Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication. So begins Psalm 130, identified as De profundis in Latin, meaning “out of the depths.” Our English word “profound” comes from the Latin word. How profound is our desire for God to listen to us, when we express our needs? Some folks label this sort of prayer as a “foxhole” prayer. When things are desperate enough, we pray out of our profound need at the moment. Then afterwards . . . depending on how things worked out . . . we are temporarily elated or angry or doubting, but then we revert to our usual patterns of life.
Behavioral psychologists have determined that intermittent reward works best for establishing behavior patterns that resist decay. So if we believe that God answers prayers more readily the harder we pray, our praying behavior will be strengthened when we receive a positive result only occasionally and randomly. If we think God behaves this way, then God seems capricious and manipulative—not a God I'd particularly want to believe in.
But, instead, if we view God as wanting to know what is on our hearts and in our thoughts—if we view God as loving us and accepting whatever we bring in prayer—then as the psalmist did, we can “wait” for the Lord and “hope” in God's Word.
The prophet Ezekiel's vision of the valley with dry bones came when his people, God's chosen people, languished in slavery in Babylon. For most of the people, this was not forced labor in the sense of the Israelites' slavery in Egypt at the time of Moses. The top members of society had been carried off from Jerusalem to pacify the captured province. If the best and the brightest went to Babylon, they would not cause trouble for the Babylonian authorities and their puppet rulers. In Babylon they could help create prosperity for their captors—and many of the exiles did prosper there as well. But their captivity meant they could no longer worship God in the land they believed God had provided for them. Despair and hopelessness characterized their plight. Psalm 137 expresses this so clearly: By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
Through his vision of the dry bones and the breath of God that gives them life, Ezekiel understood God's way of acting in a seemingly hopeless situation. Through Ezekiel's prophecy, God told those with little hope, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live.”
Many of us who have faced the reality of a loved one's death wished that this reviving of the dry bones could be a physical reality, as well a spiritual reality. But God was not reversing time as if the Babylonian captivity had never happened; instead God was offering the power of the Spirit to give new life in the face of hopelessness.
Certainly Martha and Mary felt hopeless when their brother, Lazarus, died. They had such a strong faith in the healing power of Jesus that they blamed Jesus for not arriving soon enough. Each one said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. So profound was their sadness and their hopelessness that Jesus was moved to tears of empathy. As the prophet Ezekiel experienced a sign of God's life giving Spirit in his vision, so Martha and Mary would learn what God's promise of new life meant. Out of the depths of their grief they cried out to one in whom they believed—the one who listened to them, who wept with them, and who gave new life.
Jesus prayed to the God who listens, Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me . . . He said this prayer to demonstrate to the mourners who had gathered in Bethany that his power to give new life came from his relationship with God. But his words also revealed an aspect of God's nature: God listens to those he loves—which just happens to be all of us—all humanity.
So then if we believe that God listens to not only the prayers we speak and think, but also the prayers we make without words, the prayers we make by our deeds, the prayers of our fears and anxieties, even the prayers of our hopelessness, we can expect that new life will come. God's spirit will not only offer us the strength to “carry on,” but also the gift of joyful, new life.
How then can we describe our godly hope that rises from the depths of our lives? Psalm 130 ends with these words (which I am changing a bit), People of St. Nicholas', hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is steadfast love and with him there is great power to redeem.
And Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, they will live.
Yes, we can trust—we truly do know, as did Ezekiel and Martha and Mary, that our hope rests in God, who loves us, who listens to us and who gives us new life!
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