Sermons

Sunday Next before Lent
Sunday 18 February at 6.30pm

Simon Cowling
Readings: Isaiah 60. 8 - end; Hebrews 6.17 - 7.10

I've listened to quite a few sermons in my time - as have all of you. I wonder if your experience of sermons has been the same as mine in this one respect: I have rarely heard a sermon based on the psalms. After all, the psalms are as much a part of scripture as the prophecy of Isaiah or the Letter to the Hebrews, but somehow they rarely commend themselves to preachers as offering possibilities and opportunities.

Well in a very modest way I want to redress the imbalance tonight by offering some thoughts about the Book of Psalms in general and then in a little more detail about tonight's psalm, psalm 6.

The Hebrew name for the Book of Psalms, tehillim means 'praises' - and although by no means all of the psalms (tonight's, for example) could be described as songs or hymns of praise, it seems a fitting name for the book as a whole because of the way in which the theme of praise and thanksgiving runs like a golden thread through the 150 individual psalms, culminating in perhaps the greatest of the psalms of praise, Psalm 150: O praise God in his holiness: praise him the firmament of his power!

As well as specific psalms of praise, there are psalms, or parts of psalms, along the way that are of rather different types. There are psalms of lament, either of the individual or the community. Psalm 137, which begins with the words By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, is the community lament of a nation that has been taken into exile. There are psalms that focus particularly on God's holy city of Jerusalem and on the Temple: I was glad when they said unto me, we will go into the house of the Lord is how Psalm 122 begins. There are so-called royal psalms, which focus especially on the relationship between God and the King. Psalm 110, one such royal psalm, has one of the most evocative verses in scripture: speaking of the king the psalmist sings, arrayed in holy majesty, from the womb of the dawn you will receive the dew of your youth.

Psalm 6 comes from yet another category: the psalm of penitence, a category that also includes psalm 51 which features so prominently in the liturgy for Ash Wednesday. Actually psalm 6, along with a number of the penitential psalms, does not in fact contain any explicit expression of penitence. However, given the Jewish understanding that God is a righteous God, we must assume that the writer of the psalm believed himself to have sinned because of the way in which, in verse 2 he has been afflicted with weakness and in which his bones are vexed and, in verse 7, the way his beauty has gone, worn away because of his enemies. By describing the state to which God, as he believes, has brought him, the psalmist is, in effect, acknowledging and offering penitence for his wrongdoing. Yet in the midst of his pain and anguish the psalmist's faith in God does not desert him. His penitential laments are balanced by petitions to God: rebuke me not … neither chasten me in verse 1; turn thee O Lord…save me for thy mercy's sake in verse 4. And finally, in verses 8 -10, there is a glorious transition from the feeling of rejection so prominent in verses 1-7, to a sense of acceptance before God, acceptance that enables the psalmist to assert that his enemies can now have no power over him: as we read in verse 10, they shall be confounded, sore vexed, turned back and put to shame.

Although traditionally attributed to King David, the psalms were almost certainly written and then edited over a period of several hundred years before and after the exile to Babylon. They would have been particularly used in the Jerusalem Temple as part of the worship of pilgrims. Their ability to tap in to a whole range of human emotions: joy, praise, thankfulness, prayerfulness, confusion, anger, vengefulness and many others, give them a spirituality that is both timeless and contemporary: most of us, I guess, have times when our emotions disable us, when they inhibit the development of our relationship with God and with each other. Amongst much else, the psalms help us to understand that having strong and perhaps shameful feelings, as well as the much more positive feelings of gratitude and joy, is part of what it means to be human. And that, to paraphrase psalm 6 verse 9, whatever our spiritual condition, God will hear our petition and receive our prayer. Amen.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay