Where Do I Go to Give Up?
A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter at Centenary United Methodist Church Metuchen, New Jersey August 9, 2009
Text: Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the LORD!
For with the LORD there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities. —Psalm 130, NRSV
There’s a classic Peanuts cartoon that has Charlie Brown sitting at Lucy’s psychiatric booth—you know, the one with the infamous banner, “Psychiatric Help, 5¢”. After Lucy dis-penses one of her typically twisted diagnoses, poor old Charlie Brown is left sitting there, head in his hands. With a forlorn look on his face, he implores the cosmos above, “Where do I go to give up?”
“Where do I go to give up?” It’s a question many others have asked. Maybe even you, at times. Sometimes we’ve tried everything and we find ourselves at the end of our ropes. Some sage has advised: “When you find yourself at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” But even that doesn’t work some days. Nothing seems to help when cares and problems loom omi-nously on every side, and they seem insurmountable.
“Where do I go to give up?” It’s very much in the style of the question being asked by the author of Psalm 130. Some of you may recall that this was the Psalm put to music that our for-bear in the Methodist faith heard when he went to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London for worship early on the morning of May 24, 1738. Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! the choir sang. And for John Wesley, tormented in soul and mind as he sought a deeper relationship with God, it was a cry that echoed the one welling up from deep within his own longings.
Later that day—in the evening—John Wesley found himself at a Moravian Bible study on Aldersgate Street. He had gone reluctantly…little imagining that God was about to answer that cry from out of the depths. That was the night and the place Wesley testified that he felt his heart “strangely warmed,” and knew with every fiber of his being that God had indeed redeemed him from his own sin and brokenness, and set him on the path toward a new faith and life. In one sense, that was the night John Wesley answered the question “Where do I go to give up?” by turning toward God at Aldersgate Street. That was the night, my friends, when Methodism was given its full birth.
However, Psalm 130 is not really a testimony to new birth as much as it is a raw cry of grief and loss. It has been used for centuries at funeral and memorial services. The psalmist of-fers us a powerful lament. The psalmist gives us permission to be unafraid to wail out to God from our deepest places of grief, anger, fear and frustration. The Psalm may have originally been drawn from the agony of King David upon hearing the news of the senseless and humiliating death of his estranged son, Absalom. As fraught with conflict as his relationship with his young son might have been, the King begins to speak from his depths. He laments. He wails. His keen-ing can be heard down the ages. “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!” David wishes a substitutionary moment—oh that he could have died instead, a cry for some divine intervention that would preserve the life of his now lifeless boy.
What parent is not stunned into silence at the telling of this kind of story? What person among us does not want to cover his or her ears at the sound of such agony? Out of the depths David laments the death of his beloved son. Such grief is often too difficult to bear.
As a pastor of the church, I have the awesome responsibility—the deep mysterious honor and privilege—to attend death. I do so by virtue of my office, as all pastors do. At the time of especially tragic deaths I have discovered that platitudes falter, that language stutters, that death threatens our capacity to be expressive, to intone our lament, to raise our supplication for the ear of God—to dare ask for the presence of God.
All of us have likely experienced such tragic loss at some point in our lives. The prayers we mumbled into the silence of our terror and our fear, prayed out of the depths of our tradition, became an echo of David’s cry to God from the depths—this holy place of deep truth, deep emo-tion, and deep reality. From this place of pain we stand in our depths and ask, wail, lament, com-plain, weep, hope—God, are you there? God, are you listening? Dear God, I am crying to you from out of the depths. And sometimes, ironically, that is our most holy place for conversations with God.
But this Psalm encompasses more than a cry of grief born out of tragic death. This lament finds its voice any time we have felt overwhelmed with despair, hobbled with hopelessness, separated from God by our own actions or by the extraordinary conditions that have thrust them-selves into our ordinary lives.
In their book Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat recount the experience of author and Presbyterian clergyman Frederick Buechner who, in his autobiographical book, Telling Secrets, “breaks silence about a family secret: how his teenage daughter struggled with anorexia. There came a day when he, himself, was in the pits of despair, worried sick that his daughter would never get well again. But then, in a dark night, came a message of hope, from an unusual quarter.”
Buechner writes: “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
I wait for the LORD, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning. (Psalm 130:1, 5-6, NRSV)
“I wait for the LORD…and in his word I hope.” The word “to wait” in Hebrew can also mean “to hope.” In this context, waiting is an intimate part of hoping. And our waiting is not without confidence: Like the sentinel (“watchman”) who waits for morning through the darkest night, with a certainty and confidence that the dawn will come. “Whatever the morning may bring in our imagining, it will come. The psalmist suggests that hope in the Lord, waiting for the Lord, is never in vain.”
Many years ago I was among a large group of pastors before whom a colleague shared openly with us about the depths of an especially difficult time of deep despair. His life had been in a shambles, his wife had left, his calling was in doubt…and to some degree in jeopardy. He was barely clinging to his own sanity. It had been the darkest period in his life. He said that he had especially come to dread the darkness of night when it surrounded him. So he would stand at the window of his home every evening as dusk approached and pray to God that the darkness would not come. “My prayers were never answered,” he confessed. However, in the still-dark hours of early morning, he would also stand at that very same window and pray that the dawn would come. “That,” he affirmed, “was a prayer that was always answered.”
As that troubled pastor moved forward toward healing and redemption, he discovered the powerful promise of the psalmist: For with the LORD there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem. No pit into which we may dig ourselves—no pit in which we may find ourselves thrust by the vicissitudes of life—is ever so deep as to be able to separate us from the steadfast love of God. That is our hope. God is filled with “plenteous redemption” and has “un-failing love,” and so we hope.
Out of the depths the psalmist tells the sacred story of our human experience. Out of the depths we speak the ineffable holy language of grief and fear, of hope and promise. It may be the place of our most sacred and honest conversations with God. From out of our depths we may keen and wail in the face of death and torment. Yet from out of our depths—the place we go to give up to this God of steadfast love—we discover the dawn of hope and the conviction that “morning”—a new beginning—will indeed come.
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PRAYER
Grant to us, Lord we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for-ever and ever. Amen.
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