CALLING FROM THE PIT

A Sermon On

PSALM 13


PREPARED BY

KEN GEHRELS

PASTOR

CALVIN CHRISTIAN REFORMED CHURCH

NEPEAN, ONTARIO



Perhaps you've heard about, or maybe even seen excerpts from the recent report that came out on the job situation here in Canada. The media have been reporting on it this week. They've talked about an increasing number of people working longer hours for fewer returns. We've heard of Increased productivity demanding more output from fewer personnel.
Talk shows featured the topic - they've mentioned higher stress levels. And how true that all is. Talk to counsellors, pastors, doctors and others in the helping professions and they'll all tell you about seeing people frazzled right out, drained empty , stretched beyond their limits to the point of snapping. Things build up, get too much, and the stabilizing props get knocked out from under us.

We come crashing down. We are left to flounder.
It can be a terrible experience. Those of you that have been there can testify to that - right? Can be enough to make a person panic.
Despair.
Convinced you're all alone - completely!
No way out.
Only going to get worse.

It can range in intensity.
As simple as an overnight thing that hits at 2am and disappears when the sun rises.
As deep as a full-blown clinical depression with which one may be left to wrestle for years, perhaps never fully breaking free.

There are all kinds of different triggers.
Sometimes they come when we are simply tired.
Sometimes conditions simply overwhelm - the stress gets too high, circumstances are too many and too mixed up, social forces too confusing.
Sometimes we get sick - the body is drained, chemicals or hormones fall out of the delicate balance that God designed. And our thought life and emotions are directly affected, right down to the pit of our soul.
Sometimes it is a direct attack from the realm of darkness, where Satanic forces of evil crowd in and try to destroy us.

This morning we meet King David caught in the middle of a situation that had pushed him into a corner. He felt as though life itself were caving in and smothering him.
Somehow, for reasons not revealed to us, life has caught up with David.
So the bitter, desperate refrain sounds in vv.1,2: "How Long.... How Long... How Long.... How Long...." grows in intensity until it reaches the boiling point.
How Long, Oh Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?

It's not that David was beginning to doubt in the existence of God. He KNEW God existed. But he felt that his cries bounced off a closed door, that his heavenly Father had turned his back on him.
It was, for David, the sort of time when it seemed as if any personal relationship between him and God had clouded over, and he was left alone, surrounded by a damp blanket of mist.
Have you ever heard yourself or someone close to you groan, "God has left me here to suffer on my own. I pray for relief, but it never comes. I guess He just isn't listening to me anymore."
If you have, please understand that you're not the first one to experience this - you're not a terrible heathen; you're not crazy. Scripture is filled with the cries of people who go through times like this (e.g. Ps42.9; 44.24; Lam 5.20).

Again - not that God does abandon people. The only time that happened was when He abandoned His Son hanging on a cross, leaving him totally alone to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Because Jesus was forsaken we will never be forsaken, rejected, abandoned.
In Christ we have absolute, guaranteed acceptance by the Father and the certain presence of His Holy Spirit.
It's just that sometimes in the dark, swirling moments of life we can't always see or feel that. And in those times our great spiritual enemy, the Devil, tries to deceive into believing that as truth -- that, in spite of Jesus' great sacrifice, God < I>HAS abandoned us. Maybe He's with everyone else. But He's abandoned us -- Satan tries to get us to believe that false lie.

So David cries, "How long?"How long must I wrestle with my thoughts? How long will my enemy triumph over me? How long must I wallow in the despondent slough of confused emotions & thoughts? No matter how hard David struggles and tries, he can come up with no plan of escape from his predicament. He wrestles (v.2) with those thoughts.
Have you felt them? The thoughts which try to convince you that God no longer loves you, that you deserve your atrocious fate, that He must be punishing you for something - been there?
Do you recognize the feeling - emotionally bankrupt, with no reserves?
You feel as if you cannot do anything alone anymore.
You're barely limping along, and can see no way out.

Well, David sure knew that feeling, and in the midst of it he calls out - "Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death...."
We don't know the immediate circumstances, but we do know that much of the stress in David's life came from people who were on the attack, out to kill him. Perhaps here the threat to his life was very literal.
Perhaps it was a figurative one: where the despair had grown to the point that David would have been quite happy to see the end of life, or where it felt as if he were dead already - dead inside - walking dead, no energy, no drive, no action. Just a damp , cold existence.

Now --- we could move quickly on to v.5.
But let's not. Too often we do that in the church -- we skim past the struggles of people. We hurry up to patch together solutions; to put Band-Aids on the hurts; to silence the hurts.
Notice that 2/3's of this psalm focus on the struggle. Only 1/3 is hope.

How about us?
Can we be at peace with sharing in each other's pain, with carrying the load together, with joining in the walk through the dark valleys, the way Jesus did throughout His life and ministry --rather than having to be ready with an immediate fix or Band-Aid or trying to shut down their cries of pain.
Something to consider as we do make the transition to verse 5, the point where somehow David comes to a recognition of God's goodness, His saving divine love through which hope once more comes to shine in his life.
Somehow David came to that recognition.
Maybe that recognition came through taking some time to evaluate the blessings and good things that God has given - a reality check of sorts to see again that, no, life is not only dark and gloomy. Maybe that's all it took.
Maybe it was much more. It could be that all the Psalmist had was the word of others and some distant memories of his own - memories of past times when God had acted in good ways for him or someone else. Maybe he simply had to muster the courage to make a choice, to take a leap of faith, to reach out for a hand and a hope -- a hand that's he isn't maybe even sure.... not right now, anyway.... that is there, but that he so desperately needs. Maybe it is a leap of trust made in the depths of darkness.
Refusing to surrender to that darkness and the victory of the enemy, he seeks to stand on the bedrock of God's faithful love to him."I trust in your unfailing love -- I'm going to trust.... I've got to trust, there's no other way." "That's where joy can be found." "If I'll ever sing again, it will only be because of God's goodness." Again - as with the circumstances that led to the writing of this song, we'll never know for sure. And it doesn't really matter.
How he gets there is not the point.
What matters is that he does end up in the presence, the life-giving presence of the only one who can save and rescue, who can bring life from death, light from darkness.
And, as a result, a new beginning is made possible. A small space opens up, large enough for God to rush in, and to move his life from lament to praise in a setting of new communion.

And that's where you and I finally can find hope in the midst of despair, some semblance of order when everything else is chaos, and the promise of new eternal life when all else in life seems headed towards decay and death.
So to Him we turn.

And yet, yet - even as we recognize that hope, that truth, that only source of life and light in a disappearing, stress-filled world,
yet
let's always remember that getting to that point is never easy, and sometimes is impossible to do on our own. We get so locked into our disease of depression, or the hopelessness of our circumstances, or so overwhelmed and drained by stress-filled life that we're stuck.
We become disconnected from the goodness of God.
We become unable to understand His ever-present, Fatherly care.
I saw the movie Alaska with the family this week. At one point the central character, a teenage boy, falls into raging rapids. He is swept along, pulled under, bashed against rocks, gasping, out of control. Several times he manages to splash towards the shore. But there are high rocks there. They are smooth, wet, slippery. And every time he falls back in and gets swept further along. Till suddenly a hand grasps his and pulls him free, the hand of a strong neighbour who had gone out in a search party looking for him.
Sometimes life can be like. The circumstances of the moment simply are overwhelming. They pull us under and bash us around. We need a strong hand to be there, a hand to pull us free.
That is the hand of Christ, the hand found in His body here on earth - the Church, the family and community of people who share the common bond of faith in God through Jesus.

As far as David goes the bible shows several examples of where prophets, priests, advisors and friends of David came to give advice or aid or support or strength at critical moments. They were his outside rescuers.
We are called to be outside rescuers to each other. When stressed out, burned out people can no longer see the LORD, we as a congregation have to dig in and become Jesus to that person.
We talk and read much in scripture about being the body of Christ, his arms and legs in this world. One of the tasks of the body is to minister to each other, to be instruments of healing. And no one needs that ministry, that support, that healing presence of non-judgemental fellow believers than a stressed-out, pushed-to-the-wire believer.
When the person cries out "Look on me and answer, O LORD my God!" then we, the body of Christ, his hands and feet and arms of love, look with love on that person and give all the care we possibly can.
When the person cries out, as David did, "answer me, O Lord my God", when it seems as though all they are hearing is God's condemning silence, then we, the ambassadors of Christ must be there in an openly loving and tenderly careful presence.

One person who has come through a clinical depression and wrote afterward about that experience said,
"The quiet, steady, non-condemning presence of the believer also provides a comfort that cannot be voiced. And when an agonizing question pops up, a believer's solid insight is like a rope flung to a drowning swimmer. He can bless the sick person with a tug of strength as she flounders in the murky waters of self-accusation, guilt, and hopelessness."
Lillian Grissen in The Banner Oct 14, 1985

And for that to happen, of course, we in the Church have to be constantly at work building bridges with each other, learning to trust each other rather than breaking trust and erecting barriers and walls.
Which can happen oh so quickly.
We build walls every time we break a confidence and tell someone -- even one person -- something that we were expected to keep to ourselves. We build walls every time we take up gossiping about someone. People see and hear that and think - "If they'll do that about Sandra, what do you suppose they'll say about me?" We build walls when we're quick with judgements about others' situations - "if Father had been around more, their son wouldn't be so delinquent." "If mother had been more caring her daughter wouldn't have entered a lesbian lifestyle." "Why can't he just let go of the past and get on with life?" Those barriers go up between the one making the comment and the one involved. But even more damaging, as people hear these sorts of things, and spread this kind of poison, the church is seen as a generally unsafe place to be -- certainly NOT a place to be vulnerable and expose your weak spots.
And we all end up polishing our shoes, putting on our Sunday best, and tying on the mask with the smile, making all look good and put-together as we head to the one place where we should be allowed to be honest,the community of those who follow the One who gave his all for our salvation; the One who said, "Come to me all you that are beat up, tired, and without hope. I'll give you rest." the One of whom the prophet Isaiah said, " The bruised reed he will not break, and the smouldering wick he will not snuff out." the One pictured as a good shepherd who would risk everything to head out into the wild darkness to find a lost, hurt sheep and when he has found it to gently lift it to his shoulders and bring it home to warmth and care. And with that in mind, brothers and sisters, let's go from here.
Resolved to tear down walls we may find here at Calvin.
Resolved to build bridges where we can.
To walk and talk and share the patience and compassion of Christ with each other, and with those that God gives us the privilege of meeting in this new week that we may be brought from despair to hope, from desolation to delight, from gloom to glory.