Sermon from January 9, 2011
"The Mercy of God"
Psalm 130

Let's begin with a sentence from Psalm 131.

My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me.

The meaning is clear: I am not too big for my britches. But now, let’s rewrite that sentence into four lines.

My heart is not proud, O Lord,
     my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
     or things too wonderful for me.

The first line, My heart is not proud, O Lord, turns this Psalm into a prayer. We probably noticed that, but having O Lord at the end of the line makes it crystal clear. The first line is about the person’s secret self: My heart is not proud. Yes, but how do we know what’s really going on inside you?

That’s where the second line helps. It repeats the first line but turns it outward. My eyes are not haughty. I don’t look at other people with haughty eyes. A proud heart struts, and our eyes show it. They look smug. They look down on other people. They can look cruel.

The third line repeats the first two, but it goes further and identifies the haughtiness the person wanted to avoid. I do not concern myself with great matters. Taking that to heart would eliminate at least half the talk shows in America. The Psalmist knew his limits and chose to live within them.

The fourth line extends that idea and explains why the Psalmist did not concern himself with great matters. They are things too wonderful for me. There are some beautiful and important matters in this world that I just don’t get; I’ll never get them; and I’m not going to pretend that I get them.

Now, you may think, “Why didn’t the guy just say, ‘I am not too big for my britches’? Why take four lines to say what you could say in one line?”

Well, why paint your house? Why write music? Why all the lights and tinsel and bright packages at Christmas? Why drop $20,000 on a wedding? The more cause we have for celebration and the more intense our emotions, then the more elaborate will be our decorations, actions, and language. The writers of the Psalms wrote the way they did, because God arouses strong emotions, and strong emotions are not content with run-of-the-mill habits of speech.

The particular habit of speech the Psalms use is repetition, but they never become repetitive. Their repetitions usually expand our knowledge, and their cunning beauty is always meant to entice readers to keep reading, because the Psalms reveal God. That’s what matters to us in these five sermons on the Psalms. They reveal something of what God is like.

So, for a few Sundays, let’s loosen up and shed some of our emotional restraint, political correctness, and lack of imagination. Become childlike, and with all your accumulated experience listen to some of the greatest devotional literature ever written. We begin with Psalm 130.

Out of the Depths
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Out of the depths! What do we do with those four words? Maybe the writer will tell us what caused him to write that, or maybe he won’t. In the meantime, allow his words to reawaken some moment in the past when you hit bottom. Think of a moment when you stomped your foot or struck the table with your fist and said, “I can’t take it any more!”  Think of a moment when life so overwhelmed you that you curled up in a ball and gave up.

The first line of Psalm 130 offers our first clue to who God is. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. God can often be found when people are at their lowest. Maybe that’s when they realize they don’t have anywhere else to turn. We know people who have hit bottom and called on God, and then when their crisis was over, they forgot God again. That’s true, and God is not fooled. But we have good reason to believe that God is there at our lowest points with His outstretched hand.

The second line tells the first thing he cried to the Lord for: O Lord, hear my voice. He’s going to repeat that request in the next two lines. That’s not strange, because when people are desperate for help, they often repeat themselves in different words. “You gotta help me! Do something. Make it stop!” Sometimes repetition is just an ornament; at other times it’s a cry of desperation. There is desperation in this man’s voice.

The repetition that follows expands our knowledge of what was going on in his soul 3000 years ago. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy. Psalm 130 is a cry for mercy. We ask for mercy, when we are in the power of someone or something that can harm us and may have the right to harm us. Psalm 130 is a cry to God for mercy. It implies two things about God.

It implies that God can look with disfavor on human beings and treat them harshly for their wickedness. It also implies that God is merciful and can with justice treat them kindly instead. What dark distress prompted this cry for mercy? Verses 3-4 answer.

If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? Do you think God keeps a record of your sins? There is something terrifying in the thought of God, meticulously making notes of our sins. Isn’t that what people in a business environment do, when they are making their case for firing someone? We know how hard it is to reverse their decision. You can complain to the HR Department or get a lawyer, and good luck to you. But if you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?

When I read this, I can’t help thinking about 1 Corinthians 13:6: Love . . . keeps no record of wrongs. The next line reveals the love of God and affirms the central theme of the Psalm: But with you there is forgiveness. Not just leniency but forgiveness! The mercy of God removes the guilt that put us in jeopardy with Him.

The first section of this Psalm ends with a shocking conclusion: therefore you are feared. If God meticulously made notes of our sins and then without mercy took steps to give us our just punishment, fearing God would make sense. Psalm 130 has taken stock of sins against God, has acknowledged the justice of impending judgment, has pled for mercy and received forgiveness, and as a result fearing God made sense.

Can we make sense of that? I don’t know that I can, but I’ll tell you what I think so far. The man who wrote Psalm 130 had realized the gravity of human offenses against God and their frightening consequences. Forgiveness did not make him feel free to trifle again with the justice and goodness of God. It is the people whose evil ways have been exposed and then forgiven, who know the true character of God and respond with reverence; and fear is never far from reverence. It is the people who disregard the justice of God who do not fear Him, or who fear only getting caught by Him – a fear that diminishes with every passing year that nothing bad happens.

Waiting for the Lord
Let’s read the next two verses. They take us further inside the soul of the person who wrote them.

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
     and in his word I put my hope.
My soul waits for the Lord
     more than watchmen wait for the morning,
     more than watchmen wait for the morning.

I often wake up at 4:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m., and I lie there with my thoughts waiting for the alarm or the plop of the newspaper in the mouth of the driveway or the first evidence of light on the bedroom ceiling. Do you ever do that? Have you ever had to wait in a hospital emergency room for treatment or wait for a letter of acceptance from the college of your choice?

If so, you have something very personal in common with the person who long ago wrote Psalm 130. Five times he uses the word wait. We feel his frustration and his impotence, when he evokes the dark and seemingly endless hours of a pre-dawn patrol: more than watchmen wait for the morning, and then repeats it: more than watchmen wait for the morning.

What might make his waiting different from ours is in the first line: I wait for the Lord, my soul waits. Then he repeats it in verse six: My soul waits for the Lord. What was he waiting for the Lord to do? Remember the theme of the Psalm: But with you there is forgiveness. He was waiting for evidence of God’s forgiveness. He could see evil first-hand, unmistakable. But what evidence would persuade him that God had shown mercy? Psalm 130 doesn’t explicitly answer that question.

It does answer another question. What kept him waiting and not giving up? What turned his waiting into hope and not into despair? That line at the end of verse five does it: and in his word I put my hope.

Whose word? God’s word to Israel. What word is that? The answer begins the concluding section of Psalm 130. Verse seven turns the Psalm in an unexpected direction: O Israel, put your hope in the Lord. The agony we sensed at the beginning of the Psalm was most personal, but the cry for mercy was on behalf of the people of Israel.

It was the sins of Israel that weighed on the man who prayed in this Psalm. It was the impending judgment of God on Israel that sent him to the depths. It was in God’s word to Israel that he put his hope. The next two lines express the substance of God’s word to Israel:

for with the Lord is unfailing love
and with him is full redemption.

God has spoken that word to Abraham and his descendants for 4000 years. The Psalm’s faith in that word led him to conclude with this hopeful promise:

He himself will redeem Israel
     from all their sins.

This Is Your God
Psalm 130 found a permanent place in the Prayer Book of Israel, because rebellion against God found a permanent place in the experience of Israel. The depths out of which Psalm 130 uttered its cry for mercy have been captured well by another Psalm. Look at Psalm 106:43-45. These verses are a companion piece to Psalm 130. They give a proper context in which to understand the resilient hope of Psalm 130.

Many times he delivered them,
     but they were bent on rebellion
     and they wasted away in their sin.
But he took note of their distress
     when he heard their cry;
for their sake he remembered his covenant
     and out of his great love he relented.

The beginning of verse 43 identifies the evidence of forgiveness that Psalm 130 hoped to see. Many times he delivered them from some national disaster. The hope that God would do it again sustained the pious man who wrote Psalm 130.

This God, our God, meets people and nations in the depths. He hears their cry for mercy, and in response He dispenses forgiveness instead of cold justice. He inspires a holy fear in the hearts of those who have been set free from their sins. He meets and hears and dispenses and inspires over and over – so resolute is He to have a people who bear His name among the nations of the world until the restoration of all things.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
The Lord’s Supper is the permanent, material reminder that God is such a God as Psalm 130 represents Him to be. Around that holy table we make a general confession and many particular confessions of our sins, and we hear the word of forgiveness: rooted in Christ, confirmed in the Church, and experienced in our hearts. So we have hope that with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption. And we fear the Lord.

At the top of Psalm 130 you see what we might call its title: “a song of ascents.” In fact, you’ll find the same title on 15 Psalms: 120-134. Both the Old and the New Testaments refer to a journey to Jerusalem as “going up to Jerusalem.” It seems likely that Jews sang these 15 Psalms on their pilgrimages up to Jerusalem for their great national feasts such as Passover and YomKippur.

They sang Psalm 130 as a national confession that they were “prone to wander, prone to leave the God they loved” and as a prayer for His forgiveness and restoration.

Psalm 130 is not a bad prayer to pray for our nation. There are times when it seems that our beloved nation, like a prodigal son, has taken its ample inheritance and forsaken God to squander it in riotous living. Let’s pray that it comes to its senses.

Above all, Psalm 130 is a prayer for the Church. We too, like Israel, are prone to wander, prone to leave the God we love. It is easy for us to push God away with the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things – Mark 4:19-20. Out of the depths let us cry to God for mercy and then remember His merciful covenant with us, on display and confirmed in Holy Communion.