Clothed With Joy

Clothed With Joy

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

June 5, 2016

Scripture: Psalm 30

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

You know, until I started working on this sermon this past week I didn’t realize how much I love Psalm 30 that we just heard. I don’t think I had ever felt its power before like I did this last week. I don’t think I had ever felt its truth before like I did last week. I think this last week I came to a new realization of just what Psalm 30 means for us. And you know, that’s one of the great things about the Christian faith and about our sacred text, the Bible. No matter how much you read it, no matter how much you study it, not matter how much you teach it, no matter how much you preach it, it is always revealing new truths to you. Not that the truths are actually new. There’s nothing new about the Bible itself. The newest texts in it are over 1,800 years old. No, the truths aren’t new in any objective sense, but sometimes they sure come across as something new to you, or at least they do to me. Or maybe sometimes they don’t come across as totally new. I mean, it’s not like I’d never read Psalm 30 before. Still, these texts can hit you with a new power. They can take you down into new depths of meaning. They can raise you up to new heights of understanding. They really can do all that, and it’s quite a rush when they do. Psalm 30 did that for me this past week, and I want to share with you some of that meaning and significance that this last week I found anew in Psalm 30.

Psalm 30 begins: “I will exalt you, O Lord, for you lifted me out of the depths.” Near the end is talks about “my wailing” and “my sackcloth.” I find such power in those lines. Using only a very few words, it expresses the deepest truth about life and about God. It talks about “the depths.” It talks about wailing. It talks about grief. It talks about death. This Psalm knows what life really is. Life is not all happy happy joy joy. Life has its depths. Life has its down times, its low places. Life has its pain, its loss, its grief. I know a little bit about what some of those depths have been in some of your lives. I sure know what they have been in mine. They’re an unavoidable part of life. We all have them. We all have to deal with them at times.

The great thing about Psalm 30 is that it doesn’t just deal with the depths. The Psalmist says that God has lifted him up from the depths. He says God heard him and healed him. He gives us these magnificent images of how God deals with the bad times in our lives: “You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.” Clothed me with joy. Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that one of the most hopeful and uplifting lines in the whole Bible? It is for me. I hope it is for you.

But our Psalmist of Psalm 30 doesn’t stop there. He goes on to tell us something about God that is the foundation of his trust in God’s ability to lift him up from the depths. He says “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may remain for a night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” There’s some strong realism here. Yes, God does get angry with us. Yes, we humans do things that make God mad. Whenever we sin, God gets angry. When people commit really horrible sins, sins like murder or genocide, God gets really, really angry. I’m sure God’s anger is directly proportionate to the evilness of our ways and our acts.

I get mad too. I get mad at people who hurt me, or cross me, or sometimes even with people who just disagree with me. Never with any of you of course. I’m your pastor. It’s not my job to get mad at you, or at least it is my job not to let you know that I’m mad at you. Moving on—I know that it sometimes takes me a long time to get over being mad. I think that’s just human of me. Psalm 30 tells us it’s not like that with God. Yes, God gets angry; but God’s anger lasts only for a moment. God’s favor, I’d say God’s love and God’s grace, last a lifetime. We may make God mad, but all our lives God loves and favors us nonetheless. That’s how God can turn our wailing into dancing and can clothe us with joy. God always seeks to do that for us because God’s love for us is stronger than God’s anger, and it lasts a lot longer. It lasts our whole lives long.

So, are you down in the dumps? Do you hurt? Are you grieving the loss of a loved one? That’s OK. Don’t try to deny it. God knows that it’s part of our being human. God knows it because God is God, but God knows it intimately and personally because God felt it personally in Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate. God doesn’t reject you for it. God doesn’t scorn you for it. Rather, God embraces you in those down times, those times of pain, those times of grief. God is there to hold you and to comfort you. And God is there to lead you back out of whatever kind of depth you’re in. God is there to remove your sackcloth, or better, to help you remove your sackcloth. God is there, working to turn your wailing into dancing. God wants to clothe you with joy. Always. No matter what.

So give thanks to the God of joy. Enter into the love of that God joyfully. Singing. Dancing. Shouting for joy. Shouting Halleluiah to the God who brings an end to wailing and leads us up from the pits of grief. Let your heart sing and not be silent like the Psalmist says. He ends his Psalm saying “O Lord my God, I will give you thanks forever.” Let’s us do the same. Let us thank God always and in everything for God’s love, for God’s grace, for God being there to turn our wailing into dancing and to clothe us with joy. There are no words sufficient to say what that means or to give thanks for it. But we can shout. We can sing. We can dance. And we can sing our praise and our thanks. We can come to Christ’s table filled with joy because God loves us and saves us. Thanks be to God! Amen.