Divine Waiting
Psalm 130
August 9, 2015 SOH
Theme: Redemption
Wednesday, residents and towns along the
Animas River had a rude awakening. The beautiful,
clear waters of the Animas had turned an awful orange
from pollution. Amazingly, it is the fault of the very
agency tasked with cleaning up pollution, the EPA. A
sludge pond at the Gold King Mine, near Durango,
Colorado was breached, polluted water running into
the Animas. Durango, Aztec, Farmington, significant
parts of the Navajo Nation, the San Juan River and the
Colorado River will all be affected.
It’s a perfect picture of how sin works. What we
think we have bottled up, hidden away and protected is
suddenly exposed. Just like sin in the real world, it
doesn’t affect just you, but everyone downstream.
Everyone in your friends list, everyone on your email
list. Everyone connected to you. It stains the rocks of
your foundation. It stains the very life around you. Sin,
well, it’s pretty awful pollution.
As awful as this is, it’s not an isolated case. Our
visit to India in 2007 shocked our visual, olfactory, and
auditory senses with the level of pollution. You know
it’s bad when you open your suitcase on arrival home
and get knocked over from the odor.
Here in the US every man, woman, and child is
responsible for four pounds of waste products every
day. I think we’re making progress as we learn to
recycle and reuse, but let’s face it, we’re consumers
and we’re greedy; we want more and we don’t want to
give any up. Here’s some food for thought; an
anthropologist went through a forty year-old dump
discovering hot dogs that could have just been
removed from the package (Don’t think about that too
long), cling wrap still clinging, Styrofoam cups still
cupping, newspapers that can still be read, and plastic
toys that still work. Decomposition is slower than you
think.
Take heart, there are things you can do and if
you need to learn about them, here are some courses
you might consider;
1. Class 1. Refrigerator Forensics: Identifying and
Removing the Dead.
2. Class 2. If It’s Empty, You Can Throw It Away:
Accepting Loss, Semester 1.
3. Class 3. If the Milk Expired Three Weeks Ago,
Keeping It In the Refrigerator Won’t Bring It Back:
Accepting Loss, Semester 2.
4. Class 4. Recycling Skills 101: Boxes That the
Electronics Came In.
5. Class 5. Recycling Skills 201: Styrofoam That Came
in the Boxes That the Electronics Came In.
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6. And a final class called Giving Back to the
Community: How to Donate 15-Year-Old Levis to
Goodwill.
Well, we have a way to go cleaning up our
environment and caring for it in a way that honors God.
But the fact remains that we need a disposal system
for the waste of our products, food, and human byproducts.
We also have a little issue to contend with in the
spiritual waste in our lives – those bits and pieces of
spiritual trash we all accumulate, pile up, and try to
hide away thinking it’ll go away if we ignore it long
enough. We don’t release cyanide or cadmium or
chromium, but we spew out gossip and insults, halftruths and lies, selfish manipulations and hurtful
actions. Mix in anger and lust and greed, and you’ve
got a serious iniquity management problem.
I don’t know how they can clean up the Animas
River. It may only be through the dilution of the
contaminates and the natural filtering of the water over
rapids and through plants that nature will be able to
restore the waterway. I just hope the fish and other
living organisms will be able to survive.
The trash piles of your soul are a serious
problem. Left alone, their rotting presence in your life
will continue to affect your spiritual and emotional
environment for years to come. I do know how to clean
up the trash piles of your life.
Today’s lesion, Psalm 130, is an attempt to help
us understand where our sin goes. “Out of the
depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice!” I
know many of you have first-hand experience at what
it’s like when you are near drowning in your own sin, in
the mess of your life. I’ve never experienced utter
hopelessness like some of you, but I’ve experienced
that moment when it felt like my own actions, my sin,
had brought me to the brink of drowning. Gasping for
spiritual air, the very breath of the Holy Spirit himself,
you cry out for rescue. Not all of it is our own making,
sometimes our sin is the selfless sin of losing
ourselves, our direction, our very identity by giving up
too much of our self to others and we have failed to
become the person God intends. “Lord hear MY voice.”
Much of our faith and much of the Bible is about
our corporate life together; worship, fellowship,
mission, service, and some prayer. This Psalm is a
reminder that God created us individually, unique, and
of great worth.
St. Anselm (11th century) put it this way: O Lord
our God, grant us grace to desire thee with our whole
heart, that so desiring, we may seek and find thee, and
so finding thee we may love thee, and loving thee we
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“…my soul waits for the Lord more than those
who watch for the morning, more than those who
watch for the morning.” In verse 6, I find the deep
confidence to keep moving and I think you can too. I
never liked working graveyard, but in the summer I
knew about 4:30 the eastern sky would begin to get
light – morning was coming. The darkness of your soul
may try to hide him, keep him away, the light of God’s
grace, his peace will come. In the winter, when the sun
rises and you face that warmth – just bathing in it,
soaking it in as the cool of the night recedes you know
it’s come again. We wait; not “will he come” but
anticipating his coming just like the morning.
The key word is “redeem.” In verse 7&8, the
assurance is lifted as a proclamation of praise to God
and the focus shifts from me to thee; from the personal
to the corporate. Let me paraphrase:
Oh, people of Peoria and Surprise, and Phoenix,
and Glendale, and all over Arizona, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast never-ending
love, and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem each of you
from all the pollution of sin in your life.
may hate those sins from which thou has redeemed
us, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Amen.
This Psalm is a cry for a personal
transformational experience from God. It is a
realization there is nothing we can do on our own; “If
you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who
could stand?” The longer you try to stand on the trash
pile of your sin, the harder it’s going to be to stand; you
simply start sinking deeper away from those who love
you and from God.
Forgiveness is never a DIY project – Do It
Yourself! You have a part to live out; confession,
amending your ways, and grieving the hurt you have
caused. Reconciliation comes with the gift of
forgiveness. In essence, your garbage gets hauled
away by those who forgive you. When it comes to
deep spiritual divide between you and God, it is Jesus
who offers forgiveness and hauls you out of the miry
clay of sin. Jesus, the trash man. Jesus, the
environmental restoration agent.
Verse 5, “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;” not a waiting game, but an
anticipation that here, with the Lord is where I find and
claim hope. The hope of scripture is the assurance of
God’s intent, desire, and plan to forgive you and to
restore you and to re-make you into his image.
Where does the trash of sin, the pollution of your
selfishness go? It goes straight to the cross. And
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that’s where it stays forever, no environmental
damage, no toxic waste, simply gone.
The words of Psalm 103:12 might say it best; “as
far as the east is from the west, so far he removes
our transgressions from us.”
There’s nothing trashy about God’s gift of
redemption and release; it’s a sacred system of total
and complete sin removal.
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