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The Rev. Frank Logue
Soulful Waiting
For God alone my soul in silence waits; With these words from our psalm for this morning, the Word of God seeks to bring us back to what is real, what is lasting, what is enduring. We can wait for the stock market to rebound, or the real estate market to settle out, or the job market to suddenly flood with new opportunities. And those things may happen. But your investment portfolio, your property and your job are all temporary. We gather this morning to worship the one true God, who is more stable than any investment, any piece of property and even the best of jobs. Yet how can we count on the God we can’t see, to deal with the problems we can see? Does this even make sense, trusting in an invisible God? Let’s go back to Psalm 62, spend some time there and see what we discover. If we look at all of it, we find the poetry describes competing sources for comfort, strength and peace in life. On the one hand, there is God. The Psalmist describes God as: my rock, my salvation, my stronghold, my safety, my honor, my strong rock, my refuge, and our refuge. The Psalm says that power and steadfast love belong to God. On the other hand, there are other people and the status they crave. The Psalmist says that other people bless me with their lips and in their hearts they curse. Lies are their chief delight. They are a leaning fence, a toppling wall seeking to bring me down. Neither status nor wealth means anything. All the people of high status and low status thrown together are lighter than breath on the scale of what matters. You can’t set your heart on wealth or put your trust in it. So we see two clear alternatives. We can put our trust in other people and the things other people value, or we can put our trust in God. For those of us who have taken the time out of very busy lives to gather to worship, the choice would seem clear. Yet, I too feel the temptations to status. I also can judge others success by their car, clothes and career rather than the content of their character. Put your trust in things that are passing away and the psalm warns you will be shaken to your core when stuff fails you and people desert you. So where is your trust this morning? If your self worth is determined by the opinions of others, then your sense of right and wrong of good and bad will depend on how others view you. People will bless you with their lips, but curse you in their hearts. We are human. We disappoint one another. We don’t even mean to do it much of the time. We just do. Place your trust in God and then your hope is secure. See yourself not through the eyes of other people, but through the eyes of God as revealed in scripture. We see this morning how Jesus chose four fishermen—common men who would have been overlooked by many. They did not possess outstanding educations, sterling pedigrees or anything else to recommend them to others. Yet, Andrew and his brother Simon, whom Jesus would rename Peter and the sons of Zebedee, John and his brother James, became a third of the group of Apostles that turned the world upside down after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Others would have missed this about the men, the strength of purpose and essential character that Jesus saw. But the Holy Trinity knew these men from their mother’s wombs and knew that they were the core group around which Christianity would grow. This shows how God sees past the exterior to what is real about us. Psalm 62 ends, “God has spoken once, twice I have heard it, that power belongs to God. Steadfast love is yours, O Lord, for you repay everyone according to his deeds.” The way the psalmist says it, being repaid according to your deeds sounds good, cheerful even. But I have heard it said that the great fear of most people is that they will get what they deserve. In our heart of hearts we know that we sometimes have bad motivation for good behavior and where we know that though we sometimes smile and talk nice to people, we can also harbor thoughts far from kind. We know ourselves well and hope we won’t get what we deserve. But the Psalmist says this is a good thing. God sees us, knows us and rewards us for the good we do. And the evil we do left unrepented will be punished at the end of time. But the Psalmist is thankful because people are slandering him, saying all manner of bad things for no good reason and he trusts that God will sort it all out eventually. In fact a little Hebrew might help here. The word for rewarding someone here has the root of Shalom. You know Shalom. It’s that well known Hebrew word for peace. But it means much more than just a lack of hostility or violence. The Hebrew word shalom means health, wholeness, well being. This is what God gives us. The psalm says that steadfast love is your O lord, for you give peace to each according to his deeds. This is what the Psalmist who has been hurt and wronged by others is waiting for. Not vengeance, for which other psalms cry out. No, Psalm 62 asks for peace. Look at the context causing the Psalmist to write. He has been wrongly hurt, abused by those he trusted. Now he trusts in God alone. The trust is in saying, “God I know you know what is right and I trust you to sort it all out and bring me peace.” What this hurt and wronged person does is not to seek revenge. He doesn’t slander or hurt those who hurt him. No, he waits soulfully, silently, waits for God to be God. This is not to say that he doesn’t open his mouth at all. After all, the Psalmist just gave us Psalm 62 during this same time period. He can go about his daily business with his soul waiting silently for God. I know that actual silence can be and is useful and may even be what the Psalmist meant. But he said his soul was quiet and elsewhere the Psalms will talk about a soul being disquieted. I want to suggest that this matters more than speaking or not speaking that in your heart of hearts you work to find the place where you can wait for what comes. You set about doing what you know to do to care for yourself or your family. You take the steps you know you need to take, but you put your trust not in your own actions, but in God. This has not been easy for me, but I have found some times of anxiety, where I can actually make this trick work. I can decide that it’s in God’s hands and I can go about my business with a soul at peace knowing that the issue is in better hands than mine. This is what it is like to lean on a strong rock, to count on God for salvation rather than money, status or power. This is no excuse taking no action. Any one sermon can not help you sort through everything. What I am trying to show is not how to take the steps to tackle your personal mortgage crisis or job situation. You will need to do more than sit and wait trusting God to sort it out while you relax. I am asking where you put your trust and trying to suggest how your own essential self worth should be weighed on God’s scales and not mine or anyone’s else. And when you do face a problem, the way to find peace is to pray, stay in prayer about God’s will for the situation, do what you know how to do, and then lay the worry on God. Find quietness in your soul over the problems by trusting God. But what about that first question? How do we trust in an unseen God to deal with all too real problems? First, let’s acknowledge that we trust in an unseen force all the time. Even atheists do. [Take a hymnal. Hold it at arms length and drop it flatly, loudly to the floor.] Invisible. Dependable. [Pick up the hymnal. Hold it at arms length and drop it flatly, once more.] No one in this room who saw what I was doing doubted that a dropped hymnal would fall to the floor. As dependable as clockwork, gravity keeps steadily working. [Pick up the hymnal. Hold it at arms length and drop it flatly, once more.] Our steadfast, rock solid God created gravity and other dependable ways for the universe to work. Behind all of these is the God who created that order and stays with us in the chaos we make out of that orderly universe. God is your salvation, your rock, your stronghold, your refuge. Don’t put your faith in other people and what they think of you or in status, wealth, or honor. These things are fleeting. Put your trust in the One who is trustworthy. And having put your trust in him, let your soul be at peace that whatever comes, you are gonna be fine.
For God alone my soul in silence waits; Amen.
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