SING OF HEALING

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Psalm 30

July 8, 2007

Psalm 30

¹ I will extol you, O LORD, for you have drawn me up,

and did not let my foes rejoice over me.

² O LORD my God, I cried to you for help,

and you have healed me.

³ O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol,

restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.

⁴ Sing praises to the LORD, O you his faithful ones,

and give thanks to his holy name.

⁵ For his anger is but for a moment;

his favor is for a lifetime.

Weeping may linger for the night,

but joy comes with the morning.

⁶ As for me, I said in my prosperity,

“I shall never be moved.”

⁷ By your favor, O LORD,

you had established me as a strong mountain;

you hid your face;

I was dismayed.

⁸ To you, O LORD, I cried,

and to the LORD I made supplication:

⁹ “What profit is there in my death,

if I go down to the Pit?

Will the dust praise you?

Will it tell of your faithfulness?

¹⁰ Hear, O LORD, and be gracious to me!

O LORD, be my helper!”

¹¹ You have turned my mourning into dancing;

you have taken off my sackcloth

and clothed me with joy,

¹² so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.

O LORD my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

I have a problem with rap music, and with hip-hop, and even with some current country music. My problem is that my ears aren’t fast enough. Contemporary songs spill out lyrics faster than my ears and mind can process them. I don’t doubt that there is meaning in there; I just can’t see the words in my head long enough to absorb it. By the time I have one line deciphered they are four verses further along. So I look ‘em up on the Internet—and sometimes I still don’t know what they say!

Here is a verse from a song from rapper Notorious B.I.G (and believe me, I had to look through a lot of his songs before I found one that was clean enough to recite in church);

You - ringin’ bells with bags from Chanel

Baby Benz, traded in your Hyundai Excel

Fully equipped, CD changer with the cell

She beeped me, meet me at twelve

Made no sense to me until I came across a translation of the lyrics by an Oakland high school student for a school assignment. Here is what the song means: “Despite the fact that you attempted to win her at her doorstep with bags full of expensive clothes and a car (the lower end model Mercedes Benz which you financed by signing over your current vehicle) containing an expensive stereo and a cellular phone, your woman has contacted me through my pager indicating that we should rendezvous at midnight.”

The original had better rhythm! Let’s see if we can translate into understandable English this song called Psalm 30 that has been in printed form now for hundreds of years.

First point from our song, God does get angry. Now there is a scary thought! The Puritan preacher

Jonathan Edwards in his infamous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” told his congregations that we were all suspended over the fires of hell by a thin rope which was frayed and rotted and that God hovered over us ready to cut the rope with a razor, a sharp razor. Well, I pity poor Jonathan’s audiences and even Jonathan himself. That is a mighty harsh image of God with which to live and not one that would inspire much allegiance from us. Conversely, in the Psalms and in quotes from the New Testament most of the descriptions of God use words such as, “steadfast, loving, compassionate, one who rescues, redeems, saves, protects.” Does God get angry with us? Your little boy insists on pouring the glass of milk for himself, “I can do it! I can do it, Daddy!” Wanting to bolster his self-image, you have a momentary lapse of sanity and allow him to pour the milk. Of course he rests the heavy jug on the lip of the glass, which then tips over and slides away, which causes the jug to slip out of his hands. Milk is all over the table and the jug is belching more of it onto the floor. By the time you grab the jug and heave a deep sigh at the mess, the boy has run outside and is chasing the dog through the flower bed you spent three hours planting the day before. Now…tell me that you still love him. Of course you do. One day he will grow up to be a responsible citizen--and not just responsible for all the messes and crises. But tell me also if you are not angry with him. Of course you are. He is acting irresponsibly and thoughtlessly. Which impulse is stronger in you? The love or the anger? Your anger is but for a moment (well, six weeks max), but your love is for a lifetime. “For God’s anger is but for a moment; his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning..” God gets angry when we act irresponsibly and thoughtlessly, but God is more love than anger.

Second point, God needs us to get the word out. I have never had much luck bargaining with God. You know how it goes. “Oh, God, I know I didn’t study the Driving Manual, but please, please, please let me be able to answer all the questions on this test and get my driver’s license in this state and not get totally humiliated that I am an adult who has been driving for 20 years but can’t pass a simple exam that they give to 16-year-old kids! Please God!” Not that that ever really happened to me of course…. But you get the point: bargaining rarely works because we have little to offer God in trade. But the psalmist may have hit on a winner. He writes, “What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!” And it obviously worked since this is a thanks psalm that begins with the singer saying, “O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.” Could it be that God needs us to praise him? Is that assignment so important that God would forgive the arrogance of this psalmist who claimed in his prosperous days that he had done right proud by himself and that nothing could ever rattle his world? And if it is that important that God have servants to spread the word and sing God’s praises, had we not better get about doing exactly that? Venus Williams won at Wimbledon yesterday and afterward got in a few pieces of praise in an interview televised worldwide. “God has been so good to me in my life,” she said softly and sincerely. Didn’t say that God had added power to her vicious backhand, didn’t claim that God guided her blistering serves to those hard-to-return corners, just simply proclaimed the goodness of God, the importance of God to her. You may shake your head at athletes that do “God promos” after victories but sulk silently after defeats, but we have to ask ourselves, when have we shown that much exuberance, that mush excitement, that much enthusiasm about God? We best be letting some of that come out frequently. It matters to God.

Third point, (sermons are reputedly supposed to be three points and a poem. We’ll let the rap verse serve as the poem.) third point, God does heal. Forehead-slapping, faith-healing fakers give the concept of healing a bad name. But God does indeed heal. The psalmist says that God saved him from the Pit. Some scholars take that to mean from a severe illness. Others interpret it as rescuing the nation of Israel from its own self-centered ways. We could take it also in modern understanding as pulling the sufferer out of existential despair or meaninglessness, hopelessness, that limbo that we fall into where we can’t figure out what the purpose is anymore. Like the psalmist, we are usually responsible for getting ourselves into the Pit by our lost humility and our ego-inflation. I guarantee those will make you sick. But if we give God a tiny opening, then God-given changes can occur in our lives, healing can be ours.

Robin was only 14 but he was an alcoholic already. Uncontrollable to his parents, unable to see value in anything, his life positioned in opposition, an anti existence, he spent his days skipping school and his nights sleeping under the pool table in the local beer hall. But a few years later he got interested in a girl, a girl who was very interested in God, who praised God with her voice and her actions. It was the opening God needed. God healed Robin, brought him from the Pit into the pew, from under the pool table to a place at the Lord’s Table. Do you know the liturgy for the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, in the Roman Catholic Church. The priest says: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit, Your death brought life to the world. By Your Body and Blood free me from all my sins, and from every evil. Keep me faithful to Your teaching, and never let me be parted from You.” And then the priest holds up the bread and cup and proclaims: “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to His Supper.” And all the people reply: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”

Our God to whom we cry, our God whose love overrides his anger, our God who delights in our praise, our God turns us from sorrowful mourners into joyful dancers because he loves us. Our God heals. And that’s a song we can sing.