Hope Beyond Hope
Hope Beyond Hope The Rev. Bingham Powell We don’t talk enough about the Psalms, so today we are going to talk about the Psalms. The Psalms are an important book in the Bible that are unlike any other. We read a Psalm every single week. It is the only book in the Bible that we do that with. We read a Gospel every week, but there are four of them to pick from. The Psalms, in their entirety, are found in the Book of Common Prayer. It takes up over 200 pages. It would be a lot thinner if we didn’t have the psalter in there. But we do because it is so important to our faith and to our worship. The Psalms were important to Jesus. He quoted from them frequently, including on the cross. He very much understood his life in light of the Psalms. Many people throughout generations of the faith have found the Psalms the center of their spiritual life. Almost every monastic community, if not every single one of them, puts the Psalms in the center of their worshiping life. They have various cycles of how often they will read the Psalms that go anywhere from once a month to once a day. Can you imagine reading all the Psalms every single day? The Psalms are unique and special. They are sometimes called “the prayer book of the Bible.” The Psalms also have a different place within the canon. We generally say that Scripture is about God speaking to us, that we are meant to hear the word of God through Scripture. That is a complicated sentence that we can’t unpack today. But we will say that generally God is speaking to us through Scripture. The Psalms have some element of that, but more than anything else, it is about us speaking to God. In the Psalms we will find people bringing the full range of emotion and experience to that conversation with God, from the lowest lows to the highest highs, from moments of elation and joy and celebration down to moments of despair and anxiety and fear and anger. There is a group of Psalms called Imprecatory Psalms which are all about violence and bringing vengeance on people. Those are not meant to be a moral model for us, they are not aligned with God’s dream of a reconciled world. We don’t read them on Sunday, but they are there and they show us that we can bring our full selves, even those messy bits, to God. We don’t need to hide any of it from God. Every moment of frustration, anger, and doubt we can bring to God, just as the Psalms do. The lead singer of the band U2, Bono, wrote an introduction to the Psalms in a book a couple of decades ago. He said that the Psalms are like the blues. If you know the blues, you know the Psalms, and you know Bono is on to something. Our Psalm today is Psalm 40. Speaking of U2, there is a song called “Forty”, which is based on this Psalm. Psalm 40 begins by talking about this moment of despair, very low moments that the Psalmist has been through. It talks about it in the past tense, it talks in terms of having gotten out of it. So it is a celebratory way to talk about it, but in the way the Psalmist talks about it, we know it was a very low moment of despair, a moment of mire and clay, a moment of being in a desolate pit, and then being pulled up on to the highest cliff with sure footing. It must have been really bad, whatever the Psalmist went through. In the very first line it says, “I waited patiently upon the Lord,” and I think it is a most misleading translation. It sounds like I’m patient, everything is fine, God can take all the time he wants because I’m a patient person. But that is not what this means. It is not what the Hebrew says. What we have here is a waiting that is very deep. One translation reads, I waited and waited and waited. I think that is a good translation. The word patient also a sense of hope to it. The Jewish Publication Society translation says “I hope in the Lord,” which is a better translation than “I waited patiently.” Personally, I think we should translate it “I waited in hope for the Lord,” because it would bring out both elements of waiti