Psalms of Doubt

A Reflection for Compline using Psalm 13.

David Runcorn tells the story of being in Church and hearing someone pray to God about a famine in India. It wasn’t the normal sort of intercessions that the congregation was used to: ‘God why on earth do you let this happen? Why don’t you do something about it? How can you let all of those people suffer in that way?’ Runcorn comments that the man praying was new to Christian faith and new to the church and so hadn’t learnt what constitutes good manners in praying. He goes on to hope that he never does.

What is refreshing about this story is the honesty and the directness that the pray-er has in addressing God. ‘Do something about it, how can you let such a dreadful thing happen?’ The man praying doesn’t have a neat theology of how bad things can happen. He has a healthy and human response to the awfulness of the situation he is praying about.

But imagine for a moment that prayers like this were said at one of the services in your church on a typical Sunday. I imagine there would be a fairly hushed response, followed by a sense that he wasn’t ready to be on the intercessions rota yet. And I think that I’d be one of the people making that suggestion. Our praying has a tendency to be rather polite. That’s not a bad thing, except where it stops us saying what we really want or need to say to God.

And that’s where the Psalm we read together tonight comes in. ‘How long …?’ is its repeated refrain. How long will god be hidden? How long will things be hard? How long will my enemies triumph? How long will I have to put up with this? And this is not an unusual reaction to the events that happen to us in our lives. How long? Why? Who do you think you are? Are you really there at all? These are the questions that we bring to God in the depths of our hearts. Although sometimes we don’t allow them to reach our vocalised or our thought out prayers. And what we should take from the Psalmist tonight is that we don’t have to come before God with a fully formed answer. We don’t have to come before God and be polite. We can ask questions, searching questions, of God. We can tell him what we really think, even when that is not what we think God wants to hear.

I chose Psalm 13 to read tonight because I remember finding it at the time of the last Gulf War. I was opposed to the war, but saddened by the Puritanism and self-righteousness of much of the opposition to the war that refused to accept that once we were going in things looked different. I also had a brother who fought in the war, just behind the British front line. Emotionally I found it a complicated and difficult time. My brother was putting his life on the line in a war I thought was stupid. Yet those who opposed the war seemed to me almost more gung-ho than those advocating the war. I wasn’t sure what to do, say or think, let alone how to pray. But thank heavens for the discipline of daily prayers and the regular diet of the Psalms. In saying my prayers I found that this Psalm with its echoing refrain of ‘how long?’ put many of my feelings into words. Now I say this not from any desire to show my politics, but to show that even things we don’t know what or how to pray about can be brought before God and the difficulties shared.

So from this Psalm of Doubt, we can take a way of praying that is more direct than we are usually comfortable with but which can break through to honesty. We can take the ability to ask questions of God. We can take the need we feel to bring the intractable questions of our lives into God’s presence to ask for help in sorting them out.

By the end of the Psalm, things seem to return to a sort of hard won normality, with the Psalmist proclaiming his trust and faith in the God who has dealt well with him in the past. There is faith in doubt, it seems, just as last week we found doubt in a Psalm of faith. This is so, I think, because the opposite of faith is not doubt – it is despair. Doubt leaves us asking questions, perhaps ever banging the table and demanding answers. Despair simply leaves the room. There is an important sense in which in asking the questions, in demanding the answers, doubt is refusing to give up on faith. It is trying to maintain faith in the midst of the trials of life.

I want to finish with a reference to the rock band U2. For many years U2 ended there live show with a Psalm, during which they would leave the stage, so that the audience went away singing the words from the Bible. It was a version of Psalm 40 that began ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, he inclined and heard my cry.’ But to this they grafted a very Psalm 13-esque phrase, and it was this that the audience left singing - ‘How long to sing this song?’ Patience is not a virtue often associated with rock musicians, so perhaps that was why the urgency of ‘how long?’ appealed. But I think that this doubting question is actually a song of hope. How long to sing this song can be a form of doubt that moves close to despair. But the repeated singing of this phrase by thousands as they left a concert was an uplifting experience. It was as if we were promising to keep singing the song, to keep asking the questions, in the hope that sooner or later we would be answered, and then all would be well. Let us keep doubting, keep questioning, and keep the faith that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

Toddler Bible

We have found a fantastic series of Bible stories for very small children. They are called the First Word Heroes/Heroines, and published by Pupfish. They tell the stories of various heroes or heroines from the Bible in 12 words. Fantastic.

My favourite is probably David, whose story goes like this:

David

Goliath

Shout

Stop

Find

Stones

Aim

Throw

Splat

Fall

Winner

Hooray!

I'm still coming to terms with the skill of telling such a long story in just 12 words. It's a piece of genius.

Also available are Noah, Daniel, Jonah, Miriam, Ruth, Esther and Martha. They're great and our 19 month year old loves them.

So do I.

A Short Guide to the Eucharist. 2: Where is God to be found?

At the Eucharist, one of the most important things that we do is we come to meet with God. All worship is offered in the presence of God. We come into God’s presence to make our offerings of praise and thanksgiving and to ask God for help and blessing.

Standing behind this is Jesus’ promise that ‘where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’ (Matthew 18.20). In the Eucharist, we are especially mindful of the presence of Jesus among us.

In fact, the Eucharist is structured around three particular places or moments when we meet with God. This is not to say that God is only present at these moments, only that the liturgy is shaped to give special prominence to these three places.

1. Meeting God in his Word

The first place that we meet with God is in his Word, the Bible. We have three Bible readings at a Eucharist, one from the Old Testament, one from the New Testament and a Gospel reading. Here we hear the stories of God’s presence with his people, and we are given help and guidance for our lives.

The readings are taken from a list of readings called the Lectionary. This is shared between most of the major Christian denominations, so the same readings are read in the vast majority of Christian churches across the world. Taking readings from a Lectionary also means that we read from all of the Bible. The Lectionary takes us through the Bible (not absolutely all of it, but most of it) in three years. It also means that we don’t simply choose the easy passages, or our favourites. All of the Bible is there for us, easy and hard, challenging and comforting, we need it all.

In our Eucharist service, we give a special place to the Gospel because it is the stories of Jesus. It is the stories of Jesus that the rest of the Bible points to, and so we give them special prominence in our worship. In the Eucharist we process the Gospel into the heart of the church and sing our responses to it. This is a sign that the Gospel is at the heart of our life as a church, and should be at the heart of all of our lives as Christians.

In addition to the three readings, we have a sermon which explores and explains the meaning of the readings for us today. Just as later in the service the bread is broken and shared, so in the sermon the Word is broken open and shared. The sermon is also part of meeting with God in our Eucharist.

2. Meeting God in his people

Each of us in church is made in the image of God (Genesis 1.27). St Paul reminds us that each of us is a Temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 5.19). And so we should not be surprised to encounter God in one another. We do this in many ways, in our sheer presence to one another as we gather together and worship. Together we are the Body of Christ – we are the presence of Christ to one another and to our world.

The place where this is marked during the service is at the peace. Jesus instructed his disciples that if when they came to the altar they remember that they were in dispute with someone, they should immediately go and be reconciled and only then come to the altar. So it is most important to share the peace with those we find difficult, and not just to share the peace with our friends!

3. Meeting God in the Sacrament

The final, and most important place that we meet with God in the Eucharist is in the sacrament itself – in the broken bread and poured out wine that are for us the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

Through Christian history there have been many arguments about exactly how we meet Christ in the sacrament. But what is important is that as we receive communion, as we eat the bread and drink the wine, that we are in the presence of God. The whole of our service builds to this point, and once we have receive communion, all that is left for us is to be sent out into the world to bring God’s presence to a world that badly needs it.

Psalms of Faith

A reflection for compline using Psalm 77.

Some words from the Psalm we have just said together: ‘You are the God who worked wonders • and declared your power among the peoples’.

As we consider the Psalms this Lent, it is worth remembering that the Psalms are the ‘Prayerbook of the Bible’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). They are a collection of hymns and prayers that were in regular use in Israel, in the Temple, in Synagogues and in homes, in public worship and in private prayer. The Psalms formed the basis of Jesus’ own prayers, and they, along with the book of Isaiah, are the most quoted book of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. The church has used the Psalms since the earliest days. St Paul urges his readers to praise God in Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. The offices of morning and evening prayer and also of compline consist of saying or singing the Psalms and reading the Bible. Many of the responses that we use in these services are taken from the Psalms. In that sense, the Psalms form our faith. They are given to us so that we can use them in our own prayers, and they are a model for our prayers.

Tonight my theme is ‘Psalms of Faith’, which may seem a little odd as all the Psalms are Psalms of faith. But it is worth singling this out as a theme within the Psalms because of the way in which the Psalms treat faith. If you want an example of a Psalm that has a sort of polished and pious faith, then I suggest you look at Psalm 119. It is very long, and concerns the Psalmists relationship to the Word of God, or the Law. It’s the sort of school swot among the Psalms, saying things like “My delight shall be in your statutes and I will not forget your word” (Ps. 119.16) and “Lord, how I love your Law! All the day long it is my study” (Ps. 119.97).

But I have chosen to focus on Psalm 77 not just because it is shorter, but also because it is a Psalm that has many of the themes of faith that can be found throughout the Psalms. Let me quickly point out four features of faith in the Psalms that I think are helpful to us:

First of all the Psalm is direct and immediate in its calling on God: “I cry aloud to God and he will hear me” (v1). When the Psalmist speaks to God it is not well mannered, it is crying aloud. And it is not just when life is good and easy, but also ‘in the day of trouble’ (v2). God is in the Psalmist’s thoughts even when things are so awful that speech it impossible (v4).

Second, there is an honesty to the Psalmist here. I read verses 3 and 4 as being a bit self-pitying. It’s a bit cloying and clearly an exaggeration to say that ‘I am so troubled that I cannot speak’ (v4). The Psalmist obviously can speak, which is how he can tell us that the can’t speak! But this self-pity and exaggeration is not refined out in his prayer, it is emphatically left in. This is the Psalmist as he really is, not the Psalmist in his Sunday-best.

Third, the Psalm of faith has its fair share of doubt. The Psalmist asks questions of God (Will the Lord cast us off forever? Has his loving mercy clean gone for ever? Has God forgotten to be gracious?) and expresses his fear that God is impotent. More of doubt next time, but just notice this doubt within the Psalm of faith.

Finally, the Psalmist recounts the story of God’s action with his people. He retells the story of God delivering the people of Israel through the Red Sea. ‘Your way was in the sea and your paths in the great waters; but your footsteps were not known’ (v19). In those last few words, he gains courage from the way that God delivered his people even though they could not always see where he was leading them.

So immediacy, honesty, doubt and stories. These are the features of the faith shown in the Psalms. If the Psalms are models for our prayers, how might we pray with faith like that shown in the Psalms? The immediacy of the Psalmists faith challenges us. Do we pray wherever and whenever we want, and expect God to hear us? We can, and we should. God is more ready to hear than we are to pray.

And we can also be honest with God, we pray as ourselves not as the people we’d like God to think we are. God knows all the secrets of our hearts. He knows when we are being self-pitying or exaggerating or being overly modest. He knows who we are, and he wants us to pray to him, not some Sunday-best caricature of ourselves.

Doubt is our subject for next week. But don’t be afraid of doubt or of admitting your doubt to God. He is big enough to cope, and he knows when we doubt even when we don’t admit it.

Finally, we should let our prayers meditate on our stories. These stories are the times when God has been close to us, or has done something special for us. They give us something to hold onto in faith, even when times are hard. But the stories of the People of Israel and the stories of Jesus are our stories also. We were grafted into these stories when we were baptised, and they continue in us today. We are part of the stories that we read in the Bible, and we should read the Bible in this light.

Let me conclude with a brief reflection on the sort of faith that we see in the Psalms, in the ordinary Psalms like Psalm 77 and even in the model schoolchild that is Psalm 119. We see faith not as a series of things to believe, as though heaven were accessible by sitting a multiple choice exam. Instead we see faith as a relationship with God, a God who can be questioned, shouted at, nagged and loved. A relationship of faith that has much more to do with trust and loyalty than with anything else. Amen.

Given at Compline 19.2.8

Called to the Wilderness

Jesus' temptation in the wilderness is a regular story for reflection at the beginning of Lent. This year I have tried to let my engagement with the telling of the story in Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 4.1-11) guide my Lenten discipline as a preparation for Easter.

Some things to note about the story. First, Jesus goes into the wilderness immediately following his baptism, and God's identification of him there as 'my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (Matthew 3.17).

Second, Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Spirit. This is not something that happens despite God's call to him - it is a constitutive part of God's call to Jesus.

Third, the story is a retelling of the call of the people of Israel and their being led from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the promised land. Thus the time in the wilderness comes after Jesus' passage through the water of baptism in the Jordan, just as Israel entered the wilderness after they had passed through the waters of the red sea. Thus Jesus is identified as God's Son, as Israel is identified on various occasions as God's Son (cf. also Matthew 2.15). Thus Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness, as Israel spend 40 years there.

The temptations also reflect Jesus' faithfulness to his calling at just the points at which Israel was unfaithful in the wilderness. Jesus is tempted to turn stones into bread. Almost as soon as Israel was free from Egypt, they began to complain that they did not have enough to eat (Exodus 16.2-3). In refusing to turn stones into bread, Jesus is being faithful to his calling, where Israel was not.

The second temptation again refers to Israel's failure to trust the Lord to provide. When they came to the next place in the wilderness, Israel complained that there was nothing to drink (Ex. 17.1-7). Again, they began to wonder if it would have been better in Egypt as slaved. Moses called the place Meribah and Massah (which means 'proof' and 'contention').The Psalms refer to this as a test (Ps. 81.7) which Israel failed, hardening their hearts (Ps. 95.8) and angering the Lord (Ps. 106.32). Jesus is tempted by the devil to throw himself off the Temple to prove that God will care for him. It seems a different thing, except that the Book of Exodus tells us that at Massah and Meribah, the children of Israel put God to the test by saying 'is the Lord among us or not?' (Ex. 17.7). Jesus certainly recognises this parallel, for the quotation he uses to rebuke the Devil comes from a passage that in full reads 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah' (Deut. 6.16). Again, Jesus is faithful where Israel was not.

Finally, the third temptation on which the Devil takes Jesus up a very high mountain recalls Mount Sinai on which Moses receives the Law. Famously, while Moses was in the presence of God receiving the Law, the people of Israel were forging an idol - the golden calf - and worshipping it (Exodus 32). Jesus' faithfulness is complete, Israel's was empty.

The whole pattern of Matthew's account of the temptation follows Deuteronomy 8 (which is the source of Jesus' first quotation). The force of Deuteronomy chapter 8 is that the wilderness is a foundational experience that must not be forgotted by the people of Israel. They were fed in the wilderness (first temptation) so that they might learn to be humble and not exalt themselves (second temptation) nor forget the Lord and go after other gods (third temptation).


[Two asides for theology nerds:
1. Matthew's account seems to me a very sophisticated reading of Exodus 15-32 through the lens of Deuteronomy 6-8. Matthew uses Deuteronomy to interpret Exodus, so that the significance of the events and Israel's faithlessness is revealed. He also uses Exodus to undermine the implications of Deuteronomy that the faith of Israel in the wilderness is the foundation of Israel's ongoing faith (see especially Deut. 8). for Matthew, it is Jesus who fulfils the vocation that Israel failed at.
2. Because of this and because of the logic of the order of the three temptations, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Matthew has the original order of the temptations, and that Luke's account (which transposes the second and third temptation) is a later alteration (cf. Luke 4.1-13).]


In fact, I think that the whole of the story is about the nature of God's call to Jesus, and also God's call to us. All of this material about Jesus fulfilling Israel's vocation is not simply a bit of clever Biblical scholarship. It goes to the heart of what Jesus time in the wilderness was about, and to how we are therefore to use this season of Lent. Jesus in the wilderness is testing his vocation. He has been told who he is - God's beloved Son - and in the wilderness he learns what this means.

We too were told at our baptisms that we are God's beloved sons and daughters. This is a calling, not simply a status. Baptism is the source of all Christian ministry, because it is God's call to us all to follow. We all have our vocation, and we are to be faithful to it.

As I reflected on this, it seemed to me that my Lenten discipline this year should be to try to identify what it is that makes me faithless to the call of God. I don't mean by this vocation to ordained ministry or any other sort of 'professional vocation'. I mean what it is that gets in the way of our calling to be the people who God made us to be - his beloved sons and daughters. Fasting and prayer are the background to this, as Jesus fasted for 40 days before he met his tempter. But the point of all our Lenten discipline is to come to the renewal of our baptismal vows at the Easter vigil with a greater faithfulness to the one who calls us onwards.


My thanks to members of Foundation who attended a Bible study on the above passage and helped me get my thought together here.