Psalm 13

 Have you ever had a time in your life when you couldn’t sense the presence of God? A time when everything seemed to be going wrong, or when you were in a deep season of grief? How did you respond when you couldn’t feel God near?

One of the reasons that I deeply treasure the Psalms is that they are these beautiful songs and prayers written out of all of the human emotions. If you are feeling something, you can probably find it expressed in a Psalm. Last week, with Psalm 100, we heard a Psalm of praise, but this week, Psalm 13, would be considered a Psalm of longing or grief. 

The Psalmist starts out with this statement of “how long”. How long O Lord will you forget me - for I am feeling abandoned. How long must I bear this pain? Because I’m in deep grief. How long will my enemies succeed? I’m angry that they seem to be prospering. 

Give me an answer, God!

Have you ever been there, friends? Have you ever been in such a place where you just cry out to God?

I’m going to be honest, I get a bit more fearful when folks tell me that they would never pray to God like this. That God only wants to hear their praise and concerns. That surely this isn’t the way to talk to God.

Or that God doesn’t want us to have such feelings. 

Friends, the truth is that God created you as a human being not a robot. One of the gifts that God gave us when he breathed the breath of life into us, is feelings. When we deny our feelings, we are denying part of who God created us to be. Would you look at the Creator of the universe and dare to say, “Well, God, you really screwed up with this feelings thing”? By no means! 

Yet, some where along the line we have bought into the lie that our feelings are to be feared or disregarded. But you can only do that if you haven’t dwelled in God’s word. If you haven’t been in the midst of the Psalms like this one, where the Psalmist is crying out “how long?” Or you have read the Gospel accounts of Jesus through a watered down lens. For Jesus was both God and Man. Fully divine and fully human - and he had feelings!

And if Jesus brought all of who he was before God in prayer, then surely we can as well, dear brothers and sisters. Surely we are not meant to hide part of who God created us to be, with this rich tapestry of emotions, from our Holy God. God knows you. God loves you. And God wants you to bring your whole heart before him, even the parts that are crying out “how long?”

Because if we aren’t willing to be people who bring our hearts before God, then we miss the blessing of second half of this Psalm. There are very few Psalms that are considered laments, or prayers of grief and longing, that end there. They may start there, but as the Psalmist brings their heart before God there is a shift in realization. Which is true in Psalm 13 as well. 

For in the final stanza there is this declaration of who God is and what God is about. God is the God of unending, trustworthy, steadfast love. God is the God who redeems the brokenhearted. God is the one who never leaves or forsakes us. 

In other words, God’s true self is not who the “how long” section of the Psalm was thinking he was. But the Psalmist had to work through all that he was feeling in order to truly reach this realization. 

Friends, we all work through our emotions in different ways and at different times. And that is okay. Because our emotions are a gift, and when we bring them before the Almighty God, they can actually help us realize something new about the God who loves us. But we can’t rush people into that. We can’t substitute empty platitudes for another’s path to discover the well of God’s grace and mercy. 

Because it is only in crying out to God that we can truly meet the God who hears and responds. We can tell others that God listens to people in distress. We can tell folks that when we cry for help, God is there. But there’s a big difference between telling someone something and having them discover it richly for themselves.

Jan Richardson is a United Methodist pastor, but she is best known as an artist and a person who writes blessings. I think of blessings a lot like Psalms, human words put to that place where emotions meet prayer. In 2014 her husband of only a few years, Gary, went into the hospital for surgery and never came home. What emerged was this collection of raw and honest blessings for people in times of grief. Blessings for the first time coming home as a widow. Blessings for the anger that comes when a loved one dies, blessing for hope. 

Richardson writes, “A blessing meets us in the place of our deepest loss. In that place, it offers us a glimpse of wholeness and claims that wholeness is here and now.”

Sounds a lot like the steadfast love of God that will not let us go, does it not? The one who can turn our mourning into dancing. The one who declares that while sorrow may last through the night, joy comes with the morning. 

But we have to be willing to bring it before God to get there. We have to be willing to be honest in our grief, to get to the place of healing. 

Think about in terms of your human relationships. Which relationships flourish the most - those where you try to hide bits and pieces of yourself or the ones where you are honest? Which ones make you feel the most loved - when you feel like you are not accepted as you are or those who say come as you are and we will sit in it together? 

God wants us to be honest in our relationship with him - even and maybe most especially when we are grieving and life is hard. God is waiting to redeem all that we are experiencing, but that is really hard to do when we try to hide parts of ourselves from him, or do not trust him and his love enough to lean in. 

Friends, the Psalms encourage us to be real with God. Not who we think we should be. Not saying just what we think God wants to hear, but to be whole. For God did not create us as fragmented people, but whole human beings. And it is in praying out of that wholeness that we will find that our brokenness is bound up by Christ. Let us come before our Lord, with all that we are and all that we are feeling, and find the healing of our Savior. Amen.