Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19 Commentary

Since I can detect no logical reason for skipping verses 5-11 as the Lectionary would have us to do, it makes sense to preach on the entire psalm as these 19 verses form a seamless whole.  But I leave that up to you!

In general, as a psalm in Eastertide, one could map this song onto the experience of Jesus himself.  Jesus suffered much and even died but was in the end delivered back to life.  But since the pattern of Christ’s dying and rising is to be the pattern for all of us, it also makes sense to map this onto our individual experiences of life in a difficult world.  The sentiment expressed in verse 11 of “Everyone is a liar” is surely something we feel at times too.  We seem surrounded at times by dishonest people who seem as often as not to get away with their deceptions.  Meanwhile we feel afflicted by that very fact as well as at times by grave illnesses, chronic pain or struggles, emotional trauma, anxiety over finances, worries about the wellbeing of our children or grandchildren.  At times it most certainly feels like too much.  What else can we do but cry out to God as the psalmist does for deliverance and rescue and restoration.

Of course, the big pastoral challenge in preaching on something like Psalm 116 is that we will be speaking in the presence of any number of hurting people who have cried out for deliverance but who have not (yet anyway) received it.  Worse, we are preaching to people who never received what they asked for when they found themselves in extremis because they did lose the job they asked God to preserve for them, they lost the sick child they asked God to heal.  For them the words of the psalmist in verse 6 that “the Lord protects the unwary” may grate on them or sound like fingernails on a blackboard.  (The word “unwary” in Hebrew is a curious word only used about 18 times in the Old Testament.  It has often been translated as “simple” but can also mean open-minded or foolish.  In any event, there does not seem to be anything negative about the word but may just be the equivalent of someone who places a simple faith and trust in God.)

So some pastoral care needs to be exercised so these people feel seen in the midst of considering a psalm whose lyric descriptions of deliverance and answered prayers may feel a bit wounding or distancing.  As always, we preachers sometimes simply need to acknowledge that what the poet of Psalm 116 experienced does not always happen or does not happen soon enough for a lot of us and we cannot know the reasons why but can only continue to hope and pray for God’s good work in our lives and in our world.

But the descriptions of suffering and prayers for deliverance from the midst of that difficult season of life constitute only half of Psalm 116.  The rest is all about the response to the wonderful working of God and that response boils down to exuberant gratitude.  One could wonder what all the talk about “fulfilling vows” means here.  Does this reflect that the psalmist more or less bargained with God?  “Oh, God, if you get me out of this I will . . . always praise you . . . declare your goodness to others . . . serve you in any way I can.”  Or there are the so-called “foxhole prayers” of soldiers in battle.  “Oh, Lord, don’t let me die and if you keep me alive . . . I will become a priest . . . I will become a pastor.”

It reminds me of a scene from the TV show M*A*S*H in which a wounded but recovering soldier tells the Army Chaplain Father Mulcahy that he had promised God to become a priest if God got him out of the battle alive.  “And now here you are,” Mulcahy says.  “Yes and . . . I don’t want to be a priest.”  The good Father more or less laughs this off and tells the soldier that if every person who had ever promised God they’d become a priest actually did so, there would not be enough work to go around for that legion of priests!

Of course, it is possible the psalmist is not recalling such a posture of bargaining with God.  And anyway we may have any number of issues with taking some quid pro quo stance with God.  It may simply have been vows to be thankful and to express that gratitude in every pious way the poet here could think of.  Not least among the things that thanksgiving would naturally lead a believer to do would be faithful worship practices, faithful participation in the worshiping community and its varied ministries, leading a moral life that avoided lying and cheating but put a premium on things like ministering to the poor and marginalized.

In any event Psalm 116 serves as a good reminder that abiding gratitude is the proper posture for anyone and everyone who believes God has wrought salvation for them.  And in this Eastertide Season, this is a fitting prompt for us to recall that Christ’s victory on Easter morning was not just so that I could have my individual salvation worked for me or that now Jesus is “my personal Savior” as though that is the extent of it all.  Instead we are prodded to recall that from the deep well of gratitude we owe our God in Christ there should issue forth many streams of mercy and good works.  And of course as should be standard operating procedure for all of us who preach, we need to make it clear over and again that we are not saved BY those good works but we do them BECAUSE we have already been saved by grace alone.

Indeed, we get a good reminder of this in this week’s Epistle selection in the Year A Lectionary when in 1 Peter 1 we read, “Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.  Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for each other, love one another deeply, from the heart.”  We obey God and love one another not in order to be saved but because we already have been saved through the One God raised from the dead.

Illustration Idea

Sometimes gratitude can simply overwhelm you.  Particularly when a gift or an act was both unexpected and lavish, we can feel like we don’t know where to begin to express our thanks.  In the movie As Good As It Gets,  Helen Hunt plays Carol, a Manhattan waitress in a restaurant where a famous but very quirky writer named Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) comes every day for breakfast.  Melvin eventually becomes aware that Carol’s son, Spencer, has a chronic illness that frequently requires hospital visits and this often causes Carol to miss work.  So because he wants to see Carol every day, Melvin arranges for a high-priced physician to take care of Spencer and finally bring the boy to lasting good health.  You can watch the scene when Carol first learns of this here.

In that scene Carol and her mother are clearly overwhelmed.  When Carol begins to gush about this to Melvin at breakfast one day soon thereafter, he feels embarrassed and tells her to “put it in a note.”  She does so in a Thank-You letter that eventually runs to over 40 pages!  When we receive something of great value, maybe even of supreme value, our normal reaction is a gratitude we can scarcely even begin to express properly or capaciously enough.

And that is a good bit of what Psalm 116 is also about in terms of God’s answering our prayers and saving us.