Psalm 27 Commentary

At Calvin Theological Seminary for the past two decades we have used as a kind of homiletical template Paul Scott Wilson’s “The Four Pages of the Sermon” format.  As some of you reading this may know, Wilson uses what he calls Trouble and Grace as the two primary components of a sermon.  Page One (or part one of a sermon) is “Trouble in the Text” and that is balanced by looking for that same issue on Page Two “Trouble in the World.”  Then Page Three looks for “Grace in the Text” and of course that is followed by looking on Page Four for that same “Grace in the World” today.

Some years back I had a student who wanted to follow this framework but he also seemed to have concluded that any given biblical text must already more or less correspond to Wilson’s ordering of the Four Pages.  This student wrote a sermon on Psalm 27 and worked really hard to make this psalm’s first six verses fit the pattern and so he tried to contort them into the “Trouble in the Text.”  This did not work!  Because clearly Psalm 27 begins on an exuberant note of confidence in God’s care, love, and protection.  If anything—sticking to the Wilson schema for a moment—Psalm 27:1-6 is more like the “Grace in the Text.”

But that is the funny thing about Psalm 27: it does have “Trouble in the Text” but it more or less backs into it.  If the first six verses radiate a sunny optimism and trust, beginning at verse 7 the picture changes.  Suddenly this confident psalmist is pleading with God to hear his cries, to not turn a deaf ear to him, to not abandon him.  It hardly sounds like the same person who had just written about how even if a whole army were to attack him, he’d not worry in the least because he knows God will protect him.

So what is going on here?  Well, another reflection of real life is what is going on here.  As is the case across the Hebrew Psalter, so also here we see a reflection of how life goes sometimes.  We’ve all been there.  You are in church some Sunday morning.  You sing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and “Awesome God” and you do so in a full-throated way.  What’s more, you feel the truth of those hymns deep in your heart.  You are not faking it until you are making it.  You mean it.

But then three days later on a Wednesday afternoon something in life comes along and knocks you clean off your faith stride.  Suddenly nothing seems so certain anymore.  Suddenly we are crying out to our awesome and faithful God but this time we do so with the fear that God is not taking as good as care of us as we might wish.  We wonder why God has allowed some breakdown in communication at your workplace that is threatening your very job.  Or you wonder why God would allow a sickness to come or an accident to happen.  The stability of your world is thrown off kilter and for at least a brief while you wonder if you can put the pieces back together again.

Psalm 27 is just how life goes sometimes.  Thus there is comfort in this poem’s validation that such things do not happen to us because we are people of weak faith or because we did something wrong so as to deserve some bad or sub-optimal thing that happens to us.  No, this happens to the strongest and the best of believers.  But when it does and precisely because we are people of faith, the tougher moments do not translate into a season when communication with God stops.  Yes, when we are in a good place such as seems to be reflected in the first six verses, then we praise and thank God.  But when things take a turn, we are still praying to God because where else would we turn?

As the psalm assigned for the Second Sunday in Lent for Year C of the Lectionary, this can be a reminder that when we remember our mortality (as we do in Lent), we know that even so we remain in the hands of our loving God.  Because Jesus also experienced both moments of wonderful clarity when he could confidently teach people about the God whom he called his Father.  But in the end Jesus also went all the way to a cross where he cried out to God in pain and dereliction.  Yet as he breathed his last, he said “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”  Death did not separate Jesus from the love of his Father and neither do our deaths.

Psalm 27 begins with a bang of utter confidence in God.  Then it dips into cries for God to stay faithful when some bad things come.  And then it concludes in a modality of waiting and hoping.  If something happened that obscured for a season what the psalmist calls “the goodness of God,” he even so vows to wait, to remain hopeful and confident, to expect that the better season of life reflected in the first half dozen verses of Psalm 27 will come once more to the land of the living.  Waiting is hard.  We all know that.  We have all experienced that.  But very often such hope-filled waiting is the shape faith has to take in a broken world as we live between the already and the not yet.

[Note: In addition to these weekly sermon commentaries on the CEP website, we also have a resource page for Lent and Easter with more preaching and worship ideas as well as sample sermons on this year’s Year C Lectionary texts.  So visit our Lent and Easter resource page!]

Illustration Idea

In the film The Devil Wears Prada, Stanley Tucci plays haute couture expert Nigel, who had long worked for the queen of the fashion world, Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) who is the editor-in-chief of the leading fashion magazine Runway.  Late in the film while visiting Paris, Nigel gushes with enthusiasm to Miranda’s secretary, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) that at long last Miranda was giving him his dream job.  Soon Nigel would be independent of the hard-driving Miranda as he headed up a whole new line of clothing and accessories by an up-and-coming designer named James Holt.  Nigel knows Miranda will be announcing this at a formal luncheon and in the scene at that luncheon we see Andy and Nigel eagerly awaiting the big announcement.  And then at the last minute, Miranda pulls the rug out from underneath Nigel and announces the job is going to a rival who Miranda knew was threatening to replace her at Runway.  Giving her the Holt job got her out of Miranda’s way.  Nigel is stunned and awkwardly applauds the announcement he did not want to hear.  Andy asks how he’s doing.  “She’ll make it up to me.  When the time is right,” Nigel says.  “You sure about that?” Andy asks.  “No, but I have to have hope.”

The conclusion of Psalm 27 is also all about having hope.  But happily unlike with Nigel choosing to hope in someone he knows is unreliable and capricious, when we say we are waiting in hope to see the goodness of God in the land of the living, we can be sure about it.  God has a long track record of being faithful and a good bit of Psalm 27 details that.  So yes, we also have to have hope but ours is a well-founded one because of who our great God in Christ is.