Psalm 31 "We're Still Here!" Scott Hoezee

Well, here we are on this first Lord's day of the new year, century, and millennium. Despite computer glitches and human evil, a ripple or two of panic, some accidents, some dreadful incidents as well as all the silly merrymaking which people could muster for a few hours all over this globe, we're still here. In just two days Y2K has gone from an odd-looking combination of symbols to our reality. For the next little while, when writing out checks, we'll all be erasing the numbers "1,9", grinning to ourselves at how hard it is to break the habit of assuming the year is still 19-something.

Beyond that, though, we'll soon enough get used to the number 2000. Someone will come up with a way to refer to the new decade we're in. The 90's will give way to some new shorthand way to refer to this next ten-year stretch. Then we will start to look for the ways this decade is distinct from the last, even as we like to think the 90's were distinct from the 80's. But what it all comes down to is the simple fact that 2000 is our reality. Tomorrow we go back to work and if it now and again seems strange to refer to the twentieth century in the past tense, we'll get used to that, too. Because it's time to stop thinking about time and get on with life. We're still here.

But this morning we are not just "here" in the twenty-first century but specifically you and I are here in this sanctuary. We are here in what we believe is the presence of God. And we've come here, most of us at least, not because the new year has changed our hearts or increased our spiritual thirst. We're here for the same reason we've always come: because we believe in God.

Certainly we all now and again have our doubts, be they fleeting moments or long dark nights of the soul. But in general, when we step back and survey the broad contours of sacred sojourns through this life, the one unbroken line that we can see is our rock-bottom belief that there really is a God and that he really did come down here once upon a millennium in the form of a man called Jesus.

It's a daring set of beliefs. Throughout most of history it has even been radical to believe it. Almost no one who has ever had faith has claimed it is a natural, obvious, or easy thing to embrace. Yet we do believe. Most days we believe right down to our socks that Jesus is Lord. We render up prayers to him without thinking. We get our burger and fries and pause in our hearts to say "Thank You." We kiss a loved one at the door before he or she heads off for work and we don't even have the door bolted shut again before we furtively plead for this one's safety on the roads.

That's just how many of us think, and at least some of us cannot remember a time when we thought any differently. And so we're back here this morning in the presence of God. We're still here because we believe God is still here. In Psalm 31:5 the psalmist refers to God in a way that anchors not only this psalm but the whole of our faith. The psalmist commits his spirit to God because Yahweh is, he says, "the God of truth."

In Hebrew the phrase is el emet, and the word emet is a root word for "amen." The God on whom this psalmist stakes his past, present, and future is the "Amen God!" He is "the God of truth" not just in the sense that he does not lie but in the sense of being faithful, reliable, steady, and sure. God is stable. In a world where people can be so fickle, where once-good friends can drift apart and where sometimes even the most trusted of confidants betray our trust--in such a world cynicism is easy, trust is hard. So much so that we perhaps have a difficult time really conceiving of Someone who just flat out will never let us go.

But that is the foundation on which Psalm 31 is built but also on which everything we believe is built. It is the basis for this psalm's two most striking lines. A good deal of the psalms use somewhat formulaic language. Phrases like "being handed over to enemies," God's being "a refuge and a rock," asking God "have mercy on me"--all these are quite common throughout the Psalter. It seems like certain catch phrases were so conventional that all Hebrew poets made use of them.

But here and there in the psalms there are phrases found nowhere else. Psalm 31 has two such lines in verses 5 and 15. The more famous of the two is verse 5. Because Jesus quoted this with his dying breath in Luke's gospel, this verse tends to pop out at Christian readers. But even had Jesus not spoken these words, they would still be striking. "Into your hands I commit my spirit." A similar idea comes in verse 15: "My times are in your hands." The spirit and the times of this psalmist are placed into God's hands. But what does that mean? What did the psalmist convey with these words and, assuming we would like to adopt a similar view for our own lives, what might they mean for us?

Let's begin with verse 5, which has come to be understood differently than it was originally intended. Since these were Jesus' dying words, we assume this verse is meant only for the moment before death--a pious way to depart this life. And indeed this phrase did come to be used just that way. The first martyr Stephen said this in Acts as he was being stoned to death as did the famous early church martyr Polycarp as he was being burned at the stake. Taken this way verse 5 looks like a kind of holy epitaph.

Curiously, however, that is not the way it is used in Psalm 31. Instead this is very much a plea not to die! This psalmist is in trouble. Evil people plotting schemes of death surround him. So in verse 5 he cries out, "Look, O God! I'm taking my ruach, my very breath, and placing it into your hands. Keep this breath in my body, O Yahweh, O reliable and steady and faithful God! Don't let them take my breath away from me!"

Similarly in verse 15: couched in a context which indicates that life had gotten about as bad as it can get, the psalmist declares that his times are also in God's hands. First his breath and now his times are cupped in God's hands. Hemmed in by people who don't believe in God, who ridicule the psalmist for his faith, this poet hurls everything to God.

What's more, this psalmist is bold enough to tell God that what he expects God to do with his breath and times is preserve them. He's counting on God to quell the lying tongues around him, to squash the evil ones who wish him harm. He's putting God on notice that God's own faithfulness and mercy are on trial here. He expects results.

And apparently God come through. The psalm concludes in verses 21-24 with words which make it clear that these prayers were answered. You can envision this psalm being read in a Temple worship service by the psalmist as a personal testimony. He would try to whip up the faithful by giving his autobiography. The final line of this psalm has the psalmist essentially saying, "Just look at me! If God could get me out of the jam I was in, he can do the same for you! So thank God for what he did for me and, while you're at it, take heart! He may well do the same for you one day!"

Psalm 31 is a typical biblical tribute to God. In one form or another, most of us could repeat these words from our own experience. Whether we've ever had a situation exactly as grim and dangerous as the one that appears to be described here, many of us have at one time or another felt pretty desperate. Maybe you had a troubled pregnancy and spent months fretting about the well-being of the baby in your womb. Or maybe you had a child in the hospital or a spouse undergoing a scary surgery or treatment. Maybe you've felt depressed and at the end of your rope, stuck in an unfulfilling career and a less-than-happy marriage.

And for at least some of us those have been the times when we have thrown ourselves on God's mercy. When situations are quite literally "out of our hands," we find ourselves throwing everything into God's hands. When my daughter was in the hospital with a serious bone infection some years ago, I well remember the evening she had a violently adverse reaction to a medication. I went crazy with anxiety and a sense of helplessness. I just had to get out of the room and so marched into an empty stairwell and pounded my fists against the concrete walls in fear and frustration. But when I finished that pounding, I opened up my clenched fists and heaved empty hands toward heaven. I had to put it into God's hands. Mine were empty and powerless.

Again, perhaps many of us have such stories to tell and perhaps many of us can end those tales as happily as the poet of Psalm 31. Even so, when we read a psalm like this one, can we avoid thinking about all those times when deliverance did not come? All we need to do is look around this sanctuary today and we find the air thick with memories, some of them bad memories. We see the marriages we committed into God's hands but that ended in divorce and mangled hearts anyway. We see the widows whose mates were not healed. We see the couples whose covenant children we prayed over but who nevertheless now take a hostile attitude toward the church and all it stands for.

What do we do with Psalm 31? Can we trust God with our body's breath and our life's times even though things may not click together so neatly for us? Can we still join the psalmist in calling God the God of utter reliability, faithfulness, and stability when, as a matter of fact, we do not always get our prayers answered the way we want?

If the Christian faith were a matter of seeking only a pain-free life of health, wealth, and success, then every counter example of such a life would serve to diminish the trustworthiness of God. But a faith whose primary symbol is a cross can never be construed in such simple terms. Most of the time when we look at the cross, or when we ask the average Christian to express what the cross means, we say (or we hear others say) that what the cross means is "Jesus died for our sins." And that's true, of course.

But maybe we need to look at that cross and realize that what it also means is that there's more to God's ways with a fallen world than simple formulas, neat guarantees, or pat answers. The cross may be God's giant "No!" to sin, but it is also God's giant "No" to simplicity. The cross screams testimony to how complicated things can be, how deeply entrenched evil is, how perilous it can be for even the Son of God to enter this world. Even Jesus could not get off this planet with his every prayer answered and his life preserved.

Yet Jesus was resurrected and is alive today to proclaim that God is faithful. Even when the worst happens, even so we commit our entire selves to God's pierced hands. As we enter this new period of earthly time, we again commit our times to God's hands. We do so hoping that all will be well for us, believing that God is the one who has the power to make it well for us, but we commit our entire selves to God first and last because he is worthy of our faith, adoration, and our very selves. Maybe all will not be well, but we believe God is still worthy of our love.

Some years ago we looked at that well-known story from the Book of Daniel in which Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego get tossed into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down before Nebuchadnezzar's false god. Just before tossing them in, the king told the three boys they were in for it. They then replied, "O king, we believe that our God will deliver us from your furnace. But even if not, we will not abandon our God for your idol." But even if not. That's a true statement of faith in the God who we believe is so loving, so gracious, so finally determined to make all things new in his eternal kingdom that we commit ourselves to his tender hands even if the bottom falls out in various areas of our lives for now.

I sometimes have thought that if being a Christian were a ticket to earthly happiness and success, the world would be banging down our church doors to get in. If the children born to believers were always statuesque, handsome, beautiful, kind and never in trouble; if the businesses of Christians were always booming successes; if Christians either never got sick or always got healed when they did get sick; if Alzheimer's never hit our fellow believers and nursing homes were filled only with non-Christian people vegetating away their final years on this earth--if that were true, might it be the case that the world would hunger to get in on this action themselves?

Probably some would. But I've come to suspect that even if all that were true, a lot of people still would remain outside the church. Those who did come in just to access a richer life would be doing so for the wrong reasons anyway, but I suspect that so long as we told the world that the only way we would baptize them was if they confessed their sins, embracing Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and the only way to salvation--so long as that remained the entry requirement, I suspect that a lot of people in this world would say, "No thanks! Handsome kids and a hearty bank account or no, I will not subject myself to your mysticism. I will not associate myself with fundamentalists past and present or with the intolerance which criticizes Buddhists and Muslims who seek their own way to the Divine. You can keep your Christian ways. I want nothing to do with this Jesus or what you think he asks of people."

And the reason some, maybe many, people would react that way would be because at rock bottom they do not believe in or trust God. Whether or not he would make them successful in the short- or long-run, their spiritual blindness would make them shy away from entrusting this God with their breath, their destiny, the times of their lives. They would feel safer staying as in control of their own lives as they could.

Believers are not guaranteed that everything in this life will end as happily as Psalm 31. Yet our faith carries with it that aspect of "but even if not." We think and talk that way only because we love God and we love God because the cross shows us how much God loves us. We give him our very selves because he is worthy. He is reliable, faithful, and true. He holds our spirits and our times even as he holds the entire universe together in hope.

He cares for us and loves us in more ways than we know, attending to and answering prayers in ways we cannot see much less give him proper thanks for. When the bottom falls out on this or that part of our lives, he's with us then, too, in the valley of the shadow, reminding us that he's been to death and back himself and so can preserve us as well through the very worst things life sometimes dishes out to us.

We can say with the rest of the world "Happy New Year," and we can hope and certainly also pray it will be happy, too. But as people of faith what we really more properly say to one another on this day and always is "Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord!" Be strong and take heart. We're still here. So is God. Into his hands we commit our all. Amen.