Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
September 27, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The world of ancient Israel was a very dangerous place. Throughout Old Testament times warfare was virtually constant. The little Jewish state battled constantly with the other small states on its borders to the south, east, and north. Worse, it was constantly threatened and attacked by the great empires of the day—Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia among others. When they lost a war the Hebrew people faced death, destruction, enslavement, and exile. It’s easy for us to romanticize the ancient past and to think of the world of the Bible in images drawn from Sunday School books for young children. That’s not how it was. Not at all. It wasn’t anywhere near that pretty.

So we can perhaps understand their desire for a God who protected them from their enemies. Small as they were, they often could not defeat their enemies on their own. So when on occasion they did defeat an enemy, they ascribed the victory to their God Yahweh. If we’ve won, they reasoned, it must have been Yahweh’s doing because we couldn’t have done it on our own.

We see them engaging in this process of ascribing victory over enemies to God in our reading this morning of Psalm 124. Apparently the Israelites have just defeated an enemy, or several enemies. We don’t know who the enemy was, but the Psalm is set against a victory in warfare against someone or other. The Psalm says that but for God’s help they would have been crushed, overrun, destroyed. Their God has allowed them to escape from the enemy’s trap, from the destruction the enemy had tried to inflict on them, the Psalm says.

The Psalmist introduces the matter by saying “If it had not been the LORD who was one our side when our enemies attacked us,” we would have been defeated. He concludes his presentation of the idea that God had given Israel the victory by saying “Our help is in the name of the LORD.” Now, the phrase “our help is in the name of the LORD” is quite appealing. We like to think too that our help is in the name of the Lord, the name of Jesus Christ. Yet we can see, I think, that the Psalmist meant something quite different by the phrase than we’re likely to mean. He meant that the god Yahweh had defeated Israel’s enemies in battle. I doubt that very many of us understand that meaning when we hear the phrase. That doesn’t mean that the phrase has no meaning for us, but it does mean that we have to look deeper for a meaning that may inhere in the Psalmist’s words that isn’t the precise meaning he intended when he wrote them but that says something important to us. And that’s OK. With the help of the Holy Spirit we can discern deeper meanings than the original meaning of a text. That, after all, is why the Bible is still alive and isn’t merely a dead collection of ancient writings.

The first thing I want to ask in our quest for a deeper meaning in this ancient text is: which enemies are we talking about when we say that the Lord is on our side when enemies attack us The Psalmist meant a human, physical enemy. Most of us, I think, mean a spiritual enemy. At least, I know that that’s what I mean. God is on our side as we struggle with spiritual enemies, that is, spiritual questions and difficulties that disturb our souls and disquiet our minds. So if we want to understand just how it is that God is on our side, that our help is in the name of the Lord, we need to inquire into the nature of spiritual enemies, those things that disturb our souls and disquiet our minds.

Many of you have perhaps heard of the great nineteenth Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. My father at times considered himself the reincarnation of Kierkegaard, so appealing did he find Kierkegaard’s theology. And he didn’t think it coincidence that Kierkegaard’s first name is the root of our last name. Be that as it may, Kierkegaard taught that the fundamental human spiritual problem is despair. Despair is the absence of hope. It is the feeling of isolation and meaninglessness that, Kierkegaard taught, was the inevitable result of living out of relationship with God. He thought that people who did not have a relationship with God lived in despair even if they didn’t know it. Despair for Kierkegaard was more an objective condition of humanity than a subjective feeling. I’m not sure I get that one, but that’s how fundamental Kierkegaard thought despair was to the human condition.

I think that Kierkegaard was right. What, after all, are the spiritual enemies that we all struggle with? Fear is a big one, for me at least. Fear of death, our own and that of our loved ones. Perhaps even more fear of dying, of the pain and suffering that so often precedes death. Fear of failure in business or in our personal relationships. Fear of ending up alone. Fear of the perils that exist in the world, from crazed extremist terrorists to drunk drivers to the thief that comes in the night to global warming and its disastrous consequences. Another big one for me and, I think, for our culture generally, is the sense of meaningless, the sense that all this life business just doesn’t mean anything in the end, concluding as it always does in death. And a sense of hopelessness, the sense that there just isn’t anything we can do about all of those things that we fear, nothing we can do truly to give life meaning. Those are some of the spiritual enemies that I struggle with, and perhaps you do too. Or perhaps you have other spiritual enemies that keep you awake at night or that disturb your sleep with upsetting dreams.

And what is the common denominator of all of these spiritual enemies? Kierkegaard nailed it over 150 years ago. The common denominator is despair understood as living out of relationship with God. What makes despair go away? If living in relationship with God, that is, living not in despair, makes our spiritual enemies go away, then we know that our fundamental problem is despair. So: What makes fear, meaninglessness, and hopelessness go away? Establishing a strong personal relationship with God makes our spiritual enemies go away. Only establishing a strong personal relationship with God makes our spiritual enemies go away. Only establishing a strong personal relationship with God can make our spiritual enemies go away. Which establishes that the fundamental spiritual enemy with which we struggle is despair, is the absence of God.

Or rather, it is our perception of the absence of God. You see, God is never really absent. God really is on our side as we battle the spiritual enemy of despair. As the Psalmist says, our help is in the name of the Lord. Our help in the battle with despair comes when we call on the name of Lord. God’s always there, but we need to turn to God to make God’s presence alive in our lives. Our help comes when we call on the name of the Lord in prayer, in worship, in participating in the Sacrament, in reading scripture, in fellowship with other Christians who are also calling on the name of the Lord in these ways, who are also battling the spiritual enemy of despair.

When we do that, when we make the presence of God in our lives alive and active, despair disappears. What, after all, is there to fear when God is on our side? How, after all, can life be meaningless when we live it in close communion with the ultimate meaning behind everything that is, that is, with God? How, after all, can we be hopeless when we hitch our wagon to God’s star go where God leads us? Despair is our enemy, and our help really is in the name of the Lord our God. The Psalmist got it right so long ago. More right than perhaps he knew. Thanks be to God. Amen.