Photo by Serrah Galos.

Fearless Trust

Psalm 27 invites us to a glimpse of a well-worn, mature faith. These words are not those of one freshly afoot on the road of life with God. These words are the embodiment of the image of the tree in Psalm 1, a life firmly rooted in God, watered by past experiences of God’s salvation, by the promises and hope of what the Lord has said. David writes as one well-schooled in the art of trusting God.

Perhaps most striking about David’s assurance is that chaos seems to be the vantage point from which he prays. He describes his circumstances with images of vandal hordes descending and all hell breaking loose (vv.2-3). David’s increased depth of trust and hope in God has not resulted in a diminishing of the very real threats that plague him. But David’s trust has reframed everything. In the midst of this anarchy, David is “calm as a baby, collected and cool” (vv.2-3). 

There is something so radically this-worldly about the shape the hope Psalm 27 invites us into. The pain and the danger are real but so is the reality that God is inviting us into counter-rhythms that syncopate the cadences of chaos with order and beauty. Two important practices stand out within the context of the psalm. He writes in vv.4-5:

I’m asking God for one thing,
only one thing:
To live with him in his house
my whole life long.
I’ll contemplate his beauty;
I’ll study at his feet.

1. Contemplative Prayer

First, David invites us to the disciplines of contemplative prayer, silence and solitude. David’s world much, much like our own, moves at a frenzied pace. We are constantly being discipled by the antichrist rhythms of noise, notifications, news, and the normalization of violence. David knows that the only response is to retreat. A retreat not away from this world but a retreat into the refuge of God’s presence. Thomas Merton writes that when Christians forsake contemplation they substitute the “truth of life” for “fiction and mythology” bringing about the “alienation of the believer, so that his [sic] religious zeal becomes political fanaticism.”  David instead of leaning into the madness, embraces silence and solitude. He writes of the presence of God:

 That’s the only quiet, secure place
in a noisy world,
The perfect getaway,
far from the buzz of traffic.

2. Immersive Worship

Second, David immerses himself in worship both private and communal. Even on the way to church, he’s already singing his own songs:

I’m headed for his place to offer anthems
that will raise the roof!
Already I’m singing God-songs;
I’m making music to God.

Worship is the eruption of joy and gratitude, not a response fueled by emotivism, but a quiet resolve to contemplate what God has done and to voice heartfelt thanksgiving for it. Worship is the antidote to our own poisonous obsession with self, our propensity to live at the mercy of our circumstances and our ever-changing whims. Worship in the face of great trial is not a denial of our situation. Rather it is God’s invitation to to view the world from his own vantage point, to be with God and find that in all things he is drawing near to us.

This Exuberant Earth

David expresses one final plea, “You’ve always been right there for me; don’t turn your back on me now. Don’t throw me out, don’t abandon me; you’ve always kept the door open” (vv. 9-10). He asks for guidance, he needs God to show him the way. He writes:

Point me down your highway, God;
direct me along a well-lighted street;

And he ends his prayer in one final, resolved, steadfast, radically hopeful expression of trust. Again, what’s remarkable about this ending stanza is that this resolution is not reserved for another life. He finds hope right here in the midst of the confines of this world, this place, amongst these people and these circumstances. He knows that God won’t quit on him and so, grizzled veteran of faith and trust in God that he is, he won’t quit on God. He holds fast to the hope that God’s goodness will reveal itself again, right here in this “exuberant earth.” Don’t quit. God is faithful. In the beautiful translation of Eugene Peterson:

I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness
in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
Take heart. Don’t quit.
I’ll say it again:
Stay with God.

In honor of the life and legacy of Eugene Peterson, I will be using the Message version of the psalms as our text. Psalm 26 sounds, on its face, like the self-righteous protestations of a deluded legalist. Is David really placing wagers on his own integrity (v. 1) in the presence of a holy, all-seeing God? He even invites God to perform open-heart surgery on him, examining the hidden caverns of his life (v. 2). So what are we to do with a psalm that most of us would never claim is true of our own experience? How do we pray this along with David with a straight face?

What David expresses here is a visceral, unflinching trust. It may sound as though he is unwilling to confess his own sinfulness but that misses the point. This psalm is not about who David is, this psalm is about who God is. The steadfast love of God is the branch that David clings to, holding fast in the rushing currents of falsehood and idolatry. Left to his own devices, David would be swept along with the sinners, the devious, the frauds. But David’s life is not defined merely by his own actions, his life flows from a deep river of confession, worship, and prayer.

I scrub my hands with purest soap,
then join hands with the others in the great circle,
dancing around your altar, God,
Singing God-songs at the top of my lungs,
telling God-stories.
God, I love living with you;
your house glows with your glory. 

The Message, vv.6-8

He expresses his trust in the means that God has provided for purification. He recalls rapturous times of worship in the presence of God and the community. His life is shaped by story and song both of what God has done and his own experience with God. Everything for him starts from a deep and personal encounter with God.

David invites us to a faith that is embraced in momentary acts of faithfulness, where the words of our mouths and the state of our hearts are constantly presented to God for examination. God’s presence is a fire, engulfing and purifying every corner of his life. We can trust that God’s presence will not simply rubber stamp our agendas, or provide us with good feelings to get us through the day, but it will provide a way forward, a way of openness, of integrity, of transformation.

David beautifully conveys the meaning of life: God, I love living with you. David’s life before God expresses the poles of this life: exuberant displays of abandon in the congregation where everything is in its right place and a life of contemplative nearness in the midst of ambiguity and brokenness, a life lived up close to God. Openness, vulnerability, this is the life that is oriented to God’s presence. Trust is the foundation of this life, a trust that says God is exactly who he has shown himself to be, abundant steadfast love and thus, I can trust that I am exactly who he says I am: beloved.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.” -Eugene Peterson

Some men are less than their works, some are more. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough. [He was] the same man in his life and in his writings.^[1]T. S. Eliot on Charles Williams. Feels appropriate for Eugene as well.

I suspect my story is not unusual. I was languishing in self-doubt, self-loathing, and self-absorption. I was a pastor, in title, not in practice. I was given a title and a job description but not a vision for doing God’s work that actually cultivated an awareness of God’s presence. Church work seemed like the least Christian work I could imagine. Five years into pastoring, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be more where the action was, where the power of the Gospel was manifested in ways I could touch, and where I frankly felt a little more useful. I was going to study law.

And then I met Eugene Peterson.

Up until that point, I was aware of Eugene Peterson but wrote him off as the author of a “popular” Bible translation—my two semesters of Greek encouraged me to use this word, “popular,” pejoratively…little did I know at that point that Peterson was a Semitic languages scholar whose translation, The Message, was a pastoral attempt to help his congregants better hear and read Scripture, it was not the first or the last time Eugene taught me a lesson in humility and listening. I picked up the book “Working The Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.” This was my second conversion.

For the first time, a light was beginning to shine on what it meant to pastor not simply as a job but as a vocation. It would not be long before I had read every book I could find by Peterson. Eugene was drawing me into a deep life of doing for God that flowed from a being with God, a way of “saving souls” while finding my own. Eugene wrote as an artisan, a tradesman who crafted pictures out of words. Eugene was a storyteller in the heritage of Jesus himself, drawing people into the expansive world of Scripture and making its world seem not so distant from our own.

Before I met Eugene, people would ask me what I did for a living in different social situations and I would always respond “teacher.” I told myself that I did not want to push people away who might have reservations about the idea of talking to a pastor but really I am just not sure I believed in what I did—really, I am not sure I knew what it meant to be a pastor.  Eugene’s wise words and contemplative faith saved my own faith. Not my faith in Jesus, or in the power of the gospel, but my faith in pastoring— in doing thousands of seemingly irrelevant tasks faithfully, of committing to Scripture and prayer above all else, of discerning a vocation of deep spirituality in the midst of a demanding job description. Eugene Peterson awakened me to the reality that it is a profound and fearful thing to call one’s self a pastor. It is now a title I wear with great pride and even greater humility.

In an interview recently, Eugene said his hope for life’s work was simple, “I hope I can be part of changing the pastoral imagination of pastors in America.” To that prayer, I know the Lord has answered “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Eugene was my pastor. And by judging from my own experiences with my colleagues, Eugene was a pastor to thousands of other pastors and thus his congregation is in the millions. Though I never met Eugene, I apprenticed myself to him, acquainting myself with his generous mastery.He gave me a trade, he passed down tools of Word, gospel, prayer, and poetry, he invited me into the kind of work that dignifies a man, that makes him grateful for a hard day’s labor. He made me want to be a better pastor and a better man. He writes, “A life of congruence. It is the best word I can come up with to designate what I am after…”^[2]From Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places

I am not only grateful for Eugene’s life but forever shaped by it. I have great joy in the thought that at this very moment, Eugene is beholding and smiling at the face of the Savior he loved so dearly—I hope that Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karl Barth, and John of Patmos are there for the first brunch by the lake as well.

Thank you, Eugene. You have been my companion in finding my way as a pastor, it is lonely work, and I needed you. ^[3]From Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor. The afterword is a “Letter to a Young Pastor”

To those with minds whose imaginations paint with every color until the canvas is stained with streaks of brown and black.

To those who write scripts of loneliness, abandonment, and failure.

To those who only remember songs of lament, even on a bright and warm autumn day.

To those whose breathing grows shallow, whose chest feels heavy, whose shoulders ache from unseen burdens.

To those who are well-acquainted with the harrowing darkness of the middle of the night.

We have too many testimonies of anguished brothers and sisters who lived with the pain day in and day out to say that there is any formula for healing. For most of us, life is not linear, some days go up and others go down. But just because there is no formula does not mean the promise is void. The promise proclaims to us no matter the darkness, the light will break through. No matter the swells of the waves, they obey the command to be still. No matter the grave, life will rise up.No matter the depth of despair, there is hope.

We need hope, we need it to sing over us, to bring our distorted realities into focus, to repair our broken imaginations, and to lift our heads. Hope often connotes something in the future. Hope is not simply that it will all work out in the end. It will. But what does it hope look like right here, right now?  For those mired in the struggle of mental health, what hope is there? As C.S. Lewis writes achingly, “I need Christ, not something that resembles him.” We need hope, not something that resembles it. Hope is not an outcome, it is the very presence of Jesus. Jesus knocks at the door, he comes in and he sits down to a meal with us. He says to us simply and without qualification or prerequisite, “I am.” I am here, I have overcome, I care for you, I have healed you, I am healing you, and I will heal you. I am.

For those brothers and sisters fighting, clawing, despairing because your own brains are double agents, betraying you, isolating you. There is hope for you, there is healing for you. It doesn’t depend on you, saying the right words or performing the right rituals.  1 Peter 5:7 invites us to cast all of our anxieties upon him because he cares for us. The Greek form of the verb translated “cast” (epirito) does not designate a period of time (past, present, or future) it simply acknowledges it as a fact. Essentially, Peter is saying, “Jesus does not tire of your wrestling with mental health, he does not grow weary, or heavy-laden by anxieties past, present, or future. He will take them, he will carry them. Every single time, every single day. He will never fail.”

You are welcomed as a beloved child. Jesus will always come to you. There is hope now and forevermore. Cast your anxieties upon him, every moment if you need to, he cares for you. Grace and peace to you.