2023.01.15 | "Out of the Miry Bog"
“Out of the Miry Bog”
Psalm 40:1-11
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Jan 15, 2023
Our Scripture Reading today begins by painting a word picture of a person praising God for rescuing them from a pit of mud, which the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates as a “miry bog.” Other Bible versions translate “miry bog’ as the miry clay, deep mud, or mud and filth. Whatever the version, it’s clear that the person being rescued is in your classic metaphoric muddy situation.
Given our recent rains, it wasn’t hard to find a “miry bog” or two at my local park on Friday. These photos were taken after our dry Thursday, so you can imagine that after yesterday’s downfall, they are today bigger, deeper, and muddier.
Our East Bay soil, rich in clay, makes for the worst kind of sticky, icky mud — it’s easy to slip-slide and almost impossible to get rid of. At our local park, the mud was everywhere and sometimes cleverly disguised as grass. Because HARD had thoughtfully closed some of our favorite trails, I didn’t fall into any miry bogs that required divine intervention or rescue.
This time. One of the reasons I love today’s Scripture is because I have not only been in many of life’s miry bogs, I have had what the author of Psalm 40 beautifully describes as that feeling that God has put a rock under my slipping, sinking feet and has thereby steadied or rescued me. I have had so many of these experiences, I developed a system for categorizing and naming them. For me, they fall into three categories.
First, there are “sudden salvations.” If you, like me, have been traveling down the freeway on a busy day and you glance out the side window for just a moment. When you return your eyes to the front, the cars that were free flowing are now stopped in a sea of red lights. You slam on the brakes, your car screeches to a stop within a fraction of an inch from the car in front of you and the car behind you manages to stop as well. “Oh, thank God!” you cry. And you never forget, you never look to the side, you tell your children when they learn to drive to never, ever look to the side. And you are forever grateful that no one died because of something you did. That is what I call a sudden salvation.
Second, there are “long term rescues.” If you, like me, have lost someone you loved, if you have gone through a divorce, if you have suffered infertility, if you have been betrayed, you know what a terribly long time you can be stuck in the miry bog of grief and sadness and disappointment and brokenheartedness. After you’ve been in one of life’s longer term miry bogs, you learn that with every passing week or month, you feel different, then you feel a little bit better, and then, after a year or so, though you still remember and you still suffer, you are so much better at keeping your thoughts corralled and having some perspective on what happened and why, and then you wake up and a little voice says, “Oh, thank God, I think I’m going to be all right.” That is what I call a long term rescue.
Third, there are “epiphanies.” If you, like me, have ever been angry at someone or at something that is happening in your life, you know you are right and you know they are wrong. You have rehearsed your arguments over and over in your head and there is no way you are going to either forgive this person or vote for that wrong-headed idea or give someone what they want. Your mind is set and your heart is hard. Then at the moment it matters most, when you have to vote or write a check or sit down and talk with this person, your heart is suddenly softer, and you feel compassion, and you say and do what you didn’t think you could say and do and you say “thank you God” for unexpectedly saving me from my own hard heart. That is what I call an epiphany.
There may be many more categories. The life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr., who we honor tomorrow, reminds us that God sometimes saves by sending us prophets, many of whom lose their lives in the battle to speak truth to power and the people. MLK was no stranger to the many personal miry bogs of life, including depression, but his advocacy for civil rights and for people living in poverty, will always be considered a rock that saved our country from languishing in an even great miry bog of racial prejudice and inequality.
For me, regardless of what name or category I give my experiences of being pulled out of the miry bog, each is followed by a period of gratefulness and thankfulness to which I cling and vow to remember. Today’s Scripture reminds me that it is an important act of faith to also give voice or witness to my experience.
The Psalmist, which is one way to refer to the person who wrote this Psalm, likens her gratitude to being given a new song to sing, a song specifically of praise of God the giver of rock and says that singing her new song will leads others to hear and put their trust in God.
And trusting God is the key to so many other acts of faith, which the Psalmist lists as not following false gods, giving up less meaningful rituals, and hearing and obeying God’s will.
In verses 9 & 10, the Psalmist reports that she has shared the good news of her own deliverance from the miry bog with the great congregation, saying:
I have told the glad news of deliverance
in the great congregation;
see, I have not restrained my lips,
as you know, O Lord.
I have not hidden your saving help within my heart;
I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation.
When I reflect on the Psalmist’s outspokenness, it does seem that we here in our own great congregation are less likely to credit God for pulling us out of our miry bogs and less vocal in our subsequent praise of God. I think there are three reasons for this reluctance.
First, praising God for rescuing us raises the issue of why God does not rescue or save others. Second, praising God for rescuing us is at odds with the dominant scientific mind set that looks for logical or causal explanations and rejects the intervention of a supernatural power. And third, praising God for rescuing us runs counter to modern psychological thinking that centers itself on self-help and the individual, and not on trust in the divine. Rather than risk accidentally saying we are more deserving or others are not deserving, rather than risk looking like an idiot or conservative, rather than risk looking weak and uneducated, we pull our praise of God and go silent rather than share with a disbelieving world how we interpret our experience.
But we lose so much when we do not claim our stories of salvation and do not proclaim God’s praises. When we pull our praise of God, we give up both our freedom and our power to be authentic. And ultimately, we lose two things most vital to our survival as individuals: trust and hope.
As we heard, Psalm 40 begins in praise. But, ironically, it ends in lament. Listen to verses 11-13
Do not, O Lord, withhold
your mercy from me;
let your steadfast love and your faithfulness
keep me safe forever.
For evils have encompassed me
without number;
my iniquities have overtaken me
until I cannot see;
they are more than the hairs of my head,
and my heart fails me.
Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me;
O Lord, make haste to help me.
Like the Psalmist, most of us experience life as cyclical: bad times follow good. And one of the means of surviving the bad times is to remember those times when we were rescued by God. In other words, if we can accept the theological unknowns, from experience, comes trust and hope. In other words, we are free to choose to believe for ourselves that if God did it before, God will surely do it again.
And praise, especially if spoken aloud to others, has the potential to build trust and hope in others. That’s why God gives us a new song, a song of praise, to sing when we find ourselves not in miry bog of self-doubt and sorrow but on the solid rock of our trust in God.
In writing this sermon, I learned that the Irish rock band U2 has a song based on Psalm 40. It is called “40” and it was written rather quickly by Bono one day in the early 1980s when they were wrapping up a recording session. They had the music, he had a King James Bible. He opened to Psalm 40 and sang.
Released in 1983, “40” became so popular that U2 made it a staple of their live concerts, usually as the last song. Performed over 400 times, it was not uncommon for the audience to continue singing the closing lyric as the band left the stage one by one and the audience headed for home. Across parking lots and up and down city streets, the refrain repeated into the night. If you haven’t heard “40,” here’s a short sample.
How long? Well, U2 and their fans have been singing “40” for 40 years. To give that some context, Jews and Christians have been reading and singing Psalm 40 for about 3,000 years. Psalm 40 reminds us that our faith calls us to recognize the many and varied ways that God saves us. Our faith calls us to trust that God will save us in the future. Most importantly, our faith calls us to sing a new song of praise, our own song of praise, to the God who saves again and again. Amen.