Does This Psalm Have A Seatbelt?

Text:  Psalm 14

Theme:  "Does This Psalm Have A Seatbelt?"

9th Sunday after Pentecost

July 29, 2012

First Presbyterian Church

Denton, Texas

Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

+In the Name of Jesus+

For the director of music. Of David.

¹ The fool^[a] says in his heart,
“There is no God.”
They are corrupt, their deeds are vile;
there is no one who does good.

² The Lord looks down from heaven
on all mankind
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.
³ All have turned away, all have become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.

⁴ Do all these evildoers know nothing?

They devour my people as though eating bread;
they never call on the Lord.
⁵ But there they are, overwhelmed with dread,
for God is present in the company of the righteous.
⁶ You evildoers frustrate the plans of the poor,
but the Lord is their refuge.

⁷ Oh, that salvation for Israel would come out of Zion!
When the Lord restores his people,
let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad!

Somewhere in the town of Chula Vista, California there lives an 8-year-old boy by the name of Danny Dutton.  As you're about to find out, he took seriously a homework writing assignment which challenged him to explain God.  Here are just a few of the interesting comments he had to make:

One of God's main jobs is making people.  God doesn't make grownups, just babies.  I think because they are smaller and easier to make.  That way He doesn't have to take up his valuable time teaching them to talk and walk.  He can just leave that to mothers and fathers.

God'second most important job is listening to prayers.  God doesn't have time to listen to radio or TV because of this. 

God sees everything and hears everything and is everywhere which keeps Him pretty busy.  So you shouldn't go wasting his time by going over your mom and dad's head asking for something they said you couldn't have.

Atheists are people who don't believe in God.  I don't think there are any in Chula Vista.  At least there aren't any who come to our church. 

Don't skip church to do something you think will be more fun like going to the beach.  This is wrong.  And besides the sun doesn't come out at the beach until noon anyway.

If you don't believe in God, besides being an atheist, you will be very lonely, because your parents can't go everywhere with you, like to camp, but God can.  It is good to know He's around you when you're scared, in the dark or when you can't swim and you get thrown into real deep water by big kids.

Danny Dutton's got a lot on the ball, wouldn't you say?  And Danny, it's not just 8-year-olds that feel as though they're being thrown into deep water by big kids.   Life has a way of making us all feel like that from time to time. 

In today's Psalm, Psalm 14, the "big kids" that throw us into "deep water" are described as "fools" and "evildoers".  They are corrupt; they are vile;  they do no good; they do not understand; they do not seek God; they try to frustrate the plans of others. 

The psalm is attributed to King David, and it's very apparent that he is frustrated at the whole state of affairs.  I read a number of Bible commentaries on Psalm 14 in my prep work for this week, and most of them limited themselves to defining terms, placing the psalm in its historical context, and so on and so forth.  All of that is great if you're a professional theologian, but most of us are not.  Most of us live in Realville where the the "big kids", so to speak, throw us into "deep water."  The commentators don't seem to capture the human side of this psalm --and, specifically, the frustration bordering on anger.

David says:  "The fool says in his heart ,'There is no God.'"  Nowadays, if you go running around saying things like that you could get into trouble.  It's not polite, or politically correct, to make judgment calls like that.  It's even worse if Christians do it; it sounds boastful and arrogant and self-righteous.  There are atheists out there in Realville, and it's not good to smack them down and call them fools.  Some of them are, in fact, quite smart. 

We heard from the 8-year-old Danny Dutton.  Now let's hear remarks from some folks in their mature years.  What they have in common is that they are all famous to one degree or another, and they are all atheists.

Start with Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- otherwise known as Mark Twain.  He was one of the great writers in American history.  Think Huckleberry Finn.  In Twain's autobiography, he gave his view of life:

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other.

Age creeps upon them and infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities.

Those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief.  The burden of pain, care, and misery, grows heavier year by year.

At length ambition is dead, pride is dead, vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place.

It comes at last -- the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them -- and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing, where they were a mistake and a failure and foolishness; where they left no sign that they ever existed -- a world that will lament them a day and forget them forever.

Bertrand Russell was an Englishman.  He died in 1970 after becoming a world famous mathematician, politician, and philosopher.  He received the Nobel Prize for literature.  In a letter to Lowes Dickinson toward the end of his life, he had this to say:

We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and the emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness.  But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silence returns.

Another famous Englishman and atheist was W. Somerset Maugham, one of the most popular British writers of the 20th century.  Toward the end of his life, he wrote:

When I look back on my life...it seems to me strangely lacking in reality.  It may be that my heart, having found rest nowhere, had some deep ancestral craving for God and immortality which my reason would have no truck with.

Another Nobel Prize winner was George Bernard Shaw.  His body of work gave us the famous musical "My Fair Lady."  He died in 1950 -- only a few short years after the end of World War II.  In his personal testimony, given toward the end of his life, George Bernard Shaw, an atheist, had this to say:

The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt.  Its counsels which should have established the millennium have led directly to the suicide of Europe.  I believe in them once...in their name I helped destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds.  And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.

All of this only serves to illustrate that you don't have to be illiterate or uneducated in order to be a fool.  "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God,'" says King David.

Does this psalm have a seatbelt?  It surely needs one, because it takes us on quite a ride.  At the very moment when we start comparing ourselves to atheists, we are tempted to slip into a certain pride.  "We're not fools; we're believers.  We go to church; we worship; we pray." 

But, as we're about to find out, they don't hand out merit badges for that, my friends.  David points us away from ourselves and our comparisons with others, and points to God.  He says:  "The Lord looks down from heaven on the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God."  Then, pulling the proverbial rug out from under our feet, says:  "All have turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one."  The New Testament echoes this when it says:  "All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God."

I assure you:  this message is not popular.  It's not "trending" like certain Youtube videos, the London Olympics, Chik-fil-A, or the broken marriage of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. 

Yet, on nearly every Sunday in worship, we confront this truth when we confess our sins in the liturgy.  There, in that Prayer of Confession, whether the words sink in or not, we are being brutally honest with God and ourselves.  We are not playing the blame game -- which is America's favorite indoor sport.  We are not copping a plea and promising to do better.  The fact is, we are 'fessing up!  The old confession of my childhood church is burned into my psyche:  "I, a poor, miserable sinner, confess unto Thee all my sins and iniquities for which I have ever offended Thee and justly deserved Thy temporal and eternal punishment."

Indeed, Psalm 14 pours as huge bucket of ice-cold water on all of our proud piety.  But then, just as quickly, it throws out this little reminder:  "God is present in the company of the righteous."

"But wait," you say, "that can't be right; God can't be with us. We just confessed that we are sinners, that we are unrighteous."  That is true, but it's only part of the story.  If God is with us because we are righteous people, then put a fork in us because we are done.  We're toast.  But if we are righteous people because God is with us and chooses to be with us, then that changes the whole nature of the game. 

This, of course, takes us to the very beating heart of the Gospel.  In Jesus Christ, God is with us.  He went so far as to become one of us.  And, through His death and resurrection, he took the "filthy rags" of our unrighteousness, and, in turn, gave us the royal robe of His righteousness. 

St. Paul put it in very personal terms for all of us:  "Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ -- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith."

Danny Dutton was right.  Sometimes the world is like a big kid that throws us into real deep water.  But God, in Jesus Christ,  goes in there right along with us.  And that's the good news for today and every day.  Amen.