Psalm 40* is a Gospel psalm—a psalm of good news.  What is that Good News?  Simply put, it is: the Lord can and does save.  The most basic accusation of the faithless is, “Your God cannot save.”  In Psalm 40, the writer says he was in a “pit of destruction (v.2).  Later we find some of that may have been a pit of his own making (v. 12) and some came from enemies around him (v. 14).  In the midst of that pit, he cries to the Lord (v. 13—make haste to help me).  His enemies then make the most basic attack possible, they go for the jugular of faith—they see his trouble and cry “Aha” your god cannot save.  This sneering finger pointing is one of the most basic themes of all the scriptures.  The great Pharoh would not let a motley host of slaves go free and dared God (in the person Moses) to make them free.  On the run in the wilderness, as the water ran short and the food ran out, the people cry again to Moses.  The substance of their cry, “it would be better if we had never left”, is the accusers cry—God cannot save.   Over and over again in the history of Israel, those who resist the instruction of the Lord, the Torah, accuse God.   At the most basic level, they shout “You cannot save”.  The priests of Baal surround Elijah and laugh that YaWeH can do nothing to them.  When the kings of Israel think that the armies of Egypt look like a better bet to resist the armies of Assyria and keep Israel free and independent, Isaiah tells the faithful that the accuser has won; his charge “Your God cannot save” has been vindicated.  When Herod’s terrorist death squad sweeps into Bethlehem and starts slaughtering children, the cry on their lips may as well have been “Your God cannot save.”  Even today, believers here and all over the world are challenged to vindicate their God.  “Your God cannot save” is the most basic accusation that anyone can level at a believer. 

How are we to respond?

For the last 100 years or so one common place in North American Protestant Christianity is to retreat and narrow the field of God’s saving activity.   In hope that God won’t be made a fool of Christians retreat and say, “well, God really only means to save souls”, and souls are conceived of in a sense that has no connection with life as any of us know it  – workplaces, scientific endeavors, political institutions, creative expression, educational institutions, virtually the sum of life are declared secular or neutral and thus not in need of God’s saving Grace and Power. Only souls are in need of grace, not really the world that God so loved.  Another tactic so that God won’t be made a fool is to merely baptize the present with the piety of Christian terminology.  Practices born out of religions that worship false gods are “Christianized”—music born in rebellion against God gets allegedly Christian lyrics and God is supposed to be vindicated.  Sentimental prosody pap that makes a mockery of the fullness of our emotional lives has a few words from carefully selected scripture inserted, and now it’s supposed to be fit for the refrigerator magnet treatment as “inspiring”.  Economic practices that grind down on the poor and make their lives misery are baptized with terms like Christian freedom and vocation and “see our God can save”, well at least those of us lucky enough to have been born in the US, Canada, or Europe. 

But the Good New of Psalm 40 and the story of God’s salvation from Genesis to Revelation is that God offers us a different way:  If we truly remember what God has done for us, saving us from Egyptian slavers, keeping us through the dark nights of Exile in Babylon, nurturing us even when the King’s terrorist death squads tried to take away our only hope, building us up when all of Rome was against us, protecting our Scriptures and our traditions when the supposed keepers of the faith wanted us far away from the Scriptures as possible, --if we remember all those things.  If we celebrate them year after year, holy liturgical season after season, like the Psalmist does when he proclaims “Many, O LORD my God, are (11) the wonders which You have done,

          And Your (12) thoughts toward us;

          There is none to compare with You.

          If I would declare and speak of them,

          They (13) would be too numerous to count.”

Then we will slowly, and sometimes painfully, build up a trust in the God who has saved in the past and when crunch time comes for us, when jobs choke the God given creativity out of us, when our politicians want to wage death in our names and everybody around us wants us to sign off on it, even when death strikes those close to our hearts, in those times then we will be ready for blessing for we will believe God can save, indeed “How  blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And  has not turned to the proud, nor to those who  lapse into falsehood.”   We will even enter into the history of God’s saving works by writing our own scrolls of testimony of the great things God has done for us, we’ll bring them to the temple and proclaim them for all to hear.  We’ll let our neighbors know that while all others might shout “he cannot save”—we will offer our story that indeed he does save.  We will not hide his righteousness (his faithful promise keeping) in our hearts.  We will not be silent about his faithfulness and salvation.  We will not conceal his loving kindness.

In the Matthew’s account of the Passion week, the soldiers executing Jesus shout at him, “Save yourself, If you’re really God’s Son, come down off that cross.”  The accusers basic charge is shouted for all to hear.  And for a time even the disciples believed that charge.  Peter with the last bit of hope in his heart sprints back to the tomb when Mary Magdelene reports that it’s empty.  There he finds a few clothes and again believes the accusers charge—he walks away shaking his head.  Later, when he really meets the risen Lord, face to face, he like the Psalmist now believes that God can save—that the world can be set to rights. Now like the psalmist he’s got a testimony to bring to the temple, he cannot restrain his lips—God has kept his promise. He has brought back Israel, paid for her in blood coin, and through Israel, all of us.  God had promised a world so transformed that the faithful dead would rise from the dust and a new king would take the throne.   And there at an empty tomb was the down payment, the first fruits of that promise that God made to Abraham so long ago, I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations.  So

Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;

          Let those who love Your salvation (34) say continually,

          "The LORD be magnified!"

God can save. He’s saved before.  He’ll save again.  He’ll save all who are afflicted and needy.

*The painting is by contemporary American artist Phillip Ratner.  It is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, MD.