Sermon Tone Analysis

(1) Breathing Fire

I pull my iPhone from my left pocket to check the time as I walk down Lincoln Way in downtown Auburn.

It‘s 8:13 pm—Monday.

Plenty of time to pick up Micah by 9. I turn right, down an alley towards High St. My car is parked by Alesci’s barbershop.

I had just come from Royal Indian Cuisine restaurant.

The sun is setting.

The parking lot is almost empty.

I get to the parking lot and reach for my car alarm key.

Click!

Click!

I open the door.

I hear loud, angry expletives coming from a man across the street, hidden by a row of cars parked by the street.

I get in the car.

I reach for the door lock.

Click!

I sit there waiting for the man to come out of the shadows.

A couple of seconds later, a middle-aged man—medium built, round face, thin blond hair, walks passed the cars towards a tree along the sidewalk, a piece of document in his right hand.

He reaches for a branch with his left hand, yanks on it with fury and lets out a roar.

He’s breathing fire.

Steam is coming out of his ears and nostrils.

So I drive off the parking lot in a hurry, keeping my eyes—and my car—far away from him lest I be consumed by his rage.

(2) Reminder

Psalm 109 is one of the imprecatory psalms along with Psalm 35, 55, 59, 69, 79, 83, and 137.

It is a difficult psalm to understand.

It is full of curses and maledictions.

It is shockingly dark, ugly, and vindictive.

It makes us cringe.

It makes us want to stay in our car, click the lock button, and keep driving.

It makes us wonder why it is even in Scripture.

We’re not alone in this.

Bible interpreters have also struggled with Psalm 109 and its kind.

They write it off as an inferior ethic to the enlightened ethic of Jesus.

Why did God include these psalms in the canon of Scripture?

Is it merely so he can remind us to skip them?

Is it merely so he can remind us about the bad old days before Jesus?

Is it merely so he can remind us how not to pray?

Now we pray as Jesus tells us to: “Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you”?

But this would be a gross misrepresentation of God’s first testament.

For do we not also see in the Old Testament echoes of Jesus’ ethic of love?

What of Deuteronomy 6:5?

What of Leviticus 19:18?

No, Psalm 109—and the rest of the imprecatory psalms—have something more positive and profound to teach us.

If for nothing else, Psalm 109 reminds us that what I saw on the sidewalk of High St on Monday night is common occurrence across the world with far more serious results than broken tree branches.

It reminds us of the deadly consequences of ignoring our anger.

We think of those who perished in El Paso, TX; Dayton, OH; Garden Grove and Sta.

Ana, CA because of the madness of others.

Psalm 109 reminds us to deal with and confront our anger.

(3) Take it off the streets!

As soon as we start reading Psalm 109, God grabs us with these beautiful words: “My God whom I praise.”

It begins with an address to God.

Despite all our questions about this psalm, we find that it is first and foremost a prayer.

And there lies the secret to learning from it.

Despite our apprehensions about it, Psalm 109 is first and foremost an address of faith.

It is a prayer that begins like all prayers do, a direct address to God.

We cannot begin to imagine how difficult it must have been to utter these first few words.

For what these words represent are the choices we make all day long about what we leave in the streets and sidewalks of our lives, and what we choose to include in our prayer lives.

Here we find that David in Psalm 109 has already made the most difficult choice even prior to verse 1, a choice we too must make.

This decision is to take his anger off the streets and into the very presence of God—totally unvarnished and unfiltered.

It is the unseen, but the most important move in the psalm—a move we’ll do well to emulate.

We first follow Psalm’s first move.

(1) We take it off the streets

Right off the bat, God is telling us in Psalm 109 that the most difficult of all human emotions belong in our prayer life.

And he tells us to take it off the streets and the sidewalks of your life.

“Bring it here before me unvarnished and unfiltered and I will not only teach you how to really feel; I will teach you anger as I meant it to be—not as a dark energy that forces submission and consumes others, but anger as blessed and redemptive energy to fire up your passion to destroy sin in your life and in the life of others.

But you must first get your anger off the streets and sidewalks of your life and into your prayer life.

Make your anger a matter of prayer.

Do it and you will really begin to pray!”

(4) Follow its tortuous path

Then (2) We follow its tortuous path

So we follow the psalmist and find that his tortured prayer path is rough indeed.

So what do we find?

We find that: All anger is a response to attack.

Psalm 109:1-5

Unrighteous anger and righteous anger are cut from the same cloth.

They are both aroused as a result of unjust attack.

The difference between the two is the perception of the individual feeling attacked, and his or her response.

The next time you get angry, stop yourself long enough to ask, “Why am I reacting in this way?

Why am I feeling attacked?

Why is my anger being aroused?

” And immediately make it a matter of prayer.

Take it off the street as quickly as you can and into the presence of God.

And he will shed light over your angry spirit.”

Psalm 109 then walks us down the rough path our unrighteous anger takes.

We lash out when we are attacked.

This is what we find in Psalm 109:5-15

The Psalms’ realism is in full display.

We find that Psalm 109 is a mirror held before us reminding us that God is describing us at the very core of our anger.

Psalm 109 is us unvarnished and unfiltered when we get angry.

Yet, the difference here is that David’s unvarnished rage has been taken off the street and in the presence of God.

He takes his unholy anger to God and, instead of taking vengeance himself, he asks God to do it for him.

Not exactly the most ideal.

But it is a step in the right direction.

Psalm 109 moves again.

He continues to hold the mirror before our face and continues to challenge us to keep it there.

For he says, the reason why you lash out when you are attacked is because of you are self-righteous.

We lash out because we feel self-justified.

Psalm 109:16-20

And last, Psalm 109 tells us that

We lash out because we are afraid.