Psalm 80: A Cry for God's Salvation

(Click on the above title to hear JJ's sermon from Psalm 80)

The lectionary asked us to consider Psalm 80 as a part of the readings for the 1^st Sunday in Advent. Despite the difficulty presented by the Psalms as a resource for preaching (their liturgical purpose, the difficulty in determining their historical context, and the communal nature of the Psalms), it seemed appropriate to begin the Christian year with a Psalm that has the Lord’s people crying out for the Lord’s salvation and deliverance.

Psalm 80 is a psalm of lament. Lament Psalms can have a hard time connecting with contemporary American Christian audiences, perhaps because so much of the American Christian experience over the last few decades has been largely a triumphant experience. The dominant theme of American Christianity is the goodness of God. We tend to equate material wealth and economic prosperity as signs of the blessing of God, which while true, tends to create a fairly skewed view of Christianity. However, psalms of lament insert a mournful and angry tone into worship, inviting believers to confess their own disillusionments and disappointments with life and with God. So for a church that has been nurtured consistently on messages of God’s goodness and grace and mercy, a Psalm that is angry with God and accuses God of abandoning God’s people and being responsible for their pain and suffering has a difficult time connecting. We are largely uncomfortable with such accusatory expressions directed at God, and even more uncomfortable with their public expression in worship, where we tend to favor messages that have a more positive spin.

But back to Psalm 80. It starts off rather bleak. We are not told of the situation, but the community is crying out for God to save them. The cry of verse 2 – “Stir up your might and come and save us!” becomes the refrain of the entire Psalm, found in vs. 3, 7, and 19 – “Restore us, O God of hosts, let your face shine, that we may be saved.”

The actual situation that gives birth to the cry for salvation is difficult to establish. Some have suggested that the psalm was written in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile by a people who have had to come to grips with the ultimate challenge to their faith – abandonment by God that led to a loss of their home country. Others have suggested that the cry of salvation arose as the intense cry of pain from a community that has been torn in two by the division of the kingdom between Rehoboam and Jeroboam after Solomon died. Regardless of the situation, the cry for restoration is a communal cry for God to restore the kingdom, to right the wrong that they believe has been done to them by God.

Their experience is apparently one of pain. The people are afraid, and feel abandoned and frustrated because of it. All the while God appears to them to be unmoved by their plight. God seems strangely absent. And so the Psalm moves from a cry for restoration to a tone of accusation. God has fed them the bread of tears, God has made them the scorn of their neighbors and God has caused their enemies to laugh at them. Finally, after cries of pain and accusation, the Psalm ends with a plea for God to send his righteous servant to restore the people back to God.

How do we connect with such a Psalm of lament?

Many people never question their relationship with God. They know God is present and in some cases are keenly aware of that presence most of the time. But for others, such a relationship with God is not easy. For these people, faith is a challenge, especially when confronted with difficult circumstances and situations in life that just make no sense and have no real solution. For some, they just can’t seem to find their place in life. For others, they just can’t seem to get ahead and can’t seem to get over the lumps that everyday life keeps sending them. We all have either experienced or known people who have experienced the feelings of fear, uncertainty, abandonment, and anger toward God that are engendered in Psalm 80. For these people, it is comforting to know that God can handle our lamentations…God can handle our questions and God can handle our accusations. However challenging and discouraging and discombobulating we might find the dark night of the soul, it can be a vehicle toward greater faith, if we have but the courage to lay our feelings and emotions honestly before God.

But the Psalm is a communal lament. In the Psalm, the community is afraid because the kingdom that they once knew is no longer. Whether the Psalm is about the divided kingdom or the Babylonian exile, the situation for the kingdom looks bleak. It went from a thriving, growing, powerful kingdom to a small and seemingly insignificant kingdom, threatened by its larger, richer, and more powerful neighbors. The faith community, finally and at long last, has realized that there is nothing for it to do but cry to God for salvation, and wait expectantly for God’s deliverance. And their expectant hope took concrete shape in the form of a person who is at God’s right hand, the one whom God made strong, and this person will restore the people to faithfulness, life, and worship – waiting for the advent of God’s divine action for God’s people.

I submit that our church situation is the situation of the community in Psalm 80. We were once larger than we are, but over time have gotten smaller. We are surrounded by larger and richer churches who are competing (probably not the right word) for the same new members that we are. We are struggling to find our way; to discern the will of God; to figure out a way to survive and thrive and grow when it seems as if the deck is stacked against us. We too are afraid of what is going to happen to our church in the future. I would even bet that there might be those among us who have a hard time deciding what God can possibly be doing to let things get to this point. We have done everything as faithfully as we knew how. We made decisions and congregational moves that we believed were the best for the church, and because we believed them to be the leading of the Holy Spirit, and yet now we are not sure what to do or where to go.

Psalm 80 is a psalm in which the community of faith acknowledges that on the one hand God is in control, but on the other hand laments because of the uncertainty of its present circumstance and is clearly waiting for God to come and save us. Today is the 1^st Sunday in Advent, and lament is appropriate language for Advent. If Advent were only about heart-warming stories of a baby in a manger, then Advent might fail to connect with us in our times of darkness and discontent. To own our fear and lament our circumstance and the challenges it brings us is to profess and deepen our own faith in God. Let us not forget that Psalm 80 – a psalm of lament, moves from despair and accusation, fear and abandonment to a renewed hope that God will act and see that God’s will is done. So perhaps our proper response to our circumstances, as Advent begins, is to mimic the act of faith and hope in Psalm 80 – to cry out to God and dare to see and expect a greater manifestation of the reign of God where others might see and expect nothing. Like the people in Psalm 80, we address God when God seems absent. We expect and hope that in spite of our fears, we will see God in the most surprising places – in a manger – or the most God-forsaken places – on a cross.

Advent is the time where we cry out – “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts, let your face shine that we may be saved.”