A sermon preached at Wethersfield (CT) Evangelical Free Church on July 3, 2022 as part of series entitled ‘Prayers of the Bible’
David Baer
Psa. 64:0 To the choirmaster. A David Psalm.
Psa. 64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
6 They search out injustice,
saying, “We have accomplished a diligent search.”
For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep.
Psa. 64:7 But God shoots his arrow at them;
they are wounded suddenly.
8 They are brought to ruin, with their own tongues turned against them;
all who see them will wag their heads.
9 Then all mankind fears;
they tell what God has brought about
and ponder what he has done.
Psa. 64:10 Let the righteous one rejoice in the LORD
and take refuge in him!
Let all the upright in heart exult!
Congregational prayer
On this Independence Day weekend, we thank You for the many privileges that our nation has brought to us as its citizens. We are thankful.
We know that the fruits of independence and nationhood have not always in our history been available to all. We ask forgiveness for those times when we have been participants in such shared sin, either by omission or commission. And we thank you that you have on so many occasions been merciful to these United States of America.
We are anxious in this moment, when nothing seems assured. We who have children or grandchildren fear for the world and the nation in which they will come of age. Like the psalmist, we often feel that unrighteousness and conspiracy outrun justice and truth and even decency. Have mercy upon our nation, we ask.
Among our flock and our families at WEFC, we are plagued by the same illnesses and vices and worries that are common to all of our neighbors. We ask you to be merciful to us. Yet we have hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, we have tasted his goodness, we have known freedom in him. We want more of his Spirit. We ask you for more freedom in Christ, freedom not only to rejoice, but also to serve and even to lay down our perks and our lives as you invite us to do.
We pray that even as you have been present to us in worship, that you now come to us through your Word and then through the Lord’s Supper. We are hopeless without you. Yet we rejoice in your closeness and your care.
Amen.
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Psalm 64 is nobody’s favorite Psalm.
Nobody memorizes this psalm. I bet we could walk through every home represented in our WEFC family and not find Psalm 64 tucked under a single refrigerator magnet. I can almost guarantee that nobody has this psalm cross-stitched and framed, hanging in the living room.
It’s a dark psalm. It’s foreboding. It begins with a complaint that is then developed in such conspiratorial detail that it doesn’t really even fit any of our established categories of the biblical psalms.
It walks us through a sinister, conspiratorial landscape. Only late in the psalm does the Lord even show up in the prayer’s lines and dissipate the clouds that the psalm has by that point left hanging above our heads. And only in the final clause of the entire psalm does the pray-er discover that he’s not the only one who knows this dark web of fears, conspiracies, and anxiety that has become his life.
The psalm does bring us into the light, does bring us towards hope in its final verse or two. But it makes us wait an unusually long time before it grants us that relief.
The writer of Psalm 64 believes he lives in a dangerous and menacing world. If we share his assessment, then we walk with him on infected soil. The path to school or to work or to grandmother’s house takes us past the open mouth of a dark cave. People are plotting against us—against me—around a candle just inside.
If you have seen anxiety in your life or a family member’s life descend towards paranoia, then this psalm will sound uncomfortably familiar to you, at least in its first verses. In our family, Karen and I not unfamiliar with paranoia. A family member calls up when his own darkness descends. He knows he’s being paranoiac in those moments, he knows the things he fears are probably not real, but he can’t escape the thoughts.
Or maybe the things you fear—alongside this brother psalmist—really are real. Maybe a rational person shouldfear those things. Maybe the anxiety that grips us in 2022 is a rational response.
By my lights, the writer of Psalm 64 claims to live in a deeply conspiratorial time when it’s impossible to know for sure how much of our anxiety is based on fact and how much is merely imagined.
And you know what? I think we do, too.
I think that when this psalmist describes his moment, he describes ours as well.
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Now we are a community of Jesus followers. You may be visiting us this morning and may not yet have become a follower of Jesus. If so, you’re warmly welcome among us. We hope you’ll choose to hang out with us often. But a Jesus community is who we are and why we gather.
We claim to have found light and life in the mist of all that I’ve described. That’s our experience. It’s our testimony. It’s our witness. It’s our claim.
So in the light of this conspiratorial psalm this morning, I want to say this:
We rejoice in a dangerous and uncertain world. Our God-given joy takes root in infected soil. We whistle as we walk past the open mouth of that dark cave, not because we are naive, but because we have learned to trust in a reliable Lord who is really there. Really here.
The prayers of the Bible are not always voiced from strength. Quite often, their words flow from weakness. The prayers of the Bible do not always express deep confidence. Quite often they manifest dread and anxiety. We may find some model prayers, but we won’t always find model pray-ers. Perhaps there is no such thing. Maybe we mostly find pray-ers in process … pray-ers in formation … maybe as pray-ers we’re all works in progress.
This psalmist sure seems to be one.
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He prays out of palpable alone-ness. You could cut his anguished isolation with a knife.
In fact, the fact that he is very much alone is the first of three observations I want to make about this psalm.
Let’s hear again those first six verses:
Psa. 64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
6 They search out injustice,
saying, “We have accomplished a diligent search.”
Do you notice that everything about this psalmist is singular and everything about those who threaten him is plural? He’s outnumbered.
Let me read it again, highlighting the singularity of this psalmist over against the plurality of his enemies…
Psa. 64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
6 They search out injustice,
saying, “We have accomplished a diligent search.”
He is all alone. Outnumbered. All the odds are in their favor. He is left only with the hope that God is somehow present … listening … watching … and prepared to act. But all of his address to God is a plea, not yet a report.
Observe with me, too, how invisible those who conspire against him are to him:
Psa. 64: 2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows, (YOU CAN’T DODGE AN ARROW, YOU DON’T EVEN SEE IT COMING, IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME, TALK TO A DEER HUNTER WITH A SCAR OR TO THE VENISON IN YOUR FREEZER.)
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly, (YOU DON’T SEE A SNARE BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE … TALK TO A TRAPPER WITH A SCAR.)
thinking, “Who can see them?”
Let’s take a deep breath … and let’s take the measure of this man’s predicament.
FIRST: He is all alone.
SECOND: He can’t see his enemies.
Let’s take a deep breath … and let’s the measure of this man’s predicament.
First: He is all alone.
Second: He can’t see his enemies.
I’ve wondered, as I’ve spent many hours with this psalm this week, whether this pray-er is sure that all those invisible conspirators really exist. The nature of a conspiracy is that it takes place in secret. It’s hard to know for sure who’s out there … how many of them there are … how realistic is their threat … and whether they’re even really there … which is pretty bad if they are. Or whether I’m making this all up in my head, which might even be worse.
And even this wondering seems to bring our psalmist closer to our time … and to our anxious, conspiratorial moment. A time when it’s sometimes hard to know who are the crazy ones and who are the sane ones. And where I stand on that spectrum.
If you identify at all with this kind of isolated anxiety, then this psalm is a prayer for you. You should pray it.
Praying in the Bible’s way is not an exact science. We don’t have to know precisely what’s going on around us. We are invited to express before the Lord our ‘complaint’—as this Psalm call its—in hope that we aren’t actually as alone out here as we feel.
Or maybe you know all too well who has plotted against you at work … at school … in your family. Maybe there aren’t really any ambiguities at all. It’s not that things are unclear for you, it’s just that they’re so miserably unfair. So wrong.
And you are so left isolated and defenseless against their plot.
This prayer, then, is also a prayer for you:
Psa. 64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
6 They search out injustice,
saying, “We have accomplished a diligent search.”
For the inward mind and heart of a man are deep.
Before we leave this first part of today’s message, may I leave you with one more observation? It would feel evasive for me not to say something about it before we move on into the two remaining sections of this psalm. It would seem as though I were leaving God’s Word floating in space, unconnected with who we are and where we are in this moment.
In our hyper-politicized moment in this country, how can you know if you’ve fallen prey to the angry environment we live in? No matter whether there are conspiracies and conspirators out there, how can you know when *you* have become conspiratorial (and are playing the enemy’s game)?: When you no longer take your fears to the Lord first before you take them anywhere else.
I think this psalm encourages us to do just that.
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This psalm’s first pray-er felt himself to be very alone. He was isolated and more than a little bit afraid.
Now the biblical psalms before they are anything else are prayers. They show us the many forms that prayer to the God of Israel and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ can take. They offer us models for prayer. Not the prayers of model people, necessarily. But the range and diversity and daringness and honesty of prayers as these were prayed by Israel and as they are now prayed by followers of Jesus everywhere. But the psalms do more than merely show is what honest prayers are like. They show us also how honest prayers work.
Very often prayer begins with our darkness and then leads us into deep encounter with God.
That is exactly what happens in this prayer. The prayer takes a step forward at verse 7. In English, this awareness of God’s presence and God’s activity is introduced with the word ‘But…’.
Why this little word?
Well, ‘but’ appears right here in order to represent a turn that the Hebrew pray-er makes in the sudden realization that he is not alone.
Now don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. He has not yet realized that his plight is one that is familiar to other people. It’s not that he finds himself suddenly in the presence of a sympathetic community. The turning at verse 7 is not that kind of turning.
Rather he sees that his invisible enemies … his unseen conspirators … have their counterpart in the presence of the unseen God … an unseen Ally … an unseen Protector.
Psa. 64:7 But God shoots his arrow at them;
they are wounded suddenly.
8 They are brought to ruin, with their own tongues turned against them;
all who see them will wag their heads.
Let’s dig down deeply into this truth that this prayer is telling in these two little verses.
Do you see the irony in these verses, right here in verses 7 and 8?
Back in verse 4, we read that the wicked ‘shoot… from ambush at the blameless, shooting at him suddenly and without fear.’
Here we see that God shoots his arrow suddenly. In the Hebrew text, the words are the very same two words, just as in our English translation ‘shoot’ and ‘suddenly’ are the same words in verse 4, where they describe the conspirators’ shooting as in verse 7, where they describes God’s sudden shooting.
That’s one aspect of the irony of what the psalmist begins to see clearly as he prays and communicates to us in vv. 7-8. We could bookmark this reality for a moment by observing that ‘maybe the pray-er’s world is not quite as dangerous as he imagined.’
But there is a second irony. It is the conspirators’ own scheming that leads to their downfall. They are brought to ruin ‘with their own tongues turned against them.’
So which is it?
A. Does God turn on his righteous one’s persecutors and destroy them?
B. Or does their own scheming bring their downfall.
Well, the psalmist seems untroubled by the fact that it’s both of these things at the same time.
There’s instruction in this for us, I think.
Why is it, in time, that the worst schemers we’ve ever met … whether in our little private lives or on a public canvas writ large in the form of politics or history … why is it that they are so often … in time … brought low … disgraced … and often destroyed?
Did they do it to themselves? Yes, because that is how the world works, our psalm tells us.
But did God’s arrow also fly silently and suddenly in the turn of events. Well, yes, because that’s also how the world works, our psalmist would have us believe.
Are we being instructed to have eyes to see the silent hand of God moving in the slow and then sometimes sudden turning of events?
I think so.
More importantly, are we being invited to learn to walk prayerfully and fearlessly through the conspiracies of our moment? Yes, I think so.
You see, there is a permanence in righteousness that tends to outlast its enemies. And there is a fleetingness to the temporary dominance of the unrighteous that tends to fade slowly or to fall suddenly as time in this God-shaped world of ours moves forward.
It turns out, this psalmist comes to understand in prayer, that he is not alone. It turns out, we students of this instruction, come to understand, that we are not alone. God, with his swift arrow, is watching … patiently … but also attentively … and in time actively.
Do we expect it? Do we observe it? Do we quietly give thanks for it?
Or are we bereft of eyes that see the movements of God’s hand no matter how blurry and fleeting and poorly lit the image? Have we become so secularized that we cannot see His hand in our history … in our histories?
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At the end of this psalm—in the last two verses … the final four lines of this psalm, the pray-er finally finds himself in human company.
I’m going to skip over verse 9 and focus in the final moments of this teaching on verse 10.
[Then all mankind fears;
they tell what God has brought about
and ponder what he has done.]
Psa. 64:10 Let the righteous one rejoice in the LORD
and take refuge in him!
Let all the upright in heart exult!
‘
In the first line of verse 10, our pray-er is still very much alone. But having seen what his eyes have seen—or perhaps what his confidence in the Lord promises his heart that he will see—his is a solitude of rejoicing rather than of trembling in fear. It is an aloneness that shouts out God’s reliability and seeks to find still further refuge in Him.
Then, in the psalm’s final syllables, the pray-er recognizes that God’s trustworthiness amid anxiety-producing circumstances is an experience that all God’s sons and daughters can be expected to experience: Let all the upright in heart exult!
The Psalms so often do this kind of thing, moving from the long, arduous, taxing journey of the individual, who must fight his or her battles himself…
… into the welcoming embrace of a community … of a family … where every one has fought his or her own battles.
There is in fact a coming home to a family like ours at WEFC and hundreds of thousands of other communities where Jesus is honored. But that community of faith … of shared destiny … of Jesus’ presence … never quite eliminates the burden that rests on the shoulders of each of us to engage our fears, our addictions, our anxieties, our sin, our faithlessness … on our own and for ourselves … before God.
It’s a paradox of being a disciple of Christ, one of the really deep ones. Each of us is very much alone in the most critical decisions about who we will be … and at the same time embraced in the arms of a community that understands, supports, prays, and walks with us.
This psalm is just one of many manifestations of that same reality.
Are you anxious? Are there those who would bring you down? Or bring your church down? Or bring your nation down? (On this Fourth of July).
Does the chaos within and without make you unsure about whether the threat lives only in your head? Or whether it really and truly stalks your family, your workplace, your school, your country?
Then pray:
Psa. 64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my complaint;
preserve my life from dread of the enemy.
2 Hide me from the secret plots of the wicked,
from the throng of evildoers,
3 who whet their tongues like swords,
who aim bitter words like arrows,
4 shooting from ambush at the blameless,
shooting at him suddenly and without fear.
5 They hold fast to their evil purpose;
they talk of laying snares secretly,
thinking, “Who can see them?”
This little, unfavorite psalm is not the answer to all our problems. Nor is it more than a single important voice within Scripture.
But it invites those who trust in God to walk with confidence until that day, soon or far off, when God’s will shall be done … on earth as it is in heaven.
Meanwhile…in this present darkness…
Let the righteous one rejoice in the LORD
and take refuge in him!
Let all the upright in heart exult!
Canter Bridge 