Out of the Depths
Psalm 130
5th Sunday in Lent
13 March 2005
When you open the Bible to Psalm 130, you hear a haunting human voice –
groaning out from someplace terribly dark. The owner of this
voice is not visible to us. Our eyes can’t penetrate to the awful
place where the groans are coming from. But there is no mistaking
what general direction this voice comes from: it rises from someplace
underneath; from someplace darkly cavernous – underground, underwater –
the voice is moaning. The speaker has fallen very far, and the
cry comes ringing out from something like an abyss or from something
like a grave or from something like the bottom of the sea. And
these are the words that rise up from that very dark, very low place:
“Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.”
When people cry to God “from out of the depths,” where might they be
crying from? There is no shortage of deep places from which
groaning rises to God. There is the deep of dying itself, our
long, horrifying fall into the dark of the grave. But no one need
be dying to cry “from out of the depths.” We speak rightly of the
depths of poverty, the depths of despair. Certainly to live in
profound grief is to live in a chasm, very dark and deep. Mental
anguish of any kind can feel like an abyss. Think of how we use
the word depression for a psychological state. Depression means a
pushed-down place, a pit – to cry from there is to cry from the depths.
Not everyone cast down in the depths can manage a cry. One
feature of living in a low place is the loss of your voice. Why
call out from down there? You’re buried, smothered. No one
can hear you – what’s the point? You have fallen beneath the
sunny space where people get to have a voice. Notice that the
person who prays this psalm asserts his or her voice anyway. It’s
a remarkable thing, really, that someone thrown down, sinking, and
discouraged from asserting a voice should still find the courage – or
desperation – to say, “Out of the depths I cry to you.”
Of course, some of us can’t find our true voices till we reach the
depths. It turns out that when we occupy sunny space, when things
are going easily for us, our lives have a way of not saying much that
matters. What we had judged to be living at the top turns out to
be just occupying the shallows. It’s the depths – depths of
suffering, depths of outrage, depths of doubt, depths of love – that
bring our lives at last into real speech. The depths may
well be our surest places of contact with God. God may, as they
say, be everywhere; but according to our scriptures the surest place to
find God is among those who live in the depths. Whatever “heaven”
may mean, God is certainly there; but for us who are drowning, falling,
buried, the much better news for now is that God inhabits the
depths. Perhaps to find ourselves there is to find ourselves able
at last to cry to God.
What the person who prayed Psalm 130 now specifically cries to God
about is the dreadful, repulsive crookedness of human beings. The
word used is iniquities, and it doesn’t refer to little rule
infractions or boo-boos. Iniquities refers to what is truly
perverse in us: the layer on layer of deceit, the betrayals and
manipulations, self-justifications and self-promotions, the taking of
what isn’t ours, callous neglect of sufferings we could help to end,
acquiescence to rank injustices – all this robbing, all this demeaning,
all this killing. Out of the depths of knowing all that he knows,
the psalmist cries to God.
At first we may think that what has him mostly in the depths is a sense
of his own iniquities, but as the last verse of the psalm makes clear,
his concern is also with his the iniquities of his nation, the
iniquities of his political system and of his religious system
too. All of this – the iniquities of his own people and the
corruption of their systems and the way he himself participates in all
that human crookedness – has laid him low. It’s too much for him,
as I think it’s finally too much for any serious adult – how damaging
we are to the world and to each other, how impossible it is make things
right, how hopeless it is to make even ourselves really right.
The psalmist glimpses the staggering size of our human problem and
cries out.
The problem is so huge that we can’t do anything about it. If God
were to demand that we do something to fix it all, we would not
survive. If God were to demand we be accountable for it all, we
could not stand. How do you make amends for a world gone
awry? How could we possibly straighten out our own crooked little
hearts? How would we reverse cycles of abuse, roll back the tide
of injustice, make right all that has gone horribly, horribly
wrong? If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could
stand? Who indeed.
The world is broken. We are broken. And none of us can put the pieces back together again.
To this desperate reality, the psalmist, still crying from the depths,
speaks a hopeful word. Forgiveness, he says. There is
forgiveness with the Lord.
How does this word really change anything? We’re careening along
in our messed-up world, in our own off-kilter lives, and this word
comes – forgiveness – and what are we supposed to do with it?
For the psalmist, as for the whole witness of Scripture, this is the
first word of a whole new world. As Walter Brueggemann
writes: “(Forgiveness) is the first act, the baseline, the
promise for all else, genuinely (out of nothing). There is
forgiveness, and from it everything else flows. It is not
‘grounded’ or reasoned or explained. It is the first fact of new
life, or the new age.”
The first fact of new life. God’s forgiveness changes
everything. It is not we who change the world or ourselves.
It is not up to us to fix everything that has gone so wrong. It
is not our job to pull ourselves out of the depths. Instead, out
of the depths we cry to God – we cry to God our despair, our grief, our
loneliness, our desolation, our shame - and the word that comes back is
“forgiveness.” The word that comes back is “grace.” The
word that comes back is “release.”
With God there is release from this completely unmanageable,
intractable, infinitely layered problem of our human condition.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean that everything is okay. It means our
problem is shared by larger shoulders than our own. It means God
is with us, even in the depths of the mess we helped create. It
means a whole new kind of life is possible, one that doesn’t depend on
our worthiness, or on our ability to manage ourselves, or on our
ability to fix our world, but on God’s grace alone.
Having claimed this reality, the psalmist turns now from prayer to
testimony. “I wait for the Lord!” he tells his community, “My
soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord.”
Not content simply to declare the good news for himself, he goes on, “O
Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast
love, and with him is great power to redeem.”
This is the gospel in a nutshell, the good news that lies at the heart
of all of Scripture: With the Lord there is steadfast love and great
power to redeem. Nothing that we do can fix us or our
world. God’s grace alone.
When this is the kind of God we claim, and with something as much at
stake as final liberation from all the mess we have made, what does it
mean to say with the psalmist that we wait for the Lord?
The kind of waiting we’re familiar with is pretty passive. It has
impatience in it, and maybe irritation. This is not what the
psalmist means when he speaks of waiting.
When the psalmist says his soul waits for the Lord, he means his soul
expects the Lord, his soul hopes in the Lord, his soul watches for the
Lord, his whole life points toward the Lord. It’s another way of
talking about trust, which is anything but passive. It takes
courage. It takes daring. It takes strength.
We and all our systems are so damaged that we can’t fix things.
To say we wait on God is not to abdicate our part in working towards a
new world but to declare that our resources will never be enough, that
we ourselves are too much a part of the problem. To say we wait
on God is to say that even in the depths, we will point our lives
Godward, and trust that God inhabits the depths, and hears in the
depths, and is even now acting in the depths to make a new world.
To cry out of the depths, believing that God hears despair, is the
psalmist’s first act of hope. He cries not just for himself but
for us all: for how we damage ourselves and each other, for how
impossible it is to make things right, for the brokenness of our whole
sad world. But in the end his prayer is not lament but praise,
because what he knows is this: There is One who stands over all
our mess, not in judgment but in love. And what rains down is
grace, forgiveness, release.
Hope. Hope in this Lord, says the psalmist. Hope, even in the depths.
