Psalm 138 Commentary

Years ago I read a wonderful novel by Indian writer Arundhati Roy and one of the things I liked about the book was its great title: The God of Small Things.  That title can be an apt summary for something you run across often in the psalms, including in Psalm 138.

Israel praised their God for many things, not least his majestic and awesome power, might, and strength.  They praised God for all the big things God has done and still does in creation and in the redemption of God’s people.  God is awesome and magnificent and holy in ways that evoke due reverence, even a kind of holy fear, from God’s people.

Yet what seemed the most striking in some ways to many psalmists—think of Psalm 8 in particular—is the wonder that this great big God was so good at noticing us in all our littleness.  God is not an aloof deity far removed from ordinary folks.  God is the God of small things and of small people.  Even the lowliest of people do not escape God’s gaze and also God’s loving care.  And somehow the fact that this majestic God could condescend to see us and care for us in all our mundane and simple lives was striking.  They were gob smacked that, in the words of Psalm 138:6, “Though the Lord is exalted, he looks kindly on the lowly; though lofty, he sees them from afar.”

All the ways in which God’s almighty power could get channeled into the lives of regular folks became a key source of additional praise to Israel’s God.  The letting loose of divine lightning bolts was a wonder but so also (and equally so perhaps) was this God’s ability to gently cup a poor person’s face in his hands in order to lift them up, to help them.  A whole lot of theology—including ultimately the incarnation of God’s Son—gets caught up in this line of thought.

Just generally Psalm 138 is one of the sunnier poems in the Hebrew Psalter.  Everything is turning up roses for this psalmist and so this person writes as though it’s almost automatic that when a believer calls upon God to do something, God hears and answers swiftly.  If you have a need, God meets it.  If you walk in the midst of enemies who sneer at you, scoff at you, spread bad rumors about you, God will vindicate you over them.  This is one of those psalms where everything gets pretty neatly tucked in on every corner.

Of course, as we have noted repeatedly here in CEP sermon commentaries on the Book of Psalms, there are plenty of other poems in this collection that bear witness to a dimmer truth: it does not always work out quite this neatly.  There are also times in life when God seems to have taken the day off or just generally gone off duty for a season.  There are plenty other times in life when the people who sneer at us get away with it and our own vindication seems like a pie-in-the-sky dream that may never come true.  And all those lowly people?  Yes, God sees them and yes, sometimes God comes through for them but not always right away and sometimes seemingly not at all.  The Psalms of Lament exist because given the nature of who Israel believed God to be, life just isn’t supposed to go the way it too often in fact goes.

Psalm 138 begins by saying that God has so exalted his own decrees that it surpasses even the due fame God already has.  But sometimes it is precisely the decrees and promises of God that are the source of lament.  Not a few psalms say to God, “You’re letting us down!”

Even so, that does not undermine or render unimportant the ardent praise offered up in Psalm 138.  Yes, one would want to be careful touting this song and its sunny-side-up sentiments in front of someone in duress whose situation is not quite stacking up to all that.  As I say to my students in preaching class, the problem with miracles and various forms of divine deliverance and vindication is that those things don’t always happen.  It can be pastorally dodgy to celebrate a miracle in a sermon in front of a congregation that has broken-hearted folks sitting there whose daughter was not miraculously cured of her cancer, whose prayers for safety for their child were not answered.

Perhaps then a poem like Psalm 138 can be presented not just as someone’s testimony to the goodness of God but also and at the same time as something that is aspirational for all of us.  If this does not reflect recent experience, we hope it will one day.  And though it may be a bit painful, even the lowly and despised who have not seen God reverse their fortunes can still by grace find it in themselves to celebrate with those whose story—for the moment at least—is happier.  When Paul urges Christians to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, he did not say this would always be easy to do.

But part of our union with Christ and with one another is that we find ways to do this even so.

Illustration Idea

As President, Barack Obama worked long hours.  He made it a priority every evening when it was possible to have dinner with his wife and daughters but once that was finished up, he went back to work.  Most days he ended up in his private study upstairs at the White House where he worked until 2:00am and the key thing he did in those final hours of a long work day was personally writing letters back to a handful of letters his staff had singled out for him to see.  No President can read the torrent of mail that comes in every day but Obama made sure he did see a half-dozen or so per day and composed handwritten notes of reply.

One can only imagine how it felt to those few folks every day who received such a personal reply from the most powerful person in the world.  The closest I have ever come to this was when I wrote a thank-you note to former President Jimmy Carter in 1993 for something he had said in a speech I heard him give at a conference and that I used in a sermon on the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which I enclosed with my letter to him.  A few months later I got a letter that was a xerox copy of my original letter on which President Carter hand-wrote a few lines of reply to me.  I was thrilled.  I framed that and it is still in my office to this day.

When the powerful take note of ordinary folks, it feels amazing and good.  Israel knew they received exactly such royal treatment by the God of the universe and as in Psalm 138, they could not express their wonder over this often enough.