“Let them thank God for God's steadfast love, for God's wonderful works to humankind. “ We spoke those very same words just a few moments ago when we recited a portion of Psalm107. Those fourteen words of praise and thanksgiving are repeated in the entire Psalm several times. We only read nine of the 43 verses of Psalm 107 this morning.
The makeup of these ancient words is one in which after the introductory three verses several examples are described of the ways that God’s people go astray, and how God saves them. The six verses we read together tell of those who are sick due to their sinful ways and because of iniquities endure affliction. They were so bad off, those protagonists of these six verses, that they were almost dead, we were told. But, there, on the edge of the abyss of drifting off into that nothingness of death, their saving act was to cry out to God in the midst of their trouble and pain. And God, we’re told, sends healing.
Repeatedly through this Psalm we find the same structure: a brief description of those who have wandered from God and suffered because of it. But they turn to God and are redeemed. And over and over, those exact same words of praise and thanksgiving that I just reminded us of are repeated. From thousands of years ago, across the times of history, we can hear worshipers intoning those words that have not been diminished by centuries of use: “thank God for God’s steadfast love, for God’s wonderful works to humankind.”
The Psalms are a moving and powerful collection. They’re liturgy for those who worshiped the God of Israel all those years ago. But they’re more than that. They’re prayers; the prayers of people who cry out in distress, who are grateful for the gifts they have, who give praise and who seek justice. And yet, they’re not just prayers, not just liturgy, though those two genres combined would certainly be enough to warrant our attention to them. Beyond liturgy, beyond prayers, they are at their very core poetry; they, like all good poetry, are meant to express something more than just description or categorization. Poetry uses mere human words in whatever language to evoke emotion and intensified emotion at that. Poetry goes beyond information into realms that defy description. According to a more recent poet of our own English language, Robert Frost, “a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” (found on http://www.brainyquote.com/) Alice Walker another, even more recent, poet in fact wrote a poem about poetry. Who better to teach us about poetry than a poet and what better way to do it than in a poem? Her poem is titled “How Poems Are Made/A Discredited View.”
Letting go
in order to hold on
I gradually understand
how poems are made.
There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
The leftover love.
The love that spills out
of the too full cup
and runs and hides
its too full self
in shame.
I gradually comprehend
how poems are made.
To the upbeat flight of memories.
The flagged beats of the running
heart.
I understand how poems are made.
They are the tears
that season the smile.
The stiff-neck laughter
that crowds the throat.
The leftover love.
I know how poems are made.
There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.
(from Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful, © 1984, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers)
So we listen again to the words from Psalm 107: “Let them thank God for God's steadfast love, for God's wonderful works to humankind“ and we hear more than just thanksgiving and praise. We hear the lump in Frost’s throat, the homesickness, Walker’s place of loss and gain and leftover love. And we connect in ways unimaginable with some people who lived lives so different from ours as imaginable as they gathered for worship of the same God we today are worshiping.
Yes, we can get technical and dissect poetry and identify the formulas that make a certain style of writing a poem. The Psalms are no different; we can look at the words and see the devices used by those ancients. But we miss the point in doing that. We miss the heart-wrenching fear of those who were there on the edge of their demise until...until they cried out and a saving hand reached down and gently, ever so gently, pulled them back.
Because of this august collection of liturgy and prayers and poetry, we can see the ones the psalmist describes as they teeter on that brink between here and the hereafter there. And because it is poetry, we ourselves find ourselves on that very same brink, teetering along with them; joining countless others through barely noticed years and decades and centuries of history who have teetered and cried out in their distress and suffering.
And who among us has not at one point felt that teetering, that suffering, that lovesickness, that fear, that loss? Each of us, in our own way and in our own time has known the heart of the poet who created this psalm and been known by the psalmist. We have cried out to God; in fright, in panic, in the midst of throat-closing distress. We have known times of loss and felt that our being was ebbing away; teetering on the very edge of that abyss.
Ah, how I wish I could answer the questions that are swirling all about us right now; the questions that start with “why…” and go on to wonder about the suffering, the pain, their very existence. We query the forces of the universe as we seek to get the slightest grasp on those whys, listening deeply...deeply...deeply to the echoes of our cries that resound from the abyss trying to turn them into the answer we seek.
And yet we teeter, seesawing back and forth wanting to be saved, to be redeemed, to be kept from whatever Pit is threatening to draw us in and undo us.
And God, our God, the God of a psalmist who was doing what all good psalmists do...God reaches out. God reaches out and steadies us...slows us...breathes the breath of Spirit into us as the creating God breathed breath at the very dawn of creation. God, doing what all good gods do, draws us away from the edge we have too long wavered at, and settles us down.
“I sent you,” God says to us, “I sent you, my beloved daughter...I sent you, my beloved son...to be the light that shines in darkness. Not for condemnation and sorrow but for life and love. I need you to go to those who are also suffering, those in their own distress. Go to those on their own brinks of nothingness and help me to draw them back.”
Who knows if a poet of millennia ago, our psalmist, could foresee that any one of us, here in this time and place, would intone the words of our psalm and be reminded that “God’s steadfast love endures forever”? If anyone could do such a thing--if anyone could see us thousands of years hence...homesick, lovesick as we are...it would have to have been done by a poet.
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