Sermon Commentary for Sunday, January 25, 2026

Psalm 27:1, 4-9 Commentary

The Lectionary is known for chopping up psalms and other passages. Sometimes the reasons are painfully obvious: we need to brush past sentiments about wicked people and pleas for God to deal with them severely. Let’s keep the Jesus who says nice things but bracket out his calling down woes on Chorazin and such. In this week’s case, however, the inclusion of only verse 1 of Psalm 27 and then snatching up verses 4-9 from the center of the song is less easy to discern as to a reason why we would not just read either the whole psalm (it’s only 14 verses long) or at least all of verses 1-9. The skipped verses of 2-3 make mention of wicked people or whole armies of bad folks making moves against the psalmist. But these are mentioned only to convey the utter confidence the psalmist seems to have in God’s ability to shield him from evil and from evil people. So there is no clear need to skip those two verses.

Indeed, including those verses as well as further statements of confidence in verses 4-6 get at one of the more curious features of this particular psalm. On the one hand there is great confidence that all of his prayers would be heard by God. What’s more, once God hears this person’s pleas for protection, God would surely swing into action and take care of things. But that is why verses 7-9 are rather striking because suddenly it sounds as though the psalmist’s confidence has wavered a bit. The tone gets a little desperate. We saw a similar dynamic last week in the Year A selection of the first part of Psalm 40. A song that begins with what sounds like utter assurance in God’s providential care of the poet ended with that same poet crying out to God and characterizing himself as desperate, poor, and needy.

I noted a week ago that this is perhaps a good reflection of how life goes sometimes. We have good days and bad days. We pass through seasons in which our union with Christ feels thick and firm but then suddenly a new season dawns and . . . well, we’re not so sure. As with so many emotions and sentiments we encounter across the Hebrew Psalter, such testimonies and prayers reflect the fact that the life of faith does not proceed forever in straight lines down the center of very smooth and well-lit pathways. Even true believers experience loss, disorientation, grief, and fear.

At the seminary where I teach preaching, we have for over twenty years used the “Four Pages” approach developed by homiletician Paul Scott Wilson. The “normal” ordering of the pages or the four sections of the sermon are Page One: Trouble in the Text; Page Two: Trouble in the World; Page Three: Grace in the Text; Page Four: Grace in the World. But I tell students that even if they choose to organize their sermons around these four pages or movements, not every biblical text opens itself up in just the usual order of moving from Trouble to Grace. Some sermons may begin with Grace in the Text because that is the way the text is ordered. Despite my pointing this out, I did have a student years back who preached on Psalm 27 but since he thought Trouble in the Text had to come first, he tried to suggest that Psalm 27:1-6 was the Trouble in the Text when clearly—as I had to point out to him—that is actually the Grace in the Text. Psalm 27 begins with a grace-filled sense of God’s goodness and then backs into some Trouble by the time you get to verses 7 and following.

In talking with this student, it occurred to us that indeed, this is how life goes sometimes. You go to church on a Sunday morning and sing “Awesome God” and “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and you can just feel your heart resonating with every confident lyric in such songs. You are in full-on Psalm 27:1 mode: “The Lord is my light and my salvation! Whom shall I fear?” But then long about Wednesday something happens that knocks you and your faith sideways a bit. Suddenly you are pleading with God to hear you, to not forsake you, to be there for you even if your own parents were to forsake you. This happens in the life of faith.

Of course, the Lectionary is halting us at verse 9 this week but many of us know the concluding verse of Psalm 27 about confidently waiting for God to show up with his goodness right here in the land of the living. But waiting is hard. Even waiting in confidence can be a bit trying. Despite the fact that most of Psalm 27 radiates confidence and assurance of faith, there are more than a couple reflections even here that the texture of actual life in the land of the living is bumpy at times.

These may not be pleasant truths but seeing them on display in Scripture tells us God is with us both when we feel utterly confident in God and when we have cause to wonder what in the world is going on with God. Finding ourselves feeling a little desperate along the lines of what we pick up on in verses 7ff need not mean something is wrong with our faith much less that God has abandoned us and can no longer even hear us when we cry out. There is a whole lot of reassurance we give to people when we preach this message. We will be less than one whole month into 2026 if you decide to preach on Psalm 27 for the final Sunday in January. But it did not take long to experience some unsettling and even frightening events as the new year began. Whether that is concerning the headlines in the news or personal health crises in our families, people need to know God is here, that God hears, that though waiting to see the goodness of God in the land of the living is not always easy, that goodness of God still exists and somehow, some way, someday, we will see it.

Illustration Idea

In her novel Stone Yard Devotional, Australian writer Charlotte Wood introduces readers to an anonymous narrator, a woman around the age of 60 who carries abiding grief over the death of her parents some decades before and who got burned out in her work as an environmental activist. So she leaves her husband and her previous life to move in with a group of Catholic Sisters in a monastery community out on the lonely plains of Australia. She herself is pretty much an atheist but stays on with the Sisters eventually as a kind of permanent guest in the community. She faithfully attends all of the daily times of worship in the Chapel. Lauds, Compline, Middle Hour, Vespers, Eucharist, and more.

At one point early in her time there on an initial visit prior to her moving in permanently, she observes this: “During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in and day out, having to drop everything you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realized: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.”(1)

Psalm 27 concludes on a note of patient, faithful waiting on the Lord. Earlier in the psalm the writer declares his desire to dwell in the house of the Lord forever, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord. Such worship, such waiting is not passive and it does not stand in contrast to engaging in something more active. As Wood observed, that is the work. That is the doing. So it is in the life of faith lived coram Deo, before the face and the presence of God.