Sermon Text: Psalm 85
Date: March 23, 2025
Event: The Third Sunday in Lent, Year C
Psalm 85 (EHV)
You showed favor to your land, O Lord.
You restored Jacob.
2You removed the guilt of your people.
You covered all their sin. Interlude
3You put away all your wrath.
You turned from your burning anger.
4Restore us, O God who saves us.
Put an end to your indignation with us.
5Will you be angry with us forever?
Will you extend your anger through all generations?
6Will you not turn and revive us,
so that your people may rejoice in you?
7Show us your mercy, O Lord,
and give us your salvation.
8I will hear what the true God, the Lord, will say.
He indeed speaks peace to his people, to his favored ones,
but do not let them turn to foolish ways.
9Surely his salvation is near for those who fear him,
so that glory may dwell in our land.
10Mercy and truth meet together.
Righteousness and peace kiss each other.
11Truth springs up from the earth,
and righteousness looks down from heaven.
12The Lord will indeed give good things,
and our land will yield its harvest.
13Righteousness walks in front of him.
It prepares the way for his footsteps.
Seek a Lenten Mindset!
For some tasks, you just have to be in the right headspace, and if you’re not, perhaps you need to try to manufacture it. For instance, if you know you need to work out or do some cleaning around the house, but perhaps you just don’t feel like it, sometimes putting on the right music, podcast, or TV show can flip that switch and get you going. Perhaps you have a project due for school in the coming weeks, but it feels so far away that you find yourself lacking the drive to get any work done on it. But perhaps setting smaller, more immediate deadlines can help light that fire under you to get started.
During the season of Lent, we might have to work especially hard to focus our minds on the season’s themes. Lent is very different from the Advent and Christmas seasons. There’s nothing in the world around us that can help “set the mood” for Lent. Just the opposite, actually. Everything around us directly contradicts that self-reflection centered on our sins and the need for God’s forgiveness. So, sometimes, having a model to follow, a path to trace, can help us get “in the zone,” as it were. Thankfully for us, in Psalm 85, we have exactly that.
The psalm writer begins this song to God with a bit of a history lesson. Now, it might seem a little bit weird to give God a history lesson on his own actions (did he forget?), but this really ties in with what we talked about on Wednesday evening with the Second Commandment. The best way to use God’s name is to share what he has done and to praise him for it. And that’s what the psalm writer is doing here: You showed favor to your land, O LORD. You restored Jacob. You removed the guilt of your people. You covered all their sin. You put away all your wrath. You turned from your burning anger.
Now, there is no indication of what events the psalm writer is talking about, and that’s probably intentional. Looking back through Bible history, we can see repeatedly where God followed this pattern of favor, restoration, and turning from fierce anger. We might think of Abraham and Sarah’s lack of trust in God’s promises for a child, so they turn to Hagar, Sarah’s servant, to be a “surrogate” of sorts in direct contradiction to God’s explicit promise that Abraham and Sarah would have a son (Genesis 16, 21). Perhaps, as the First Reading set the stage for the exodus of God’s people from Egypt, we think of the numerous times that God’s anger burned against the people for their idolatry and grumbling during those forty years wandering in the wilderness—beginning with that horrendous scene making and worshiping the golden calf (Exodus 32). David sinned against God in his lust and adultery with Bathsheba and in his deception and eventual murder of her husband, Uriah (2 Samuel 11-12). The prophet Elijah served at a time when the number of faithful people in the whole nation dipped to just 7,000; everyone else was serving the false gods of Baal and Asherah (1 Kings 18-19, esp. 19:18).
Whether the author of this psalm is a contemporary of David or lived a while after him, there was more than enough material in Israel’s history to draw on to see this pattern in God’s work. The people sin against God, and he is truly and justly angry over that sin, and yet he has compassion for his people and restores them.
Knowing this pattern helps us to understand the questions the psalm writer asks God, “Restore us, O God who saves us. Put an end to your indignation with us. Will you be angry with us forever? Will you extend your anger through all generations? Will you not turn and revive us, so that your people may rejoice in you?” He is not saying, “God, you have no right to be angry with us! This is unjust treatment!” In fact, just the opposite. When he asks God in v. 4 to “restore us” or “turn us back,” that’s a clear admission that they had gone astray. Put another way, you could say that the psalm writer is repentant for himself and on behalf of his people at large.
The psalm writer’s questions reveal that he knows and trusts God’s attitude, which drives God’s actions. The psalm writer had seen this before: God’s people sin, and he has mercy and compassion on them. So, his pleading with God is not a vain hope that he thinks has no chance of coming true; instead, it is a confident request that he knows God will follow through on: Show us your mercy, O LORD, and give us your salvation. He pleads with God to make his nature present in their lives.
The psalm writer had an appropriate Lenten mindset, which we want to emulate and capture for ourselves today and in the days, weeks, months, and years ahead. As we examine ourselves, we should see every reason God is upset with us, for his wrath to bubble over us. We have failed to be what he expected—demanded—we should be. But we, too, can look back over history and see the principal way God deals with people. Is it with anger and retribution or with mercy and forgiveness?
In fact, we have a far greater thing to point back to than the psalm writer did as we consider our sins. At the absolute latest, the psalm writer is writing hundreds of years before Jesus’ life. So he could look at God’s interactions with human beings and the promises that God had made. But those promises, certain as they were because God had made them, were still unresolved and unfulfilled.
But as the wheel of time rolled on, God sent his Son when that right moment came. Jesus made real what, up to that point, God has only promised and deferred. He came to redeem us who were wasting away in our sin under the law so that we might become the heirs of God rather than his enemies. When we plead with God to be merciful and forgive our sins, we can and should point to the cross. “Look, Lord! The punishment my sins deserved was doled out in the body of my Savior Jesus! There is nothing left for me to pay; he did it all for me!”
That repentant, Lenten mindset should be our approach to God for all our lives. Nothing we’ve done or will do can change what Jesus has accomplished. The steadfast God will not decide one day to no longer forgive you or to go back on his promises. No, if God’s promises are sure, then all the more is the fulfillment of those promises sure!
When his Spirit-given attitude is in us (one that is repentant, both sorry for our sins and trusting God’s mercy to forgive), we are the fig tree that Jesus pictured in our Gospel. We are bearing the fruit of faith because the fruit of faith is not trying to pretend we don’t have sins, nor is it assuming our sins create a hopeless situation for us. No, a fruit of faith is a confident resolve that he indeed speaks peace to his people, to his favored ones. And how does he speak that peace to us? Through the Word-made-flesh, Jesus, who paid for our sins with the sacrifice of his life for us. We are forgiven, no matter how grievous our failing or how deserving we think (and know!) we are of God’s wrath. Will God be angry with us forever? No! Because in Jesus, the punishment has been met, and his promises are fulfilled.
My brothers and sisters, we are truly God's favored ones. Not because of anything you have done or anything I have done, but because of what God has done for us. He will not be angry with us forever because he took out his just anger on Jesus. We do not have to worry about the effectiveness of his death because we know what awaits us just three days after his death at that garden tomb.
So, go forth in genuine acknowledgment and sorrow over your sin, but not hopelessly. Go forward trusting that all God has promised has been done and will be done. Your sins are forgiven. You are God’s child. And because of what he’s already done for you, he will bring you to his heavenly home. Thanks be to God! Amen.
