Yes, that’s another reference to The Princess Bride. But many people found themselves in the pit of despair during the COVID-19 pandemic, and there are other reasons why we might struggle with feelings of hopelessness. Psalm 40 contains a cry for help, but not before the beginning with memory of how God rescued the psalmist from something like emotional and spiritual quicksand. At the same time, however, the psalm is left unresolved at the end, as the psalmist continues to wait.

How patient of a person would you say you are? More specifically, when we pray to God for help, how patiently do you wait for a response? And what does it mean to be “patient,” anyway? Psalm 40 opens with the declaration, “I waited patiently for the LORD” (vs. 1). Those words can make it sound like the psalmist is walking through life with calm and confidence, unperturbed by the troubles that press in from every side. But as we’ve already seen throughout our study of the Psalms, the biblical picture is more complicated than that.

Verse 13 of Psalm 27, as we’ve seen, is ambiguous and open-ended. And one of the reasons I want to leave it that way is because that open-endedness, that lack of resolution, is a better reflection of how life actually is. We need communities that don’t try to prematurely pin happy endings on every story of suffering. So imagine this: what would happen if congregations were to sing the whole of Psalm 27 together? Would those congregations become places where it was safer for people to admit when they were struggling to find their confidence in God?

At some point in your early education, a teacher probably told you that sentence fragments were unacceptable. Your sentences needed to express complete thoughts and end with a period. And Bible translators try to do the same as they work with the original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. But verse 13 of Psalm 27 is notoriously difficult to translate, because it’s a fragment that trails off, leaving the psalmist’s thought incomplete. Should we try to complete the psalmist’s thought, or leave it open-ended? I believe there’s virtue in the latter…

Those who have taken introductory survey courses in psychology may be aware of two classic sets of experiments, one using a “visual cliff” and the other a mother’s “still face.” Both shed light on how important a mother or father’s facial expressions are to a child who can’t yet speak. And to me, that recognition deepens the sense of lament when the poet who wrote Psalm 27 complains that God has hidden his face.

Sometimes it seems as if the challenges of life will never end. I think back to the global pandemic that began in 2019, leaving us all wondering how long it would drag on and what new complications might lurk just around the corner. We needed a boost of confidence in the future. For believers, that means confidence in God. Psalm 27 seems to promise that; in the New Revised Standard Version, the heading for the psalm is “A Triumphant Song of Confidence.” And the psalm certainly seems to be just that…until it doesn’t. 

Twice in Psalm 57, the psalmist writes: “Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth” (verses 5 and 11). As suggested in the previous episode, the psalmist exults in God, but that exultation also turns to exaltation in the closing verses. God’s love and faithfulness are again the reasons for the psalmist’s celebration, and the psalmist will not only praise God to the nations, but to the very skies.

Many of us, at one time or another, have either wished for a guardian angel, or have called someone that because they’ve somehow helped save us from disaster. The psalmist who wrote Psalm 57 could certainly have used one, being threatened by people who were pursuing him to kill him. But even in the face of that threat, the psalmist speaks of God’s love and faithfulness as if they were the very emissaries of God, sent for the psalmist’s protection. And because of this, the psalmist sings joyfully, with a song loud enough to awaken the dawn.

Like Psalm 56, Psalm 57 is another whose heading grounds the song in the story of David, referring to when David sought refuge in a cave while fleeing the murderous Saul. But again, it’s not clear which cave is meant. Here, we’ll use the story in 1 Samuel 24 as the backdrop, then go back to the question we asked before: what does the psalmist mean by God’s “wings”? How was it a place of refuge? And where might that place of refuge be for you?

One of the most poignant passages of the New Testament is Jesus’ lament over the city of Jerusalem. Knowing what was about to happen, he could have railed at the city for its refusal to believe. But instead, he spoke with sorrow, as a mother hen who wanted to gather her chicks together for protection, only to be refused. The opening line of Psalm 57 seems to use the same imagery: the psalmist seeks refuge under the shadow of God’s wings. But is the psalmist using the same metaphor as Jesus?