Hilton Head Island – May 14, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 10:1-9; Psalm 12:1-8
John M. Miller
Text - Help, Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the faithful have vanished from among the sons of men. - Psalm 12:1 (RSV)
Over the course of the next few months, we will occasionally be examining some of the kinds of questions with which people of faith are confronted from time to time. It is not always easy to be faithful to God, because we are constantly bombarded with issues which seriously challenge what we believe, and it behooves us squarely to recognize that reality.
King David faced a challenge to his faith in his perception that there were no more godly people left in the kingdom of Israel. To his way of thinking, they had all disappeared, if indeed there were ever any of them to begin with. "Help, Lord," he pleaded to God, "for there is no longer any who is godly.... Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak" (Ps. 12:1-2).
David felt completely abandoned by everyone. Further, he thought that many people had dealt treacherously with him. Many promises had been made, but nobody had delivered on them. It is not safe to try to psychoanalyze somebody who lived three thousand years ago, but I’ll do it anyway. In the historical accounts about David that are found in I and II Samuel, it seems clear to me that if David was not certifiably paranoid, he was minimally suspicious that everyone was out to get him, and he did not hesitate to voice those fears frequently.
Perhaps David wrote Psalm 12 when Saul was trying to kill him, or when one of his sons was trying to seize the throne from him, or when the Philistines or Ammonites were about to crush him. If so, it is little wonder that he believed all the godly of the earth were gone. Bette Davis said, "If you have never been hated by a child, you have never been a parent." H.L. Mencken said, "The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." For nearly all of us, there come periods in our lives when circumstances give us a very sour outlook on the world and all its inhabitants. It is an inevitable by-product of the human condition. The question then is this: ARE all the godly gone? Are we ever truly alone in our faith and faithfulness, and all others have fallen away?
In light of the number of mass killings that have happened lately in America, it is easy to feel that the godly are indeed gone. The headlines scream at us, and the news clips on television make it appear as though the whole world is collapsing around us, as young men with assault rifles indiscriminately fire at any unfortunate souls who happen to pass too close to them.
The list of atrocities against the Ukrainians by the Russians seems almost endless. Bombs, missiles, and drones deliberately strike schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Children are kidnapped and sent into Russia, and their parents have no idea where they are, or if they are even alive. Women are raped as an instrument of savage warfare. Now the Russians are attacking Red Cross warehouses of food for the besieged Ukrainians. To us it all seems terrible, but what must the Ukrainians be feeling? The spring counter-offensive is about to begin, but will it win back the eastern part of the country that the Russians have occupied? Are all the godly gone?
Whenever we think that all the godly are gone, that everyone has abandoned the ship of righteousness, we need to ask some very pointed questions about our perspective. Have the obvious difficulties the world is facing so reduced our objectivity that we can no longer get a good grip on our own reality? Because the media focus so heavily on bad news, do we lose sight of the fact that always there is also much good news in the world, even if the media for mercenary reasons choose not to make us aware of it? And if we personally sense at a particular point in our lives that all the godly are gone, does that perception reflect reality, or simply a pulverized period of our existence?
Adam Gopnik had a thought-provoking critique in The New Yorker of how the American press has gradually shifted from simply reporting the news about government, business, and so on to becoming the adversary of government, business, and so on. He said, "The reporter used to gain status by dining with his subjects; now he gains status by dining on them.... Yesterday's edge becomes today's tedium, and the only way to get more attention is to continually up the ante. If everybody does this - and everybody does - pretty soon even an issue of Good Housekeeping practically foams at the mouth." But surely that is something of an exaggeration - - - isn’t it? News reporting may be more adversarial than it once was, but most reporters still report the news without being adversaries.
Because any of us has a jaundiced view of reality on the basis of our own jaundiced personal vantage point does not mean that is the way things really are. It is like the one old codger saying to the other old codger, "I like your hearing aid. What kind is it?" The other chronologically advanced gentleman answers, "It's 5:30."
The first man has a peculiar perspective on the world by merely looking at a hearing aid and saying he likes it, and the second has a peculiar perspective, because even with his hearing aid, he still can't hear. And so David, kvetching to the Almighty about the duplicity of the human race, either chose to ignore or forget that there are many decent, honest people who are not out to snare the beleaguered monarch.
In its superscription at the beginning of Psalm 12, it says that is was David who wrote it. There is no superscription for Psalm 10, so we don’t know who wrote that one. Whoever it was, he seemed to be as consumed by as dyspeptic a view of the human race as David was when he wrote Psalm 12. The anonymous psalmist says, “Why dost thou stand afar off, O Lord? Why dost thou hide thyself in time of trouble? In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor; let them be caught in the schemes which they have devised. For the wicked boasts of the desire of his heart, and the man greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord. In the pride of his countenance the wicked does not seek him; all his thoughts are, ‘There is no God’” (Ps. 10:1-4).
Maybe you never feel like the words used in these two Psalms, but I admit that sometimes I do. Sometimes it seems like all the news is bad, and that humanity as a whole has gone to pot, both figuratively and literally, if “pot” is given a particular meaning. But such a jaundiced view is generated by too limited a perspective. Over the long haul and taking everyone into account, most people are decent and upright most of the time. As the old aphorism used to declare in days gone by, in memorable if not fully acceptable grammar, “God Don’t Make No Junk.” Too many people might get too far under our skin too much of the time, but overall, nearly all people behave most of the time like they know themselves to be sons and daughters of God.
Politicians are the easiest people to castigate, because their errors of judgment are in the news more than other types of people. Reporters, commentators, and preachers love to take potshots at them, because their mistakes of judgment are often so readily uncovered. But even if we strongly disagree with the politics of certain politicians, most of them probably believe they are following the right course when they propose whatever they propose. Nevertheless, when we focus so heavily on the politics we most oppose, it may seem to us like all the godly are gone. But that might be as much a dark view of us as much or more than it is a dark view of them. In any event, turning ourselves into pretzels over the machinations of politicians only pretzelizes us, and it doesn’t change the positions of the pols one mini-millimeter.
“But,” we say to ourselves, “some people don’t obsess over what anybody does. They just withdraw into their own little shells and let the rest of the world go by, letting anybody say whatever they choose to say.” Even if they do, does that mean that all the godly are gone? Not at all. Questionable or dubious behavior might be sins, but there are far worse sins than that. So if David, sitting in his palace in Jerusalem and grousing to God, said that all the good guys were gone, did that mean they were gone? Not at all! Nobody is absolutely righteous, but probably nobody is always as mean or menacing as the gloomy king of Israel alleged, either.
The prophet Elijah, after having bested and then slain four hundred of the prophets of Baal in the famous contest atop Mt. Carmel, soon had to run for his life from the wrath of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. He ended up in the desert, and there he uttered his doleful lament to God, "I, I only am left among the faithful, and they seek my life, to take it away." God said, more or less, "Kwitcherbellyachin’, Elijah. There are still 7000 loyal folk in Israel who have not bowed their knees to Baal. So go on back home and get to work," and he did, and he did, and it turned out okay, just as God intimated it would.
Tough times can obliterate our objectivity. If things get hard enough, we can conclude that we alone are straight arrows, and that everybody else is an apostate schlemiel. But, as Rudyard Kipling said,
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too...
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a man, my son!
Or, as Kipling might have added, “Which is also more, you'll be a woman, my daughter.”
Everybody, sooner or later, acts like a perfidious schlump. But that doesn't mean everybody is a perfidious schlump. Even people who ordinarily act the part of schlumpitude are not always jerks, and only an always-jerk would always think so. If you believe everybody is a louse, your conclusion says much more about you than it does about everyone else.
When David wrote Psalm 12, I think he must have been having a bad hair day. “Bad hair day” is very descriptive of what it so aptly, and briefly, describes. A bad hair day is when nothing seems to go right. Because that is the case, we are thrown into a blue funk. The day David composed the twelfth Psalm was like that. There are people who act ungodly; of that there is no question. And there even may be some people who regularly are ungodly. But just because we might have a bad hair day doesn't mean that all the godly are gone. Most people are neither unusually good nor unusually bad; most of us are usually somewhere in between. It is not good to assume everyone is all bad, but it is not bad to assume no one is all good. If we think everyone is bad, we will fall into a terrible depression, which is what happened often to David. If we think everyone is good, we will either live in a world of illusions or we will become bitterly disappointed on a regular basis. So it is best to strive for objectivity in assessing both others and ourselves, and then we won't be catapulted toward the extremes.
Economist Kenneth Boulding said something profoundly theological and philosophical. "The hatred of evil produces steam, but it easily becomes pathological unless it is moderated and guided by the love of good and by a vision of a feasible alternative to evil. The world may be more threatened by the hatred of evil than by evil itself.... The pursuit of goodness leads into many paths and sometimes into a thicket.... Some things are better than others, and it is better to go up than down on the goodness mountain. And if we abandon the search for the way up, we will be abandoning the potential for which we came into being."
George Orwell, the pessimistic optimist who gave us The Animal Farm and 1984, also gave us a very thoughtful notion. "Saints should always be judged guilty," he said, "till they are proven innocent." I suspect King David would agree with that. I guess I'd rather put it this way: Saints should never be judged until they are finally proven innocent or guilty.
Everybody who is a believer in God is a saint. If you don't believe that, look it up in the Bible; it's there, as plain as the mark of Cain on your forehead.
“I will now arise," says the Lord (said David)…. “I will place him in the safety for which he longs. The promises of the Lord are as promises that are pure, silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times” (Ps. 12:5-6).
If you ever feel you can't trust anyone, trust God. He will then enable you to regain your trust in others. Not everybody is somebody to write home about, but if we trust in God, we can find good even in the worst of us - - - and that’s good.