Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21 Commentary

Psalm 145 pops up four times across Years A, B, and C in the Lectionary though never as the entire psalm and always with a different configuration of verses included and verses bracketed out.  There is not a lot of rhyme or reason to it near as I can tell but unless you plan to always hew to whatever verses get assigned when Psalm 145 occurs as the Lectionary psalm, there is little reason not to preach on the entirety of the song.  At just 21 verses in length, it’s hardly too long of a psalm to read in its entirety in worship and the overall poem is sufficiently unified that it should be pretty easy to preach on the whole thing too.

In essence Psalm 145 is like a love letter to God.  In verse after verse God is lauded for God’s faithfulness, lovingkindness, compassion, glorious splendor, majestic works, trustworthiness, righteousness, goodness, and especially for God’s responsiveness to people’s cries for help and mercy.

That last item is one to linger over for a bit.  Along these lines Psalm 145 claims that God:

• Upholds those who fall
• Lifts up those who are bowed down
• Provides food for all creatures
• Listens to people’s prayers and cries
• Fulfills people’s desires
• Saves people when saving is needed
• Watches over the lives of God’s people
• Destroys the wicked

All of this is presented without nuance.  Yes, implied here is the idea that even God’s people will fall sometimes (why else would they need to be upheld?) and will be bowed down at times (why else would they need lifting up?).  Also implied here is that even God’s people must have occasion and reasons to cry out for mercy or help and that now and then they need saving from this or that circumstance as well.  In other words, behind most of the 8 items listed above as things God does in coming through for God’s people is a circumstance that is less than felicitous.

Now, seeing it this way may help us begin to square a warm and upbeat and sunny poem like Psalm 145 with that one-third of the Hebrew Psalter that is filled with laments.  After all, in all of those roughly 50 songs there is more than a strong implication that despite the swiftness and apparent speed with which God responds to God’s people (the way Psalm 145 more or less presents it), there are in fact times when God does NOT seem all that responsive.  Or at the very least not immediately or at a speed we’d prefer.

Not only does Psalm 145 not promise that we will never hit hard times or grave disappointments in life, within the context of the wider Psalter we also need not read this as a promise that God will always respond to us according to our preferred time line.  Here it seems to me is something that a lot of people who listen to our preaching need to hear.  We don’t want to present Psalm 145 in such a way that the hurting in our congregations conclude that this must be a psalm for only other people—some very lucky people who have God on speed dial and who never have one of their calls go to divine voicemail—but not about their lives.

Instead we can see Psalm 145 as a celebration of God’s default settings of love and mercy and compassion and grace.  This is who God is and this is who God is even when we get bowed down and depressed or when we fall or when we are afraid enough of something as to cry to God for salvation.  Whatever the ins and outs, the whys and the wherefores as to why God sometimes seems deaf to our cries or is very slow to come to our aid, Psalm 145 shows us who God is and what God is like even so.

In this way Psalm 145 can be seen as kindling hope.  We may not always know why things do not fall more swiftly into place for us in ways that Psalm 145 could be seen as implying.  But what we can and must know is that the reason is not because it turns out that God is not loving toward us or that God is gracious to other people but for some seasons of life he is perhaps not so inclined toward us.  No, Psalm 145 shows who God is.  Always.

In the longest possible run we will see in our lives that all we read about in Psalm 145 is true.  But perhaps in the shorter run we can likewise have hope that any God who is as good as Psalm 145 displays our God to be really is near to us always, even if not more immediately coming through for us.  In the end of course the final truth of what Psalm 145 says about God can be seen in a symbol that graces the worship space of most every church in the world: the cross.  How much does God want to deliver us, lift us up, draw near to us, forgive us and save us?  The death of God’s Son on Golgotha is the answer.

The author of Psalm 145 had abundant reasons to promise in the opening and closing verses of this psalm to praise God for ever and ever.  Those of us who now live on the high side of Easter have all those reasons and an unfathomable number of further reasons to promise the same thing.

Illustration Idea

There is virtually no way to duplicate this in any translation into any language but Psalm 145 is actually an acrostic (a fact that bolsters my contention above that we are best off reading this psalm as a whole and not chop it up).  This psalm’s 21 verses correspond to the letters in the Hebrew alphabet with each successive verse beginning with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet.  Verse 1 begins with A, Verse 2 with B, Verse 3 with C, and so on.  So in essence Psalm 145 goes from A-Z  We think that some Hebrew Psalms were composed this way to make them easier to memorize.  But there may also be a sense in which this literary structure reflects what is also contained in this poem—and as reflected on above in this sermon commentary—and that is the sense that God is being praised here for every reason one could think of from A-Z, the whole kit-n-caboodle, as it were.