Psalms & the Seasons of Disorientation
Dr. James Smith
Psalm 77
19 September 2004
As a kid, I always was excited when the carnival came to town because it was always an overwhelming feast for the senses.
There were always more sights then I could possibly take in; from the assortment of rides with blinking lights to strangely colored foods that would send any dietician into a panic attack.
There were the smells of grease, dirt and unwashed, chain-smoking carnival workers who frequently hid behind the semis to smoke marijuana.
There was the taste of funnel cakes and sound of game workers tempting you to come and play their rigged games as well as the ill defined feeling of being surrounded by absolute chaos.
Later on when I became a believer, I often wondered where God could possibly be in the midst of this sensory maelstrom.
A few years ago, a relative gave me a gift that I believe that she had won at the carnival. It was something that I had noticed among the prizes and had always despised because it sat among cheap stuffed animals, beer mirrors and t-shirts emblazoned with the confederate flag.
It was the footprints poem stamped on a cheaply manufactured clock from Taiwan. My sister-in-law, who is not yet a follower of Jesus, thought that I would like it since I’m “religious.”
I left in the box for a couple of years and then needed a clock for the hallway. And since I was too cheap to go out and buy one, I decided to put it up where it has remained to this day . . . mostly just collecting dust.
This series on the Psalms have helped to remind me of the many different seasons in my own Christian life where I experienced what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls orientation, disorientation and re-orientation.
And while I, probably like you, have been blessed by those seasons of orientation where life seems “reliable, equitable and generous,” in all honesty, I have to agree with Brueggemann that “such a sure sense in God’s orderliness is not always a high and noble faith.”
And in some strange and unarticulated way, it is such a faith that I have always inherently distrusted because it seems so sure of itself; an odd sort of step child of modernity that claims that everything in life (including faith) can be “managed and controlled.”
Practically, this all too often has the ironic and nasty habit of creating a kind of “bubble” or even its own hermetically sealed “ghetto” whose children are never allowed to go to the carnival or point their fingers at strangely disturbing things.
And while all three of these components are all part and parcel of the Christian life, it seems to me that it is especially during those seasons of agonizing disorientation and the greatly desired re-orientation that have the greatest potential for conforming us more perfectly into the image of Jesus Christ.
Psalm 77 is one of those composite Psalms that contain both the cry of disorientation as well as the welcome wholeness of reorientation.
The first half or ten verses of the Psalm correspond to Brueggemann’s outline of the Biblical plea within the overall scheme of a personal complaint.
It contains a plea addressed to God to correct the situation of the Psalmist whose personal world has come undone for one reason or another.
And it dares to do something that so many Christians who cling to the old paradigm of modernity would only do in their wildest dreams . . . it complains.
“God why don’t you allow me to even sleep?” “Are you going to push me away forever?” “Do I have to remind you God that you are supposed to be gracious?”
These are not the words of someone who has been inconvenienced or the cry baby or “control freak” who has not gotten his or her way, but the words of someone who finds himself in grave danger.
Someone who has come to the terrifying realization that life is not quite so neat and orderly as its portrayed in black and white on “Leave it to Beaver” or “The Andy Griffith Show” but in all the living color of the carnival, which is merely another sobering example of the human condition.
In short, we know for a fact that everyone dies but the great irony is that those who refuse to honestly acknowledge and embrace those seasons of disorientation, never have a chance to really live.
They are those who do not fully enter into the Lenten season. They are those who think that Good Friday is “good” for all the wrong reasons. They are those who want the celebrate Easter morning without the ordeal of the passion of Christ.
No . . . our religion is a religion of the cross. We cannot experience the reorientation of Easter morning without the extreme disorientation of Good Friday.
There is far, far too much at stake for Christian believers to hold on to a life of orientation at all costs.
After all, God did not send His only begotten Son into the world to give us 68 degree homes and a generous 401k plan, but to ultimately restore or re-orient us to that which was lost so very long ago.
And while it is far too easy to forget all of this . . . He has not. God remembers.
And that’s what the second portion of Psalm 77 is about. It is about the great and godly gift of remembrance.
Verses 11-20 is packed full of rich reminders of what God has done and is itself a song of new orientation.
And it is this call to memory that functions as the turn that was necessary for the Psalmist to move from the experience of disorientation to the experience of new orientation.
Notice particularly verses 11 & 12. “I will call to mind . . . the deeds of the Lord.” “I will remember . . . your wonders.” “I will meditate . . . on your works” and “I will muse . . . on your mighty deeds.” (NRSV)
On at least 4 occasions, the Psalmist employs some sort of synonym regarding the active engagement of the memory.
And it is in that process of “chewing and ruminating on” what the Psalmist knows that God has done, that elicits that new orientation.
What a timely word for us as Americans. We of all people suffer from both historical as well as spiritual memory loss. Things move so fast in our culture that we can hardly even catch our breath.
And I’m no different. I can’t even recall what I ate yesterday and yet I know how vital it is to continually remember God throughout all the seasons of my life.
It’s so important that I decided to name my first son, Zachary, which in Hebrew means, “God remembers,” because I want him to always remember, that God remembers Him no matter what he may experience over the course of his life.
And I have not gone out of my way to “protect” my son from this world. I believe that one of greatest gifts I can give him is holding his hand as we walk through the carnival.
God has not called me to build some sort of wall around him where he will be comfortably oriented in every season of his short life.
No . . . God has called me to teach him to live out his life as a follower of Jesus Christ and become a man who will be able to recall, remember and recount the great deeds of God.
The Psalmist here in Psalm 77 remembers God in the midst of his disorientation and it is precisely then that the “sun breaks through the clouds.”
And from his musings, he brings forth to speech and declares out loud the times throughout history when God saved his people . . . “the descendents of Jacob and Joseph,” the times when He led his people through his servants “Moses and Aaron.”
But the Psalmist doesn’t limit himself to the realm of recorded human history but also to shadowy primeval times when God “moved over the surface of the chaotic deep.”
And in the language of a conquering king, God struck fear into those elements which dared to stand in the way of His right to orient and order an otherwise disordered and disoriented situation.
Water, which is so frequently understood in the Old Testament as a symbol of disorder and chaos, could not stand in His way as God cut His own path leaving unseen footprints.
Psalm 77 then reminds us that God is able to break into the midst of those hellish seasons of disorientation that we all experience at different times throughout our lives.
And whether or not such a season of disorientation comes about by your own doing or not, it is when we reorient ourselves toward God and remember Him that He can come as a conquering king and blaze a path out.
The lure of the carnival is great, while at other times it comes to town and sets itself up for business, whether you like it or not.
Its sights, smells and sounds provide a formidable distraction as well as the perfect opportunity to become bogged down and to forget God.
But the good news is that even though we may be surrounded by cheap stuffed animals, beer mirrors and people wearing t-shirts with confederate flags, the mere memory of His unseen footprints is enough to part the sea and lead you out and into the new place that He has prepared for you.
Let’s Pray
