De Profundis. The Psalmist is writing from the abyss. Out

of the depths I cry to you…Lord, hear my voice.

This is a desperate, ragged cry flung toward a God who

may or may not be listening. This is prayer, stripped of

everything but tears.

This season, we’ve been living in the shadows.

Temptation assumes you still care about doing right.

Fear assumes that there’s something worth protecting.

Worry assumes that there’s a future worth fretting over.

Even idolatry is a desperate reach toward meaning. But

despair has stopped reaching. Despair dives deeper

than sadness. Sadness clings to memory of purpose.

Despair has let it go. Despair whispers in your ear, “It

will always be like this. Nothing will change. No one is

coming to help. Even God has turned away.”

And sometimes it is hard to argue against despair when

we see children pulled from the rubble of bombed-out

buildings. When families flee devastation and find no

refuge. De Profundis.

When, closer to home, the vulnerable are denied

essential support and children go to school hungry in a

land of abundance. When neighbors live in fear of arrest

for having nowhere to sleep. My heart broke this week

when a longtime member of this congregation told me

he brings a passport to worship. Institutions we were

taught to trust are failing in ways that once would have

been unimaginable. De Profundis.

Underneath it all, there is something more insidious than

grief. Philosophers call it nihilism. The internet prefers

LOL Nothing Matters. We become a culture so wary of

being deceived that it feels safer to hold nothing in your

heart at all. Nothing matters. That is the new despair—a

durable worldview built out of despair.

And who can blame them? They’ve been sold

connection, meaning, and belonging in forms that

will never be able to deliver them. In betting sites and

gaming culture, online pornography that promises

intimacy with no vulnerability, social media outrage

selling the illusion of community absent the obligation of

mutuality, AI companions that offer the feeling of being

cared for and ask nothing from you in return.

Despair keeps furiously busy. But it is going nowhere.

Perhaps you’ve heard the term “synthetic relationships.”

Engineered to feel a little bit like hope. But there is

nothing there. And it is killing us.

Researchers call them deaths of despair—deaths

by suicide, overdose, alcoholism. Chronic distress.

Disconnection. The collapse of the very communities

that once told people their lives were sacred. De

Profundis. They are crying out.

Somewhere a teenager sits alone in the darkness.

The screen offers the only light visible in the room.

The algorithm is learning where he lingers to feed

him more. More. More. He finds a community, not of

belonging, but of a kind of shared rage, of despair—a

place where violence is celebrated, archived, turned into

iconography. This teen is not being recruited into an

ideology. He is being confirmed in a feeling he already

has: that nothing matters anyway, that no one sees me,

that the only way to be remembered is to do something

unforgettable, and acts of violence always make the

news. De Profundis. He is crying out. And the darkness

answers every time. Will we?

Friends, we are living in a spiritual emergency. Every

day, shadows claim the lonely and the lost, promising

belonging and delivering devastation. We must offer

another way. But before we get there, I want to stay in

the pit a moment longer, because we know it not only

from what we read about the world out there, but from

what we experience right down here. I know I do.

Like all of you, I face shadows that I do not often

mention from this pulpit. I look at the world careening

toward techno-dystopia and meanness, and I wonder

whether I’m offering anything more than a whisper into

a hurricane. The contempt is so loud. The resentment

is so deep-seated. The violence so constant. The

disruption so relentless. Some days preaching feels less

like courage and more like rearranging the furniture

while the house is on fire. And there are children inside.

I think of my own sons. In the middle of the night, I

dread the world they will inherit. I wonder what we can

do to make it more bearable, more human. There are no

answers to these nightmares. De Profundis. Out of the

depths I cry to you, O Lord; hear my voice.

The prayer of the psalmist belongs to us all. These

words belong to the child in the rubble. To the exhausted

soul running out of reasons. To the one who has done

everything right and cannot explain why it all feels so

hollow. The psalmist’s prayer belongs to us all.

And then, the psalm shifts. If you kept a record of sins,

Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness.

Don’t miss that. The one we cry to from the depths is not

keeping score on us. Forgiveness is not an afterthought

for our God; it is buried deep in the ground of divine

being. And so, the Psalmist can sing, “I wait for the

Lord…my soul waits…more than those who watch for

the morning.”

Wait. What? We don’t wait. Not us. Not anymore. We

refresh. We scroll. We increase the speed to 2x. Waiting

feels like wasted time when you can fast forward

through the commercials.

But the psalm suggests a vigil. You scan the horizon,

desperately looking for the first hint of sunrise. Or

maybe you lie awake to hear your teenager open the

door in the middle of the night. Or perhaps you keep

watch at the bedside of a dying parent. Or you pace

the waiting room floor while the surgery drags on hour

after hour. Maybe you keep the phone close and pray

for that one phone call that will signal safety. You stay at

your post. You keep vigil. You watch because you know

the one you are waiting to see. The one who gives your

waiting purpose. Wait for the Lord.

Maybe you remember when Jesus kept his eyes open.

It happened in Gethsemane, the night before his death.

His friends all fallen asleep, unable to wait and watch,

and Jesus prays there in the garden, “Father, if it is

possible, let this cup pass from me.”

We know that prayer. God, if it is possible, let this

suffering, this pain, this sadness, this despair pass from

me. Jesus pours his soul out, and in response, he hears

nothing. Silence. He prays again. “Father, if it is possible,

let this cup pass.” Same words. Same silence.

The next day, from the cross, he cries the words of Psalm

22. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

De Profundis. The Son of God is in the abyss.

Listen to me. God is not waiting for you to climb out.

God is there with you. Hope in the Lord. It is a verb.

A decision to defy despair. Vaclav Havel called it an

orientation of the spirit—a direction you choose before

the destination is known. That’s hope.

I run nearly every morning. And having heard that

fact, you might assume that I love it. I don’t. At least,

not at first. Almost any runner can tell you that

the first mile is never a pleasure. It’s a negotiation.

Everything in you wants to stop, to go back inside, to

wait until I feel like it. But I never feel like it. And so,

you go anyway. And somewhere around the second

mile, something shifts. Not always. But often enough

to get you up tomorrow morning.

I think that’s what hope looks like. I think hope is a

decision made before the evidence supports it. I think

hope is the action that precedes the emotion. Hope is

not optimism. Optimism is vibes—the vague affirmation

that things will probably work out. Maybe, maybe not.

Hope compels action.

Back in 2017, Maggie Smith wrote a poem that went

viral. The title of the poem is “Good Bones.” She wrote it

for her children. And for mine. And for all children. It is

about the impossible task of handing over a world you

know is broken. She writes:

Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger there is one would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world.

So, like a realtor walking through a real dump, the

poet points to the good bones. The poet closes: This

place could be beautiful, right? You could make this

place beautiful.

This is not an optional exercise. I want you to do this.

Take a moment to think of someone who held the faith

so it could reach you. Someone in your life who prayed

you into faith. Someone who loved you enough to pass

on the word of life that has a claim on your life. Who

in your life is that person? Think of the people who

prayed through plagues and wars and the collapse of

institutions. Think of the people who kept the church

alive in the catacombs and the labor camps and the

burned-out neighborhoods. Think of those who sang

spirituals in the deepest darkness. Who stayed at their

post when the choice cost them everything.

They heard the same whispers: nothing will change, no

one is coming. They cried out anyway.

I know there are moments when it feels like you’ve got

nothing left. I know that. But you can’t set this faith

down now. Friends, you have no right to abandon the

faith that was preserved for you at such sacrifice. Hope

is the sermon we preach with our feet. I’ve seen it. In

hospital rooms where no one knew what to say so we

just stood in silence. In stacks of letters insisting hungry

children are our responsibility. In the simplest acts of

human decency—like a hand on a shoulder, a table

shared with a stranger, a word of grace offered in a

tense moment.

Friends, there is no algorithm for human compassion.

It’s on us to keep it alive. In the face of every force that

says otherwise, we will make this radical claim: no

person created in the God’s image is without worth.

Every human soul is sacred.

All along the way, the shadows of despair will creep in on

us, offering identity built on lies, or belonging achieved

through destruction. Hold nothing in your heart.

We will offer a living hope that this place could be

beautiful. That we could make it so. It’s that first mile

run in the dark before dawn. It’s that vigil kept through

the longest night. It’s the sacred song still sung despite

despair. It’s faith held fast, kept burning, and passed on.

This is the way. De Profundis. It is not only a cry of

despair. It is a declaration of defiance. God is in the pit.

You are not alone. Hope in the Lord. Amen.