The Third Sunday of Epiphany, 25 January 2026, Austwick, Clapham
What is the composer of Psalm 27 going through, to make this prayer?
Listen again to what he says…
The wicked, my enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh…
A host encamp against me, and there rise up war against me…
My father and my mother forsake me…
There are those who lie in wait for me…
My adversaries, false witnesses, have risen up against me, and those who breathe out violence…
This is a man besieged, surrounded on all sides by those who wish to do him harm. His enemies want to rain down deadly violence upon him. He is ensnared in the traps they have laid for him. And he is alone in this trauma – for even his own flesh and blood, even his father and mother, have forsaken him. This is a scene of utter abandonment, fear, and the expectation of worse to come.
You may see this person clearly in your mind’s eye if you translate this picture to any of the places of conflict in our world today – to a Palestinian West Bank home surrounded by settlers who want the frightened family gone, to a small Kharkiv apartment where a Ukrainian family huddle as bombs whistle past their window, to the anxious people of Greenland, waiting for an invasion.
The composer of Psalm 27 speaks for countless suffering people in the world today, just as he did way back when he wrote these words nine centuries before Christ. The Psalm is usually attributed to a young David, before his days as a king, when he was fleeing from King Saul and in hiding, whilst the priests who protected him were being sought out and executed. [1]
Some people describe Psalm 27 as a cry for help – and it does contain many such cries:
Hear my voice, O Lord, when I call; have mercy upon me and answer me…
Hide not your face from me, nor cast your servant away in displeasure…
You have been my helper; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation…
Deliver me not into the will of my adversaries…
This is a man turning to prayer at a time of desperation. I’d imagine prayers of this kind rising up from the injured, their families and friends, in the minutes and hours following the train collision in southern Spain last weekend. I’m reading a book by the Yorkshire novelist David Peace, called Munichs, about the 1958 Manchester United plane crash and its aftermath. I was moved by a scene where the first reports of the crash reach Old Trafford, and the schoolboy apprentice young Nobby Styles is dismissed early from his boot-cleaning and bin-emptying duties. He leaves for home, filled with dread for the fate of his teammates, but does not go straight home, for once in Collyhurst he first heads to St Patrick’s Church, where he kneels at a pew praying and crying and pleading with his maker, “rather me than them, please God, just take me, please. Just let them live, please, please, God, let them live.” [2]
Was Nobby’s prayer a prayer of desperation or of devotion? Reportedly Nobby Styles was a devout Catholic throughout his life, who attended mass each morning of England’s 1966 World Cup campaign and made his confession on the day of the World Cup final. In David Peace’s book we next see him in church again, at the funeral of one of his club colleagues, where he is not sitting in a pew in the congregation, but serving as an altar boy. [3]
Nobby was asking the impossible in praying, “God, just take me, please, let them live”. But – this is the important thing – he was praying. In a moment of crisis, at a time of desperation, he showed the same instinct as the Psalmist David did: to turn first to God. In trust that God would hear his prayer and meet him and those for whom he prayed in their hour of need.
And so we can read Psalm 27 not simply as a cry for help, not only a prayer of desperation, despite the awful situation, but as a prayer of devotion. For at the very start of it, the Psalmist sings out these words:
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom then shall I be afraid?
The Psalmist loves to come into the sanctuary of prayer, it is a practice at the very heart of his life. He says,
One thing have I asked of the Lord, and that alone I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
To behold the fair beauty of the Lord and to seek his will in his temple.
He trusts that God will hear his cries; that in the day of trouble he shall hide him in his shelter.
He knows that God will help him lift his head up high above the enemies round about him.
This gives him great gladness, it brings joy to his heart and music to his voice.
At the end of the Psalm, though his enemies are still circling with murderous intent, this is what the Psalmist confidently says:
I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
And, though he is in the midst of a great trauma, he finishes with a word of encouragement for those, like us, reading his words today; a lesson from his life that he wants to share with us:
Wait for the Lord; be strong and he shall comfort your heart;
wait patiently for the Lord.
I am forever humbled by those who even in their darkest hours, turn first in faith to God.
Those who, later, looking back on hard times, tell us, “It was my faith that got me through it.”
May God grant me, grant us all, such strength in such devotion.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Psalm 27.
[2] David Peace, Munichs, p.33-35.
[3] Wikipedia: Nobby Styles; David Peace, Munichs, p.33-35.
