Psalm 107:1-9, 43

Those of us who are of a certain generation might be prone when we read the words of Psalm 107 to hear in our heads a little song by a quartet from Liverpool called The Beatles—you may have heard of them. The song went to number one in the summer of 1965, and it’s not surprising that it should have been so popular. Its popularity likely has to do with the fact that it speaks to a common theme among all of humanity. We all at some point find ourselves in a situation where we just have to cry out for salvation. If we haven’t yet, we will someday visit a place where we will have come to the end of our resources, where we are in distress and all we can do is say “Help!” (That’s the title of the song, by the way.)

In 1980, the year he was gunned down and killed, John Lennon said in an interview that the lyrics of that song weren’t just written because the film of the same name needed some music, but that they expressed his feelings, because he was just overwhelmed with all the pressure and the attention that the meteoric rise of the Beatles had put on him. He said, "I was fat and depressed and I was crying out for 'Help.'

Appearances can be deceiving. Even the most apparently successful among us can find ourselves at the end of our rope. And our Western culture can make it difficult to admit that we need some help—that we are finding it difficult to deal with the stress that we are experiencing in the particular place in which we find ourselves. We may hesitate to admit that we need help. We may feel that we are valuable only when we are self-reliant, and self-sufficient. In many ways our culture has elevated the myth of the “self-made man” and the rugged individualist to such an iconic status that we have to launch public information campaigns to let people know that it’s okay to ask for help—that there is no shame in saying “I can’t do this on my own; I need some help.” That goes against what many of us tend to think society expects of us—we may be tempted to think of that as a failure, as a weakness.

But in Psalm 107, the psalmist reminds us, and the ancient Hebrew people, that the identity of the people of God is NOT characterised by rugged individualism. The hallmark of the people of God is not absolute self-sufficiency or total self-reliance. On the contrary, the people of God are the people who have cried out for help in the midst of their troubles. They are the people that God has delivered from their distress—the people that God has saved—that God has rescued from the hands of the adversary. In short, the people of God are the people who have been redeemed.

The lectionary gives us a portion of Psalm 107: verses 1 through 9, and then the last verse, verse 43. Verse 1 begins with a refrain that we hear again and again throughout the psalms, “His steadfast love endures forever.”  The Hebrew that is almost always translated as “steadfast love” is of course, chesed—that everlasting faithfulness, God’s unending lovingkindness and mercy—God’s goodness that never fails. Chesed tells us that He is always working for the salvation of His people, always making a way for those who are lost and oppressed, and continuously acting to deliver those who are in need of deliverance. In verse 2 the psalmist tells those redeemed by God to “say so,” and in the NRSV, the redeemed are saved from “trouble.” However, a more literal translation of the Hebrew would yield “those He redeemed from the HAND of the enemy.” The image there is one of being gripped by the adversary, and the Hebrew for enemy or adversary there is tsar— an interesting word because it not only means “enemy or adversary” but also “tight or narrow.” It describes a place where one feels confined—where there’s not much room to manoeuvre. it refers to a tight spot. So we could translate the psalmist’s words here as “those God has rescued from a tight spot”—from the squeeze of the grip of the hand of the adversary—from a place of pressure and stress. Then verse 3 tells us that God has not only rescued them, but gathered them together from all four directions—from all over the world. It’s hard not to think here of the way that in the Book of Acts in the New Testament, the good news of the gospel goes out from Jerusalem in all directions—into all the world—and here the psalmist refers to a time when all the people of God are gathered together from all four of those directions. Just as the psalmist has referred to four directions, he’s about to tell us about four groups of people that God has redeemed from four different situations; we hear about the first one beginning with verse 4, those who wandered in the desert, and who in verse 6, “cried to the LORD in their trouble.” This is part of a recurring refrain that appears in each section of this psalm, and in this recurring refrain we find that word for trouble—the Hebrew word “tsar” again. The word is the one in verse 3 that implies a tight spot, a place of pressure and stress, and the squeeze of the hand of the enemy. And so the psalmist says that in the midst of this tight spot—in this place of pressure and constriction—where it’s hard to move—from that place the people cried out and God delivered them from their distress. Now, the word that is translated as “distress” there is not tsar but a different word to describe the undesirable situation that the people are in, and that Hebrew word is “metsuqah.” The root of that word—we see it right in the middle, is tsuq—and tsuq means to constrain, to tighten, to exert pressure upon, to stress out, to squeeze—so both tsar and tsuq have to do with tightness and narrowness, with being in a tight spot, being under pressure—feeling the squeeze and stress that makes it hard to move, hard to breathe, that constricts and constrains. Certainly our congregants will understand the physical sensation of being in a place or a situation that makes them feel like that—tsar and tsuq. Verse 7 tells us the details of the rescue, and then in verse 8 we find another recurring refrain and another reference to God’s steadfast love—His chesed—which is followed, as it is throughout the psalm, with the details of what God has done in this specific instance, and what His actions tell us about Him. God’s chesed is again mentioned as the content of the thoughts of the wise in verse 43, the last verse of the psalm.

And so the psalmist in Psalm 107 tells us of a gathering of the people of God—the people who have been delivered and gathered together by God from the four cardinal directions. Corresponding to these four directions are four groups of people. Verses 1-9 tell of some who wandered in desert wastes, finding no way to an inhabited town, but they are only the first of four groups of people that the psalmist tells us about. These who wander are only the first of four groups of people who find themselves in trouble, in distress, in a tight spot where they are feeling the squeeze of the enemy’s grip.

Certainly one obvious preaching tactic would be to consider the four groups of people in the four “directions of distress,” all of which conveniently begin with the letter D. When we think of the people of God as those who have been redeemed, these four categories are the answer to the question, redeemed from what? These are four situations from which the people of God have been delivered: the desert, detention, disease and disaster. We in in our modern experience might not have ever found ourselves lost in the desert, or locked up in jail, or stricken with disease that finds us at the very threshold of death’s door, or in danger of losing our lives in a tempest-tossed ship at sea, but we can still identify with the distress and the trouble—the tsuq and the tsar—that the psalmist is describing here. And from those distressing directions, the people of God cry out, they are heard and delivered, they are gathered together, and they give thanks for God’s chesed.