Hilton Head Island, SC – October 7, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 56:1-13; Matthew 6:25-34
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – When I am afraid, I put my trust in Thee. – Psalm 56:3 (RSV)
It seems highly unlikely that anyone here would imagine that I came up with that sermon title all by myself. Most assuredly I didn’t, and I want you to know that. “Letting Go and Letting God” has been an expression in Christian culture, at least American Christian culture, for many years. But what does “Letting Go and Letting God” really mean? What does it connote or suggest or imply?
To seek an answer, let us look at yet another of the Psalms which are ascribed to David, King of the Israelites. The superscription at the beginning of Psalm 56 says this: “To the choirmaster: according to The Dove on Far-off Terebinths. A Mitkam of David, when the Philistines seized him in Gath.” These words require some explanation before we get into the Psalm itself.
Originally, all of the Psalms were sung. They were not merely spoken. To get the full effect of this, I urge all of you to go up to Mepkin Abbey near Moncks Corner, SC, and spend at least 24 hours. I want to alert you to the fact, however, that they have seven services a day at Mepkin, and at most other monasteries or convents around the world, except on Sunday, when they have eight. The first service, incidentally, is at 3:20 AM, and the last one is at 8:00 PM. To get sufficient effect, I recommend you go to at least three or four of the services.
At Mepkin, the monks routinely sing through the whole book of Psalms, from Psalm 1 to Psalm 150, and then they start the cycle all over again. Every Psalm is sung to a particular tune, and the choirmaster, either using a pipe organ or a guitar, leads the singing.
Three thousand years ago or so, when the Psalms were originally being written, there were also many choices of tunes for each Psalm. For example, Psalm 23, “The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want,” may be sung to dozens of tunes. Probably the most familiar to us in Christian hymnody are Crimond, Evan, or Belmont. The number and kind of poetic “feet” in each Psalm determine what tunes may be utilized for that particular Psalm.
David presumably wrote Psalm 56, and he directed that it was to be sung to the tune, “The Dove on Far-off Terebinths.” (A terebinth is a small species of tree, which incidentally produces turpentine.) Nobody knows now what the tune “The Dove on Far-off Terebinths” sounded like, but David knew, and he told the choirmaster, whoever that might be, that is the tune to which he wanted his Psalm to be sung.
But further, and from the standpoint of this sermon far more importantly, David wrote this Mitkam (a certain kind of poem, maybe like a sonnet or limerick or whatever) – quote -“When the Philistines seized him in Gath.” The Philistines were enemies of the Israelites. You may remember that David killed the Philistine Goliath with a smooth stone from his sling. We read in I Samuel how David was captured by the Philistines, and lived in captivity among them for a time. Apparently it was out of that experience that Psalm 56 was written.
Listen again to the opening verses. “Be gracious to me, O God, for men trample upon me; all day long foemen oppress me; my enemies trample upon me all day long, for many fight against me proudly. When I am afraid, I put my trust in thee. In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust without a fear. What can flesh do to me?” (56:1-4)
Psalm 56 is yet another of the many instances when David remembered his having been in a very tight spot. He felt totally hemmed in by adversaries, and he was convinced there was nowhere he could go. Therefore, as frequently in other such circumstances, David turned to God.
The French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote an intriguing and melancholy story about the marriage of a high-strung and unhappy young woman, Emma, to a solid if also somewhat stolid physician, Charles Bovary. It is called Madame Bovary. Emma plunged quickly into matrimony with her husband, and then berated herself for having done so. Flaubert describes the situation: “Then gradually her thoughts took focus. Sitting on the grass, poking at the turf with the point of her sunshade, Emma said over and over again: ‘O God, O God, why did I get married?’”
The difference between Emma Bovary and King David is that she hemmed herself in by her own decision, and David was hemmed in by the decision of his enemies. When she called out to God in exasperation over getting married, she didn’t really expect an answer or a solution. She knew, as they say, that she had made her bed and now she must lie in it. When David called out, his motivation was quite different. But we shall address what it was a bit later.
Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s account of his birth into a very poor family in Limerick, Ireland, and then their emigration to New York City. Their lives were filled with humor and hope, tragedy and triumph. When Frank’s mother Angela’s baby daughter was only seven weeks old, the infant died. Angela was keening into the night, and her neighbor, Mrs. Leibowitz, hearing her cries, came in to try to comfort her. Frank McCourt writes in his style without any quotation marks, “My mother screams again, Dead, Mrs. Leibowitz. Dead. Her head drops and she rocks back and forth. Middle of the night, Mrs. Leibowitz. In her pram. I should have been watching her. Seven weeks she had in this world and died in the middle of the night, alone, Mrs. Leibowitz, all alone in that pram. Mrs. Leibowitz holds my mother in her arms. Hush, now, shush. Babies go like that. It happens, missus. God takes them. In the pram, Mrs. Leibowitz. Near my bed. I could have picked her up and she didn’t have to die, did she? God doesn’t want little babies. What is God going to do with little babies?”
When Jesus advised the peasants of northern Judea not to be anxious about having the necessities of life, he was speaking to people who were much more like the McCourt family of the slums of Limerick than like Emma Bovary in a comfortable middle-class situation, married to a doctor who was a very fine man who loved her dearly. And yet Emma was probably more anxious about the finer things of life than the McCourts or the Galilean peasants, because she had many of them, and they had none.
It isn’t easy to let go and let God if you think God won’t catch you in your free-fall into trust in divine grace. People who know they have nothing to fall back on are more likely to fall back on God than those who consider themselves self-reliant.
For all the fact that David was a king and had far more worldly possessions than his subjects, he also knew that spiritually he often was essentially poverty-stricken. That especially happened when he felt surrounded by enemies. Then he believed he had no choice other than to let go and let God. “When I am afraid, I put my trust in Thee.”
“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for today.” Many years ago a man named Bill W. started an organization for people who needed the help of others to overcome their addiction. They needed to recognize a Higher Power, said Bill W. They needed to live one day at a time, he said. And so now, in thousands of locations all over the world every day, people gather in rooms large and small, and they say, “Hi, my name is John” --- or Mary, or Juan, or Maria, or Ivan, or Moira --- “and I’m an alcoholic.” They are attempting to let go and let God, or at least that Higher Power.
But what does it mean, this “letting go and letting God”? First, some things it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that by turning over our problems to God, He will solve them. It doesn’t mean that when we are up against it we can simply ask God to liberate us. It doesn’t mean we can put ourselves into a motivational “neutral,” with the motor still running but with us removed from the storm and stress.
What it does mean is a recognition that for the moment God is willing to bear the burden of our problems. Not forever, not even for the long haul, but for the moment. It means we can step outside ourselves by admitting that we are powerless to resolve our difficulties on our own, and that temporarily we give them over to God. It means that whatever is crushing us cannot kill us so long as we realize that God is there with us in the midst of the crush, and that He will not abandon us.
Emma Bovary knew she had made a mistake in marrying Charles Bovary, she being she and he being he. He was too pedestrian for her, and she was too fanciful and flighty for him. But she couldn’t let go and let God, because there was too much Emma in her. Angela McCourt, in the moments after the sudden and unexpected death of her child, had a heart shattered by her loss, and she could only ask why God would want babies, despite what her well-meaning neighbor said to her. Astonishingly, Angela was in a better position to let go and let God than was Emma.
And David? As I have implied on many previous occasions, David was a psychological piece of work. I have always been both intrigued and appalled by him. And despite his convoluted thought processes and his sometimes atrocious behavior, in the circumstances out of which Psalm 56 was written, he did the best thing anyone in his situation could do: he let go and let God. He knew he couldn’t extricate himself immediately from having been captured by the Philistines, that he would have to cool his heels for a while before he escaped from their velvet-gloved clutches. So he turned to God to help him get through the tight spot in which he found himself until he could take matters into his own hands and flee from his captors.
From time to time, all of us find ourselves in situations where we are truly stymied. We can’t do anything at all to change our circumstances, at least for the moment. When that happens, what should we do? We can stew in our own juices, and curse our fate, and loudly rail our displeasure to everyone around us, or we can admit to ourselves that we are unable to extricate ourselves from whatever it is that keeps us from going forward, and subserviently place ourselves in God’s hands. God won’t miraculously free us from our problem, but He will keep us close to Himself until we can free ourselves. To let go and let God means allowing God to be God and us to be us, knowing that He is much stronger and more dependable than we ever can be.
David did escape the Philistines, but it took many months or perhaps even a few years to do it. I Samuel doesn’t give us the chronology; it only describes the predicament. But for as long as it took for David to get away back into Israel, he knew he was in God’s care and keeping, and he knew that was sufficient to sustain him.
When things are going well, and life seems relatively calm and unencumbered, we may become over-confident, supposing that we don’t need God. If everything is fine, we feel independent, capable of managing every challenge. It is when the wheels come off that we are faced with a very different spiritual test. Will God step in and straighten everything out? Not necessarily. Perhaps that is not even likely. But will we allow God to step into our turbulence anyway? Will we let go and let God, allowing God’s presence to become more evident to us? When we believe we don’t need God, we may not think about Him very much, but when life closes in on us, will we allow Him in, even if He does not lift us out of whatever imprisons us? To acknowledge God’s presence is not to expect an immediate liberation, but rather to be able to withstand that which so severely frustrates us.
It is hard to discover the golden mean between independence and interdependence, or between interdependence and dependence. God does not force Himself on us. We are free agents, endowed with free will. But when we encounter those inevitable situations which restrict us, how we decide to deal with them determines whether we are willing to let go and let God.
David made his choice. What shall we choose?