It was just a couple of weeks ago that I went on a sort of personal pilgrimage. I sailed down the Thames in London from Westminster to Greenwich. The reason that I wanted to do this is to relive something from my past, for the only time that I had ever sailed down the Thames was on a school trip when I was eight years old, and on that school trip the only two things that really interested me were making sure that my lunch was preserved intact and that I got a little model of the Cutty Sark ship. Other than that, nothing really registered.
It was time to grow up. And so, I sailed from Westminster to Greenwich. It was a beautiful day! As we went along the great river Thames, we had someone who was a narrator and was giving an account of the different places that we were seeing. One moment he said, “I would like to turn to the right of the boat and note that it is on that very point the Mayflower ship set sail in 1620.” We were in Rotherhithe, and I noted it. We went down around the bends of the meandering Thames to Greenwich.
We alighted at Greenwich, and I wanted to do something I hadn’t done for a very long time – I went into the National Maritime Museum. Once in there, I thought, “I really should read up more about the Mayflower. It had just caught my attention. I didn’t realize that it had left from the Thames originally. I started to read about this incredibly important ship, particularly for those of us who live south of the border.
This Mayflower ship that was originally launched in 1609 and had been used for a few years to transport alcohol and wool and wood had finally been hired to take some pilgrims, some Puritans was the term that they would use perhaps, or was used slanderously against them at times, to go to a new world, to find a new colony, and to get away from the oppression of the religion of their land. So in 1620, sixty-five got on board the Mayflower at Rotherhithe on the Thames.
They sailed down the Thames and around the south shore of England, eventually to Plymouth, where they were supposed to meet a ship that was coming from Leiden, in Holland – the Speedwell. The Speedwell was to have other Puritans, others who shared the same nonconformist beliefs, and they were to come together and sail to the new world. But, the Speedwell had a leak. It was deemed unseaworthy. It might even have been done deliberately. We don’t know. But it meant that if all of them were going to go to the new world, they all had to go in the Mayflower.
On September 6, those from Leiden joined those from London and together they got on the Mayflower, 102 passengers and 50 crew – way more people than there should have been on the boat – and they set sail. But of course, they were later than they were supposed to be, because of the wait for the Speedwell. The seas were rough and North Atlantic was churning, and the boat was tossed and turned. People became sick, and there wasn’t enough food for them, because there were too many passengers, and the crew was struggling to keep everything going.
It was buffeted and tossed and turned, but eventually it arrived, not where they had anticipated in Virginia, not in the Hudson in New York, but Provincetown, Cape Cod. There in November of 1620, they got off the Mayflower to create what they thought was a new world. It is an incredible story! Two of them died on the way, and only 50 per cent of them lived beyond the first year of arriving in what we now know as Massachusetts. An incredible journey!
I read this with great interest. I am sure most American school children would know it off by heart, but I didn’t. Then I started to read a little further into some of the finer print. I was caught up in this story. As I read a little further along, one of the historians commented that one of the things, if not the main thing that kept the passengers of the Mayflower alive was the singing of hymns. Of course, the hymns that they sung were hymns based on the Scriptures and the Psalms. They preceded Wesley and Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge and others.
They didn’t have a hymnbook to read, but they had the Bible, and they sang from the great Psalms. You know the one that meant the most to them? It was from today’s passage: Psalm 130. You can just hear them in the hold of that ship singing out of the depths:
I cried unto thee O Lord, ‘Lord hear my voice and let thy ears be
attentive to the voice of my supplications. If you should mark
iniquities, no one should stand, but there is forgiveness in thee
that thou might be revered.’
You can hear them singing it, can’t you?
Tossed and turned in the hold of a ship, going to a land they did not know, realizing that they did not have a compass to take them beyond where they were going to land, realizing that they were breaking into a new world and leaving all that they knew behind, they sang Psalm 130. I paused for a moment, realizing that this very Sunday I was going to be preaching on this Psalm. I thought, “Isn’t it incredible how the Word of God lives and how it becomes incarnate in people’s lives, and how it makes a huge difference to people, so-much-so that it makes a difference to a nation, it makes a difference to a continent. Psalm 130 is the Psalm that inspired people to go to lands that otherwise they would not have known.
In Latin, this Psalm is known as De Profundis. De Profundis means “the deep” or “from the depths” mimicking Jonah and the whale, sounding very much like the language of Jonah. The psalmist talks about the De Profundis, the deep things. More often than not, when we talk about “deep” things, it is pejorative, it is negative: a deepening recession, deep depression, deeply distressed. Usually deep means something bad, not always – you can be deeply in love! But, it usually means something bad, because the depths represent a place of darkness, of unknowing, of uncertainty. The psalmist is crying out from the depths. He cries out with his voice: “Lord, hear my voice, hear my cries from this deep place!”
It got me thinking about something that might seem rather trivial, but nevertheless was quite powerful. Many years ago, not long after we were married, we got a new dog and his name was Monty. Monty was our first Cocker Spaniel. Dear Monty! He lived until he was nearly sixteen. What a wonderful old dog he was. He was just a puppy when we got him, a few weeks old – black and tan and greasy. We loved Monty! One day, as I normally did, I took him into the back garden of the manse in which we were living in Nova Scotia, for a little walk around and no sooner had I turned my back than he was gone!
I thought “How can he disappear? There is fencing, there is a garden. He is only little. He can’t go anywhere! Where has he gone?” He disappeared completely! Like the Bermuda Triangle, he had gone! I called out to him, “Monty, where are you?” And then, I heard this little cry. I tried to follow where the cry was coming from, and I walked over and there in the middle of the lawn was a little hole. At the bottom of this little hole were these two spaniel eyes. He had fallen into a used and discarded septic tank, and was eight feet underground in the mire. As I started to pull the sod away, I realized it was a big hole. I was amazed no one had killed themselves in this before!
There was a wooden frame, and there was sod on top of it, but the wooden frame had rotted and the ground was starting to cascade inwards. Dear little dog was eight feet down in a septic tank, crying and looking up at me. We called the fire department. Firemen came. One man grabbed another one by his ankles, created a bit of a chain, and was lowered head first into the septic tank to pull this little dog out. Well, if he was greasy before, I won’t tell what he was like when we got him on land! This little dog was hugged and kissed – but first of all rinsed off! I thought to myself, there were these little cries from the deep or else I would never ever have known where he was.
I thought of the firemen being lowered down into that hole and reaching out and grabbing the one who was crying is such an incredible image of what God is like in our lives: “Out of the depths I cried unto thee O Lord! Lord hear my voice and let thy ears be attentive to my supplications.” That is exactly what happened in the Book of Psalms, for the Book of Psalms is about God listening to the cries of his people. But the best way, I think, to understand this story is to actually begin at the end of it. It is better to read the Psalm from the end than the beginning, and I will tell you why.
Stephen Farris, one of Canada’s greatest preachers, who is by the way preaching here this summer – I blatantly do some promotion – suggests in a commentary that he has written on Psalm 130 that we should not spend all our time on the “cries” or on the morbid issues of death or trouble, because we will in fact get carried away with those. He says, “This is a Psalm ultimately of good news, because it is the end of the Psalm where the real power is: God will redeem Israel.” This is not a passage where we should only worry about crying from the depths, but rather it is one of great joy, of redemption and salvation and hope.
This is why the Reformers, in particular, and the Protestants of the Early Reformation stressed Psalm 130 as a Psalm of joy. For example, St. Augustine many years before had said Psalm 130 is the Gospel. Beza, Luther, all said, “This is the Gospel. This is Good News!” But, the one who elevated it above all the others was John Wesley. He, as we know, had a major conversion experience in his life on May 24, 1738, at Aldersgate. But according to the historian Prospero, on that very morning he went to St. Paul Cathedral. This isn’t very well known. He went to St. Paul’s Cathedral and there were hymns being sung, and there was music being played. The music for De Profundis – “Out of the depths I called out to thee O Lord” – was being performed. Wesley was there that morning in the great St. Paul’s Cathedral – where, as we all know our own Rachel Mahon will be playing for the next twelve months, which is great news! In this incredible cathedral, Wesley was there in the morning listening to De Profundis. That night, listening to a lecture on Luther’s work on Romans at Aldersgate, his heart was strangely warmed – and we all know where that led, and what it produced for God! It is not too much of a stretch to suggest that the seeds had been sown with Psalm 130.
The Psalm spoke again in another time and another place, and they lived. For those who look at this Psalm, they see within in the Cross of Christ. They see all the things that we see on Golgotha in this very Psalm: Jesus crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He sounds just like the psalmist: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee O Lord.” When the psalmist says, “If there are iniquities and you keep a record of them, who will stand, who will live?” Jesus meantime looks down from the Cross and forgives those who have crucified him “for they know not what they do.” And of course, when the psalmist believes that God will redeem Israel, the Saviour of the world was nailed on the Cross for the salvation of all. If that isn’t Psalm 130 manifested in the Son of God, I don’t know what is!
No wonder they saw in this thing the Good News, no wonder it is the powerful Good News! It must be Good News for us! It must be the way we sing songs of joy and commitment and hope and passion. But I also suggest that the meaning of the Psalm is in the middle. The psalmist says, “I wait for the Lord. My soul doth wait, and in his Word do I hope.” For the psalmist, you see, his cries would result in God doing something, but in the interregnum he had to wait. He had to be patient.
Lent is a time of patience. Lent is a time of rich preparation and growth. We might sometimes be in the depths, but it is a time to ask ourselves whether or not in fact we are living as God wants us to live, whether or not we have the strength for the challenges that we face in life, whether or not we have the commitment to the good of the world that we should have. This is a time to wait and ponder what is important in our lives.
The great Alfred Lord Tennyson, who you know I love, once wrote a poem entitled De Profundis. It is about Psalm 130, but it is so radically different, it is amazing! He writes De Profundis about the birth of his child, and he likens this waiting on God to the gestation period when a child is deep in the womb. For those of you who are parents, this will resonate with you. Listen to these incredible words of Tennyson:
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Where all that was to be, in all that was,
Whirl’d for a million aeons thro the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous eddying light –
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
Thro’ all this changing world of changeless law,
And every phase of ever heightening life,
And nine long months of antenatal gloom,
With this last moon, this crescent - her dark orb
Touch’d with earth’s light – thou comest, darling boy;
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that great deep before our world begins,
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will –
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore –
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon, that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
Wow! Tennyson sees that even in the womb God is at work, the Spirit is at work. Even in the dark place, as he calls it, even in the deep place, God is at work, the Spirit is at work.
That is what the psalmist believes. That is why the psalmist says, “I cry out to you from the deep.” He knows that the Lord hears his voice. He knows that God is there. He knows that he is not alone. He hopes and he waits and he anticipates that God will act. How many of you in your lives have not found yourself waiting for God to act, waiting for a moment when God will just explode on to the scene. That waiting is hard, but in the waiting, like a child, you grow. The beginning of the Psalm is the reason for it: “Out of the depths I have cried unto thee, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice.”
Why was he “crying”? Was he crying because of some sin that he had committed and he needed forgiveness? Quite possibly! Was he mournful and was he regretful of something he had done or some good that he had left undone? Probably! Was he concerned about the suffering of his nation around him and for the future well being of his nation? Probably! He does say “And we wait on God, who will save Israel.” It is not just about him; it is about the world around him. He is not so self-absorbed in his own grief or in his own problems that he is not also concerned for the wellbeing of his nation. God will restore Israel, he will: this is what the psalmist believes. No matter what, God will restore Israel.
I thought this week, and I said this on Wednesday night in the Xchange Service, that on Tuesday night I watched the News late and it struck me that is how many times the camera had revealed people grieving on the news: the families from the Malaysian airline crying and screaming and grieving, the parents of young girls who had been killed in products made by General Motors. They were grieving – right there, on television. The young people who were in the refugee camps in Syria, as Tony Berman rightly said in his article last week in The Toronto Star – we have forgotten about Syria at the moment – but you look into those children’s eyes in that camp and the mothers and the fathers who have lost children, and you see grieving. It just seems that they jump off the screen to you!
You know you can’t do anything for them. You know you can’t wrap them in your arms. You know you can’t read Psalm 130 to them. But, look what the psalmist says. At the point of his need, he says, “Hear the voice of my prayers. Hear the voice of my supplication. In your Word do I hope.” For a moment I just stopped. All you can do is pray for them. Pray for them because you know that even for those who are in the depths, God is still at work. In this incredible mystery of God’s redeeming work, in the midst of it, he hears their cry.
Oftentimes, I wonder what we offer the world. Oftentimes, I wonder what difference faith makes. Oftentimes, I wonder whether all the conversions and all the changes that happen in people’s lives in their walk with God ultimately in the history of the world mean anything. And then, I stop, and I read Psalm 130, and I realize it matters. It mattered to those in the bowels of the Mayflower. It mattered to Wesley at a time of deep soul-searching. It matters to all who cry out to the Lord. It matters, because ultimately it is as Stephen Farris said, “Good news.” Amen.