A sermon preached at St Mary’s Iffley by Andrew McKearney on 18 April 2021.

Tonight’s psalm is one of the evening psalms. It’s often said at Compline or Night Prayer because of the concluding verse:

       ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep,

       for it is you Lord, only,

who make me dwell in safety.’

That phrase is one that’s easily learnt by heart for use by us as we go to bed or when we toss and turn during the night:

       ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep,

       for it is you Lord, only,

who make me dwell in safety.’

As so often with the psalms, we don’t know what trouble the Lord has freed the psalmist from. It’s helpful if possible to have this sort of information so that we can better understand a psalm.

But there are some hints in this psalm that the author is caught up with a group of wealthy and powerful people. In verse 2 ‘nobles’ are referred to who ‘love vain things and seek after falsehood’, and a little later in verse 7 we hear reference to people whose ‘corn and wine and oil increase.’

So perhaps the psalm is about being surrounded by wealthy and powerful people, something we may find relevant in today’s consumer culture.

But the strength of not knowing exactly what the psalm refers to, means that we can bring our own experience to this or any other psalm and use it’s phrases to express our own troubles or pressures.

So the opening verse is there for all of us to make our own:

       ‘Answer me when I call,

       O God of my righteousness;

       you set me at liberty when I was in trouble;

       have mercy on me and hear my prayer.’

Crying out to the Lord, feeling pressured from forces whether outside or within, we’re assured in this psalm that there is another way to live:

       ‘Put your trust in the Lord.’

It’s a recurring theme in psalm after psalm, and it’s here in verse 5:

       ‘Put your trust in the Lord.’

Living our lives before the face of God, ‘Lord, lift up the light of your countenance upon us’, this gives us sufficient inner freedom not to be trapped by those powerful forces; but it’s not easy.

The invitation to live the spiritual life, to delight in the sheer giftedness of life and of other people in all their beauty and strangeness, to seek the presence of God in all that we do, to be able to live like this we have to:

       ‘Stand in awe, and sin not;

commune with your own heart upon your bed,

       and be still.’

There’s such a strong assurance throughout this psalm, of God’s presence:

       ‘when I call upon the Lord, he will hear me.’

No ifs, no buts. And yet we know that at times the destructive forces on our souls seem just as strong if not stronger. To resist them, we each need to develop a habit of stillness before the Lord.

Sarah Sands has just written a lovely book called ‘The Interior Silence’.

Sarah Sands is a former editor of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 from 2017 to September 2020, during much of the Brexit era and the beginning of the pandemic.

Perhaps unsurprisingly she ended up with information overload and suffered from insomnia, and no doubt if she was reading this psalm she would bring to it her own chronic inability to switch off.

But inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her garden in Norfolk, she decided to research the monks’ lives who once lived there; and so began her spiritual journey in which she decided to visit 10 monasteries around the world, from a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains.

Her book ‘The Interior Silence: 10 lessons from monastic life’ tells of both her outer and her inner journey.

The last paragraph of the book sums up what she’s learnt:

       ‘Silent is an anagram of listen. It is how I shall try

to live my life, as the monks have taught me.

Attentive to the interior silence.’

It’s very close to the heart of our psalm this evening:

       ‘Stand in awe, and sin not;

commune with your own heart upon your bed,

       and be still.’

How can I cope? How can I flourish in this culture?

Finally by verse 7 ‘my heart’ and ‘their corn and wine and oil’ have become disentangled:

       ‘You have put gladness in my heart,

       more than when their corn and wine

and oil increase.’

So as the psalm comes to an end we know again who we are and how we should live. In peace we can now lie down and sleep:

       ‘for it is you Lord, only,

who make me dwell in safety.’