Just like a deer that craves streams of water,
my whole being craves you, God.
2 My whole being thirsts for God, for the living God.
When will I come and see God’s face?
3 My tears have been my food both day and night,
as people constantly questioned me,
“Where’s your God now?”
4 But I remember these things as I bare my soul:
how I made my way to the mighty one’s abode,
to God’s own house,
with joyous shouts and thanksgiving songs—
a huge crowd celebrating the festival!
5 Why, I ask myself, are you so depressed?
Why are you so upset inside?
Hope in God!
Because I will again give him thanks,
my saving presence and my God.
6 My whole being is depressed.
That’s why I remember you
from the land of Jordan and Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep called to deep at the noise of your waterfalls;
all your massive waves surged over me.
8 By day the Lord commands his faithful love;
by night his song is with me—
a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I will say to God, my solid rock,
“Why have you forgotten me?
Why do I have to walk around,
sad, oppressed by enemies?”
10 With my bones crushed, my foes make fun of me,
constantly questioning me: “Where’s your God now?”
11 Why, I ask myself, are you so depressed?
Why are you so upset inside?
Hope in God!
Because I will again give him thanks,
my saving presence and my God. (Common English Bible)
“Sanctuary at Sixty: Five Acts of Worship to Make a Space a Sanctuary,” Week One
My childhood friend McKinna’s voice rang out across the sanctuary we had spent many hours as teenagers in, worshiping God and participating in Sunday Schools, youth groups, and leading Vacation Bible Schools.
Only in this moment, we were not teenagers. I had just been ordained a minister in the Christian Church, and McKinna was well on her way at the University of Chicago Divinity School. We were summoned back to our childhood congregation right as it was in the midst of experiencing a devastating schism to preach on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which fell on a Sunday that year.
I preached on Habakkuk 3:17-19, the ending of that book when the prophet sings about how even if all manner of calamity and famine befalls him, he will still praise the God who calls him to tread upon such great heights.
McKinna preached on the passage you just heard—Psalm 42. And it was one of those sermons that fundamentally changes your relationship with God’s Word. Even though I had taken a class just on the Psalms during my last year of seminary, from a solid professor who was clearly passionate about the book, there is no substitute for having the Word of God illuminated for you in a lifechanging way precisely because it speaks to your own life, and for it to take place in God’s house.
I have shared this with some of y’all, but 9/11 was a moment in which life changed in an instant for my generation. I remember exactly where I was when I learned the news—at the end of my second period debate class when my high school principal got on the public address system to share that airplanes had been flown into the World Trade Center. Ironically, my debate partner and I had just finished writing a case for treating terrorism as a weapon of mass destruction. We retired that case after 9/11, I just could not bring myself to argue it for the sake of wins and losses on paper ballots.
Ten years after that, though, as I heard my childhood friend-turned-colleague-in-ministry unpack how deep called to deep for her in the wake of 9/11, I felt a connection to the Psalms I had never experienced before. Their laments and cries out, their vividness and poignancy, all of it landed in a way that gave voice to the lived experience of those past ten years. Which I think is Scripture at its sacred best—giving voice to our shared experience of enduring suffering by knowing God loves us.
And now, ten years later, I am humbled to be preaching on that Psalm to you, as we talk together about the nature of praise, and especially our praise of God, here in the house of God.
This is a new sermon series for a special moment in Valley’s history, the 60th anniversary of our Gothic revival sanctuary, which was completed in October 1961. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of Valley’s planting back in the spring, and this sermon series mirrors that as a five-week celebration, but we will be focusing on the acts of worship that set this space apart as a sanctuary. Our order of worship can be broken down into five such acts, right in order: praise, prayer, proclamation, participation, and finally, partaking. Each of these acts is interwoven into multiple parts of our worship service, but each of them come to the forefront at a different moment in our order of worship. We begin this series with the act of praise, which is at the forefront with our call to worship and, appropriately enough, our hymn of praise (you can’t accuse us of false advertising!).
I want to begin this series by confessing that I do think—for myself, for others, maybe even for you—that our relationship with the act of praising God has changed as a result of the past eighteen months, just as it changed after 9/11. And that is because events like 9/11, like a pandemic that has claimed over 4.5 million souls, force us to address the question of why a good God allows such terrible and lethal events to occur.
The fancy academic word for this question is theodicy, but so far as I can tell, nobody in the academy or the church has produced an answer that satisfies all comers. We can attribute such things to God as part of God’s providence, but what does it say about God that God enables such pain, or worse, actively causes it? We can attribute the pain and loss to the devil, but what does it say about God if the devil can best God so easily and frequently? We can attribute such things to fate, but that sells us and our own free will short. Or we can attribute these consequences to us and our own free will, but then why does God not intervene as God did like against the pharaohs of old?
There is no perfect answer, and the implication undergirding each of these possible answers is the same: is such a God even worthy of our praise? Because—and this is crucial for us to understand—a significant part of the Bible, from the ten plagues against Egypt to Elijah’s miracles against the priests of Ba’al—presents God as the only God worthy of praise and worship in an ancient world where gods of the rain or harvest were a dime a dozen. And today still, the religious paths made available to us are many. So why God? And why praise God?
In a word—for me, anyways, and I think the Psalmist too in this Psalm, and its companion, Psalm 43—depth. Depth. Deep calls to deep, sings the Psalmist, at the thunder of God’s waterfalls, and all the waves and breakers surge over me. Drowning in the depth of his depression and existential crisis, the Psalmist is unequivocal about the depth of his pain and sense of loss. There is no brave face, no surface-level positivity, no pop-psychology hokum. For God is not interested in a façade from us. God never was. God wants only depth, what is deepest within us, us at our most genuine and authentic, because in this broken and beautiful world, that is the home of capital-T Truth.
And the capital-T Truth here is a God worthy of our praise not because God functions as a magic wand that makes everything all better, taking away the taunts and tears and depression, but because God functions as an eternal heaven to either protect us or await us. We celebrate a legacy of sixty years in this sanctuary with this sermon series, but the God who is worthy of our praise is everlasting to everlasting, and that God cannot be reduced to a Santa in the sky who gives us our wish lists.
Notice how the question has shifted, from “Why is a God who doesn’t simply create perfection worthy of our praise?” to “Even if perfection or even goodness is unattainable, why should I still praise God?” We have stopped demanding that God be our fairy godmother, fixing everything we want fixed, and instead have begun relying on God to be our solid rock and foundation who does not wave away the storm but makes it so that we can survive the storm.
We still do not always survive such storms. More and more of you have lost someone to covid-19. Going back to 9/11, I think we each lost something that day too. For me, that loss was not limited to national pride or patriotism, it was my own presumption of innocence every time I stepped foot into an airport. Not that I ever had it fully before—although my boyhood helped, and I was coming of age into a man—but one of the things 9/11 took from me was my presumption of innocence in situations far beyond my control. I never got it back. I don’t think I ever will.
And so every time I endured an uncalled for action by airport security, or a withering comment by a ticket agent, the waves and breakers would surge over me again, washing away what innocence I may have had on account of my youth. Taunts, tears, depression, the words of the Psalmist—I felt it all.
And yet, I couldn’t have preached this sermon ten years ago. I wasn’t mature enough—in my faith, in my life experience, in my relationship with my own skin. But my childhood friend’s sermon represented a quantum leap forward for me in that journey towards maturity, because it answered for me the question raised by the Habakkuk text I preached on alongside her. Habakkuk teaches that we are to praise God even if all else fails around us, but that is where the prophet ends his book.
The Psalmist continues on, though. When all else around us fails, when the waters are rising and at our chins, breaking over us, enveloping us, covering us in totality, the Psalmist refers to God as “my help,” or “my saving presence.” My help and my God. And I don’t mean “the help.” God both seeks depth from us and lives in the depths, because it is there that God saves us from the depths of sin, from the depths of injury and sorrow, and from the depths of hell to the highest heights of heaven.
And so, every week, when we gather in this place to worship God, we begin with praise of our help, our saving presence, and our God. On it, the rest of our worship of God stands. Our worship of God rests on the premise that whatever else is happening, God remains worthy of our praise. It may be easier some weeks than others, it may be exceptionally difficult some weeks, but that worship and praise birth each other, a symbiotic relationship that, like God we praise and worship, endures forever.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
September 5, 2021