Going Unnoticed

God guides the weak to justice, teaching them his way.

—Psalm 25:9

Introduction: I Want to Live in a Wigwam

I no longer remember what I was talking about at the time, but I used my iPod in a children’s message once in the not-too-distant past. I turned it on to some random song, and it happened to be I Want to Live in a Wigwam, by Cat Stevens. I know this song is filled with rather silly ethnic stereotypes, with lines such as, “I’d like to live in a wigwam and dance round the totem pole,” and “I’d like to live in an igloo and fish from an ice-hole,” but I still rather like it. [1] Lily Tomlin once said that “the trouble with the rat race is, even if you win, you’re still a rat,” and, as we all know, Cat Stevens—who now goes by the name of Yusuf Islam—dropped out of the rat race long ago. But even before his conversion to Islam, he was searching for something—as the Wigwam song makes clear—and it was also clear that he found the western rat race to be most unfulfilling.

I think we can all relate. The rat race is unfulfilling. To be truly human is to have a spiritual aspect to one’s being. And to be spiritual is to seek answers, to want to dig deeper into the meaning of life. And most of us in this church acknowledge that there may be answers outside our tradition. We don’t have to convert to someone else’s way of thinking in order to simply listen to them. And finding truth in their words, their traditions, and their stories does not require that we adopt their religion.

When confronted with a belief she did not share, my maternal grandmother was wont to say, “I don’t believe that way.” I always found this turn of the phrase charming. It was much less negative than saying, “I don’t believe in that.” To say you don’t believe in something is to reject it, to say that your truth claim cancels out someone else’s truth claims. To say you don’t believe that way, however, acknowledges that at least two different ways of belief have come up against each other, and that a choice had to be made. And yet, choosing one way of believing over another doesn’t necessarily deny any possibility of truth in another way of thinking. It simply acknowledges two different methods.

A good example of this, and I think I’ve mentioned this in a sermon before, was when Mormon missionaries began visiting my grandfather, who was never much of a churchgoer. Though my grandmother finally asked that they stop coming round, she did not do so in a hateful way. As she put it to me later, “Joseph Smith said he saw an angel. Who was I to say he didn’t?” That belief system was not her belief system, but she would never have told someone who followed it that their experience was a lie. It was just that she simply “didn’t believe that way.”

I. Our Problems with Psalm 25

…which brings me to the 25th Psalm, which isn’t a psalm about spiritual diversity and seeking truth in other religions. In fact, it seems to imply that there’s only one way, and that way is God’s way. But the way to find that way, the way to stay on that path, is not through the arrogance of certainty. No, it is through humility. It is by becoming one of God’s insignificant ones, one of the meek that Jesus said would inherit the earth, one of those who are afflicted and put upon, it is through going unnoticed in the eyes of the world that we find ourselves. And to find one’s self in the Bible is to find myself on the right path, that is, in the way of God.

Psalm 25, then, offers not a definition of the way, but a method of praying to find it and a way of living so that one can remain open to it. This psalm is not something that is of much interest to the modern church. But that doesn’t mean it’s untrue. We may no longer “believe that way,” but it’s a way that still has much unrealized truth. And so first, let’s talk about what bothers us about the 25th Psalm.

1. First, It calls upon us to be somebody we don’t want to be, somebody our culture tells us we cannot be, which is nobody—nobody, that is, in the eyes of the world.
2. Second, though Psalm 25 reveals a method of prayer and a very definite philosophy, it is not self-help. It’s not even compatible with self-help, and that renders it pretty useless, as far as contemporary Christians are concerned.
3. And finally—and this is the most upsetting part—this psalm has the gall to talk about sinners.

These three objections that we might make when reading this psalm are all interrelated. It’s really not possible to separate them and talk about them individually, because they’re all part and parcel of the spirituality of the 25th Psalm—indeed of all the psalms—and this is the spirituality of Jesus himself.

II. Anawim

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus shared with us the Third Beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” which is a direct reference to another verse from the psalms. [2] The word that psalm uses for the meek—anawim (ענוים)—is a relatively common word in the Hebrew Bible, and it’s also mentioned in today’s psalm. It refers to those who are insignificant in the eyes of the world, but who are chosen by God. These are the nobodies that none of us strive to emulate. And yet, in their humility, the meek find justice and are taught God’s way

Humility was, no doubt, one of the things Jesus was praying for when he fasted forty days in the wilderness. Mark isn’t very specific about Jesus’ temptations, but in the very brief mention he makes about this episode in Jesus’ life, one thing that comes through very clearly is humility: “He was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.” In Jesus’ day, there was no such thing as ecotourism. People did not voluntarily debase themselves by living with animals unless they wanted to be humiliated. And when we read Matthew’s much more detailed story of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, we see the forms of pride that Jesus had to overcome. [3]

Whether we attribute the desire to do the wrong thing to human pride or to an exterior evil force, one of the best antidotes is a strong dose of humility. Jonathan Edwards once said that “nothing sets a person so much out of the devil’s reach as humility, and so prepares the mind for true divine light without darkness, and so clears to eye to look on things as they truly are.” [4]

III. Dependence on God

One of the fruits of humility is a healthy dependence. To be humble is to admit that I cannot do it on my own, and to turn to God. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., a Presbyterian who teaches Bible at a UCC seminary, wrote that

Psalm 25 offers a model of prayer and a model for living that are increasingly difficult to appreciate or even to comprehend in the midst of a secular culture that promotes self-actualization, self-sufficiency, and instant gratification. Instead of living for self, the psalmist prays, and that prayer is an offering of his or her life to God. Instead of depending on self and personal resources, the psalmist depends on God in trust, finding security or refuge in God. Instead of seeking instant gratification, the psalmist is content to wait for God. For the psalmist, prayer is not a way to pursue what one wants. Rather, it is a means to seek God’s ways. [5]

IV. Can We Still Mention Sin?

Which brings me to the final objection to Psalm 25 that I mentioned earlier. We read it together in verse 8: God instructs sinners in the way. Modern culture doesn’t really believe in sin, and I have to admit that I find this a bit perplexing. I believe it must simply be the negative baggage that the word “sin” carries that people reject, and not the whole concept itself. After all, nobody’s perfect, and I don’t know a lot of people who claim to be. Everyone admits to at least the capability of wrongdoing, and everybody admits to the need to at least try to undo wrongdoing, whether by paying somebody back, apologizing, or some other form of atonement that is appropriate to the transgression.

One of the barriers that many of us feel in our spiritual life is the feeling that we’re not good enough to approach God, and we sometimes blame the traditional teachings of Christianity for making us feel this way. But the message of admitting wrongdoing and accepting forgiveness isn’t the problem. In fact, it’s really the only solution. If I feel that I can do no wrong, then clearly, I have no need of a Supreme Being. The notion that we can be wrong and that we can do wrong is what keeps us humble, it’s what encourages us to listen to other people’s experiences, it’s what forces us to broaden our minds and open our hearts. And admitting wrong is the only way to receive forgiveness—from God or other people.

Conclusion: I Don’t Need to Live in a Wigwam

One of the easiest messages of this morning’s passage from Psalm 25 is that God notices the unnoticed, that God creates justice for the oppressed, that God gives the weakest among us an inheritance. Therefore we should notice those whom others ignore, and be part of God’s work of justice and peacemaking.

But as long as we look at others as examples of what both the psalmist and Jesus meant when they talked about the anawim, we are neither understanding the message completely nor benefiting from it. In God’s eyes, we’re all of us anawim—the meek, the weak, and the powerless. God’s will is that we all reach up to God as to a parent, and that we accept the divine embrace as children.

This is the positive message of the Lenten season. We cannot experience the new life of Easter unless we’re first willing to let go of the old one. And so between now and April 8, may each of us become a little less sure of our own perfection, may each of us become more willing to admit it when we are wrong, and may each of us depend less on our own finite abilities and more on God’s infinite abilities. In this rat race of competing truth claims, this world in which so many belief systems are constantly banging into each other, it is only through humility and self-giving that we can discover God’s truth. Those who live with the wild beasts, those who live in wigwams, and those who live in igloos aren’t the only ones who may approach God in humility. So may we if we are willing to let go of who we think we are, and let God be God.

Though our understanding be imperfect, “this, at least, we ought to regard as a fixed and settled point: That although the goodness of God may sometimes appear to be hidden as though it were buried out of sight, it can never be extinguished” in the lives of those who wait for God and trust in God’s power. [6] Amen.

—©2012 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

NOTES

1. Cat Stevens, Footsteps in the Dark: Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 (A&M, 1984), Track 4.
2. Matthew 5:5; Psalm 37:11
3. Mark 1:12-13; Matthew 4:1-11
4. Jonathan Edwards, Works, Vol. 1, p. 920
5. J. Clinton McCann, Jr., The Book of Psalms, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IV (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996). P. 779.
6. John Calvin, Commentary on the Psalms, Vol. 1 (see Ps. 25:6) 

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