Psalm 27
The Lord is our Light, our Salvation and our Strength
The Second Sunday of Lent
Church of the Good Shepherd
The Rev. Ross M. Wright
This is the second in a series of sermons on the psalms, which we are considering during the season of Lent. Of the 150 psalms, roughly two thirds of them are composed by someone who is in trouble.1 This is one of the reasons why the psalms are so well loved. Every possible emotion is explored and lifted to God – fear and trust; anger and love; depression and joy. Psalm 27 is the prayer of someone who is in trouble. And it is addressed to anyone who is in trouble, under attack, or anxious. The psalm presents us with the God who can be trusted. And it teaches us how to pray when we are anxious.
A Confession of Trust
The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom then shall I fear?
the Lord is the strength of my life;
of whom then shall I be afraid?
When evildoers came upon me to eat up my flesh,
it was they, my foes and my adversaries, who
stumbled and fell.
Though an army should encamp against me,
yet my heart shall not be afraid;
And though war should rise up against me,
yet will I put my trust in him. (vv. 1-4)
The Lord is our light. Jesus is the light of the world. He shines his light in “the dark, unevangelized continents of the human heart.”2 The good news is that God has personally come to you, to me, to bring his light into our darkness, whatever form it may take. Listen to how Paul summarizes the gospel: “For it is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). What is this light in us? It is the knowledge of God. It really is possible to know God personally. When this happens to us, God is no longer just an idea. Christian faith is no longer just a moral code. The events described in the Bible are no longer simply historical events. The light of the world has come into our lives. This experience takes place not just once, when we first trust Christ and commit our lives to him, but again and again.
Jesus Christ returns, morning after morning to dispel the shadows and the darkness. He scatters the bad dreams and the gloom so that we can have joy in God again. Charles Wesley understood this. His hymn, Christ whose glory fills the skies, is a meditation on the power of Christ to scatter our darkness:
Christ, whose glory fills the skies, Christ the true, the only Light,
Sun of righteousness, arise! Triumph o’er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, draw near; Day-star, in my heart appear.
Dark and cheerless is the morn, unaccompanied by thee;
joyless is the day’s return, till thy mercy’s beams I see,
Till they inward light impart, glad my eyes, and warm my heart.
Visit then this soul of mine! Pierce the gloom of sin and grief!
Fill me radiancy divine; scatter all my unbelief;
more and more thyself display, shining to the perfect day.
Most Christians experience times when it is hard to trust God, hard to believe. Some mornings, you wake up, think about your day, and everything seems cloudy. You don’t feel like praying. Maybe you doubt that God is there, or that if he is, that his help will come. If is a consolation to anyone, let me confess that I do not find it easy to believe. Temperamentally, I am prone to doubt and discontent. Faith in Christ has been and continues to be a struggle, a continual returning to the Lord to ask for the gift of faith. We need a miracle every day.
The Lord is our salvation. What does this mean? The Hebrew word for “salvation” is “yeshua.” It was also a personal name, “Joshua,” or “Jesus.” “yeshua” means, “God to the rescue.” This paraphrase sheds light on what Jesus Christ has done for us. He is jeshua, God to the rescue. When this world had run out of options, when our backs were to the wall, when we turned away from the light because we preferred darkness, Jesus came to the rescue. He entered our darkness and created the kingdom of light.
Salvation involves more than simply our spiritual life. God is concerned with all of life. “Salvation is intervention that makes life possible in the face of all that threatens, weakens, and corrupts life.”3 Salvation is when your sailboat has capsized, and you see the Coast Guard coming. Or your car breaks down at night in a really bad section of town, and you’re alone, and a police car drives up and says, “Can I help?” Salvation is when you discover the Christian community and realize that you are not alone; that you are a member of the Body of Christ. Your life has meaning, because God has called you and given you important work to do in his kingdom
The Lord is our strength. God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the divine warrior. He brings salvation with “a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.”4 Who is this God? He is “the Lord of hosts.” He is surrounded by a legion of the heavenly army. These are not the plump, smiling angels of Hallmark cards. These angels are armed and dangerous. In our time, there is strong pressure to expunge military imagery from our talk about God. And there are good reasons to be cautious here. It is an abiding temptation for a nation or any group or people to claim that “God is on our side.” But when we eliminate this biblical language about God, God begins to appear weak or even complicit in evil. The God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is implacably opposed to everything that resists his will or destroys our humanity in Christ. There are situations when we you will be glad that God is the divine warrior. You’re in a concentration camp, and you hear the advance of the Allied invasion – the camp is about a to be liberated. You’re living in Rwanda, and you hear the sound of tanks rolling in – the UN peacekeeping force has finally arrived.
The psalmist has seen his enemies fall before him:
When evildoers came upon me to eat up my flesh,
it was they, my foes and my adversaries, who
stumbled and fell.
It doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes our enemies prevail, just as Jesus endured “the hour of darkness” – betrayal, arraignment, and miscarriage of justice. But Good Friday and Easter are the promise that evil will not ultimately prevail. The cross, which looks to us like weakness, is stronger than death, stronger than sin.
Psalm 27 teaches us to confess our trust in the living God when we are in danger. Confession, or we might say, “profession,” is saying who God is for us. He is our light, our salvation, and our strength. There is something powerful when believers come together in the Eucharist as we have today to confess who God is for us. I know of no more powerful expression of trust in God than the Heidelberg Catechism, which begins with this question and answer:
Q. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?
A. That I belong – body and soul, in life and death – not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me form the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not hair can fall from my head; indeed that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation.
A Prayer for the Presence of God
In psalm 27, the psalmist oscillates between confident trust in the Lord and longing for his presence. How do we explain this combination of trust in God’s presence and sense of his absence, of the need to seek and search for God? Our relationship with God is always a mixture of doubt and trust: “Lord, I believe – help my unbelief!” And it is precisely when we are in trouble that we most acutely aware of our need to trust God. And so, the second half of our psalm is a prayer, or a series of prayers, for the presence of God. The heart of the psalmist’s prayer is in verse 5 and again in verse 11.
One thing have I asked of the Lord;
one thing I seek;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days
of my life;
To behold the fair beauty of the Lord
and to seek him in his temple. (vv. 5-6)
The Christian life is a continual seeking for God. We only seek him because we already know him. You wouldn’t seek him unless you already knew him. And what is more important, God is seeking us. “The hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeks such to worship him” (John 4:23).
But what does it mean, practically, to seek or to search for God? What exactly are we to seek for? And how? And where? The psalmist continues:
You speak in my heart and say, “Seek my face.”
Your face, Lord, will I seek.
Hide not your face from me,
nor turn away your servant in displeasure. (vv. 11-12)
We are to seek for God’s face. The face of God is seen most clearly in Jesus Christ. What is God like? Look at Jesus as he is revealed in the pages of the New Testament. How does God respond to people? Look at Jesus as he walks and talks with sinners and churchmen. “The fullness of the godhead dwelt bodily in him.” This is where we see God. As we read the New Testament, the face of Christ comes into focus. We also see God’s face in the faces of each other. Jesus Christ is present, here, as we gather for word and sacrament. And you see the face of God in the members of your own family; in the person you see at work every day, and particularly in the faces of the poor. Jesus: “As you did it unto the least of the brethren, you do it unto me.”
Conclusion
Psalm 27 teaches us to pray to the God of our strength and our salvation when we are in trouble, when everything seems dark and we have lost our way, when we are anxious or overcome with a sense of dread, and we can’t explain exactly what is troubling us. But what value is there, really, in hearing about someone else’s trust in God or his testimony about an answer to prayer? What value is there in hearing a sermon about it? These may or may not evoke our trust in God or motivate us to seek his face in prayer. But there is one thing that does motivate prayer – the faithfulness of God.
Though my father and my mother forsake me,
the Lord will sustain me. (v. 14)
No human being can possibly provide everything we need. No one, not even your mother, can provide the kind of comfort and shelter that we all need and crave. If we look to other people for security, sooner or later we will be disappointed. This applies to every human relationship. You will be disappointed by the church or by the rector or by your partner or by your kids. The only person who will not let us down is our brother and Savior, Jesus Christ. God alone can be trusted. And he can be trusted.
Do you believe that?
1 Eugene Peterson, The Psalms
2 I am indebted to Paul Zahl for this phrase.
3 James Luther Mays, Psalms (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1994), 132-33.
4 The phrase occurs throughout the Old Testament.