Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 (Fourth Sunday in Lent)
Lent is a time when we ponder our “dustiness,” our morality, and our fragility. In the orbit of faith, Lent is a time when we think and pray most deeply about our dependence upon God; we recognize that we ourselves are not fully and finally able to cope with life in its extremities.
For such pondering, thinking, and praying about our dependence upon God there is no better practice than the regularity and intentionality of gratitude. Gratitude is the active embrace of the truth that we live by God’s good gifts that are generously and freely given to us. In honest gratitude we arrive at Paul’s questions:
What do you have that you did not receive? And if you have received it, why do you boast if it were not a gift? (I Corinthians 4:7)
And then we reach Paul’s answer to his own questions. We have nothing that is not a gift from
God. Gratitude is the glad recognition that we live by good gifts.
For that reason, Psalm 107 in the lectionary is a fitting text for Lent, because it is the fullest voicing that we have in scripture of gratitude that consists in (a) naming our circumstances of need, (b) identifying God’s good rescue to our need with some specificity, and (c) responding in doxological affirmation to the God who hears, gives, and saves.
The Psalm offers four representative “cases” of human extremity to which we may add many others, such as the pandemic, concerning in turn desert wandering (vv. 4-9), prison (vv. 10-16), sickness (vv. 17-22), and storm at sea (vv. 23-32). In its characteristic parsimony, the lectionary allows us only one of these four instances of need and rescue, but the wise interpreter will feel free to take up the entire Psalm and not accept that ill-advised imposed limit. A good reason for doing the entire Psalm is that the repetition of the pattern of need, rescue, and thanks is important for both the cadence of the Psalm itself and for our own pattern of gratitude whereby we acknowledge our glad dependence upon the goodness of God.
In order to appreciate the pattern of gratitude, we might consider in turn each of these accent points that recur in each “case” of human extremity. First, each “case” portrays a human predicament in which the human agent is helpless and can do nothing for rescue or wellbeing. This includes:
A lack of food and drink in the wilderness, in the Bible a zone that runs beyond the reach of God (v. 5).
Prison marked by darkness, gloom, and misery (v. 10).
Sickness that draws near to death (v. 174). This lectionary episode might make a particular link to the pandemic.
Peril in a sea storm that is described in extended graphic detail, “at their wits end” (vv. 23-27).
All of these cases bespeak human vulnerability and helplessness.
Second, in each case the appropriate and prompt response to extremity is urgent appeal to God: “They cried to the Lord” (vv. 6, 123, 19, 25). The human agents knew what to do as women and men of faith. They knew, in their helplessness and vulnerability, to turn to the God who cares for them. This ready turn to prayer reminds me of the exchange in the catechism of my youth:
What does God still do for you?
God daily and abundantly provides me with all necessaries of life, protects and preserves me from all danger.
Why does God do this for you?
God does all this out of sheer fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness on my part (Evangelical Catechism p. 20, questions 17 and 18).
Third, in every case God answers promptly and effectively:
And he delivered them out of their distress;
he led them by a straight way,
until they reached an inhabited town (vv. 6-7).
He saved them from their distress;
And he brought them out of darkness and gloom,
and broke their bonds asunder (v. 14).
And he saved them from their distress;
he sent out his word and healed them,
and delivered them from destruction (vv. 19-20).
And he brought them out from their distress;
he made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed …
And he brought them to their desired haven (vv. 28-30).
God’s response is immediate, without pause, in the same verses as the outcry. There is no space or delay between “cry out” and God’s response. The responses are as prompt as that of a parent to a child who cries out in the night! (See Matthew 7:7-11.)
Fourth, the effective response of God in each case is seen by the Psalmist as an embodiment of “tenacious solidarity” (hesed, that is, covenantal love).
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind (v. 8).
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind (v. 15).
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind (v. 21).
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind (v. 31).
That tenacious solidarity, moreover, in each case leads to a “wonderful work,” that is, a staggeringly inexplicable act of transformation that goes beyond all of our expectations and explanations. The conventional word for such an act is “miracle,” but that term does not adequately reflect the free agency of God who acts in faithful covenantal freedom.
Only after this repeated four-fold sequence do we arrive at thanks (vv. 8, 15, 22, 31) as the fifth element in the pattern of this Psalm. The jussive invitation to thanks is terse and uninflected. But we have two clues about how thanks is to be performed in verse 22:
And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices,
and tell of his deeds with songs of joy.
First, the ones who receive the gift of life from YHWH are to tell of God’s goodness with some specificity. This is what happens four times in this Psalm. Thanks is story-telling in the congregation so that others may also know and come to trust in the good transformative actions of YHWH.
The point is reiterated in verse 32; and in verse 2, the redeemed who have benefitted are to “say so.” Thanks is witnessing in detail to the gift of life from YHWH as in Psalm 30. Thanks is an out-loud action that tells the narrative of rescue. That is why Claus Westermann (The Psalms: Structure, Content & Message), the great Psalm scholar, has listed songs of thanks as “narrative Psalms.” Second, the same verse adds another action:
And let them offer thanksgiving sacrifices (v. 22).
Thanks includes material acts of generosity that are given back to the God who gives all good gifts. Thanks offerings are liturgically offered up to God; but practically such an offering is something of material value that is contributed to the support and wellbeing of the community.
It is for that reason that in much of the contemporary church there are “thanks offerings” that are sums of money that are variously dispatched for missional actions of care and relief. By both word and material gesture the faithful articulate and exhibit their glad dependence upon the God who gives life. The witness of word is in order that others may come to share in that glad honest dependence. The material gesture is that others may benefit from the God upon whom we all depend.
Notice how both of these actions that together constitute thanks are counter to the dominant ideology of the commoditized, autonomous self. That commoditized, autonomous self is not likely to recognize any dependence upon any other. If that self is successful, it can easily imagine it is self-made. If that self is unsuccessful, our society will effectively help it feel a sense of failure and shame.
Thus, both the pride-filled successful self and the shame-filled unsuccessful self together are not likely to embrace glad dependence on the goodness of God. As a result, neither is likely to “say so,” (v. 2), “to tell of his deeds” (v. 22), or to “extol him” in the congregation (v. 32).
We are reluctant to tell the story of how our lives depend upon the inexplicable goodness of God. In like manner, the commoditized, autonomous self is not likely to commit a deliberate act of material generosity. Amid an ideology of scarcity, we are wont to believe that there is not enough to go around, and we had better keep what we have. And surely we do not want our hard earned materiality to go to anyone who is “undeserving,” given our ideological conviction that we ourselves are “deserving” of whatever we ourselves have. Thus, our dominant value system works powerfully against both our “telling” and our “offering” in ways that outlandishly match the goodness of God.
Thus, when the faithful, as the speaker in this Psalm, commit these two acts of gratitude, they participate in a subversive, counter-cultural reality that attests we are not self-made, self-sufficient, or autonomous.
Our lives, rather, are derived from and depend upon the goodness of the God who attends to our needs. The faithful who engage in such daring acts of gratitude as telling and giving are not simple-minded. We are fully wise to the world and know very well the powerful force of knowledge, of money, and of power.
In committing gratitude, however, we embrace an act of “second naiveté,” as we slide beyond all the wisdom of the world that we know and move toward the more elemental reality of our lives. That is, we come to see that all that we are and have has been received as a gift.
In light of this Psalm, the work of Lent is to move our lives more fully into the practice of gratitude expressed in telling and giving. This move entails a willful departure from the dominant ideology of our culture that takes the form of pride among the successful or that takes the form of shame among the unsuccessful. It turns out that amid the goodness of God, neither our pride nor our shame counts for anything. A life given over to the telling and the giving may become unencumbered by either pride or shame, unencumbered enough to be lost in “wonder, love, and praise.” The ones who steadily practice thanks can, with the Psalmist, gladly affirm:
He raises up the needy out of their distress,
and makes their families like flocks (v. 41).
It is no wonder that the final word of this Psalm is that we may “consider the steadfast love (tenacious solidarity) of the Lord” (v. 43). We have nothing better to think about!
Walter Brueggemann
