Psalm 27
In his novel, Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike has a marvelous expression in which he characterizes
religious language as "the words of the dead."
The Psalms are the words of the dead -- words which have power and authority; words which speak
to the heart long after their original speakers are gone.
Rabbit says, at one point, "Laugh at ministers all you want; they have the words we need to hear
-- the ones the dead have spoken."
The Psalms are a significant resource for the life of faith.
Generation after generation of faithful women and men have found their own voices in the Psalms
and have heard the voice of God.
The Psalms are a dialogue -- they express both sides of the conversation between the people of God
and the God who desires to live in communion with people.
The Psalms are the voice of the people and the sovereign response of God.
Utilized to help us honestly find our description of our reality, they can bring our whole life
under the care of God.
John Calvin called the Psalms an "anatomy of the soul."
The Psalms express all of the emotions, which people can experience in their life with God.
The language used runs the entire gamut from loud joyful praise to quiet intimate love,
from deep doubt to the height of faith, from unspeakable anger to desperate longing,
from overwhelming moral guilt to gentle comfort, from troublesome worries to great relief.
The Psalms articulate the goodness of life, celebrate the delightful aspects of creation,
speak of God's reliability, and praise the sensibility of God's moral law.
The 150 Psalms also have speech which evocatively describes rage, resentment, self-pity, suffering,
a life in disarray -- the abrasive experience of being disoriented, of life that is sometimes unstable,
confusing, and all too transient.
What goes on in the Psalms is peculiarly in touch with what goes on in our lives.
Bureggemann also says: "[The dead] do vote in the Psalms; they vote for faith, but in voting for faith
they vote for candor, for pain, for passion -- and finally joy. Their persistent voting gives us a word
that turns out to be the word of life."
Psalm 27:1,3,5 reads: "The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me,
yet I will be confident!
For he will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent;
he will set me high on a rock."
At 7:37 a.m. on December 1, 1997, Mike Carneal arrived at his high school where a prayer meeting
was occurring.
About thirty-five students were singing songs, holding hands, saying prayers.
When they said "Amen," Mike pulled out a gun and began shooting.
Nicole Hadley, a popular fourteen year old freshman basketball player, took a bullet,
crumpled to the floor, and later died.
Mike pulled the trigger ten more times, hitting several students -- seriously wounding some,
and murdering two others.
Senior Ben Strong, leader of the school prayer service, kept yelling:
"Mike, what are you doing? Put the gun down!"
Just as Mike took aim at the school principal, Ben stepped in front of Mike and demanded that he stop - he did!
Ben Strong is a young man of great courage.
He would say he was just an ordinary person with great faith in God.
Asked about his reactions during the moments of the shooting, Ben Strong says "that he was just reacting.'"
"You don't know why stuff like this happens, but it does.
And you can't really do anything to change that.
You can change how you react to it, but you can't change the past."
You can change how you react.
This is the lesson of Psalm 27 -- you can face life with trust instead of trepidation.
Charles Spurgeon once declared: "A little faith will bring your soul to heaven;
a great faith will bring heaven to your soul."
In the interview, Ben Strong says that his faith was made stronger through this tragedy:
"God is the only one who got us through this.
God is always there for us, no matter what.
If I wasn't a Christian, I don't know how I would react to something like this.
It would be easy to just go nuts.
But when you have God in your life, something like this forces you to lean on him even more."
Why do you believe?
Why do you trust in a God you cannot see?
What keeps you coming back to your faith - in spite of doubts, in spite of horrible events that happen
in the world or in your own life, in spite of your pain?
Perhaps your experience is similar to that of the writer of Psalm 27.
Psalm 27 begins with confidence.
It is a confidence and trust, even as there is a review of various, unspecified threats:
enemies, war, slanderers.
As we pray this Psalm, we can fill in the general language about armies descending around us
with the specifics of our life circumstances: