March 22, 2026 – Fifth Sunday in Lent
Psalm 130
Luke 18.1-8
Notes From the Abyss
Fifth Sunday in Lent
Last week was a lot of fun, wasn’t it! We had little ones dancing jigs at the front of the church, you were all swaying and clapping your hands, we heard lots of laughter and plenty of energy surged through the rest of the service. It brought a lot of smiles to a lot of faces. Well, don’t get used to it. We’re back to Lent, back to penitence and remorse and despair, and there are few better places to begin than deep in the depths of the Slough of Despond.
In John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the Slough of Despond is where Christian, the story’s protagonist, begins his long journey from sin and guilt toward his desired destination, the Celestial City, Bunyan’s vision of heaven. Here is the way Bunyan describes Christian’s surroundings in the Slough of Despond:
“The miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.”
Bunyan’s tale came to mind this week when I read Friday’s piece by Marilyn Pagán-Banks In our Lent Devotional, her reimagining of the 130th psalm. She calls it A Song of Ascents, and if you check out Psalm 130 in our pew Bibles, you’ll see that the psalm that Claudia read this morning is one of fourteen Songs of Ascents in the Psalter. These are the songs the Hebrew people sang as they ascended the steps of the Jerusalem temple on their way to worship. Some songs are joyful, some are contemplative, and some, like this morning’s, are laments. Alhough it begins in a dark mood, the 130th psalm has long been a favorite of mine, because it turns a song of lamentation into an affirmation of the power of hope. And if you haven’t yet had the chance to read Pagán-Banks’ interpretation of the psalm, I will be sharing it as our poem this morning; she took the poetic form of the psalm, reimagined it, and wrote a psalm of her own.
Psalm 130 is not an easy one to read. It begins in the depths of despair, much like Bunyan’s pilgrim. “Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice, Let your ears be attuned to the voice of my supplications.” It is a cri de coeur, a plaintive cry from the heart of someone who feels lost and abandoned by God. Here is how one preacher of an earlier generation imagined it:
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! Is there anyone anywhere who, at one time or another, has not cried out from these depths? Who of us has not stood at the bottom of the Pit and feared that we would never know the way out? Who has never glimpsed the cliff of circumstance to the left, the sheer insuperable wall of despair to the right, and worried whether even the bottom on which we stand is secure? Who of us has never stared, like Ahab in all terror, at the blank face of God? If we have ever found ourselves confronting factors either within or without which seem to offer no hope whatever, if we have ever had no idea what tomorrow may hold but feared it anyway, then we have stood with the psalmist and know the pain in his cry, Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!”
What the psalmist is telling us is that this is an entirely human place to stand, that the feeling that the world is heading south at breathless speed, that faith teeters while hope falters, it is a feeling that has been endured in every age.
The comic on the back of this morning’s bulletin is one I have carried with me for a long time, A Knock-Knock Joke from God. I like it because it works on multiple levels, and I think it reflects the despair of Psalm 130. On the surface, it is God playing a joke. “Knock knock. Who’s there? No one answers.” Or, “Knock knock. and the person knows it is God knocking, looks up and says Who’s there? And God is silently smirking, ‘Let’s watch them think about this one for a while.” Or, “Knock knock. Who’s there? And God does not have to say anything, because the fact that they reply Who’s there? demonstrates they have heard God, and know it is God knocking on their door, and that knowledge is enough. Any one of these could have been the psalmist’s experience. Even in the depth of despair, the psalmist knew to cry out How Long O Lord? and knew as well God would not be silent forever, and in that knowledge begins the glimmer of hope.
Poet Alexander Pope lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, and his poetry endures to the present day; indeed, sometimes it seems as contemporary as today’s headlines. This is from his poem, “Essay on Man.”
“For forms of government, let fools contest;
Whate’er is best administered is best.
For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right;
In faith and hope the world will disagree,
But all humanity’s concern is charity.”
For forms of government, let the fools contest; but Pope is correct in concluding that all of humanity’s greatest concern is charity, and with it, the power of hope and love.
Part of the power of the 130th psalm I think, is its movement from despair to hope. It begins with “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord,” but by its conclusion it has moved, propelled by grace, to “O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and great power to redeem.”
One of the most ancient fables of the Western world, one which predates the fable of Pandora, stands at the beginning of time, when the great Zeus gave humanity a gift of a vessel filled with all things good for men and women. But humanity quickly became overwhelmed with curiosity, and too hastily lifted the lid of the vessel to see just what it was Zeus had granted. And as they did so, all the good things Zeus intended for us escaped from the vessel and rose to become the property of the gods of Olympus. When they realized what they had done, humanity quickly replaced the lid, but by that time, the only thing left in the vessel which had not escaped was Hope, which as a result became humanity’s present and best comfort.
If it is ironic that, of all the virtues in Greek mythology, only hope was left to us, it may well be because the very nature of hope itself is ironic, if not to say paradoxical. Let’s ask ourselves the question: when does humanity become most hopeful? Isn’t it so often when circumstances themselves seem to be most hopeless? Don’t we often find ourselves grasping for anything which would provide the slightest shred of hope when the world around us testifies to hope’s hopelessness? The writer John Clare expressed this tendency of ours to hope against hope when he wrote, “Hopeless hope hopes on and meets no end / Wastes without springs, and homes without a friend.” Yet these are the times when hope itself is most intense, and paradoxically, offers us the most comfort.
This morning’s parable in Luke’s gospel is about someone who was bold to create her own hope and good fortune.
“In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for others. In that city there was also a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for others, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ “
This is a feisty parable about a feisty widow who will not take No for an answer, who will not rest until she has secured justice, indeed a life, for herself. We can imagine her, coming to the unjust judge’s quarters day after day, knocking on his door – knock knock – demanding a hearing, and not relenting until the judge replies: “Because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” The kicker to the story is in the footnote to this parable. If you were reading along in the pew Bible, you may have caught the footnote at the end of verse 5, footnote i. The alternative reading, and likely the more authentic one, reads: “Because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not finally come and slap me in the face.” Being worn down is one thing; getting slapped in the face is quite another. (One of these days I need to write a sermon on what the Bible’s many footnotes can reveal to us!) This widow is nothing if not persistent, and will not rest until the judge’s wrong is righted.
It is a parable about prayer, not just about the power of prayer, but about the necessity of it. You and I are the widow. God is the judge. And Jesus is telling us to keep praying, to be as persistent and insistent as she and God will provide and justice will prevail. In this way, she claims her own hope, her own agency, her own redemption.
This is what leads the despairing psalmist from discouragement to hope, from the opening lines “Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord” to the conclusion of “Hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and great power to redeem!” From the Slough of Despond to the Celestial City. The psalmist travels that road with a heartfelt cry; the widow’s persistence takes the same route from discouragement to hope. God is just, God is compassionate, God is merciful, and when we do not see justice, mercy and compassion in our lives or in our world, still we know God is there. God awaits our cry from the heart; God responds to our persistence in prayer; even when God seems silent or distant, God remains as close to us as our next whispered breath.
Knock knock.