“The Company of the Righteous”
Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 14, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
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And yet, all these reasons I have for loving the Psalms make them a challenge to preach on.
In seminary, they teach you to preach from your scars and not your wounds. The pulpit is not a therapy couch, and it only leads to you bleeding all over your congregation.
And I love the Psalms because they have this rich potential of going straight to the heart of old wounds, wounds you thought were long-healed, and poking at them just so.
I love the Psalms. And. They’re hard to preach on.
I love this psalm. And. It’s a hard psalm to preach on.
Because it’s been a hard week, and this psalm cuts to the bone. Its honesty is brutal.
Right from the jump, it defies abstraction. It demands that we pay attention to the festering wounds of our shared life together. A sad reality as true now as it was back when this ancient song was first sung.
There are those who live as though there is no God.
Not that they don’t believe in God’s existence, but that they act as though they are accountable to no one but themselves.
Because it’s easy to read a line like this as a mere refutation of the claims of the likes of those who are intolerant of religious life in and of itself. Fools say in their heart, “There is no God”. But to reduce this line to a cheap rhetorical tool for apologetics completely misses the point of what the psalmist is really getting at.
She’s not singing about the refusal to intellectually assent to the reality of divine existence. It’s not a statement addressing rationalism. The psalmist doesn’t say “Fools think in their mind, ‘There is no God’”. The psalmist doesn’t say “Fools say with their lips, ‘There is no God’”. No, she says Fools say in their heart—fools say in their heart, the very ground of our being and driver of our actions in a Hebraic sense of how our bodies and lives are ordered.
It's not a denial of God’s existence, but a denial of God’s claim on our lives. A way of living that says, “I owe nothing to anyone but myself”.
It’s a dangerous, death-dealing posture that corrupts and decays. It leads communities to fall apart. The psalmist says that it fuels the consumption of others, especially the poor and powerless.
“Are they dumb,” she asks, “devouring my people like bread?”
As if those who devour will be able to stop themselves from being devoured themselves.
As if those who consume will be able to stop themselves from being consumed themselves.
Because we know how much damage has been wrought to lives and to communities when people act as though they owe nothing to their neighbor, nothing to the poor, nothing to God. We see its consequences all around us.
And so we join our voices with the psalmist. Because when we see this kind of devouring in our world and when we feel it pressing in on our own lives, the only faithful response left to us is raw, honest prayer.
I know that we’re all carrying strong emotions this week. Maybe you’re grieving and you’re angry. Maybe you’re confused about how we ought to respond to violence in our culture. Maybe you’re frustrated by leaders and influencers tripping over themselves to come up with the right formulation of words that will somehow paper over all division and strife but only disappoint. Maybe you’re scared. Maybe you’re all of these things and maybe you’re something else entirely. I know that I am.
The Psalms give us permission to bring all of that to God and to one another.
The fool says in their heart, “There is no God”, but the faithful can say in their heart, “God, here is my anger. Here is my exhaustion. Here is my sorrow. Take it, because I can’t hold onto it anymore.”
Honesty, my friends, is a form of faith.
Because when we bring that kind of raw honesty to God, God won’t reject it. God is big enough to handle and receive whatever we offer in our honesty and vulnerability. Instead, God returns to us a gift. The gift of God’s sustaining presence—of being held in love when we can’t hold onto ourselves anymore.
It’s a posture that some theologians call, “ontological gratitude”. But really, it just means living as if life itself is a gift and treating it that way.
Because when we say in our hearts, “yes, there is a God”—when the way we order and live our lives bears witness to the truth that we are accountable to and animated by something beyond ourselves and beyond our control, the One who is the source of all goodness, all value, all life—we’re going to find that all we can do is respond by offering all that we know of ourselves in praise and in thanksgiving.
Not giving thanks for all things, but giving thanks in all things.
Recognizing that even when we find ourselves in the darkest of pits and overwhelmed by the enormity of the world’s grief, we can give thanks not as acquiescence but as protest and resistance.
By saying in our hearts, “life is a gift to be shared with others”.
To be shared by showing up for the poor and the incarcerated.
To be shared by feeding the hungry and healing the sick.
By seeking justice and staying in community, even when it’s hard.
Especially when it’s hard.
Because the deliverance that you and I and the psalmist long for have already burst free from the walls of a temple on a hill and flow freely for all across this wide earth. We find it when we form deep and lasting relationships with those around us and beyond us. When we gaze upon the face of our neighbor across the aisle and around the world and are daring enough to see the face of Christ in them. To stay at the table, hoping beyond hope that in time, our enemies will cease to be our enemies.
So much has been devoured this week, friends. So much has been consumed. And so much has been said.
But here’s the thing. Future generations will not judge us based on the words that we said or the statements that we wrote. Instead, future generations will judge us based on our actions and their consequences.
Because every action has a consequence. Some consequences are good, and some are bad. And one day, we will be held to account for those consequences. So in the face of people devouring and being devoured, let us use the time we have been given—our one wild and precious life—to act in a way that leaves ripples of love and justice that will reverberate for generations to come.
May the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues. Amen.
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