What We See

Psalm 36:5-10
2^nd Sunday After the Epiphany
14 January 2007
Stacey Simpson Duke
 

About this morning’s Psalm, one writer has said, “These are some of the most wonderful words in the Old Testament.  Their fullness of meaning no commentary can ever exhaust.”

He was right.  The words are gorgeous, poetic, dazzling:

Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. 

Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep;

You save humans and animals alike, O Lord.

 

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.  For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.

Beautiful, isn’t it?  The sweep of God’s love is painted in the grandest terms available, and not only God’s love, but also three other central aspects of God’s character – faithfulness, righteousness, and justice.  These characteristics are stated in vast, cosmic terms, encompassing the heavens, the clouds, the mighty mountains, the great deep.  In other words, God’s character is “built into the very structure of the universe.”i

 
The reality the psalmist presents is so all-embracing, that it easily gathers us up into its beauty.  This is the world we want, this is the existence we want – anchored by God’s love, held together by God’s faithfulness and righteousness and justice.  Humans and animals alike are saved.  All people are protected in the refuge of God’s care.  Everyone has more than enough to eat and drink, and there is joy all around.  This is the beautiful world we long for.  Problem is, it doesn’t seem to be the world we’ve got.

 
How is it that the psalmist sees such a thing, when what we see is a world at war, a world on fire, a world hungry and blind and broken, a world falling apart?  And not just our world, what about you and me?  Are our own lives marked by the kind of assurance and happy trust the psalmist speaks of?  Are our own lives rooted in and defined by God’s love and faithfulness, God’s righteousness and justice?  Do we even believe in those concepts anymore?  How can the psalmist speak so earnestly of a reality that, at best, seems like more afterlife than real life, and, at worst, seems like some sort of pipe dream?

 
But the psalmist doesn’t start with the beautiful vision of goodness and light.  He starts his reflections in a much darker place: “Sin speaks to the wicked in the depths of their hearts.” And though we may resist difficult words like “sin” and “wicked,” surely we can recognize the appropriateness of where the psalmist begins.  The problem is not whether or not God is faithful and true.  The problem is our hearts. 

 
For the psalmist, the “wicked” is not merely the blatantly evil person, a villain we can all rally against.  The “wicked” is anyone who is not living in radical dependence on God.  If there is only one point that the entire book of Psalms would try to make about humanity, it is this: the good life, the righteous life, the happy life, is thoroughly God-centered, completely oriented to God, absolutely dependent on God’s goodness and guidance.  This is what it means to the psalmist to be righteous. 

 
In contrast, the opposite of this kind of righteous life, a “wicked” life, is a life centered on oneself, trusting one’s own sufficiency.  [For the psalmist], the trouble isn’t only in our hearts, it’s in our eyes.  In this morning’s psalm, he says it like this: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.  They so flatter themselves in their own eyes that they know not their own guilt.” [vv. 1b-2a]

 
In other words, the wicked life is a self-centered life, where what fills one’s vision is only one’s own desires and needs.  For most of us, it is mighty easy to allow our vision to be focused on only what concerns us.  Our sight gets filled up with what is right in front of us – ourselves, our family, our pursuits, our interests, our desires, our needs, our work, our burdens, our hurts. It is so easy to reduce the whole world to only the one we see each day.  It is so easy to live as if the only reality were the one we are actively managing.

 
What does this make us, if not functionally atheistic?  We may say we believe in God, but if our whole life is oriented around only the little world right in front of us, and if we order that life as if we were the ones in charge, and if we live that life as if God’s goodness and love were not forces that actually shape reality, then what does that make us, if not functional atheists?

 
A problem that starts with our heart affects our vision, making it hard-to-impossible to lift our eyes off of our own little lives and onto some grander vision of reality.  Harder still to live as if that vision were actually true.

 
But what if?  What if you could?  What if you really could both believe in and behold the grandeur of God?  What if you could trust God’s love and faithfulness and righteousness and justice so thoroughly that you would stake your whole life on it?  What if you could believe God was actually at work in this world, and for good?  “In your light, we see light,” the psalmist says.  What if your whole vision was filled with that light, so that you found yourself trusting in God’s love as the fundamental reality of the universe?  Can you imagine the radical freedom that would come with such a shift in seeing, and in being?

 
But how does such a shift in seeing happen?  Through the ages, we who are more rationally-minded have left such pursuits to the poets, who seem somehow more awake to another reality than the one that we can see with our own eyes.  The psalmist himself sounds like a poet here, pointing to the skies and the clouds and the mountains and the ocean to try to get us to see God’s reality.  Poet Mary Oliver agrees that “it is the natural world that has always offered the hint of … immense divinity – a million unopened fountains.” ii  It is not that nature itself is God, but sprinkled throughout nature are a million pointers to God, a million unopened fountains, whose source is the same as ours – God, the fountain of life.

 
Another poet, Spanish writer Antonio Machado, casts a vision of the true reality, the one we often can’t see because of daily waking reality.  In his poem, “Last Night as I was Sleeping,” he wrote:

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt – marvelous error! –

that a spring was breaking

out in my heart.

I said: Along which secret aqueduct,

Oh water, are you coming to me,

water of a new life

that I have never drunk?

 

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt – marvelous error! –

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.

 

Last night as I was sleeping,

I dreamt – marvelous error! –

that a fiery sun was giving

light inside my heart.

It was fiery because I felt

warmth as from a hearth,

and sun because it gave light

and brought tears to my eyes.

 

Last night as I slept,

I dreamt – marvelous error! –

that it was God I had

here inside my heart. iii

 
This poet, like the psalmist, knows that the source of the water coming through a secret aqueduct, the source of the fiery sun giving its light in his heart is not himself, but God.  The psalmist, unlike the poet, sees this reality not only in dreams, but, through faith, in life itself.

 
Perhaps this psalm is prayed most easily by those who can already say with conviction, “in your light, we see light.”  Perhaps these are words mostly for people who, in the midst of a world filled with hatred and violence, with poverty and terror, can nevertheless profess their radical faith that the only fundamental reality is God’s love and grace.

 
But for the rest of us, the psalmist still shows us a way forward. The psalmist is not standing there telling us what we must believe about God and the world. The psalmist faces God – not us.   He is showing us how to pray.  Prayer itself, or even the attempt at some kind of prayer, is the first, best step we can take towards the light.

 
The psalmist shows us: in his prayer he seeks God, he remembers God’s past faithfulness, he asks God’s help, he “rehearses and renews the vision of existence as a great system of grace." iv And since the psalms were written down for use in worship, we know that he does this in concert with others who are also seeking the light of God’s face.

 
We cannot make ourselves see that light.  We do not have the power on our own to tear our eyes away from our own small realities in order to grasp God’s greater reality.  We cannot change our self-centeredness on our own.  These things are God’s work, these gifts are God’s grace.  Our job is simply to point ourselves toward God, and open ourselves up. 

 
The thing is, once we do glimpse the light of God’s reality – the reality that God’s steadfast love is the pin that holds together a world that on the surface seems to be breaking apart  – once we get a glimpse of that, we cannot simply go back to life as usual.  That’s the problem, and perhaps why we resist true vision – we fear the action such faith implies.  Plato once said, “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." v

 
The light calls for something from us.  It calls us to be light in a dark world.  It calls us to live lives of the light.  It calls us to embody, however imperfectly, those same attributes that are so central to God’s character – steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness, justice.  It is not just prayer that will open our eyes to God’s gracious reality in our midst – it is action that helps bring it to bear.  Of course, it’s not easy for us.  Of course it doesn’t come naturally, not as individuals, not even as a church.  It does not come naturally.  It comes by grace.

 
You recall how the psalmist began this prayer-poem?  Sin speaks to the wicked deep in their hearts.  But there’s something that speaks to an even deeper place.  We may not hear words from that deepest speaking.  It’s less like words and more like light.  And from that light, it becomes possible, truly, for people like us to shine.  And when we do, we find that the same light can shine to the deepest heart of the world.