The Book of Psalms is really at heart a prayer book. It is a superb aid for those who feel the deep down, inner compulsion to pray, but who feel they don’t have the right language for it. The raw honesty and emotion of the psalms can surprise us, and teach us that what matters is not flowery language or graceful imagery, but a personal, honest openness before the Creator of all that is, who can take whatever we dish out – our anger, our shame, our hope, our fears – and then transform them, and us – no matter what.

You may have found yourself in similar straights at some time in your life, a time of special difficulty or danger – as you served in the armed forces, as you encountered an illness, as you found yourself in trouble, at a moment when you really were concerned about a loved one. And you may even have found yourself uttering that most elementary of prayers, a prayer for help, for rescue, for healing, and coupled with that prayer a vow that if only you came through okay you would lead a new life, turn over a new leaf, be a new person.

Psalm 107 was composed thousands of years ago for use in a special service of thanksgiving for people who had been in just such circumstances. Persons who had come through various dangers – the exiles returning over the vast desert from their captivity in Babylon, those who had been seriously ill, those who had found themselves in danger, those who had been lost at sea – persons who in their distress had cried out to God for salvation, were offered a chance to offer thanks and fulfill their vows.

In the psalm, the psalmist recounts the distress of different groups of people. And after each is the refrain, “Then, in your desperate condition, you called out to God, [and] God got you out in the nick of time.”

Suffering and the reasons we suffer are mysteries whose depths we will never fully plumb in this lifetime, but this we do know—often we contribute to the suffering that comes upon us. Not always, of course – often we have no idea of why the cancer chose her over him, why this person was onboard that fatal flight and not another, why this person happened to land in an industry that was going bust while another had found themselves on the fast track to the high-life, and so on. But much of the time that is not the case at all, and the course we set for ourselves and our society propels us towards disaster. We eat too much and too much of the wrong foods, we sit in front of the television or spend hours on Facebook or playing video games – should we be surprised when obesity rates skyrocket, when childhood diabetes increases, when heart disease climbs? We dedicate three hours a day to sports programs for our kids, and they manage to squeeze in maybe 30 minutes for homework before they crawl, exhausted, into bed – should we wonder why academic performance suffers? Buying into our culture’s obsession with acquisition and living as if more really were better, should we be surprised that as our ability to spend as we have in the past plummets, so too does our self-worth? Working too much, drinking too much, spending too much time with electronic devices and too little time with those we love, should we be shocked that intimacy is weakened, relationships sour, unions dissolve?

These individual, personal sufferings are mirrored by sufferings in society at large. Greed fuels the insatiable appetite and growth of apparently unregulated financial behemoths like AIG and Lehman Brothers and their ilk – Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but while our economy, together with our jobs, retirement accounts, and savings go up in flames, these monsters of corporate greed use our tax dollars to hire the Boston Symphony Orchestra to accompany them on a pleasure cruise to NeverNeverLand. Injustice allows the eviction of millions of homeowners duped by “subprime” mortgages invented and profited from by Wall Street “masters of the universe”, who instead of facing the music for their ruin of the economy, eagerly crowd to feed at the public trough. Welfare, all but abolished for those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, enjoys new life for those at the top of the economic food chain in the form of multi-billion dollar bailout packages.

In the midst of this suffering, both personal and communal, what can we do but cry out to God in our distress?

Well, actually, there is another approach. We can lash out at each other in our anger and our frustration, we can give in to solitary despair, we can internalize the pain and let the bile eat us away from inside out. Having been pressed to the limits of our own strength and abilities to cope and strategies for preservation and found them wanting, we can resign ourselves to our fate and an uncaring universe.

The psalmist tells us there is another way; Jesus tells us, there is another way; our faith, our history together as a people of God, tell us there is another way.

We can come together, here in worship, and together cry out to God about our personal and communal distress. We can turn to God and ask to be healed, to be made whole, to be saved, to be redeemed, to be brought out of disaster. And we can do this, because we are not left to our own by an uncaring universe, but because we have a God who loves us, no matter what.

This is the story of the Hebrew Bible, of the Old Testament. For reasons unknown, God chose not only to create this world and those who people it, but chose to partner with us, to covenant with us, to bind up the fate of this whole enterprise with us, mere humans. And yet time and time again, we turned our back on God. Having been brought out of captivity in Egypt and gifted with laws for ordering human life so that the whole community might prosper, the wealthy hoarded while the poor and vulnerable were shunted aside, the God of deliverance was pushed aside for the worship of the god of luxury goods, and yet when the divided community fell to the Babylonian invaders, God’s love and faithfulness never wavered. When the covenant written on stone failed to do the trick, this faithful God promised to make a new covenant, one that would be written on our hearts, and came to us a tiny baby in a rural backwater, in the form of Jesus. Jesus lived out that steadfast and limitless love, welcoming everyone, no matter what. No matter that they were a woman caught in adultery, no matter that they were a despised tax collector and stooge of the Roman occupier, no matter that they were persons discriminated against because of their gender or age or race or any of the others isms we use to divide the one human race, no matter that they were sick or crippled or so wrapped up in themselves that they could not grasp the freedom he was offering. And the final proof of God’s limitless love came when Jesus extended his arms wide on the cross, from east to west, to heal the whole family of God.

Friends, we have a God who loves us, no matter what. No matter that your past church attendance has been anything but consistent; no matter that when you take a good look at your past life you have much to regret; no matter that someone once told you that you are not worthy and would never be good enough for them, much less good enough for God Almighty; no matter that you actually took on a Lenten discipline this year and only kept up with it for a week or so; no matter that you still struggle with an addiction, cannot forgive a wrong that had been done to you, and at times don’t even want to live a better life. God loves you, no matter what.

This is non-negotiable, non-arguable. As Coach Belechick would say, “It is what it is.”

So the question for us, then, is “How shall we live?”

First, we can take a positive lessons from the sailor in the lifeboat – we can ask God for help, confident that the God who loves us no matter what will not turn a deaf ear to our pleas. We can ask for healing, we can be open to God’s response, and indeed, how can we expect to receive the gifts of God if we first are not open to them? This is not to say, of course, that you will always get what you pray for, that God is some sort of cosmic vending machine in the sky ready to grant every request you might think of putting in. But unless you are open to receiving God’s gifts, in whatever form they take, how can you receive them, or even recognize them when they come?

And second, we can take a negative lesson from the ungrateful sailor in the lifeboat, who reacts to his miraculous rescue not with gratitude, but by a return to his old ways of stubborn pride and selfishness. The author of Psalm 107 tells us how to respond right in the first words of the psalm: “Oh, thank God – he’s so good.” And again, in verse 31: “So thank God for his marvelous love, for his miracle mercy to the children he loves; offer thanksgiving sacrifices, tell the world what he’s done – sing it out!”

The awareness that God loves you no matter what might lead one to believe that this is a license to do as one pleases. After all, if God loves me no matter what, then I can do anything I want. Augustine of Hippo, known as St. Augustine to many, put it this way: “Love God, and do as you please.” But what he meant was that if you truly love God, if you truly understand that God loves you no matter what, you will live each day as a response to that love, and in so doing, what pleases God is what pleases you. You will choose to walk in the ways of Jesus, you will choose abundant life for the community and not just yourself, you will realize that the kingdom of God is not just something that exists after you have left this short life, but is breaking in all around you, and is to be found in self-sacrificing care for others.

God loves you no matter what, but you have a choice. It is like walking down the road on an early Spring day here on Cape Cod, when the earth is still subject to winter chill, when a breeze off the sound can still bite. You can walk in the sunlight on one side of the road and be warmed, a warmth that starts out with your face and hands but then moves to warm you right to the core, or you can cross-over and walk in the chilly shade. The sun hasn’t moved and its warmth is still available – but you have moved, and that makes all the difference.

Beloved, God loves you no matter what – therefore let us walk in the light. Amen.