cube on your forehead on a mercilessly hot day, sometimes like an ice

cube down your back. The Psalms startle as well as refresh us. We are
Tough Praise
so conscious of the gray areas, and they are many. But repeatedly the
Psalms confront us with those few things about which there can be no
Mahal Meeting, T-ort Casey, ifhidbey Island, Washington ambiguity, the few things—and I think they are no more than a few—on
June 1 S, 1997 which all our joy depends.
What Psalm 73 clarifies, more effectively perhaps than any other
biblical text, is what it means to be pure of heart—the condition that, as
the Gospel of Matthew teaches, enables us to see God (Matt. 5:8).
The Psalms have a habit of recovering certain sayings that we might
otherwise ignofe as clichés. This sermon imagines how Israelite chit-
Truly God is good to Israel,
rom birth with sa ings such as, “Truly God is
to those who are pure in heart. (v. 1)
good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart.” Yet experience often
fright them the opposite: the wicked prosper, while the righteous
Thus the psalm begins, uncharacteristically, with something that
SU er. The hard realities of e e entuall lead all o/ us to wonder,
sounds dangerously close to a religious cliché. And if the psalm stayed
“What distinguishes the pure in henrt?” In the sanctuaf y of the
there, it would be of little interest to us. But in fact we follow the
community shaped and sustained by Israel's prayers, we discover
psalrnist as she wrestles with that cliché and gradually transforms it
something new about the desires oJ those we call pure in henrt. it is
from truism to truth. Unique among the Psalms, this one charts with
“not that God pours more goodness in their direction, but that they
care an intellectual and spiritual conversion. Looking back, the psalrnist
are able to receive it.”
says of herself:

I am stupid and know nothing.

The psalmist inhabits a world of stark alternatives:
An animal I have been with your, GodJ. (v. 2 2)
- a pure heart, or an embittered one (Ps. 7 3:21)
We actually watch the change take place, as the psalrnist moves from
- living near to God, or perishing far from God (vv. 27—28)
bitterness and spiritual stupidity to wholehearted devotion to God:
- utter spiritual stupidity, or sure knowledge that “I am always with
{Gods” (vv. 22—23 ) As for me, I am always with you... .
- talking about how unfair life is, or talking about everything God has And with you{, Gods, I desire nothing on earth. (vv. 23, 25)
done (vv. IS, 28)
"With you, God, I desire nothing on earth"—that is purity of heart.
It is just this starkness that makes the Psalms so refreshing: like an ice The heart that desires nothing but God can never turn sour, because it
is set on the one desire that cannot be disappointed. Such radical single-
ness of desire is possible, but only for those who experience the complete
reorientation of heart and mind that happens to the psalrnist (as she
tells us) when she enters the sanctuary of God. Exactly what happened
to her there? In a word, she saw the goodness of God. For the first time,
she understood the truth in the old cliché:
Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart. (v. 1)
Doubtless she had imbibed that saying with her mother’s milk, and
the meaning had seemed obvious enough. If you do good, if you are
good, then you get good. “God is good to Israel"—that must mean that
the true Israel, the pure in heart, are the special beneficiaries of God's
goodness, while the wicked are designated for swift punishment and a
speedy end. It makes perfect sense that God should encourage good be-
havior with prompt rewards and be equally conscientious in punishing
the wicked. The only problem with this theory, popular among religious
people of every age, is lack of evidence. As the psalmist sees, the wicked
often do uncommonly well, by any objective measure: “In ordinary
human affliction they have no part” (v. S). The wicked are rich, well-
placed; and, to add insult to injury, they are healthy and good-looking
whereas the righteous are poor, pale, and sickly from excessive study.
This the psalmist sees, and it galls her. Following a strangled expression
lakh! ) that probably stands for some ancient four-letter word, she cries:
In vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence. (v. 13)
If the story ended there, it would be one more instance of the
falling away of the once-seriously-religious. The promising seminarian
switches to a helping profession because he cannot preach the gospel
with conviction. The over-eager young minister bails out when the good
news seems to have failed in her own life; what assurance could she pos-
sibly give to others? What saves our psalmist from their fate is a better
herrneneutic, namely, the hermeneutic of the sanctuary. For there she
embraces a radically different interpretation of the old saying:
Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart. (v. 1)
In the sanctuary of God, in worship, in God's near presence, she
finally gets it. This is what distinguishes the pure of heart: not that God
pours more goodness in their direction, but that they are able to receive
it. God is good. That is an absolute statement, true in every circum-
stance, in every direction. God causes the sun to shine and rain to fall on
good and evil alike (Matt. S:45). The difference between them is simply
that the good receive sun and rain as blessing; they are like well-planted
fields that soak up the life-giving bounty flowing continually from God.
The wicked, by contrast, are like barren hillsides. God's goodness runs off
them, bringing no richness, no growth. If anything, prolonged exposure
to God leaves them poorer, more crusty and spiritually eroded than they
were before. That, of course, is what happened to Pharaoh in the great
battle of the plagues; because he could not take in God's goodness, pro-
longed exposure to God hardened his heart and destroyed him.
“Truly God is good to Israel"—we can now see this as a statement less
about God’s special bounty to Israel than about her special perception.
The true Israel, the pure in heart, differ from others only in their ability
to see that God is good. Our psalrnist sums it up in the final verse: “As
for rue, nearness to God to me is good” (v. 28). That is far more than a
truism. As the Bible repeatedly attests, God’s immediate presence is no
Sunday school picnic. Ask Abraham on Moriah, Naomi when she returns
“empty” (Ruth 1:21) to Bethlehem, David weeping over his sin, Jeremiah
weeping over doomed Jerusalem—ask them what the near presence of
God feels like. It is pressure, excruciating in its intensity; the pure of
heart have been ground and sifted like wheat (Luke 2 2:31). So also our
pSalITlist felt the pressure that purifies:
I was sorely wounded all day long,
and my affliction was every morning. (v. 14)
It iS because ISrael feels the intense, often painful pressure of God's
presence that their praise is so sturdy and so durable. Israel’s praise is
sturdy enough that God is said to sit on it (Ps. 22:4). Imagine that: praise
sWong enough to bear God’s full weight. It is above all in the Psalms,
known in Hebrew as Tehillim, the Book of Praises, that Israel names God
aS good in every circtuTlStance. ISrael’s praise is durable precisely in ito re-
alism: the Psalms, the Praises of Israel, have been sung in Babylon, sighed
at Bergen-Belsen; this very day they are being recited in refugee camps
and at deathbeds. Israel’s praise is tough enough to bear the full weight
of our grief, our disillusionment, our bitter anger, and our most painful
failures. The Psalms hold us up and hold uS within the community that
dares to call itself Israel, the congregation of those who daily name God
as good and thus day by day grow to claim a desire that can never be
dis- appointed, so at the last each of us may truly say:
Though my heart and my flesh fail,
God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever. (v 2S)
Alleluia.
Amen.