Sermon Tone Analysis

Engage

There’s a religious joke that’s aged well that goes something like:

Jews don’t recognize Jesus.

Protestants don’t recognize the Pope.

And Baptists don’t recognize one another at the liquor store.

The humor in that calls back to the stereotype of Baptists that we don’t drink or dance or listen to the devil’s music - rock and roll.

And while desiring to live a life before others in the hopes of never giving someone else cause to stumble, the culture of many churches has shifted from a body of individuals who are pursuing holiness to a collection of individuals who feel the pressure to appear perfect.

That pressure is what Matthew West, the writer of the song we just heard, has his finger on.

As someone who has been raised in the church and now ministers within the church, he’s seen first hand how many brothers and sisters are just fake at church.

Just think back to your interaction with others this morning and even last week while making your way to your seats here in the sanctuary or in passing another in the hallways on your way to Sunday school.

How many times have you asked or have you been asked, “How are you doing?”

only to see the question answered with one word - “Fine.”

Fine?

Yeah right.

Gas prices are at $4.29 at the QT last I checked.

A gallon of milk is $5. There’s more month at the end of the money than ever before.

What’s fine for the dozen or so families this morning who are caught in the tension between the sense of accomplishment in coming to a time of graduation that’s met with the uncertainty of what comes after.

Parents ask, “will my kids be OK?

Will they find jobs?

What am I going to do when seeing them everyday turns into hoping they would just text today?”

What’s fine for the person here this morning that faces an emotional or mental health challenge that leads them to do things that would just revile good Christian folk?

You know, things like getting drunk or watching porn or using drugs.

The kind of things that some would encourage the pastor by saying, “You know, you’ve really got to run that person off, pastor.”

Tension

We’ve been trained to be fake because for at least a few generations, there have been far too many who have said, “We can’t have that in our church.”

“Can’t have what?,” asks someone.

“We can’t have this messy stuff.

We can’t just have people who don’t have their stuff together dragging their issues around here.

We can’t have any sins that I personally find disgusting here.”

So we are trained to be fine.

We learn that we have to be otherwise we can’t really belong and we want to belong because we believe that in belonging, we’ll have people around us and we’ll never feel alone, but then there’s this weird thing that in pretending to be fine in a sea of people, we expect to feel complete, maybe even popular, but that expectation falls flat because truthfully, we’re incredibly lonely as a consequence of pretending to be fine.

I have to ask, if the church is to be filled with people who are just doing fine, what makes the Church for whom Jesus died any different than the Kardashian family who covers up their physical imperfections with plastic surgery?

What makes the Church distinct from the millions of social media personas whose posts only paint a picture of lives that are perfectly happy and complete?

And clearly here I’m suggesting to you that a church filled with people who are doing fine is a church as fake as the African prince who just need a small amount of money from you to get him out of a bind that will be repaid 100-fold.

So what then are we to do?

Text

We turn once more to the Word of God in pursuit of God’s truth for our lives.

And if we were to offer a summary of Psalm 88, we would be right in concluding that this is one of the most depressing passages in all of Scripture.

It’s probably one that we don’t hear lessons or sermons from very often, if at all.

**And it may seem odd to spend our time considering such a dark passage on a morning that we recognize graduates, but there’s great truths for us to extract and apply from this psalm.

And while we’ve been reading so much together about the movement of God during the time of kings in Israel together as a church, I’ve felt drawn to preach and teach from Psalms these last five weeks because it’s in this prayer book given to us by God that we discover that we do not need to deny our emotions as human beings.

The individual psalms are prayers spoken to God and are Holy Spirit-inspired words about God that show us that God welcomes our prayers seasoned by love and joy just as much as he welcomes our prayers of anger and frustration and doubt.

The psalmist here is dealing with voicing to God his sense of loneliness and isolation.

Someone asks, “Why’s he feeling this way?”

He tells us!

Psalm 88:15 tells us that he has been suffering with an illness that has made him to live in away and in isolation from others while living constantly on the edge of death since his youth.

Another person asks, “What sort of illness would have required that he have to live away from other people?”

Well, with what we know of the Law that God had given to Israel through Moses, this illness may have been leprosy because lepers were required to be put outside the community of faith.

Cry to God in Faith

Imagine with me for a moment the sense that you’ve been stuck with something for what feels like or is literally a lifetime.

Something that you didn’t bring upon yourself.

Something that everyone can see about you that makes you stand out among others in a way that makes you to feel alone and unable to identify with others nor others with you.

Or something that lies beneath the surface that isn’t visible but nonetheless is isolating.

No one’s like you.

No one understands your pain.

No one knows how alone you feel.

That’s the case for the psalmist who may have an outward illness like leprosy and will never recover from the affliction but can only really hope to manage the symptoms.

He’s left to deal the societal consequences as best he can.

When there’s something that makes you to feel alone, honestly, how have you seen yourself deal with these things?

With ignorance by convincing yourself you don’t have a problem?

Maybe by crying in the shower?

Keeping yourself busy all day long because you’ve learned that there’s bliss in being distracted rather than being present to your issues and feelings.

And distractions are wonderful at distracting up until it’s bedtime when it takes all your strength to get a couple of hours of sleep.

And in all of this, what’s the last thing we ever do?

Talk about it.

“But I can’t talk about it, no one understands me!”

No one?

Really?

Even the psalmist knew there was one he could speak with - God.

And so he goes to God in faith here in this prayer.

Psalm 88:1 “1 O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out day and night before you.”

Think about it, the psalmist comes before God in a prayer of faith.

He knows that the God of Heaven and earth is the Creator and ruler of all.

And it is before the Lord that the psalmist comes to cry out to, where the word here for “cry” carries a sense of raising a plea for help to the God who saves.

Have you ever been driving along the highway in the car only to realize that your passenger has gone silent?

You glance over and you see the arms crossed and a stare that is fixed well off in the distance.

And you realize that you’ve done something wrong and you’re getting the window treatment?

Every husband in the room has or will know what I’m talking about.

And you ask, “What’s wrong?” “Nothing.”

“Can we talk?” “No.”

And then there’s just a deafening silence that falls over the car and you can cut the tension with a knife.

And don’t worry, I only know about this because I’ve seen it in movies.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, it’s to say this: When we are bottled up with this stuff within us and we’re heading to a place that we lack hope, our natural desire is to stay quiet, to give in to the sense of loneliness, to give God the window treatment.

This among all the psalms give us the permission to come to God in faith to air out every last bit of how we feel.

We aren’t talking to a window, we’re talking to the God of the universe.

We aren’t talking to someone who’s doesn’t know, we’re talking to a perfect Father who gave us life and sympathizes with our sufferings.

We’re talking with God who loves us so completely that even though we were yet sinners, he sent his Son Jesus to die for us so that by grace through faith we can have a relationship with him.

Cry with Honesty

And it’s every last bit of ugliness that the psalmist shares with God.

Picking up from Psalm 88:3, so troubled is the psalmist that he senses that he is getting close to a place where he will be forever separated from God, a place where he will be unable to voice prayers any longer, a place where he will be unable to praise God.

His illness has ravaged his body, leaving him weak and resembling a corpse.

As we read, we can sense how near death is to him.

Illness has so affected him that he’s unrecognizable, in fact, he’s been unrecognizable for such a long time that he’s as good as dead and not much of a memory any more.

It’s like when you’re in a conversation and whoever you’re talking to is trying to tell a story and he cannot remember the name of the person the story involves.

“You remember her, don’t you?

The lady that used to work at the cafe that was usually at the register.

You know, what’s her name?”

It’s terrible to admit, but it isn’t long after someone has departed that their names are lost upon us.

Though he’s still alive, the psalmist knows that he’s nothing more than being the what’s his name in a conversation.

It’s a terrible situation to be at a place in life where you are completely unrecognizable and absolutely forgotten.