sermons
Praying with the Psalms
Land of the Living
Ivy Anthony
Feb 01, 2026
Tomorrow February 2nd sun will set at 5:00pm (and the temperature will be above freezing!) — we have objectively made it through the darkest weeks of the year.
We are in a series called Praying the Psalms that I’ve been enjoying over the last few weeks. And honestly how timely (and timeless) are the Psalms? For me, I find their hyperbolic tendencies especially refreshing, as well as the invitation to join in the emotional journeys of so many people of faith who have gone before us. Those that have railed against God and those who have unfailingly loved God. … often the same person, in the same breath —
“God why have you left me and forgotten me forever?”
TO
“I love you with my whole life and heart, I will sing of your goodness forevermore.”
This emotional range — isn’t just a one-off, or accidental —most of the Psalms follow this movement and orientation. To me, it feels like human spiritual formation. It teaches us how to stay in relationship (with ourselves, one another, and God), even when things are broken.
The Psalms help us stay in this thing called life, and this thing called faith, which, in the Psalms, aren’t really separate. They offer us a way to match the fervor of our times. To not back down on what it means to be human. To allow our emotional states — all of our heightened energy (or lack thereof), and all of our sadness, and anger and vengeance and fear — to have an honest landing place.
AND the Psalms allow us, with the same fervor TO NOT BACK DOWN from the GOODNESS of GOD. From the undeniable love of God that somehow we continue to reach for as a lifeline in a world that seems to be heckling us, daring us to give up on hope, and give up on kindness, and give up on one another.
Lately, I’ve been describing how I feel during these times, as something akin to having a constant low-grade fever.
- Heavy.
- Exhausted.
- Sad.
- Sweaty.
- Not sick enough to collapse, but not really LIVING fully.
And when life feels like that, the temptation is to curl up in a ball. (*I’ve done it. A lot!*)
But when it stretches on for so long, it can veer toward paralysis, numbing out, isolating. Shutting down altogether. Where we disconnect from the goodness of God and that same goodness that is implanted in one another.
So today, I want to talk about what it looks like to stand together in solidarity when injustice is rampant. What it looks like to stay human with one another in community. What it means to keep choosing life, this life, this faith, in what Psalm 116 calls
“the land of the living.”
Pray: Our God, who never gives up on us — help us to stay in this life with you –and with one another.
Last weekend I was in California — moving our middle kiddo into college — and simultaneously missing the big snowstorm here. San Diego does not have snow. It has beaches and palm trees and blooming flowers and lots and lots of sunshine. **some of my favorite things**
But I was very much keeping a close eye on the homefront! I was watching notifications from our front porch camera come through, and wondering how much snow we were going to get and how shoveling out was going to go. Both my husband in treatment and my son post-surgery are not in prime condition for a ton of shoveling.
As those notifications kept pinging my phone, I started seeing people show up.
People coming to help — and not just one person … but lots of neighbors. And not just for us, but for all the neighbors around.
Neighbors came out and borrowed snowblowers from one another – and people shoveled and shoveled and shoveled.
One neighbor said,
“it’s just neighbors being neighbors.”
It’s what I love about a big snowstorm, even though I don’t like the cold! There’s a sense of ‘aliveness’, humanity, community that surfaces, even in the midst of a storm.
It reminded me of something MY meteorologist Dave Epstein once said after the ‘great snow of 2015’ — which if you don’t know, the greater Boston area got 110 inches of snow that season — it was monumental! It was truly all anyone could talk about and Dave Epstein said this:
“all of us have our own way of existing during this historical period of weather. You might not be fazed by the winter onslaught, perhaps you even enjoy it. Maybe you would do anything to be anywhere else, but no matter what your feelings about it, we’re all living it.”
“We are all living it.”
Different stories, different experiences, but same stormy, ICE-laden world.
And I think Psalm 116 is one of those that gives us a look at someone who lives in a world like this and still reaches for God and one another.
Psalm 116 (NIV)
1 I love the Lord, for God heard my voice;
God heard my cry for mercy.2 Because GOD turned God’s ear to me,
I will call on God as long as I live.
3 The cords of death entangled me,
the anguish of the grave came over me;
I was overcome by distress and sorrow.
4 Then I called on the name of the Lord:
“Lord, save me!”
5 The Lord is gracious and righteous;
our God is full of compassion.
6 The Lord protects the unwary;
when I was brought low, God saved me.
7 Return to your rest, my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you.
8 For you, Lord, have delivered me from death,
my eyes from tears,
my feet from stumbling,
9 that I may walk before the Lord
in the land of the living.
10 I trusted in the Lord when I said,
“I am greatly afflicted”;
11 in my alarm I said,
“Everyone is a liar.”
12 What shall I return to the Lord
for all God’s goodness to me?
13 I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord.
14 I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.15 Precious in the sight of the Lord
is the death of his faithful servants.
16 Truly I am your servant, Lord;
I serve you just as my mother did;
you have freed me from my chains.17 I will sacrifice a thank offering to you
and call on the name of the Lord.
18 I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people,
19 in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, Jerusalem.
Praise the Lord.
Like many Psalms, this one doesn’t just offer us one steady emotional plane. It feels a bit frenetic to me when I read it — it moves a lot.
- There are moments of love, “I love you, God.”
- Moments of desperation, “I’m in distress.” “Save me.”
- Moments of relief, “You have saved me.” “You are gracious.”
- Moments of self-talk, “Okay, soul… calm down. Rest.”
- And then, almost out of nowhere, “I’m greatly afflicted.” “Everyone is a liar.”
It’s a little scattered and a lot real! And I love that! Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann says that the Psalms tend to move through three broad movements: orientation, disorientation and reorientation.
Times when life makes sense.
Times when things fall apart, and times when somehow we reimagine, reshape a new way forward.
Psalm 116 isn’t a great example of that at least not in a neat, linear order. It sort of weaves all of those movements together. Kind of like what real life does. We trust, we panic, we talk calmly to ourselves, we remember God’s goodness, and then we can feel like there is no truth to be had anywhere!
Having said that, as I’ve been sitting with Psalm 116, three phrases keep rising to the surface for me:
“God turns an ear.”
“Return to your rest.”
and
“Walk in the land of the living.”
One of them is right near the beginning;
Verse 1 & 2 say:
I love the Lord, for God heard my voice;
God heard my cry for mercy.
Because GOD turned God’s ear to me,
It’s poignant that this Psalm starts with a God who listens.
Thank goodness.
This seems like a good starting point.
A given.
An obvious claim.
One I would make myself.
AND also one I keep holding up against the world as it is.
Let me explain a little bit. . .
**When I get into a song — either because I like it or because I’m intrigued by it, I play it over and over and over again.(much to the disdain of my family)… And even before I knew I’d preach on this Psalm — I was listening to the actual song version of Psalm 116… ON REPEAT.
And every time the song got to this lyric:
“I will bless You Lord, for You heard my plea, and the God of Heaven turned His ear to me.”
I would sing it as,
“And the God of Heaven turned HIS BACK TO ME!”
Everytime.
And I’d be like, “oh, shoot — wrong lyrics!! I’ll get them right next time.”
Except I wouldn’t. It just kept coming out of me the same way.
And I wondered, “Huh, maybe the Psalm itself is inviting me to wrestle with the truth of a statement that didn’t ring true in my body. I mean after all scripture is regarded as the “living word”, right — I’m getting some feedback in real time.
Part of me isn’t convinced that God is turning an ear right now…not in the way I would like it to translate at least!
Part of me thinks, “Whoa! Have you seen what’s going on?”
And it seems the Psalmist knows this feeling — even with the declaration that God is one who listens, the manifestation isn’t immediate calmness or unwavering confidence in the Psalmist’s body …. There isn’t a neat arrival at peace….
Instead, what we see is a very human oscillation.
First the Psalmist has to pause. And then they talk to themselves.
In verse 7, the Psalmist says to themselves:
“Return to your rest, my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you.”
This is a nervous-system-aware Psalm.
Noticing their internal state and offering themselves a gentle intervention.
Which I appreciate very much — because it’s not harmful, intrusive self-talk…
Not,
“Get it together!”
But,
“Come back to yourself. Come back to rest. Remember what/who has carried you before.”
This is some way to regulate in the midst of potential chaos, showing us how to keep breathing.
But yet as the Psalmist goes on — we are jarred again!
Because they say,
“In my alarm I said, everyone is a liar!”
Which tells me the self-talk didn’t magically fix everything. Again fear & distrust don’t always immediately resolve.
And in some ways, there it is. The inside of faith exposed, right? When the world feels untrustworthy — in every corner — we *not shockingly* feel uncertain!
And yet, I also know that uncertainty can induce a sense of panic, especially when we feel alone! It can cast an ‘absolute’ frame around everything. Around everyone — even God.
And the truth is —
There are real lies, lacing the air we breathe… . There is real corruption. Real manipulation. Real systems built on distortion and greed. Real violence.
But scripture is not surprised by this.
The Bible is full of false kings, and corrupt rulers, and prophets screaming, truth-to- power…
Our hope is not in the moral goodness of leaders.
Psalm 116 begins:
“I love the Lord, because God heard my voice.”
The Psalmist doesn’t say, “I love the king because he told the truth.” or “I love the empire because it’s just.”
Hope isn’t often anchored in rulers. Hope is rooted in a God who turns an ear toward us (wherever we are at). Scripture doesn’t seem to ask us to pretend rulers are trustworthy.
But Scripture does invite us to decide whether God is trustworthy. And to move from that real/honest place.
I think this is why it matters that this Psalm has been prayed for generations. Psalm 116 has long been prayed at Jewish tables during Passover. It is recited near the end of the meal with celebratory wine. Passover, tells the Exodus story.
One that feels all too familiar– a ruler’s power is threatened by the growth of those he oppresses. A story of danger, domination, resistance and deliverance. A story of God being with those being trampled. But Passover is not only about remembering an ancient story. It’s also about telling current stories — stories of the people who are gathered around tables — OR AROUND SNOWBANKS. About naming the world we are living in now. Stories about current issues of injustice, a communal remembering (yes), and a communal witnessing.
This feels appropriate because Psalm 116 isn’t particularly tidy. It reads like a story of someone trying to live, trying to keep going.
We do not know exactly what happened to the psalmist because so much of the language here can be interpreted as poetic — we can think,
“Really? Was it really “cords of death entangled you?” “The anguish of Sheol laid hold on you?” . . .
But maybe they did.
When we read Psalms like these, we may feel tempted to write them off — too dramatic — too all over the place… But maybe it’s not exaggerated at all. Right? Because all around us, people are experiencing their versions of hell.
People trapped in systems that are rigged/ inescapable.
People whose nervous systems are shot.
People who are shot.
And we ourselves may feel like the “snares of death” encompass us. So what would happen if we took this part of the Psalm seriously? What could we be encouraged to do if we believed folks about their own testimonies, stories? If we turned our ears toward each other…. Just as God
“turned God’s ear toward us?”
“What if we did indeed believe the evidence of our eyes and ears?”
Maybe that is in part what it means to live in the LAND OF THE LIVING — learning how to turn our ears (not our backs) toward one another, too.
The land of the living is what happens when people refuse to abandon one another in a world that keeps training us to go numb.
“Land of the Living”
This phrase —
“I will walk in the land of the living”
— is probably one of my favorite bits of scripture right now — it is one of my deepest prayers:
“God, please help me to keep walking in the LAND OF THE LIVING… keep convincing me however you can that we still have heartbeats that care for one another. Keep my heart beating.”
Because, “the land of the living” — isn’t just a destination to me, it’s a practice. A way of staying in this life together..
It makes me think of something James Baldwin wrote in “Nothing Personal,” as he spoke of dehumanization and its cost:
He said,
‘if a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe. …..and what we then are struggling against is death in the heart which leads not only to the shedding of blood, but which reduces human beings to corpses while they live.” (Nothing Personal, James Baldwin, 1964).
And while Baldwin is speaking in the context of racialized violence and the brutal realities of anti-Blackness in America, I hear in his words a truth that keeps showing up across time and place.
“Death of the heart” – – the slow erosion of our capacity to care for one another.
Kind of the opposite of the land of the living.
At community group a week ago, I learned the phrase, *that maybe is obvious*: “poly-crisis.”
We are living inside what social scientists call a poly-crisis. Overlapping crises —political, economic, environmental, relational and public health — a crisis of democracy, a crisis of trust — and it makes sense that many of us feel like we are living with a “LOW GRADE FEVER” – stuck, tired, unable to imagine a future where we are well.
I offer this — because it isn’t personal failure to some days feel paralyzed — it’s a very human response to such layered and sustained pressure.
Which is why it’s comforting to see, across the arc of scripture that we are not commanded to simply “try harder!” — we are invited to stay human with one another:
Scripture says:
“Love your neighbor.”
“Defend the dignity of the foreigner.”
“Love the stranger, provide them food and clothing.”
“Care for the widow, for the orphan — care for the vulnerable.”
Omid Safi, a Duke professor of Islamic studies, says that being close to God — real closeness, lived closeness — reshapes how we see. It trains us to recognize the movement of God and the movement of our lives as deeply intertwined — beyond political decrees, external circumstances or dominant opinions that try to inject fear.
With a real, good and living God close to us, the passion for justice and care for all of humanity – becomes a non-negotiable — because God stands with us in the threats, in suffering, in our lives.
Safi says the
“love we recognize in other people — people who love their babies and their community — is the same love that we love our babies and our community with…”
AND when we recognize that shared love, we will not stand for something happening to other people’s babies or communities that we would not accept happening to our own.
That is simply what we call justice —
Justice is not born primarily out of rage.
Justice is born out of a heart that still knows how to love.
A heart that still knows how to recognize itself in another.
That’s the land of the living.
A nation that refuses to become loveless.
Which means we don’t stay alive alone.
We stay alive together.
Where we — I guess — do actually have to try hard to stay in relationship.
To keep our hearts soft, and our ears open . . ..
The land of the living is communal.
My meteorologist that I mentioned earlier — Dave Epstein — is often referred to as a kind of, “meteorologist Mr. Rogers.” I think in part because he isn’t just disseminating information about the weather — he really cares about helping us orient inside of it. And he reminds us not to panic, to be prepared and to remember that we are all in it together.
In that crazy year of 2015, he wrote:
“As the streets continue to narrow and our tolerance and patience for the transformed world we live grows short, think about the collective experience all of us are sharing. No one is immune from these storms; Everyone has a story about the snow or what the snow is doing…..
I know that this week, I have heard stories of ice dams turning a driveway into a skating rink, . Stories about snowbanks so high, people (like me!), get nervous for high schoolers driving to school. Stories of extensive, front-yard snow tunnels and caves. Stories of a snow bench carved into a bank — perfect for whiskey sipping and meeting new friends.
“Whatever your personal take on this, everyone is connected, because most of us can’t escape” . .. . the weather, or the world! We often use the term “hardy” as a way for New Englanders to describe ourselves. We are agile and nimble, smart and innovative, we will keep on shoveling and pushing through.” (Dave Epstein).
We keep figuring it out. As frenetic as it might seem!
And this is exactly what autocratic regimes hope we won’t keep doing –– figuring it out. They hope we won’t care for each other, that we’ll turn on each other. That we’ll settle for the way things are, that we won’t trust each other, or name what we sense is wrong.
But when institutions lie — we look for people – – yes, the helpers, but also the healers, and those telling the truth with their lives…
- We look for meteorologists.
- We look for neighbors.
- Organizers.
- Teachers.
- Nurses.
- Therapists.
- Parents.
- Volunteers.
- Mutual aid workers.
- Church communities.
We look for ordinary pockets of honesty and we connect and build there.
We’ve seen this in places like Minneapolis (and all over the country), right? Ordinary people saying,
“No, no, no. We won’t stand for this.”
Ordinary people organizing food, safety, and care. Utilizing whistles and cell phones for resistance. Affirming that we will stand in the land of the living. Fellow citizens being human, showing that we are made of potent stuff, that
“good stuff within us comes through.”
The land of the living certainly isn’t a utopia. But it is what it looks like when people refuse to abandon one another. And solidarity is that refusal. Solidarity says — even if people in power lie, we will not lie to one another about what we are facing, and we will not lie about our need for one another.
The arc of justice might be long — but it bends with pressure. The pressure of people who love one another and refuse to give up on being real, and refuse to give up on the goodness of God.
And maybe this is why the Psalm ends the way it does.
“ I will fulfill my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all God’s people,” (v. 14 and v. 18)
The fulfillment of our vows to God — is to be human with one another, seeking a good, and just and living God in our midst.
Reservoir Church is sometimes called a “unicorn” of a church … and I love that.
But what we have here isn’t magic… and maybe if I’m honest, shouldn’t be that special.
I mean if anything, I think we are just stubborn. (in the best way).
We are stubborn and imperfect. .. but we are steady in our VOWS to be human with one another.
And in our refusal to stop seeking the image of God in each other.
So may we continue to situate ourselves in our ordinary lives, *in these EXTRA-ordinary times* and may we turn to one another — and to the God who turns an ear toward us — in the land of the living, that we won’t give up on.
Amen.
RESOURCES
https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jan/14/new-year-polycrisis-psychology-feeling-trapped