Psalm 69:7-10, (11-15), 16-18 Commentary

The Revised Common Lectionary is usually a straightforward affair when it comes to selected texts.  But with semi-regularity you get a text chopped up the way Psalm 69 is divided in this lection.  First we jump onto the already moving train only at verse 7, then we grab 4 verses, put 5 more in parentheses (whatever that signals), and then grab 3 more verses and quit altogether at the exact midpoint of the poem.  One wonders how this all got negotiated when the RCL was put together.  Part of what gets skipped here are some darker words of imprecation against the psalmist’s enemies (cf. vss. 22-28) and then also a nice closing doxology in vss. 30-36.

But the upshot of the psalm remains intact for the most part even if you stick with the dozen verses carved out of the larger song.  Basically what we have here is a lament and a plea.  In the early and middle parts of this psalm, the poet makes it clear that he is quite literally sinking into trouble and it is now neck deep.  As the mucky waters have been rising steadily all around him, he has been crying to God but to no avail and now not only is his voice shot, whether or not he has a voice left is soon to become a moot point because he is going to be under the waters in any event.  He will drown.

The descriptions throughout this psalm verge on the pathetic.  The psalmists claims:

• His throat is parched
• His eyes are failing
• His enemies outnumber the hairs on his head
• His enemies scorn and mock his every act of piety
• His family has shunned him
• He is scorned and disgraced
• His heart is broken
• His enemies put gall into his food and provide only vinegar to drink

All in all, he’s in a bad place!  The one thing he has left—and it seems to be an ember glowing ever more faintly—is hope that God will yet come through.  God will yet shame his enemies, charge them with their crimes, and see that they get their cosmic comeuppance.  He hopes God can yet—against all odds—deliver him and when God does come through, there will be ardent praise and worship for the faithfulness of the God who, for most of the poem anyway, seems to have gone off duty.

For preachers, it can be hard to know what to do with a psalm that is so relentlessly dark and dismal.  If some psalms seem overly sunny and optimistic about how great things always go for people who follow God faithfully, others of the psalms go the opposite direction and could not sound more pathetic if they tried.  One is tempted to say, “Come on, my friend.  It can’t be all that bad, can it?”

The psalms rarely if ever tell us what is actually going on, who these enemies are, or what the specific issues are.  They stay pretty generic.  A few well-meaning scribes or copyists or someone over the centuries added superscriptions to a few psalms to try to locate them historically, usually in the life of David.  One psalm sounds like it could fit when David was fleeing Saul and another maybe the season after David got convicted of his sins against Bathsheba and Uriah and yet another maybe that whole sad business with Absalom.  But those are just guesses near as we can tell, and the superscriptions are not canonical.  I always caution my preaching students to not preach on the superscriptions, much less let the stories alluded to in those superscriptions become the content of the sermon rather than the actual psalm at hand.

Letting the psalms stay somewhat general allows us to see ourselves in the picture and not get bogged down in wondering if any given season in my life is an exact match for a certain historical event (each of which is unique by definition).  And that in turn brings us back to the dark, dismal, and dire portrait sketched by the 69^th psalm.  Was is it really this bad?  Is it ever really this bad for anybody?

Well, not sure about how bad it was for the psalmist but we all know that at times life actually does feel about this desperate.  Those of us who are pastors have walked with people who if they described and summed up their life in terms about as bleak as what we find in this passage, we could hardly blame them or suggest they were going a wee bit over the top with all that.

The wonder of Psalm 69 and the wonder of the situations of actual people whom we know by name is not that life can feel this hemmed in and horrible at times but that people actually manage to maintain hope in God even so.  Distress is not a mystery.  Maintaining hope in the midst of distress is very often a profound mystery.  Like many preachers reading this, I have known people in the churches I served whose life has been such a relentless Job-like series of heartaches, death, and loss of all kinds that I cannot for the life of me figure out why they had not long ago chucked their faith over the gunwales of life’s boat.

But they hadn’t.  And they would never do so.  Did they have answers to their hardest questions?  Not usually.  Did they expect answers anytime soon or ever in this life?  Not usually.  Did they mouth namby-pamby pseudo explanations or content themselves with pithy slogans that reduced their faith to Hallmark-like pious sentimentality, taking comfort in ideas that actually constitute pretty bad theology?  Typically not.  But they kept hope alive.  They kept faith alive.  They had the Holy Spirit living in their hearts.  If some of us have ever seen things that may well constitute proof in the existence of God, people of faith like this might just be it.

Psalm 69 reminds us of this holy mystery and of this testament to the existence of a loving God who stays with us despite all the ways a broken world sometimes sinks us very deep into rising waters.  And that’s a good reminder.

Illustration Idea

In a sermon about the death of one of his children, John Claypool dealt at length with the reality of suffering and how we encounter it in the Christian church community.  At one point he writes the following and quotes a friend:

“There is more honest faith in an act of questioning than in the act of silent submission. That is why I found such help in a letter I received from Dr. Carlyle Marney just before Laura Lue died. He admitted that he had no word for the suffering of the innocent and never had had, but he said, ‘I fall back on the idea that our God has a lot to give an account for.’ Now, to be honest, no one had ever said anything like that to me before, and at first it was a little shocking, but the more I thought about it, the truer it became to the faith of the Bible. At no point in its teaching is there ever an implication that God wants us to remain like rocks or even little infants in our relationship to him. He wants us to become mature sons and daughters, which means that he holds us responsible for our actions and expects us to hold him responsible for his! I do not believe God wants me to hold in these questions that burn in my heart and soul. For you see, He will be able to give an accounting when all the facts are in, and until then it is valid to ask.”