Listen to my words, Lord, consider my lament. Hear my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. … For you are not a God who is pleased with wickedness; with you, evil people are not welcome. … Lead me, Lord, in your righteousness because of my enemies—make your way straight before me. Not a word from their mouth can be trusted; their heart is filled with malice. Their throat is an open grave; with their tongues they tell lies. Declare them guilty, O God! Let their intrigues be their downfall. Banish them for their many sins, for they have rebelled against you. But let all who take refuge in you be glad; let them ever sing for joy. Spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may rejoice in you. (Psalm 5:1-2,4,8-11)

Psalm 5 explicitly introduces us to a new form of prayer: lament. It’s already showed up in the Psalter starting at Psalm 3, but Psalm 5 explicitly uses the word, and so today is a good time to remind ourselves about what it means to lament to God.

Often in the face of evil: whether it’s come through events or people, we will opt to do something about it ourselves. Our fight or flight response is activated and so we’ll strive to overcome the evil or perhaps seek to run away from it or ignore it. But whichever response we use, it does not always occur to us to invoke God’s name as part of our response.

The mindset of the Psalms and Psalmists is different. In the face of evil and enemies, the first inclination of the Psalms is to come to God. And as people of faith, this is a good inclination to embody in our own lives. Lament helps us to do that by forming us in three core habits. You may remember them from our sermon series on lament that had begun just before our first COVID lockdown.

Firstly, the prayer of lament takes God seriously, as here. David declares God to be his God and also his King. David believes in his God and King, and reminds God of who he is: a God who is not pleased with wickedness nor welcoming of wicked people.

Secondly, the prayer of lament takes the evil of this world seriously. David has enemies and faces evil—people who lie and betray trust. But rather than taking matters into his own hands or fleeing away from the evil around him, David turns the situation over to God. Taking God and evil seriously means that the presence of evil in this world is firstly God’s problem and is a problem rightly submitted to God. God has said that wickedness has no place in his kingdom: so David appeals to God—“declare them guilty, O God!”

Finally, the prayer of lament is a prayer of submission to God. We don’t only turn the evil of our world over to God, but also ourselves. We don’t set ourselves up as a judge over God when we see evil in the world, instead we submit to him as the rightful ruler. This finally is where the Psalm ends: “let all who take refuge in you be glad.”

So, when you feel pressed by fear, pain, enemies, or the overwhelming crush of evil in this world: do something about it. Lament. Take God and the evil you face seriously enough to pray, shout, and cry about it before God. Then rest in submission to this God to whom you’ve come for refuge.

As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you.
May he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm.
May he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you.
May he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.

"He will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body" (Philippians 3:21).

The gospel story sounds too good to be true. It is the story of sheep rescued from a dark and fearful wilderness by the strong arms of a fierce shepherd. It’s the story of children released from prison, of demons unmasked. It is the story of fearful disciples in a storm-tossed boat; the storm stilled by the command of their Master. It is the story of sick people healed, of blind people seeing. It is the story of dead people coming to life. It is the story of the God-man.

It is the story of God who is captured, sentenced, and crucified by His own people. His friends weep and his enemies laugh. And all because of a snake. The gospel is a story about a snake who experienced the thrill of evil victory. "I have won," he hissed. "God lays in the grave." But as the sun rose over the horizon chasing the darkness from the garden, the guards ran with it, and the unexpected happened. The story turned. There was one more chapter to be written. The Shepherd came out of the tomb; God was alive. Heaven and earth shouted for joy; the angels danced, and the Father smiled as His Son went off to find His friends. And the snake; he lay in the dust; his head crushed; his tail quivering as life left him.

It is a story that we are part of. That Sunday morning, many years ago is our story. The resurrection is part of our Christian faith, its cornerstone. As we read the resurrection story our hearts are stabbed with joy. We dance with the angels as good triumphs over evil. We are glad, our faith is not in vain, Christ arose.

But…

This life and this present world are subject to sin. We seldom think of sin as vanity, but it is. Life is vanity when it has no meaning. If we do not know the meaning of life, why live? why do anything at all? Most people don't like that question because it is too deep; it gets too close to the answer that life is not worth living; that there is no purpose to it. This is the haunting refrain of the book of Ecclesiastes.

Vanity means emptiness, fluff, a fistful of wind, a pocketful of nothing. It means to pay the mortgage for all your working days and then to die. It means working hard and running fast and getting nowhere. Vanity is a political speech that means exactly nothing. Vanity is the hope that tomorrow will be different, that there is gold at the end of the rainbow; vanity is wisdom and folly, hard work and laziness, laughter, seriousness, and everything, because everything leads nowhere.

In this life, we struggle against this sin. We fight against sin in our own lives. We struggle against sin in the world. We push against greed, and we bite our tongues to keep from lying. We stand up for the oppressed and give money to the poor. We seek to elect politicians who strive for justice. When our eyes fill with longing for another’s toys, we turn away.

But so often it feels like it’s all in vain. The world does not get any better. And we, well, we don’t seem too either. We cry out with Paul, “What a wretched person I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death, to vanity?” But because of the resurrection we can also answer with him, “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25).

The resurrection gives us something to hope for in the future. While we struggle against sin today, we know that tomorrow sin will be gone. While our bodies are weak today, we know someday they will be strong. The gospel is our story. We too will be changed. Christ will transform our lowly bodies. They will no longer be subject to disease or age or sin or vanity. Christ will transform our characters to be like his. We will have no more inclination for lying. Our eyes won’t covet our neighbour’s stuff.

As surely as Christ opened the eyes of the blind and stilled the storms, he will transform us. There is hope for us. Thanks be to God.

As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you, wherever he may send you. May he guide you through the wilderness, protect you through the storm. May your day end with rejoicing at the wonders he has shown you. May you rest in his provision as he brings night, and then new dawn.

When you did these things and I kept silent, you thought I was exactly like you. But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you. (Psalm 50:21)

Psalm 50 is the first of the psalms of Asaph, which tend to circle much more around the covenant and its requirements. So it is here in psalm 50, which begins by setting up a scene of judgement.

God arrives as judge and calls the heavens and the earth as witnesses. The heavens and the earth were, after all, the witnesses God called when the covenant was first made in the wilderness. This is perhaps also a reason that we find the sky blackened and an earthquake shaking the rocks at Jesus’ crucifixion in the Gospel of Matthew: the heavens and the earth are testifying to a new covenant being made.

With the heavens and earth serving as witnesses, God then calls his people. He does not take fault in their sacrifices or offerings, but he does remind them he doesn’t actually need, eat, or drink the things they offer. God provides for them, not they for him. Everything already belongs to God, what could humankind possibly give him that isn’t already his? No, it is not out of our plenty that we give a bit to God: it is out of God’s plenty that we have received whatever it is that we have—and that has only been given to us to hold and distribute as a trust and for a time.

So we give our thanks offerings and fulfill our promises (like our baptismal and profession of faith promises) to God because it is right and proper that we do so, to remind us that nothing was ours to begin with, and to help us practice the posture of an open hand and a responsive life before the God to whom all things belong.

Worship is not just about dealing appropriately with the resources of God’s Creation though, it is also about salvation. We practice the habits of worship not only because we depend on God for our provision, but also for our salvation—for our help “in the day of trouble.” Nothing in Creation or Salvation is something we accomplished ourselves: it is all a work of God. We depend on him for everything.

Having set the record straight on what worship is for, God moves to the character and conduct of his people—naming disobedience, theft, adultery, slander, and false testimony. He says “when you did these things and I kept silent, you thought that I was exactly like you. But I now arraign you and set my accusations before you.”

I have long found this one of the most arresting statements in all of the psalms. It addresses the main issue that the whole psalm deals with, namely that we have a tendency to imagine God in our image. So our issue is not just turning other objects and pursuits into gods of our own making—idolatry—but also making God himself into a god of our own making. So even when we’re faithfully doing the right motions of worship and avoiding idolatry, we can still be off base when we shrink God down to our size, pin his wings to the cork board like a biology project, and lose all sense of his cosmic, mysterious, holy otherness.

That goes for our ethical relationship before God when we think things like “God won’t mind a white lie” or “he’ll see and understand why I’m doing this and that I’m basically a good person.” But it also goes for our understanding of God: we easily get the sense that we are the ones that hold God up or let God down rather than understanding the extent to which we depend on his every grace and provision for the very breath we breathe and life we live.

This whole psalm is a call to remember the holiness and otherness of God—to remember that he is the judge—and that we are never able to fully know his mind or his ways. This is an invitation to stand in a humble awe and fear of the Lord and to live and worship accordingly. It is he that we depend on for our very creation and for our continuing provision and salvation—which in Jesus, unlike in the psalms, we have received in full. And so it is Jesus that our lives are to be conformed to, not he to us.

As you journey on, go with the blessing of God:

May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you : wherever he may send you.
May he guide you through the wilderness : protect you through the storm.
May he bring you home rejoicing : at the wonders he has shown you.
May he bring you home rejoicing : once again into our doors.