Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own - Psalm 120

We begin our journey in a strange place this morning.

Last Sunday I introduced you to the Psalms of Ascent.; 15 songs that were sung by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the great festivals of their faith.

And the first in the series is the Psalm we read together earlier. Psalm 120. And what a strange way to begin it is.

If it were up to me, I’d have chosen something a bit lighter. Something with a tune you could whistle as you threw your rucksack over your shoulder and made ready to go.

But Psalm 120 starts with distress; majors on deceit and punishment; and then ends with war. All in the space of seven short verses. Sets you off with a spring in your step!

It jars. There’s no other way to describe it.

Either somebody’s got their numbers mixed up and we were meant to start with Psalm 121 – which is much more upbeat – or there’s something going on here that’s deliberately provocative and demands that we take a closer look. And I’m absolutely sure it’s the latter.

This Psalm’s been placed here on purpose.

And the purpose is to call our view of the world into question.

And that’s what I want to do this morning too.

You see, from our mothers’ arms, we grow up surrounded by a powerful illusion as to how the world is; and it runs like this:
Human beings are basically nice and good. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. And any problems we have in life can be solved on our own with a little more time, ingenuity and effort.

It sounds great, and we really want to believe it. Maybe many of us do believe it, and who could blame us? because like all good lies it’s very plausible and there’s a degree of truth in it.

There’s much that’s good in humanity; this world we live in is a beautiful place. We have achieved great things over the course of human history.

I’m not questioning that for a moment, and neither’s the Psalmist.

But that is only half the truth. And if we insist on living as though it were the whole truth, we’re living a lie.

We’re pretending everything’s fine, when really we know that this world we live in is far from fine.

Maybe, if we’re lucky enough and wealthy enough, we can insulate ourselves from the pain of living sufficiently well to keep kidding ourselves that everything’s fine. But that’s a luxury that most of the world can’t afford.

There’s something deeply wrong with this wonderful world, and try as we might, we can’t pretend it away.

Christian theology talks about the fall, and whether you understand the Adam and Eve story literally or take it as metaphor, the point is the same. The world is the way it is because humanity stopped living God’s way and started living its own way. God was pushed to the margins, and with him safely off the scene we set about refashioning the world in our own image. We have made it what it is.

The other day I picked up a magazine my father-in-law gets which gives you a summary of the week’s news from around the globe.

“Britain’s Feral Children” was the headline, looking at that case in Doncaster when two brothers aged 10 and 11 decided to torture two other children to within an inch of their lives.

There were pictures of the three Muslim bombers who - in God’s name - tried to blow up transatlantic jets with liquid explosives.

There was further talk about al-Megrahi and Libya; drug seizures in Ibiza; the BNP getting a slot on Question time.

There was a story from Mexico where 17 recovering addicts were taken out of a rehab centre and shot dead by members of a drugs cartel. This is just one more incident in the city of Ciudad Juarez where 1,400 people have been murdered this year because of drug crime.

450 new Israeli settlements were approved on the West Bank, killing whatever momentum the peace process had been gathering.

Ethnic violence in northwest China has seen 200 people killed and thousands more injured in recent days.

Iran continues to posture. The fighting in Helmand province claims more lives. Civilians are killed in collateral damage. Car bombs in Baghdad fail to shock us anymore.

What do we do with this stuff?

The overriding temptation in the Western world is to stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away. That way we don’t have to see it or read about it. We can keep the illusion of a happy world alive, as long as our little bit of the world’s happy.

But faith, Christian faith at least, asks us for more than that. It calls us to face the world as it is, in all its contradictory reality, and to realise that we cannot save ourselves.

We’ve had millennia to get it right. And we still haven’t managed it. We have food, but the poor still die of hunger. We crave peace, but the innocent still get blown apart in war. We champion equality but the ‘haves’ continue to live at the expense of the ‘have-nots’ while the planet slowly goes into meltdown.

Our atheist friends blame it all on religion. But the past century saw the demise of religion in the Western World, and if anything things got even worse! Many of you tell me that you see that in your own lifetime.

If we could get it right on our own we’d have done it by now. But we can’t.

So forgive me if I sound weary this morning, but I’m not prepared to brush this under the carpet and pretend it’s all ok. Because it’s so clearly not ok.

When we reckon seriously with how the world is, we find ourselves sitting alongside the Psalmist in the dust and sighing from the depths of our hearts: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.

Distress. That’s where this Psalm begins.

But thank God it’s not where it ends.

Because there are two ways we can go, once we’ve accepted the reality of the way things are. The way of despair, which is static. Or the way the Psalmist chooses – which is dynamic.

What does he do?

Well he opens his mouth. He doesn’t bury his head in the sand; he doesn’t sit, paralysed in despondency. This swell of anger and disappointment he’s feeling at the ways things are spills over and he voices it all to God.

“I call on the Lord in my distress” he says.

I wonder where you go in your distress? What’s realest for you in those moments? Is God real for you then? Do you look to him?

“I call on the Lord in my distress” says the Psalmist.

And what does he say to God?

“Save me”. “Save me, O Lord, from lying lips and deceitful tongues”.

Save me from a world that tries to push you to the margins
Save me from people who talk of peace but don’t pursue it.
Save me from the illusions that tell us we can do this by ourselves.
Because we can’t.

God, we need you.

Are you beginning to see now why this Psalm is first among the Psalms of the ascent?

The realisation that we need God more than anything is the prod in the back that gets us moving as pilgrims or disciples.

If we’re content with how things are we’ve no reason to move or to change. Why would we bother going up to Jerusalem? Why would we drag ourselves out of bed every Sunday morning to get to Belhelvie church? As long as we keep believing the illusion that everything’s fine, there’s no reason to be here!

But if we listen to the voice of our own weariness – weariness with this world that’s never at peace, and this self that’s rarely at peace either – then we’ll be in a place where we’re ready to move because we’ll know deep in our bones that what God has in store for us is better by far.

Christians have a word for that movement that starts us off on the road of pilgrimage and discipleship. It’s the word repentance. And though that word comes to us covered in the dust of the ages, its meaning is very simple. It just means changing the way you think and learning to live in a different way. It means leaving the community of those who think they can get by without God, and joining the community of those who know they can’t get by without God.

Eugene Peterson puts it this way:

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding you were wrong in thinking that you had or could get the strength, education, training to make it on your own; its deciding you have been sold an illusion about yourself, your neighbours and the world.

And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.
Repentance is the realisation that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. It puts a person in touch with the reality God creates.”


One day, 23 years ago,
I got fed up of living among the tents of Meshech and Kedar
And I decided to leave.
I knew I couldn’t change all the things that are wrong with the world;
but I believed God could start to change me,
and maybe, through me,
the little bit of the world I happen to live in.

How about you?
Have you decided yet?
Are you still buying the illusion that we can do this by ourselves,
or are you weary enough to trust God for change?

Let me close with some words from one of my favourite books of the past ten years. It’s called “Life After God” and it’s by the Canadian author Douglas Coupland.

Coupland himself has no religious commitment, and for me that makes this piece of writing all the more remarkable. Throughout the book, the world-weary hero has been looking everywhere to try and fill the emptiness he’s feeling. He’s done drugs, he’s been in and out of relationships. And then, in the last chapter of the book he takes himself off deep into the woods, and as you read you find yourself wondering if this is going to be the end for him.

But it’s not. He finds a waterfall and a plunge pool deep in the forest at the foot of the mountains, and stripping off he inches himself forward into the freezing pool in a ritual that, for him, is something like a baptism.

And on the very last page he opens up to the reader and makes this startling confession:

Now - here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me to be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me to love, as I seem beyond being able to love.

There’s only a hairs breadth between those words and the words of our Psalm this morning. Nothing has changed in 30 centuries.

And it’s to God’s glory that he can take our justifiable world-weariness and turn it into a hunger for himself. A hunger that makes us set out on the road we call discipleship, singing the words of Psalm 120 as we go.

“I call on the Lord in my distress, and he answers me. Save me, O Lord. Too long have I lived among those who hate peace”.