Epiphany 2 Year A 2025: Psalm 40

“In his book, The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois discusses ‘sorrow songs,’ music created by African captives, exiled in America. The songs are laments, prayers sung to God as a form of protest and supplication, looking for justice from a righteous God. The original American music conveys ‘soul-hunger’ and ‘restlessness’, ‘unvoiced longing toward a truer world’. The music also carries ‘hope - a faith in the final justice of things’. In the sorrow songs we have a window into the identities of an oppressed people and their belief in a God who saw them and would remember them. In their music they wrestled with ‘good and evil, suffering and pain.’ Their laments, like those in the psalms, created sacred space, a sanctuary for the soul.” (Fentress-Williams, 144)

The psalms are typically sorted into certain types or genres that reflect their usage in various contexts, especially in the worship life of ancient Israel. There are thanksgiving psalms, hymns, wisdom psalms, creation psalms, liturgical psalms, individual and communal praises and individual and communal laments. The title of the book characterizes the psalms as hymns - the Hebrew title of the book, Tehillim, means more specifically “praises”.

We really like to categorize the psalms, but it’s hard to do so with 150 poems that vary greatly across the range of human emotion. There are psalms of rage. Psalms of suffering. Psalms of great joy and thanksgiving. But the categorizations of the psalms are a later practice of biblical theologians. In the same way as people who lived in the late middle ages didn’t know they were living in the late middle ages, they just lived and historians later named the time period or how Beethoven didn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to write this in sonata allegro form”, he just wrote his sonatas in the style of the day, the name of the form was later assigned by musicologists, psalmists didn’t look at a list of potential styles of psalm and settle on a psalm of lament. They wrote from their lives and their experiences of God in their lives.

Psalm 40 is a psalm that seemingly switches “type” of psalm partway through. The first 10 verses are a psalm of thanksgiving. But in verse 11, it begins to move into a psalm of lament and then, by the final two verses does what most lament psalms do - reminds the singer that “all who seek (the Lord) may rejoice and be glad in (Him)”. It’s like the performance evaluation of psalms - a criticism sandwiched between two positive things.

Psalm 40 is deeply personal. It opens with “I waited patiently.” However, with a little digging, it means so much more. Scholar Walter Brueggemann takes issue with the translation of the first verse as “I waited patiently”, calling it a “weak rendering”. Based on Hebrew grammatical construction, Brueggemann argues that a better translation might be, “I hope intensely for Yahweh.” Notice the present tense - “hope”, not “hoped”. And, the psalmist is offering personal and deep respect. Here, “the Lord” is a translation choice based on Jewish practice of saying “adonai”, which translates as a personal naming of “Lord”, the personal name of God, out of respect whenever the text actually says “Yahweh”, a name too sacred to say aloud. 

The second half of verse one through verse three describe the rescue that was hoped for and granted: Yahweh inclined, he heard, he drew me up, he set my feet, he put a new song in my mouth. In verse 3, as elsewhere, the psalmist is eager to assert that this is not a private matter. It is personal, but not private. The psalmist’s rescue is a matter of public interest and benefit, for Yahweh’s trustworthiness in this instance leads others to trust. The phrase “new song” is a sign of new orientation. The new situation of well-being requires a break with old liturgical claims and practices. Elsewhere the phrase refers to historical liberation, liturgical renewal, and finally to a great new opening of public life for those who “hope intensely” for the Gospel.

The verbs of thanksgiving are of particular interest. There is no doubt that they refer to a personal experience, but the words have imaginative power because they also touch and allude to the primal memories of Egypt and the exodus. That God inclines and hears, brings up, and sets feet in new places is the experience of all of Israel. The new song is enacted there in the Songs of Moses and of Miriam, though the phrase is not used. When one uses this psalm, one stands in solidarity with, participates in, and relives the whole saving memory of Israel. It is the same way in which we experience ourselves taking our places at the table when we celebrate the Eucharist. It is anamnesis, the kind of remembering that makes the past present. That makes the past part of the activity of the present, not simply nostalgia or a historical reminder.

Logically, the sequence of this psalm is wrong. A complaint should not come after the joy of the new song, but experientially the sequence is significant. It reminds us that the move from disorientation to new orientation is not a single, straight line, irreversible and unambiguous. Life moves in and out. In our daily life the joy and deliverance is immediately beset and assaulted by despair and fear. In the same way as the stages of grief aren’t levels you accomplish and move onto the next one, neither are the stages of our relationships with God. It is notable that there are songs of lament in this book titled “praises”. That having the trust to cry out to God is its own form of praising God’s mercy, power, and love.

It’s hard to hold on to that trust. To trust in an all powerful and all good-willing God when those who loudly proclaim their allegiance to Jesus will, in the same breath, besmirch and abuse other people, other image-bearers of God. And we pray to God, we plead with God to work in their hearts, and it feels like those prayers fall on deaf ears. The answers of God knowing what we do not know, of God seeing the world and time itself differently than we do, can feel woefully inadequate when placed side by side with current, active suffering. What good is deliverance in some distant day when what we need is help now?

This question leads us to the psalms, particularly psalms of lament. The lament is a call to action wherein the psalmist describes a crisis, illness, traumatic event, or some type of suffering that is too great to adjudicate - not just an outpouring of suffering for the purpose of complaining, but to make sure God understands the extent and the immediacy of the situation. When we remember Israel’s history in the wilderness, and then as a marginalized community in Canaan, and finally, albeit briefly, a stand-alone nation before exile, it is likely that her passionate dependence on God over dependence on chariots and horses is just as much out of necessity as it is faith. A chronically oppressed people’s faith is formed by their experience. In the psalms of lament we can observe a response to suffering that cries out to God and in so doing recasts the situation. When God is introduced, the psalmist is intentionally shifting the power dynamic to focus not on just the circumstances but the God who has power over them. The lament then offers a selective view of an Israelite ethos, born in crisis, that is dynamic, creative, pluriform, polyphonic, and transgressive. It is “poetry of resistance.” (Fentress-Williams, 143)

So the one who hopes urges God against delay. The one who has not “withheld” praise has to ask that Yahweh not “withhold” mercy. There is a realism to our psalm, but it is a realism set in a profound trust. It is to Yahweh that Israel turns in deep need, to Yahweh and to none other, in trouble as well as in joy. (Brueggemann, 131)

What we say when we pray is important in two ways. First, it communicates our truth. It gives voice and shape to whatever it is that we are feeling and allows us to both proclaim and examine who we are. Second, it shapes us. The way in which we read our prayers in Episcopal worship shapes us by saying those prayers. I recently asked my therapist how to convince myself of what I know to be true, but don’t really believe to be true and she said, “keep saying it.” The sole point of prayer isn’t to convince God. Prayer moves us. Prayer changes us. Keep crying out. It is not in vain. Amen.