, speaking to God as the cause made me put the gun away, realizing my angst was misappropriated and my battle was not with an evil man but with a God that uses evil. Even though this battle with God would simmer and rage inwardly for years I leaned like the Psalmist David to hold my tongue.
"I have become mute, I do not open my mouth, Because it is You who have done it." Ps 39:9
For a surety, I found out God did evil and slowly over seven plus years I would realize that same God made that evil serve a greater Good in my life. The best news is that I have only begun to realize a little of the Good and the overwhelming portion will come in myriads of glories enjoyed in the ages to come.
So with my story, of why the 39th is well versed with me please allow me to share this message which explores what David must have been feeling when he penned it. If you haven't felt this same way in times past I say you have a much different relationship with God than King David and me. LOL
Enjoy, and the last is the best as with all good writing. This one could only end at the Cross.
Psalm 39 "The Bubble"
Scott Hoezee
A curmudgeon is defined as a crusty, ill-tempered older person who hates hypocrisy and is not afraid to point it out. The adjectives frequently used to describe curmudgeons include cantankerous, irascible, irreverent, and grouchy. According to those who have studied such curiously crotchety figures, a curmudgeon is like a sumo wrestler: it takes a long time and a lot of abuse to create one. Among those considered truly world-class curmudgeons, past and present, are Truman Capote, H.L. Mencken, Oscar Wilde, William F. Buckley, Friedrich Nietzsche, W.C. Fields, Gore Vidal, Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, and our own homegrown local curmudgeon, Peter DeVries. If you want to see a contemporary curmudgeon in action, turn on the last five or so minutes of 60 Minutes when you get home this evening so as to catch the weekly sneer by Andy Rooney.
Now I don't know about you, but the list I just gave does not exactly strike me as a "Who's Who?" of faithful church attenders. In fact, nearly to a person curmudgeons aim a fair amount of their surly fire at the church and all things religious. But it's not just religion, of course: when you're a curmudgeon, you are cynical about everything. So on this eve of Labor Day, we may want to be reminded of Robert Frost's summary comment on the working life: "By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day." Although not a typical curmudgeon, Mahatma Gandhi had his moments. Someone once asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, and Gandhi replied, "I think it would be a good idea." Clarence Darrow once said, "When I was a boy, I was told that anybody could become President; and I'm beginning to believe it." Robert Oppenheimer once opined that "The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it." Similarly Don Marquis:"An optimist is a man who has never had much experience."
Some years ago I used these thoughts as a lead-in for a sermon series we did on the Book of Ecclesiastes. But as many of you no doubt already detected, Psalm 39 is a kind of condensed version of that most queer of all biblical books. Psalm 39 is attributed to David and if that is so, this is David as curmudgeon. There are no cheery Psalm 23-like sentiments here. As most any biblical commentator will point out, this is one strange prayer to have included in the Hebrew Psalter.
We just don't expect this from David, or from any psalmist. As we've already seen this evening, with few exceptions very few of the utterances of this world's curmudgeons qualify as Christian sentiments. A curmudgeonly preacher would have a short career (or a long career but a very small congregation). The reason is because we look to God's Word as a source of comfort and hope, not as a font of cynicism and despair. Christians may or may not be optimists, but we're surely not pessimists in the sense of seeing no good in anything. Preachers who base their sermons on God's Word, therefore, had better not come off sounding like irascible and cantankerous critics each week!
And so there are some parts of Psalm 39 that ought to shake you up at least a little (and at least at first blush). On the children's television show Sesame Street, there is a recurring segment designed to help children see patterns. The segment always features something like six people, five of whom are carrying polka-dotted umbrellas and one of whom has a striped umbrella. The song that goes along with this is titled "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others." The child's job is to pick out the one that does not fit the pattern. If you look at the 150 psalms, you could easily sing "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others" and point your finger at this rather quirky 39th Psalm.
So what do we do with this particular poem? What do we make of this appearance of King David, the man after God's own heart, in a curmudgeonly mood? Because make no mistake: this psalm does bear a striking resemblance to Ecclesiastes, right down to the single, most oft-repeated word in that book. As we all know, the refrain throughout Ecclesiastes is "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." The Hebrew word there is hevel. It's a puny word that barely exists: hevel. It sounds less like a word and more like a clearing of your throat. You can translate it several ways, but no translation is terribly pretty as a summary assessment of life: Meaninglessness! Vanity! Emptiness! Futility! Vapor! Breath! Hevel. Maybe you could just translate it as "Phhht." And this is the summary word for human life that David uses at the end of verses 5 and 11. What is human life? Phhht!
What could possibly account for this? Worse, look at how this psalm concludes: the psalmist asks God to take a hike, to leave him alone, to look another way off in some distant corner of the cosmos! There is here no language of being a child of the heavenly Father. There is here no "sheep of his pasture" material replete with cozy imagery of walking with God down paths of discipleship. Instead verse 12 says, "I'm just a passing guest in your presence, O God. I'm a resident alien. I don't fit in with you. So look away from me so that I can feel happy again for a little while before I die."
And so I ask again: what is going on here and what are we to take away from this jarring portion of God's Word? Here at Calvin Church we've spent some time in our evening services this summer peering into a handful of the psalms. And one thing we've been noting is that taken together, the 150 psalms included in the canon of the Old Testament are not a haphazard collection. This book was carefully edited and put together with the goal that if someone were to read the entire Psalter, he or she would discover in the end an accurate reflection of the whole scope of human life and experience.
No matter who you are, no matter what your personality type, no matter what kind of season in your life you happen to be passing through at any given moment, you should be able to find within the Psalter pious poetry and prayer that can give voice to who you are and how you are feeling. Our prayer life should be our autobiography, we've said. But because no one's life is just one long series of the same old feelings all the time and every single day, any prayer book that is going to match real life will also have to be varied and textured and nuanced.
So what part of life might Psalm 39 fit? Some commentators believe that this psalm may have emerged from a period of great suffering, possibly of grave illness, in the life of this poet. This person could either be Job or someone enduring a Job-like time of deprivation and disorientation. From the looks of the opening verses, this is someone who tried silently to "grin and bear it," to be stoic and strong. He didn't want to say anything nasty about God or about the life God had dished out to him, but since nasty things were about all he could come up with for a while there, he opted for silence. "If you can't say something nice," the old bromide has it, "then don't say anything at all."
But that didn't work. This person didn't want to give evil people the satisfaction of hearing a religious person grumble and grouse about his lot in life and so he kept his mouth shut. But eventually his raw emotions built up in his heart like a cauldron of hot lava. He couldn't keep it inside. He couldn't stay silent any longer or he feared he'd explode.
And so he opens his mouth, and it all comes tumbling out. "I hate to admit it, O God, because I'm going to come off sounding like a world-class curmudgeon and grouch, but life is nothing, isn't it? You dole out life with an eye-dropper and what we get is a breath, a phhht, a bubble in the cosmic soup that is so evervescent and transient, you'd think it would hardly even register on the radar scope of an everlasting God. One day you are young and the whole thing called life stretches out before you with great promise. You see someone who is 80, 90 years-old and you can't imagine what it must be like to live that long. But then you wake up one day and discover you are yourself 80 and you realize with a start that it was like nothing to get here. The years even did the cruel thing of speeding up the older you got. You worked hard to build up a good bank account and investment portfolio, but then you don't know where it will end up and for all you know, your kids may split apart after your death bickering over it. What's the sense of anything?!"
Well, you can understand now why he kept his mouth shut as long as he did! With all of that churning within his mind and heart, silence does seem like a better option. Unless, that is, you somehow still have faith in a God whom you believe can handle such observations. And if nothing else, the Book of Psalms evinces just such a plucky faith that believes, ardently and deeply, that if the God of Israel is worth anything, then he is big enough and understanding enough and compassionate enough to be able to take it even when we shout forth our worst laments. As Elie Wiesel once observed, this is so characteristic of the Jewish mind. A Jew, Wiesel once said, can be against God, angry with God, disappointed in God but a Jew can never do without God.
Thus, even something as cynically dark as Psalm 39 ends up being directed to a God who, this psalmist obviously believes, will actually hear him. He may be a cosmic speck of dust, a bubble rising to the top of a glass of champagne and on the verge of popping into thin air, but people of faith believe that we serve a God big enough to take loving, careful note of even the tiniest bubble. That's why there is hope in this psalm even in verse 11 when the psalmist claims God rebukes us human beings for our sin. How is that good news? Because at least we know God is paying enough attention to notice our sins!
But even so, we still have to make some kind of sense out of this psalm's Ecclesiastes-like observation that all things considered, human life looks pointless, looks to be scandalously brief, and appears to be insignificant in the grander scheme of things. But honestly: this is not really news to anyone here tonight, is it? It's unsettling and all, but it's nothing we have not ourselves thought at one time or another, is it? Faith in God need not blind us to the less savory features to life. In that sense there may be something liberating about this psalmist's honesty. Because assuming that David, or whoever wrote this, was still a man of faith despite this unstinting burst of cynical observations, then we may find this psalm to be even so somewhat liberating and hopeful.
The echoes of this poet's abiding faith that we can detect here gain in poignancy when seen against the backdrop of all that is grim and despairing. And it's not just that the light of faith shines brighter against a black background. Instead the very poignancy of faith is deepened when we recognize that faith is held in creative tension with an honest assessment of life. Faith should seem more real precisely by being able to embrace the real.
Faith needs to exist in the face of life's enigmas. Faith needs to be held even after we've come to terms with the limits of our existence. For now, we do not understand everything and if we're honest, then we must admit that there is also plenty in life that we may understand just fine but that we don't like! But what we can grasp is not the whole story. For now we must accept our rather lowly position in this ever-spinning and unimaginably vast universe, and do our best to serve God even still. Even when life does not make particular sense to us, it is our duty to plug on anyway in the belief that somehow, somewhere in God's infinite wisdom it will make sense, it will add up to something.
But not easily and, for now anyway, not neatly or quickly. Yet we resist admitting this. Counted-cross-stitch faith where all of life's answers can be lifted out of the Bible and transferred onto a framed and matted wall hanging is more appealing because it looks more complete. Precious Moments figurines emblazoned with pithy aphorisms of hope, joy, or comfort of the Psalm 23 variety are nicer to see up on the mantle than whatever kind of a bust you might sculpt of the David's face as we see it in Psalm 39!
Who would want to decorate the den with the face of a man with a furrowed brow, a downwardly turned mouth, and emblazoned with the slogan "Phhht"?! Some while back I was a dinner guest at someone's house. While having hor's d'oeuvres in the living room before dinner, I noticed a small, painted tile up on the fireplace mantle. It had some words on it but I couldn't make them out from where I was sitting. So while my hosts were out of the room for a moment, I walked over. The tile said, "The judgments of God cometh right soon!" I was glad I still had some scotch left in my glass after seeing that one!
Psalm 39 and the like are not our favorite parts of the Bible's revelation to ponder. Still, there is no denying it: this psalmist's faith, though real, is nestled painfully among the thistles and thorns of life. If there is to be faith at all, this psalm says, then it must be held in the teeth of a whole lot of confusing, jarring, and just generally unhappy garbage within the limits of a life that ends in death. Life's loose ends may not be tied off neatly if, in this life, they are tied off at all. The harder questions ought not receive pat answers. They need to be wrestled with.
In this sense maybe we can come to see Psalm 39 as a preview of the cross. After all, when God ultimately tackled the very questions and conundrums raised here, the result was a confusingly terrifying event on a garbage heap called Skull Hill. In the end it was the silence of the lamb that somehow began to answer life's deeper mysteries. But if the death of the beloved Son does not strike you as at least as outrageous as anything in Psalm 39, then you may be missing the central surprise and scandal of the gospel. How perilously confusing and dicey is life in this crazy world? The cross is the Christian answer. It's that difficult, that prolix, that painful to deal with, even for God himself!
There may well be no denying the "Phhht" nature of this life. Our only comfort in life and in death, however, is that the now-pierced hands of the Savior are sensitive enough to pick up even that "Phhht" and preserve it into the eternal now which Jesus himself has prepared. These gospel beliefs will not erase the kinds of thoughts expressed in Psalm 39, this most startling of all the psalms. The gospel does not make everything easy and smooth and straightforward after all. But it is our bright hope. Many days that simply has to be enough--it has to be enough in a world which, as this unhappy psalmist so adroitly points out, has seldom found enough of anything to satisfy for very long. So give thanks to God for giving us the gospel. Give thanks to God for revealing to us the cross of his beloved Son. Give thanks to God for giving us enough. Amen.
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