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let us pray may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight our rock and our Redeemer amen um welcome everyone and welcome to those of you on the Zoom as well uh my title for the sermon today is going to be an alternative source of self-esteem so Psalm 130 I invite you to read along in your bulletin as I preach this sermon you might want to refer to it as we go along because I'll kind of go through it step by step we cannot put limitations on the mercy of God or the mercies of God This Psalm exists in a moment when penitence and worship ride the same breath. It's about waiting with a new attitude of hope in the midst of the challenges that you face.

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It's about a belief that God hears what you're going through. So let's start with the structure of the Psalm. it begins with the nature of a cry in verses one and two double exclamation points in my Bible and then it turns to the nature of God in verse three and four it gives us that powerful metaphor of the people who watch for the morning in verse five and six and returns to God's nature as the source of hope in verse seven and eight according to the Psalm our need and God's provision match perfectly in an inverse relationship to one another this Psalm is part of the song of ascents and it was sung or chanted as part of those necessary yearly pilgrimages to Jerusalem uh where the where families would walk up to Jerusalem

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Our family walked up to the top of the Guadalupe mountain this January, and I learned a lot about the heights from that experience. I'd like to imagine what it would have been like to chant these as family groups as a way to reinterpret their world. This Psalm stands apart from the other Psalms of Ascent in its note of supplication and its prayer for penitence and a relief from sins. Really, it's the only psalm that's a psalm of lament, whereas most of the...

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Psalms are psalms of lament. So indeed, from a reform perspective, it might prompt us to ask ourselves, to what degree do we have to confess to God before we're ready to worship? And what sense does this Psalm of waiting make for us in the ways that we take pilgrimage? What work does it do in its own biblical context?

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and sometimes simply praying a prayer like this can helpfully orient us towards worshiping God that happened to me as I was preparing for this sermon I would say praying praying this Psalm repeatedly okay let's begin at the beginning the Psalm begins with the memorable phrase out of the depths which stands in tension with this pilgrimage upwards towards success that everybody seems to be on The word depths might mean death or destruction. They might mean the distance between God and ourselves. Some of us need to be encouraged to spend time with the depths, but others need to be invited out of the depths for the while.

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They're all too familiar. When I think about my own life, sometimes I was in the depths without knowing it, and only can say that looking backward. I can imagine many of you grappling with the anxiety of this time, the health concerns that you're facing, the uncertainty, might relate to this notion of being face-to-face with death and destruction. And just getting started with the depths, simply naming the depths, is a strength for us.

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Eugene Peterson reminds us in his book, a long obedience in the same direction interpreting the Psalms of ascent that our place in the depths is not out of bounds to God the second part of the Psalm is about our iniquities and God's forgiveness maybe this is the most uncomfortable part of the text the Psalms remind us repeatedly that God is holy and we are dust beautiful sacred God imaging dust I was wondering what this ascent community needed forgiveness for the ancient community going up the Psalm of Ascents and what we need forgiveness for now the modern hearers of the Psalm and this leads us into different kinds of sin right personal social and As Serene Jones reminds us in her feminist theology, there's the sin of pride, which is a risk for many, and also the sin of self-abasement, which is a risk for some.

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And Greer Ann Wang In, in her chapter in Injustice and the Care of Souls-- I had to get a pastoral care text in here somewhere-- describes doing theology from the point of view of the sinned against as fundamentally a new category in our sin talk. I was thinking that one of our iniquities might be a tendency to take violence into our own hands, or to surround ourselves with weapons and the fear that inspires us to use them. But even as I say that, I'm thinking those of us in our society who are forced to lift those weapons are often the most marginalized in a way. I wasn't going to get into politics.

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That's all for today. Fundamentally, I was thinking that God would have to decide what our iniquities are. We cannot put limits on the mercies of God. The logic of this Psalm reminds us that God redeems us from our sins because it is in God's nature to do so.

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Karl Barth describes the nature of the redeeming God in this way, only slightly edited to take out the male language for God. Quote, The mercy of God lies in God's readiness to share in all God's being and doing. It lies, therefore, in God's will, springing from the depths of God's nature and characterizing it, to take the initiative, God's self, for the removal of our distress. End quote.

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Both marking iniquities and redemption belong in God's job description. We might say the qualities and nature of God provides a resting place for us as we await God's redemption. And conversely, the nature of our iniquities is marked by God's presence to us in them. Ourselves redeemed from our iniquities is an alternative source of self-esteem, and it's the beginning of all of our movements for social justice.

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Now to the topic of waiting in the Psalm. We want the sense from God that waiting is worthwhile at all, and we want to encourage this attitude of waiting, and if possible, distinguish it from its weaker counterparts. Early on in college, I read Thomas Keating's Open Mind and Open Heart and really discovered my own adult faith through the practice of contemplative prayer. When we look for what a faithful attitude of waiting might be, just a push in the right direction of encouragement could help.

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It is certainly possible that waiting with such a focused purpose for God to ask could change the waiting person in the process, so the same concerns aren't there any longer. The third part of the Psalm is about waiting, and its repetitions tune the body to wait. Its repetitions encourage an act of waiting, and its repetitions center around the trust in God's word. And this made me think of God's words of the prophets and how hope came to people because God's word was present in situations of injustice.

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Repeating verses 5 and 6 of the Psalm over and over again could foster an attitude of waiting. It could, maybe like contemplative prayer kind of, actively solder the body and mind together through the breath. What does those who watch for the morning mean? I remember hearing the biblical scholar Kathleen O'Connor teaching a passage about this in Sunday school in Atlanta when one of the class participants, an unhoused gentleman, stated that he knew what those who watched for the morning were.

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They were the homeless people on the street like himself. This made complete sense to him. What is waiting all about psychologically? The psychoanalyst and pediatrician D.W.

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Winnicott suggested, It's a joy to be hidden, but it's a disaster not to be found. There's several potential disasters here, right? We could lose faith in God, or we could lose faith in wanting to be found. What's in our minds as we picture ourselves waiting for God?

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In her wonderful book, The Birth of the Living God, Anna Maria Rizzuto interviews psychiatric patients and has them draw their image of God. One of her fundamental insights as a clinician was that people's image of God, whether we find God present or loving, influential, providential in our life, could change across the lifespan. And recent research also suggests that people with damaged attachment relationships also might go through more dramatic religious conversions as adults.

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Waiting for God can be a profound moment, but we urgently want to believe that God listens and responds to our attitude of waiting. How is waiting for the Lord different from waiting for other things? And how would we know if we had waited long enough for God? Would we get what we want, or would something within our wanting change?

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The final verses proclaim the location of hope in Israel's redemption from sin. It's important, of course, to emphasize that Israel, written of in this text, is different from the modern-day state of Israel. We've seen how the qualities and nature of God provide a resting place for us as we wait for God's redemption, and also how the nature of our iniquities is marked by God's presence to us in them. But the final note of this psalm is one of hope.

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And this hope is a hope in God and God's hesed or steadfast love. So Thornton Wilder describes the nature of hope in this way. Hope is a projection of the imagination. So is despair.

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Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees. Hope is an energy, and it arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them. In response to hope, the imagination is aroused to explore every possible issue, to try every door, to fit together even the most heterogeneous pieces of the puzzle. After the solution has been found, it's difficult to recall the steps taken.

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So many of them are just below the level of consciousness. So I just want to share a brief story from my personal life that illustrates this aspect of redeeming hope and redeeming, especially in the face of death and destruction. And this story is shared with permission, in case you were wondering. I'm a pretty bad gardener, but there are a few plants that I care about.

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And one of them during this winter's freeze is a kefir lime tree, which is kind of a plant that's associated with the foods of Southeast Asia, and it mattered a lot to me. And I left it out during this most recent freeze, and it just instantly was blasted. And I thought to myself, this is over.

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You know, I could see the dead-- I could see the dead leaves papery thin and just kept removing them. And so I finally just, you know, threw it in the compost bin. And Carolyn said to me, she saw a little green in the stem, and she said to me, You know, that still might be alive, and why don't you put it in a pot with some compost, last year's death, and Just let the rain fall on it like it needs to, and maybe there'll be a chance for life to spring again from this moment of death and destruction.

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Y'all, this tree really means a lot to me. I can't even tell you how sad I was when it died. And so, sure enough, taking back the branches, cutting away all the excess, and then there's these tiny shoots of green, like entirely new plants coming off the stem. these little moments of hope, almost accidental grace, but a real vote for life in the face of all death and destruction and giving life a chance to thrive, an opportunity for life to happen again.

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So this prayer, where penitence and worship ride the same breath, occurs in the Psalm of Ascents as they're meant to be chanted as part of that long journey towards obedience. And you would get to pray it again and again, the same way each year. In his Guide to the Psalms, Eugene Peterson reminds us that discipleship is a long journey.

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It's fundamentally different from the quick fixes our culture sells us. He says, There's little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship of something like discipleship. So, since it belongs with discipleship, something practiced over and over again, this prayer, in a cyclical way, requires a different kind of imagination. It's more like long-distance planning rather than short-distance efforts.

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In his book, Finding Jesus in the Storm, Scottish theologian John Swinton describes turning to the Psalms of lament during times of trial, and he wonders why more people of faith don't make use of them. Because the Psalms really help us struggle with God more directly. They help us name in the language of faith what's bringing us both despair and hope. We cannot put limits on the mercies of God.

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Let us turn to God again and again in this season to find hope in the midst of despair and to find a river of peace that can hold us still in the deepest storms. We cannot know what God has for us in the future, but we can keep hoping because God has redeemed us and continues to redeem us. Amen.