Psalm 6

           For the director of music. With stringed instruments. According to sheminith. A psalm of David.

Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint; heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony. My soul is in deep anguish. How long, Lord, how long? Turn, Lord, and deliver me save me because of your unfailing love. Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave? I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears. My eyes grow weak with sorrow; they fail because of all my foes. Away from me, all you who do evil, for the Lord has heard my weeping. The Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer. All my enemies will be overwhelmed with shame and anguish; they will turn back and suddenly be put to shame.  (Psalm 6)

In today’s lament, David mentions people who are plaguing him in eight words. Most of the psalm is sung to God. He asks twice, “How long?” He’s effectively accusing God of abandoning and neglecting him. He doesn’t plead with God to save him because he’s worth saving, but because God is God. His love is supposed to be unfailing, so why is God letting David suffer? We ask the same question about ourselves, and about others we see suffering. David even goes so far as to point out that the dead don’t sing God’s praises. Since we’re reading a psalm written by someone who has been dead for more than 30 centuries, I don’t think that’s entirely true, but we get his point. How could David sing the praises of God to or with the people of Israel if he’s dead?

For most of us, the “can’t sing Your praises if I’m dead” complaint would be a little over the top. Most of our difficulties aren’t life and death.  Davids could have been. But this is often how we see things. It’s a crisis. We can’t go on like this. We look to the future, and it looks like the present… unending, persistent agony. We may have only been suffering for an hour, but we’re going to die like this. How could a loving God want that? This is where David shifts gears.  His enemy isn’t God. It’s his enemies. Instead of groaning at God, he groans at his enemies and threatens them with the worst fate he can imagine – that of sinners in the hands of an angry God.

His threat isn’t idle, but it’s also not vicious. Yes, he predicts the shame and anguish of his enemies, but he also offers them an out. David advises those who oppose him to go away and leave him alone if they want to avoid that shame, anguish, and judgment.  We don’t know when he wrote this song, but I suspect that it was after he killed Goliath. He was suddenly the focus of attention for lots of people who were envious, afraid, or angry. Some of them had been his friend the day before (or so he’d thought.)

One last thing… emotions. We’re told men don’t cry, but David flooded his bed with tears and drenched his couch with tears. In the last several decades, we’ve been told that women don’t cry. Truthfully, I think women have been told this much longer, with the media showing women as hysterical so they could portray women as weak. But I think I’ve been told all my life that other people can’t handle my emotions, that it’s rude to ask anyone to experience my feelings, etc. I can understand that, because I’m not comfortable with my feelings either. They get in the way. They tell me that I’m a failure.

God isn’t afraid of our feelings.  David – slayer of tens of thousands – expressed some feelings that we might think should not be expressed to God, and God gives no indication that He was afraid of David’s emotions. David was honest with God. I’m not sure I can even be honest with myself when it comes to emotions. Maybe this is something we need to work on, both in our own lives, and with others.