Proper 13 Year A 2026: Psalm 17:1-8,16

One of the things I appreciate the most about our theology as Episcopalians is how acceptable it is to feel multiple feelings at the same time. We are encouraged to cry out to God with whatever we are feeling, whatever we are experiencing, and nothing is off limits. We can hope in God while sitting in the darkness. Through our prayers and our liturgies, we can weep and hope simultaneously - as we say in our funeral liturgy, “even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!” That doesn’t mean that at the grave we talk ourselves out of being sad. It means that at the grave we recognize the hope for “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Nothing has been “fixed” but everything has been redeemed. We are left at the same place as the writer of psalm 17 is at the end of their psalm.

Psalm 17, which we prayed the bookends of this morning, is directed to Yahweh - to the personal name of God. At the time the psalms were written, it wasn’t enough to just say “god”. Each ethnic group had their own god, or gods, to whom they prayed. Our translation says “Lord” because, historically, out of respect and awe, Jews wouldn’t pronounce the name of God. As they read scripture aloud, when they reached the name of God they would say “adonai”, meaning “lord” or “master” which was used as a sacred title for Yahweh. Yet in having written the name of Yahweh, the writer is being as clear as possible that this is the god to whom they are crying out. This is the god whom they hold responsible. And this is the god who will save them. There is no mistaking Yahweh for any other god.

Today’s Psalm is an individual lament psalm. The lament psalm is the “backbone” of the psalter. This genre consists of complaints and prayers of supplication. Sacred acts, such as washing and sprinkling, would have accompanied laments as the psalm was sung by supplicants. More than half the psalter is made up of such psalms of lament - lament, meaning an honest, passionate prayer of grief, sorrow, or confusion that a person or community brings directly to God.

Psalms of lament are a beautiful example of liberation of expression. For God, who is the great liberator, liberates us in all ways. Part of that liberation is a freedom to express ourselves honestly to God. In the words of scholar Walter Brueggemann, “The use of these ‘psalms of darkness’ may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretend way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is in fact to withhold part of life from the sovereignty of God. Thus these psalms make the important connection: everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all of life.” (52)

Psalm 17 begins with the Hebrew word “schema”, or “hear”. It’s telling whoever the word is addressed to not just to passively hear, but to hear as an action word. There are these Sesame Street shorts where Cookie Monster stars in movie parodies, like Furry Potter and Double Stuf 7, where he learns to listen to directions. In The Biscotti Kid, he learns how to listen with his whole body: eyes watch, ears listen, voice quiet, body calm. This approaches the kind of listening the psalmist is talking about. “Schema” makes clear the kind of “hearing” that God is being called to: to listen, pay attention, and act on what is heard. Listening with the entirety of one’s being - something that Israel has learned from God. It’s like when your kids turn your lessons back on you. The schema is a central Jewish prayer and a key declaration of faith. The opening words of the schema are “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”. So the psalm begins with calling God to listen to the psalmist in the same way as Israel is called to listen to God.

Throughout the body of today's psalm, we hear the psalmist pleading for a hearing. They protest their innocence and righteousness and offer to be tested in that regard before again petitioning for God’s response and protection. In the parts of the psalm that aren’t in the reading for today, the psalmist continues by expounding on the destructive character and actions of the wicked who are persecuting them before making yet another plea to God to thwart and punish those who threaten the innocent petitioner. The lectionary then picks back up with the psalmist’s confidence in God’s righteous judgment when the night is over and they awaken and are satisfied with seeing God's likeness

The “awakening” the psalmist speaks of at the end of Psalm 17 is, as you might imagine, a deeper word than to just awaken on any given morning. It could be that simple, but probably not. A deeper meaning or understanding is likely implied here -  an awakening from a “dark night of the soul”, a freeing from a current state of persecution, or a rebirth into a new understanding of God. The word “koots” that is translated as “awake” (phonetic spelling of quwts) appears twenty-three times throughout the Hebrew Bible and always relates to the transition from a state of unconsciousness - whether ordinary sleep, spiritual lethargy, or death - to consciousness and conscious activity: themes like vigilance, deliverance, judgment, and resurrection. 

The psalms’ ability to captivate and shape our imagination, to not only describe but to recast our theological vision, is achieved through metaphor. It should not be lost on us that the making of images is forbidden in the second of the Ten Commandments. But Israel’s poetry creates images in a new way, serving as its own “verbal iconography”, which allows us to imagine God in new ways. (Fentress-Williams, 141) Not a graven image with eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear, but a living God who shows us how to see and hear. Psalms of lament offer a space for hope while remaining present to the experience of those in the midst of suffering. It calls to mind an alternative anthem for the beginning of funerals, which begins: “In the midst of life we are in death; from whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.”

The structure of the psalm is a means of leading the speaker into, but also through and out of, the darkness. One of the great powers of the psalms of lament is their ability to transcend a specific time and context to speak to a universal human experience. Notice at the end of our  psalm, the psalmist is still waiting. They have not received the deliverance for which they plead, but they speak with confidence of beholding Yahweh’s face and of receiving their satisfaction. That word “koon”, awake, which the psalmist is looking to and holding onto the promise of, binds together daily experience, divine intervention, prophetic warning, and ultimate resurrection, reinforcing the continuity of God’s redemptive purpose from the Old Testament through the consummation of all things.

So what are we to do with this? We are blessed to have so much poetry that acknowledges suffering as our sacred texts because humans are humans and it can truly be hard to live as humans in a human world with so much suffering. I had a teacher in high school who said that when he starts complaining about “kids these days” it would be time for him to retire, because kids are kids. In the same way, it can be astonishingly easy to see ourselves in the experiences of ancient people. Our texts today are full of examples of ancient people doing things we can picture ourselves doing without much imagination. Jacob wrestles with God. Jesus has compassion on the hungry and the sick. Jesus’ followers are so eager for him that they follow him into a deserted place without packing a lunch. And the psalmist pleads for God’s righteousness to come. 

Poetry is how we can imagine ourselves into their world and use their words in a way that is authentic to us today, right here and now. We can use the psalter, Israel’s prayer book, to lift up our prayers to God of every experience in our lives - our gratitudes and thanksgivings, our sorrow and grief, our anger and rage, our joy and our love. The psalms of lament remind us that we have liberation of expression to our Lord, who wants all of us. There is nothing that is inappropriate to discuss with God. We owe God, and our own souls, nothing less than our true, complete selves. Amen.