Psalm 27

As you may have guessed by my less-than-subtle use of it in the liturgy, the text I want to consider with you this morning is Psalm 27. It’s a beloved, favorite psalm for many people, known perhaps especially for the affirmation of faith with which it begins: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?”
We don’t often hear about the Book of Psalms from the pulpit, and I’ll confess that I’m not one to regularly preach from it. That’s somewhat strange, I guess, considering it’s the longest book in the Bible, and – fun fact – the Old Testament book most often quoted in the New Testament. But, if you’re like most Presbyterians – most church-goers in general, really – you’re probably more accustomed to hearing Psalms in a liturgy, perhaps in the call to worship, or to singing them in hymns and choral anthems.
And to an extent, that makes sense. We think of the psalms today as a book of the Bible, but actually, the collection we’ve come to know as the “Book of Psalms” was the hymnal of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. Still, I think it’s important, from time to time, to look a little deeper at the psalms because along with being beautiful poetry and making wonderful music, I think they show us something about what it means to be human. More specifically, what it means to be human in the presence of God.
This particular psalm, Psalm 27 has been near and dear to the hearts of many Christians and Jews through the ages – perhaps it’s a favorite of yours as well. For me personally, Psalm 27 always makes me think of a musical paraphrase of the psalm, a song called “Peace” by singer-songwriter Jennifer Knapp. Probably because of this, I always imagine the person who wrote this psalm as a “she.”
Of course, we don’t know if the psalmist was a man or a woman – it’s attributed to David, but it was written long after he died. Because here’s the interesting thing about the psalms: unlike most of the hymns in our hymnal, we know little to nothing about the composers of these ancient songs. All we know about the authors of these prayers, we know from the psalm itself.
In the case of Psalm 27, Biblical scholars tell us that in ancient Judaism, people who had been accused of a crime or indiscretion of some sort often sought asylum in the Temple, much like the practice that still exists today of claiming “sanctuary” in churches. Many of these scholars think that’s what was going on with the person who wrote Psalm 27; that she (or he) had been accused – falsely accused, the psalmist argues – of a crime and had sought out refuge in the Temple, where she prayed to God to deliver her from her accusers and vindicate her. What we have in our text today is her prayer.
And, at first glance, it sounds like our psalmist prays with great faith and assurance. We hear her sing “The Lord is my light and my salvation; though an army encamps against me, my heart shall not fear.” She expresses her confidence that God will protect her, and lift her up; that if even her mother and father forsake her, God will not abandon her. The psalmist writes, “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” – while I am still alive. She’s not talking about some future “pie in the sky in the by and by”, no, she’s declaring her confidence that God will answer her prayer, and that she will be there to see God’s deliverance.
Out of this deep trust in God, she asks, “Whom shall I fear? Of whom shall I be afraid?”
It’s a rhetorical question, of course, to which anyone listening is supposed to respond with resounding faith, “Nothing!” “No one!” “You have no reason to fear!”
But I’ve never been very good at rhetorical questions. Whom, or what, shall I fear? Well, I’m glad you asked!
To start with, how about gun violence, in our nation and in our own community? What about cancer, that illness that eats away at our bodies, even as the long trajectory of treatment eats away at our souls? What have we to fear? Well, now that you mention it, how about war? Nuclear war, chemical war, biological war? What about ISIS? Or any kind of terrorism, for that matter – threats from abroad and mass shootings and hate crimes in our own nation?
What about increasingly powerful storms, and floods, and earthquakes? Or the continuing demise of our planet at our own hands?
Of whom shall we be afraid? How about bullies? Perhaps particularly those on the internet, cyber bullying our children and grandchildren, so much so that more middle school students now die of suicide each year than in car crashes.
Or, if you’re like me, perhaps you’re afraid of the first 100 days of a new administration, led by a president who has mocked a disabled reporter, bragged about sexually assaulting women, threatened to throw his political opponents in jail, and suggested that all Muslims should have to register with the government, something that sounds eerily reminiscent of Jews required to register in Nazi Germany before the Holocaust.
Whom shall I fear? What shall I fear? I don’t know about you, but when I look at the world around us right now, I can’t stop coming up with things to be afraid of!
What, then? Is our psalmist just naïve? Is she extraordinarily pious and faithful, in a way that we could never be? Maybe, but I don’t think so. After all, if what the scholars say is true, she’s praying this prayer while she hides in God’s Temple, seeking asylum and safety from her accusers, from people who seek to do her harm.
And actually, over the course of this psalm, the psalmist names quite a few things to be afraid of. “Evildoers assailing her and seeking to devour her flesh”, for one. Enemies and foes. An army encamped against her. Adversaries and false witnesses rising against her that, in her words “are breathing out violence.” As it turns out, even as the psalmist proclaims her faith that God will deliver her, even as she asks if God is for her, who can be against her, she is well aware that she has quite a lot to fear!
Faith…and fear. I’ve heard some people say they’re opposites…but I’m not so sure about that. I think they might be more like two sides of the same coin. Having faith in God’s goodness, and power in the world when things are going well – that’s not so hard, is it? But holding onto faith when things are falling apart, or when it feels like evil has the upper hand? Well, as one author puts it, that’s faith that knows what it’s talking about.
My husband Andy is a fan of the popular book and movie series “Game of Thrones” – perhaps some of you are as well. I came across a quote from that series recently, where one of the characters asks his father, “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” To which his father responds, “Son, that is the only time a man can be brave.”
I think it’s important for us to remember that. This beloved psalm, this song of prayer to God, was not written from a place of comfort and complacency. The psalmist goes back and forth, vacillating between fear and faith, in the same breath proclaiming “The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear” and “Do not give me up to the will of my enemies – the very people I do fear!” She says “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living,” and yet cries out to God, “Do not hide your face from me; do not cast me off.”
There is a book that I always go to when I study the psalms, a book by Old Testament Professor Denise Dombkowski Hopkins, called Journey through the Psalms. I like this book
because Hopkins writes very plainly about the way that faith and fear coexist in the psalms, just as they coexist in our own lives. She recounts how her own relationship with the psalms changed drastically when her only brother, Brian, drowned at age 23. In an instant, her world was turned upside down and filled with grief, pain, doubt, and fear deeper than she could have ever imagined. She found herself drawn to what scholars call the “lament psalms”, psalms that cry out to God in pain and fear and anger. Psalms like Psalm 22, the beginning of which Jesus himself cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Hopkins recalls that she experienced a sense of comfort, of not being alone, as she read the words of her spiritual ancestors shaking their fists at the sky, and demanding that God deliver them from their present suffering, crying out, “Why God? Why?”
Hopkins never tries to answer that question of why, and she points out that neither do the psalms. That’s not the point. When we’re on our knees crying out to God, we’re not looking for a well-reasoned explanation of why bad things happen, are we? Certainly, our minds may want answers, but at our core, in the deepest place of our being, I think what we’re really seeking is God’s presence with us, God’s faithfulness to deliver us. We join our voices with the author of Psalm 27, “God, hear when I cry aloud and answer me! Do not hide your face from me, or forsake me! God, you have been my light and my salvation – do not fail me now!” [Pause]
Our psalmist knows that fear and faith can coexist. That one does not cancel the other out. And she shows us by example that we can take that fear, that pain, that anger, to God in our prayers. It doesn’t make our faith any less. If anything, it makes whatever kernel of faith we can muster up stronger because, in those moments, we are praying a prayer of faith that knows what it’s talking about.
The psalms are a valuable resource to us as people of faith because of the cover the whole range of emotions; they speak to the truth of the human experience. There is no “The Lord is my light and my salvation” without “Hear me, O Lord! Do not hide your face from me!” There is no 23rd Psalm – “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” – without the 22nd Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
In the end, for our psalmist, I think that faith wins out. I say that not so much because the psalm ends on a positive note, though it does, honestly, because the psalmist is praying at all. The fact that we can read her psalm today means she made the choice to lift up her prayer to God. In the face of fear, she keeps on keeping on. She puts one foot in front on the other. Even as she vacillates between faith and fear, our psalmist keeps going through the motions of her faith.
I think we modern-day disciples have something to learn from her there. “Going through the motions” often gets a bad rap as “hollow” or “empty”, but there are some days when going through the motions is the only thing we can do. We can lift our prayers to a God who promises never to leave or forsake us – even when we feel like that God is nowhere to be seen. We can live our lives according to the conviction that goodness is stronger than evil, even when everything around us seems to indicate that evil is winning the day.
Because friends, to persevere in prayer in the face of fear, to hold tight to what is good in the face of radical evil, to honestly voice our concerns to God even when it feels like God is not listening, or when we’re not sure there’s anything even God can do to help, this is active, faithful resistance. It is not where our resistance to evil ends, by any means, but it is certainly where it starts. For prayer – honest, unabashed prayer – is the spiritual grounding of everything else we do.
In one of those great Gospel paradoxes where everything is turned upside down, it is only through playing our broken selves and spirits before our God that we find the courage to stand
back up and continue living as Gospel people. It is only by getting on our knees that we receive the strength to get up off of them.
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? [Pause] There is plenty to fear. Our psalmist knew that. We know that. But friends – fellow disciples of Christ – wait for the Lord. Keep going through the motions. Be strong, and let your heart take courage! For I still believe that we shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Thanks be to God.