Restore Us, O God

Preaching Notes

Focus Text: Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

Wait. An Advent series based on Psalms? That seems a bit … odd. Where are the prophetic utterances thundering from the mountain tops, bringing both hope and consternation? Where are the gospel stories of John the Baptist and Jesus talking about the kingdom for which we wait? This just doesn’t seem right.

We understand. But go with us for a while and see if you can’t hear the prophetic call through the words of the psalms chosen by the lectionary for this season. See if you can’t hear the longing for the kingdom that Jesus came to proclaim and for which John paved the way. We can hear the ache for the fullness of God’s presence in these words.

Psalm 80 is a perfect way to begin the season of anticipation and hope. God is absent, according to the psalmist. We haven’t heard a word from the Lord in so long. People are left to their own devices, and some of the devices have gone wildly astray. God seems angry with our prayers, staying silent as we beg for relief, for righting the ship of state that seems to have gone astray. We are scorned on the world stage; enemies laugh at us.

Sorry, does that sound like political commentary? It is a historical reflection of the emotional state of the people of God from thousands of years ago. It is the struggle of the people to feel like God’s chosen, given all that was happening to them at the time. The psalmist gives voice to that despair. The psalmist allows the people to lament. Perhaps even better, the psalmist gives hurting people a song to sing.

“Singing Resistance” was launched in Minneapolis at the beginning of this year to respond to the government's immigration siege. But they didn’t invent it. Singing has been part of resistance from the beginning, as the psalms repeatedly point out. Singing gives voice to pain, strengthens resolve, and unites people to stand against oppression. The people sang as they marched to Selma. They sang in concentration camps and detention centers. They sang as they made their march and died on the Trail of Tears. They sang as their children were ripped away and punished if they spoke the language of their families. They sang as they were driven from their homes at the order of the Tsar. They sang as they worked in the fields under the lash and the hot southern sun. They sang as they made bricks out of mud and straw, building monuments to the pharaohs.

They sang. We sang. Singing songs of resistance with pleas for restoration is part of human history. Singing tells the truth of what is going on, with the effect of helping the singers and the hearers face the reality in which they live.

The song of Psalm 80 is a lament. It is telling the truth about how it feels to be seemingly abandoned by God. The psalmist gives voice to the people’s despair, doubt, and brokenness.

This is followed by a time of remembering. The lectionary leaves out the verses of how God has husbanded the fragile vine that was Israel, transplanting them from the sandy soil of Egypt into the lush lands of Palestine. You can decide if these verses are worth reading in the hearing of the people, or whether reference to the time of remembering is enough. When life is bad, it can be healing to remember when times were better. It can be sustaining to recall that it hasn’t always been like this. Suffering swells to fill our whole perception of our lives. By remembering different times, we can be sustained and encouraged to call for a return, not to those times, but to that relationship, that way of living bound up in the grace and provision of God— living in the tender mercies of a God who cares for us.

That’s the Advent invitation. Let us live in partnership with God again. Let us walk, aware of grace, hospitality, and reconciliation again. Let us be the people who have hope of restoration into a new reality, a new kingdom, a new kin-dom. Let us watch and wait for what God has in store for all of creation, as we lean with eager longing into the promise. Let us live hope in its most powerful form: new life, new strength, new possibility. We begin this Advent season, as we often do, longing for hope. Restore us, O God.

Psalm 80 has an interesting clue hidden in the final verses. The psalmist writes: “But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself” (Ps. 80:17 NRSV). No doubt in the mind of the writer, this was the king or a prophet, maybe even a whole nation. who desired to be obedient to God and represent God’s law and mercy in all that was done. Through this “right-hand” man or woman, all people have an example of how to walk with God, how to hope in the silence, how to sing praises even in difficult times. No doubt, the psalmist imagined someone on the world stage then.

But we hear something different this Advent season. We hear the promise of one who would live at the right hand of God and show us how to live there too. We hear of the one who brought God to us and us to God. We, this Advent season and always, look for the face to shine on us and then through us as we seek salvation. Restore us, O God, in the name of the one who sits at your right hand, Jesus the Christ.

Rev. Dr. Derek Weber, Director of Preaching Ministries, served churches in Indiana, Arkansas, and the British Methodist Church. His PhD in preaching and media is from the University of Edinburgh. He has taught preaching in seminary and conference settings for more than twenty years.