Speaker 1: See, grief and pain and acknowledgment and time, these are such incredibly important parts of our story, but sometimes I think we forget them as parts, and we start to confuse them for the whole. Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
First of all, I'm so glad to be back. I've been away for three Sundays in a row now, although I did get the chance to sneak in here last week for the 9AM service, which was great, by the way. I loved hearing Jim's take on Psalm 26. But like many of you, I have been tracking along with the podcast this summer while I'm on vacation, and I've been posting some of my thoughts to YouTube as we go as well, so that's been kind of fun. But I am back from a break, and we are in the last stretch now preparing for the fall.
The journals are off at the printers. The building is being painted. Downstairs was all finished this week where our kids' areas are. The upstairs will be done next week, so you might see some work that's still in progress there. The new bike racks are outside.
The landscaping is not, but that and the railings are coming, so hold on for that as well. But all of this means that the final touches are now coming together for the fall season, And this is always just sort of a really fun part of the year for us as a team as we get ready for that. So mark September 8 on your calendar. That Sunday is our fifth birthday together. And if you're a volunteer, you should have already received an invite to our fall team kickoff dinner that happens earlier that week.
If you're not a volunteer and you didn't get an invite, then you can go to commons.life and join a team and volunteer, and then you can still join us us for dinner that week. However, that said, if you and I haven't met, my name is Jeremy. I'm one of the people who hang out around here, and tonight we are looking at Psalm 42. But just to recap a little bit from this summer, we've been looking at the Psalms all summer, and these are poems that sit in about the middle of your Bible. And a few years ago, we worked through nine Psalms together.
This summer, we're doing eight more, and that means that by the end of the summer, we will have covered 17 of the 150 psalms in your English Bible. So only 133 to go, which should take us, I don't know, a couple decades. Anyway, but this is the kind of remarkable thing when you recognize just how significant a chunk of our sacred texts are made up of poetry. I actually put some of my thoughts on this up on YouTube earlier this summer, But part of what I love about the Psalms and part of what I love about how central the Psalms are is that they remind us that the primary way we speak of the divine is literary. Not literal, but literary.
And there's a difference. Because sometimes I think we fall into the trap of thinking that literal, concrete, verifiable, factual language is paramount. But the truth is when it comes to God, all of that is incredibly limited. I mean, almost nothing I ever say about God is literally true. It's all language that grasps at straw to communicate divine love.
And so metaphor and simile and analogy and poetry, this is really all we have in the end when it comes to God. I mean, God's love is like nothing else that we know. It's infinite and unchanging and unconquerable. And so what we do is we use words that are drawn from our best experiences of broken love in the world, and that's appropriate. It's good and it's healthy and it's beautiful, but it's always analogy for something better.
Now one of the ways that we can say this is that all theology is biography. Everything you will ever say about God is a reflection of the life that you've experienced, and therefore the life that you've encountered God through. But remembering the centrality of the Psalms and poetry and subjectivity in the scriptural narrative, It reminds us of just how beautiful all of our grasping really is. Your words about God are limited precisely because God is not. And Psalms and songs and poetry are part of what help you to remember that.
Now, today we have Psalm 42. But first, let's pray. God of grace and peace, we welcome you into this moment just as you have welcomed us into this day. May our words and our voices, our conversations and togetherness remind us of the divine among us right now. As we turn our attention to the poetry of your people, to the images and metaphors that have carried countless followers through difficult spaces for millennia.
May we find ourselves in the tumult of those who hold fast to you. Speak peace to our anxieties and courage to our fear. Speak grace to our shortcomings and love to the deepest parts of our being. May we yearn to encounter you this day just as the poets have. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Amen. Okay. Psalm 42 is a bit of a shorter one. So let me read it to you fully, and then we'll kinda dive in together. As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God? My tears have been my food at day and night. While people say to me all day long, where is your God? These things I remember as I pour out my soul.
How I used to go to the house of God under the protection of the mighty with shouts of joy and praise among the festival throng. Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for yet I will praise him, my savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me.
Therefore, I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, the heights of the Hermon from Mount Mizar. Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls. All of your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day, the Lord directs his love. At night, his song is with me.
A prayer to the God of my life. I say to God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning oppressed by the enemy? My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, where is your God? Why, my soul, are you downcast?
Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for yet I will praise him, my savior, my God. Psalm 42. Now, that opening stands up as the deer pants for streams of water. When I was a kid and I was first introduced to Christianity, there was a very popular song that riffed off that line.
I will save you my rendition of it, but it was it was a nice song. However, this is a very famous poem. And so today, we have to talk about authorship, metaphor, memory, and what it means to remember the full story. But let's start with who wrote this poem. Because I read the entire psalm to you, but there's also a superscription for psalm 42, and it will be labeled as verse zero in your bible.
Now sometimes, because of the way that the psalms are numbered and laid out with a verse zero, a lot of people tend to ignore those superscriptions. They assume that they are editorial comments, and they are in a sense, but they are very old editorials. Now there is some debate, but generally most scholars agree that these superscriptions, these verse zeros, are not original to the poems or to the poets. They were likely added when the Psalms were collected and prepared for worship. But, and this is important, we have actually no record of the Psalms from before those superscriptions were added to them.
All of our oldest copies, including the Masoretic texts that come from about ten centuries after Jesus, which our Bibles are translated from, and including the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, which were discovered last century but were written in the century before Christ. All of them actually have these introductory verses. Now sometimes different copies are different from each other, and that's why we have textual criticism to help us figure out which is the original. But we actually have no textual tradition of the Psalms without these introductory statements. And what that means is that as far as the community of God is concerned, these verse zeros in your bible, they are part of the sacred text.
Now I put you through all of that because this particular verse zero is kind of interesting. It says this, for the director of music, a masquil of the sons of Korah. Now sons of Korah. Of the 12 tribes of Israel, one was the Levites. And within the Levites, the descendants of Aaron became the priests, but there were other jobs for other Levites.
Within the Levites, there were three more main groupings, the Kohathites, the Gershonites, and the Merarites. And within the Kohathites, there was another group called the Korahites. These were the sons of Korah. Now Korah was the cousin of Moses who led a rebellion against Moses and who along with his co conspirators was consumed by a fireball from heaven, so legend says. But that means that the sons of Korah were part of the Levite tribe, the descendants of a traitor who continued to serve the community by writing songs and leading in worship.
And in fact, 12 of the psalms are credited to these sons. This one just happens to be one of the most famous songs in human history. And I wanna think about that for a second because probably all of us have something somewhere in our story that we wish we could forget about. Like, something back there that we're embarrassed by or something that we wish that we could leave behind us. Sometimes it's part of our story.
Sometimes it's a family story. Sometimes it's something that was handed to us and we had no control over it, and yet it just kinda sticks around like a bad haircut. And sometimes I think we have this tendency to imagine that the only way to move forward is to cut ties and start fresh, to leave the past behind and begin all over again in a new town with a new name. Sometimes that's true. There's a place for that.
But you would be surprised by what can be redeemed. Because I'm gonna guess that exactly no one here has ever heard of Korah in his story, and yet here you are reading the sons of Korah thousands of years after they wrote. And if you have hurt someone or you have damaged a relationship in your life, if you have made decisions that now you regret, none of that ever has to stay your story. Because regardless of what your past has meant, your name means whatever you choose for yourself today. And every morning that you get up and you live with generosity and grace and commitment to the story that you want to be about, this is the story that will outlive you in the end.
Look, people can talk about you, people can misrepresent you, but the story that endures about you will be the story you let God tell in you and through you. And that's really interesting to me. But we're not done with this superscription yet because there's another word in there that kind of stands out. It's the one that's not English. It's the word.
And a is a type of song. But the interesting thing here is that a Mesquil is generally a joyous song. Having just read to you all of Psalm 42, that does not seem to describe this song. This week, I was at Home Depot, and I was returning a hammer drill that I had rented to install the new bike racks outside, which was fun, although I was very sore the next day because manual labor. But in front of me was this other gentleman who was returning his rented power tool, And I was the audience for a conversation that demonstrated how our expectations can disorient us.
The employee checked the tool, made sure everything was there, and he rang up the rental, and it came to $74. And upon hearing this, the gentleman who had rented the tool says, I thought a minimum charge was in effect. To which the man behind the counter said, yeah, but you were over the minimum anyway, it doesn't really matter. That'll be $74. However, the first gentleman pulled out his contract and pointed to the line where it said minimum charge in effect, and he explained, yes, but here it says minimum charge in effect, so I should only have to pay the minimum.
I mean, it is in effect after all. And at this point, I'm trying to figure out, does this man not understand what minimum charge in effect means, or is he just trying to scam his way into a cheap rental? Either way, after a few minutes of banter, he grumbled and paid, and I was able to return my tool, which, by the way, did have the minimum charge in effect because I only needed it for about an hour. But the point is this, if you're expecting one thing and you end up with another, that can be a little disorienting for a moment. And yet for me, there is something really beautiful about imagining this poem at home in the category of joyous.
See, is actually this complicated word. The root is a which means to have insight or to teach. And so is a song that offers us wisdom and leads us to joy. But sometimes wisdom is about knowing how to navigate those more difficult spaces in our lives, isn't it? Again, this is really interesting to me.
What is joy? What does it mean to sing for joy? Does it mean an absence of grief? Or can it sometimes actually be grief observed well? And spoiler, that's actually what I think this psalm is about.
So we've talked a lot in this lead up, but let's go back and walk through this poem and the movements of it. And as we do that, I'm gonna use the translation of Robert Alter for the rest of the sermon because I really like his rendition of this psalm, and we'll talk about why as we go. But in Alter's version, the poem begins this way. As a deer yearns for streams of water, so I yearn for you, O God. My whole being thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and see the presence of God? Now there's a couple things here. First of all, the more familiar translation as the deer pants, so my soul pants. But what's interesting here is this word, it's in Hebrew, and it only shows up twice in the Bible. So we don't really know exactly what it means.
The only other appearance comes in the prophet Joel, and there it's describing something very similar. But the debate among the rabbis has always been whether this word describes the sound of an animal lapping up water or whether it describes the action of an animal leaning in or bending their neck down toward the water. Now I happen to think that panting is maybe a bit more of an evocative word, but the reason alter has gone with yearning is because he's leaning toward that second meaning. It's the idea of reaching out or bending toward God. And really, that's what the poem is about, isn't it?
I mean, this isn't describing someone who has found God. This isn't an animal who's reached the water. This is someone leaning in. My whole being thirsts. When shall I come and see God?
This is about sacred anticipation. Part of what's neat here is the way the poet has layered that anticipation for us. You start with this idea of a deer yearning for water, and then you get the writer yearning for the living God. But in Hebrew, the adjective living is also the adjective for fresh water. So there's this sort of layering that's happening here.
And then you've also got this neat thing with the phrase, the presence of God. This was originally, at one point, when shall I see the face of God? But it's being revocalized in the Psalm. And this is this interesting practice in Hebrew where you might write something about God, but you would never, you dare not actually speak it. So it's like the divine name.
You write the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, but you say Adonai or Lord. Some things are just too sacred to say out loud. Here, the writer has actually written the face of God, but you say the presence or the reflection of God when you read it. And so the idea is almost like a deer who bends her neck down to the water and sees the face of her creator in the reflection looking back at her. Because there is something sacred about your yearnings as well.
And maybe it's not the face of God directly. I mean, it's imperfect, and there's ripples in the water that obscure it. But when we long for something well, but not out of our jealousy or our envy, but out of our deepest passion and excitement to experience the goodness of God and the breadth of creation. This is in itself somehow an encounter with divine presence. And if you honor that and you cultivate that and you prune that when it needs to be, this will help you recognize the face of God in your life.
And all of this is off to a pretty good start, isn't it? If you open that superscription and you anticipate a joyous song and then you open your scroll and you read, as the deer yearns, so I yearn. My whole being thirsts. When will I get to see the divine reflected back to me? I think you're feeling pretty good about this song so far.
And then the poet continues. My tears became my bread day and night. As they said to me all day long, where is your God? So we've had thirst as the central metaphor so far. Now we have salt bread to eat.
We've talked about entering into the presence of God. Now we're mocked for having ever believed we might see the face of the divine. And I think sometimes this is where we kind of read through and maybe we've heard this song before. And don't get me wrong, it is beautiful when you remember and you memorize the scriptures. Being able to recall psalms, to speak to the moment you find yourself in, this is a wonderful source of comfort.
And there are times frequently when I simply don't have the words to express myself in prayer, and being able to rely on the people of God and the poetry of God to speak for me is profound. Sometimes, because we know where it goes, we kinda jump ahead in our head, and we miss the twist along the way. And sometimes that twist is actually kind of the point. Look. You open Psalm 42, and you're told to expect a a joyous song about wisdom and life, and you start reading about yearning and longing and all of that being reflected back to you, and then your tears become your bread.
That's gonna shake you. And, of course, I'm not just talking about Psalm 42. I'm talking about the fact that you got married and you found out it was much harder than you thought. Or you started a new job and it wasn't at all what you expected. Or you encountered God, you really did, but then the next day, you had to go back into broken relationships full of tension and strife, and you had to figure out where the divine was in all of that.
Because here's the thing about wisdom and about joy, if it can't face a real world and it's not particularly wise, and maybe it's not really all that joyful. And here, the sons of Korah aren't trying to sell you something that doesn't exist. They believe in joy. They trust in wisdom. They are confident that your yearnings reflection of the divine that animates all things, but they want more than a pep talk for you right now.
They wanna build something durable. And so they start up here, and then they drag you down here, and then they begin to turn inward. And the voice of the poem begins to speak to herself right now. She says in verse five, how bent my being, how you moan for me. Hope in God for yet I will acclaim him for his rescuing presence.
And two things here. Alter has used the phrase how bent my being. The NIV, which we read earlier, has used my soul is downcast within me. But the trick here is the translation of these two words, Shi'aq Nefesh. Shi'aq can mean a lot of different things.
It can mean to flow or dissolve, to vanish or disappear. But actually, the core idea of the root word is to melt. Nefesh is often translated soul, but really it's more like your life spirit or life force. It's what lives in you and through you in the world. And here, in the form that it takes in Psalm 42, actually, it most directly refers to your breath.
So literally, what the poet says is something like, my breath melts away. Now the NIV has taken that to mean, oh, you're really sad. Your soul is downcast. Alter has taken that to mean something more tragic. He says, how bent my being.
It's kind of this idea that something has become twisted inside the poet, like like almost like a candle that's melting and bending over. Personally, I actually kinda think my breath melts away is pretty great on its own. For me, it captures that sense of, like, not being able to express exactly what's happening inside. And you've been there. That space where someone asks you what's wrong and all you can say is, I don't know.
But then this interesting thing happens. Right? From there, the poet says, yet, I will hope in God. I will acclaim him for his rescuing presence. And we've already seen what this presence is all about.
That's the face of God. Literally, what the poet says here is I will praise the face of my salvation. And from here, the poet continues now on an upswing saying, my God, my being is bent from my plight. Therefore, I will call you from Jordan land. From the Hermons and Mount Mizar, deep unto deep calls out at the sound of your channels.
All of your breakers and waves, they surge over me. By day, the Lord ordains his kindness, and by night, his song is with me. Prayers to the God of my life. So what happens here is in the midst of all of that darkness and despair, the poet tries to reach out and remember better times. That's good.
Right? It's wise and it's healthy and it's holy to do that. And when you find yourself stuck, it's important to remember that this is not all there is. But remember, the sons of Korah aren't trying to sell you something that doesn't exist. And sometimes, even when you do all the right things and you take all the right steps in all the right ways, you still just feel sad.
And so the next line is a return to the pit. I would say to the God, my rock, why have you forgotten me? Why in gloom do I go hard pressed by the foe? With murder in my bones, my enemies revile me. When they say to me all day long, where is your God?
How bent my being, how you moan for me, hoping God for yet I will acclaim the face of my rescue, my God. And I know that you hoped that this Psalm would end on a better note than that. God knows I did. But this right here is really what makes Psalm 42 a masculine. Because this is what makes it wise, and this is what makes it paradoxically joyous in the end.
Because this poem doesn't run from its pain. It recognizes and it names the waves of grief that come and go and ebb and flow in our lives, and yet it refuses to accept that that pain is all there ever will be. See, grief and pain and acknowledgment and time, these are such incredibly important parts of our story, but sometimes I think we forget them as parts, and we start to confuse them for the whole. And there is this very fine line between honoring our pain and being honest with our grief and then somehow dropping over the edge into self pity and despair that feeds on itself and begins to emaciate us. Ram Dass once said that we often savor our misery like wine.
And that is what's so wise about this poem. It's what sparks joy somewhere down the line. The fact that the poem doesn't feel the need to push pain down in a way where it can fester and grow, but it doesn't wanna savor it either. Instead, it brings that hurt to the surface. It honors it as holy.
It allows it to speak and be heard, but never as the only voice in the song. There's always a dialogue that's happening here between despair and hope and pain and joy. Because what the sons of Korah know is that your grief observed well is the only way back to your joy. Before we close, I wanna show you a brief clip of an interview between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper that's been making the rounds this week. And maybe that's not exactly what you expected to see in church, but I want you to watch this certainly for the answer that Colbert gives here.
But maybe even more importantly for the tenderness his words pull out of Anderson Cooper. Because what you'll see here is some of what this poem is trying to open up in you. That space for your hurt to be honored and named and transformed into something new somewhere down the line.
Speaker 2: You told an interviewer that you have learned to in your words love the thing that I most wish had not happened. I remember saying You went on say what punishments of God are not gifts. Do you really believe that?
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: It's a gift to exist. It's a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that. And I guess I'm either a Catholic or a Buddhist when I say those things because I've heard those from from both traditions.
But I didn't learn it that I was grateful for the thing I most wish hadn't happened is that I realized it. Mhmm. Is that and it's a it's an odd oddly guilty feeling because
Speaker 2: It it doesn't mean you
Speaker 3: don't want to have happened. I want it to not have happened.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: But if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is and not I'm not always. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss.
Speaker 2: Well, that's true.
Speaker 3: Empathy. Which allows you to connect with that other person. Right. Which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it's like to be a human being if it's true that all humans suffer.
Speaker 1: What Colbert is expressing here is what the sons of Korah knew some thousands of years ago. Life is a gift, and life is hard, and life is beautiful. And it's only when all of that is allowed to be named in the same breath, in the same song, at the same time that we can properly find our joy in the full story in the end. Poet writes, How bent my being, how you moan for me. Hope in God, for yet I will acclaim the face of my rescue, my God.
May you hurt deeply. May you grieve fully. May you celebrate joyfully. May your ebb and flow find the wisdom to be exactly where you are right now so that empathy might become you in the strong name of the risen Christ. Amen.