Sermon for July 12th, 2026

Psalm 7:1-17 (OT p.491)

A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning Cush, a Benjaminite. 1 O Lord my God, in you I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me, 2 or like a lion they will tear me apart; they will drag me away, with no one to rescue.

3 O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, 4 if I have repaid my ally with harm or plundered my foe without cause, 5 then let the enemy pursue and overtake me, trample my life to the ground, and lay my soul in the dust. Selah

6 Rise up, O Lord, in your anger; lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies; awake, O my God; you have appointed a judgement. 7 Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered around you, and over it take your seat on high. 8 The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me.

9 O let the evil of the wicked come to an end, but establish the righteous, you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God. 10 God is my shield, who saves the upright in heart. 11 God is a righteous judge, and a God who has indignation every day.

12 If one does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and strung his bow; 13 he has prepared his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts. 14 See how they conceive evil, and are pregnant with mischief, and bring forth lies. 15 They make a pit, digging it out, and fall into the hole that they have made. 16 Their mischief returns upon their own heads, and on their own heads their violence descends.

17 I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.

Psalm 7: The Song of the Slandered Soul

The newspaper for a small town printed a controversial headline that read as follows: "Half of the city council are crooks." This threw the city into an uproar, and the council threatened to sue the newspaper for slander and libel unless they issued a retraction and an apology. The editor-in-chief of the paper agreed, and the next morning the newspaper ran the following headline: "Our Apologies: Half of the city council are NOT crooks."

I know a thing or two about slander, libel, and defamation. Somewhere on the internet, still live today, is a petition calling for my termination. Thankfully, that picture of me, smoking a cigar in my clergy collar, looking like some kind of Presbyterian mob-boss, has been taken down. But the petition is still there, sitting at 208 signatures, most of which are from people who have never set foot in El Paso. Everyone loves to sign a petition.

Most of you are probably well aware that I do enjoy a good cigar and a pour of scotch--that's hardly surprising for a Scottish-American Presbyterian Pastor. But the clergy collar in the picture tells me exactly when it was taken, because I only wear that once each year: On Ash Wednesday, when I go to Vitola's cigar lounge to do the imposition of ashes for people in our community, particularly for people who still cherish the ritual, but have fallen away from the church, or don't feel welcome in one. It's a deeply moving experience for me, and hopefully for those who participate in it as well.

So the picture itself is true... but the story it tells on the petition is false. The story stems from an incident awhile back when our church had to fire two school employees... for good and ample reasons. Our governing board (the session) was fully aware of the situation, and was supportive of me throughout--but on the advice of our attorneys, we were limited in what we could say about it.

In that absence of information, supporters of the two former school employees (or possibly the employees themselves) started the petition, accusing me of all sorts of things, including financial impropriety. Ten months (and ten thousand dollars) later, a full review of our finances from an independent accounting firm uncovered what I already knew--the only "financial improprieties" originated from the employees who were fired. That vindication, however, came at a tremendous cost to the church, and it didn't really alleviate all the frustration, all the division, all the heartbreak from that experience.

Slander sucks. But I know I'm not the first one to go through it--most of you can probably think of times in your life when you have been wrongly accused, or judged unfairly. Three thousand years ago, a man wrote a song about exactly this, which found its way into the pages of the Bible. Our scripture reading today, Psalm 7, has been called a "Song for the Slandered Soul." And while it offers hope for those who have been wrongly accused, it also offers a helpful process--not for vindication or justice, but for coming to peace and acceptance of the things that are ultimately out of our control. Let's jump into the text of that song...

If you look at Psalm 7 in your Bible, you'll notice a little line in italics before verse one even begins: "A Shiggaion of David, which he sang to the Lord concerning Cush, a Benjaminite." This is the ascription, and most of us skip right past it, the same way we skip the terms and conditions on our phones. But it usually tells us some pretty important things, and in this case, it contains two fascinating mysteries.

First, (not a mystery) the ascription tells us who is singing the song: David. As in King David, here probably before he became king, while he was still serving as a commander in the army of his predecessor, King Saul.

Second, (here's the first mystery) there's that strange word shiggaion. It appears only one time in the entire Bible, and honestly? Nobody knows what it means. But the best guess is that it comes from the Hebrew root שָׁגָה (shagah), which means to stagger, to reel, to lurch, to wander off course. So perhaps, a staggering song. A reeling prayer. And if you read Psalm 7 straight through, that's exactly what it does—it lurches from terror to courtroom drama to confidence to praise, like someone who can't quite find his footing. That's what slander does to you.

Third, there's the mystery of Cush. Here's everything else the Bible tells us about Cush the Benjaminite: Nothing. He appears nowhere else in scripture. John Calvin concluded he was some ambitious member of Saul's court, who figured out that the fastest way to get ahead was to spread a false story about David—that David was a traitor, secretly plotting against the king. In fact, where our NRSV translation says "concerning Cush," the Hebrew literally says עַל־דִּבְרֵי־כ֝֗וּשׁ (al divrei Cush) or "concerning the WORDS of Cush." Words were the whole weapon. They usually are.

So this man's accusations were serious enough to produce an entire psalm... and yet history can't even verify who he was. That sounds familiar. The petition calling for my termination was started by a person named—I'm not making this up—"Jack Concerned." I've never met Jack. Neither has anyone else. As far as I can tell, Jack doesn't exist. Anonymous accusation is not new. It's at least three thousand years old. David never got to confront his accuser. What he did instead... was sing.

Now, we could walk through this psalm verse by verse, but I think the better way to hear it is the way you'd watch a person stagger: in movements. Psalm 7 makes four big swings.

The first swing is panic. Verses 1 and 2: "O Lord my God, in you I take refuge; save me from all my pursuers... or like a lion they will tear me apart; they will drag me away, with no one to rescue." Notice that David doesn't open with an argument, or a list of the facts of his case. He opens with fear. And notice the image he reaches for—not an army, not a sword. A lion. Because that's what slander feels like from the inside. It feels like being hunted... like something is tearing at you, dragging you off, and no one is coming. If you've been there, you know David is not exaggerating.

The second swing is the most interesting one: In verses 3 through 5, David—the victim here—suddenly puts HIMSELF in full focus: "O Lord my God, if I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands, if I have repaid my ally with harm... then let the enemy pursue and overtake me, trample my life to the ground."

Do you see what he's doing? Before David says a single word about his accuser, he stands in front of God Almighty and says: Search ME first. And if you find that I actually did this thing... then let them win. Let them have me. That is a dangerous prayer. It's the kind of oath you can only pray with a clean conscience, and that's exactly the point. David checks his own hands before he points at anyone else's.

The third swing is into the courtroom. Verses 6 through 11: "Rise up, O Lord... awake, O my God; you have appointed a judgment... The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness."

David has no remedy on earth. He can't get a fair hearing from Saul's court—that's where the slander started. He can't win the argument in public; the story has already spread. So he does the only thing left to do. He appeals his case... upward. He files it in a higher court, before a judge who, verse 9 says, "tests the minds and hearts," a judge who doesn't have to rely on testimony, because he was there.

And in that courtroom, David prays two words that should stop us in our tracks: "Judge me." We'll come back to those two words, because I think they might be the hardest words in this whole psalm.

The fourth swing is my favorite, because it's almost comical. From inside the courtroom, David finally looks over at his enemy—and what he sees, in verse 15, is a man digging: "They make a pit, digging it out—and fall into the hole that they have made." This guy (Cush) is committed. He's digging his hole with a shovel, perfecting the trap, making it nice and deep... and then he falls right into it. Verse 16: "Their mischief returns upon their own heads."

Now, we have a word for that, and it isn't a biblical word: It's Karma. Calvin, in his commentary on this passage calls it "recoil", and says that it's "not a thing which happens by chance—but God, by the secret direction of his own hand, causes the evil which they intend to bring upon the innocent to return upon their own heads." It's not the universe balancing itself out. It's a Judge, quietly ruling.

And here's what I want you to notice most of all: in this entire psalm, David never lifts a finger against his enemy. He never touches him. He never has to. After all that reeling—the lion, the oath, the courtroom, the pit—the psalm comes to rest on solid ground. Verse 17: "I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High."

Stop and think about what has actually changed for David by the end of this psalm. Nothing. He's still accused. The story about him is still out there. Cush, whoever he is, wherever he is, is probably still slandering him. Every one of David's circumstances is exactly as bad as it was in verse 1. But David himself has changed. He started this song running from a lion. He ends it standing still... singing, even.

So how do we do that? Let me give you three things to take home.

Number one: When you've been wronged, pray like a shiggaion.

Remember that word? The staggering song. The reeling prayer. I think most of us believe, somewhere deep down, that our prayers have to be composed before we're allowed to pray them. That we need to calm down first, get our theology straight, find the right words, and then come to God—the way you'd clean the house before company arrives. But God looked at a prayer that staggers—a prayer that swings from panic to courtroom fantasies to talking about holes in the ground—and God said: That one! Put that one in my book.

You do not have to find your footing before you come to God. Coming to God is HOW you find your footing. So pray angry. Pray scared. Pray lurching. Just pray—and let the prayer do what David's did: carry you, swing by swing, somewhere you could never have gotten on your own.

Number two: Pray verses 3 through 5 before you pray verse 6.

Before David asks God to rise up against his enemy, he opens his own hands for inspection: "If I have done this, if there is wrong in my hands... then let them have me." Self-examination first. Petition second. Why? Here's the uncomfortable truth about being wronged: it doesn't make us righteous. It just makes us wronged. And if we're not careful, the injury becomes a license—we start believing that because they did something terrible to us, whatever we do next is justified. That's exactly how a victim becomes a pit-digger. Some of the nastiest things ever done in this world were done by people who were nursing a genuine wound.

So before you take your case to God—before you compose the email, before you tell your side to one more person—pray David's dangerous prayer: "Lord, if there is wrong in MY hands..." Not "have I ever sinned"—we know the answer to that one. But in THIS conflict, in THIS mess: Search me first. If your conscience comes back clean, you can pray the rest of the psalm with power. And if it doesn't come back clean... well, now you know where to start, and it's not with your enemy.

Number three: Take your case to a higher court, and dare to pray the prayer nobody wants to pray: "Judge me."

I told you we'd come back to those two words. Think about how we normally use them: "DON'T judge me." That might be the closest thing our culture has to a creed. We say it half-joking (don't judge me, I ate the whole thing!) but secretly, we mean it. The last thing any of us wants is to be judged.

And then here comes David, standing in the courtroom of heaven, praying: "Judge me, O Lord."

How can he pray that? Calvin asked the same question—because he knew that elsewhere in the Bible, David actually prays, "Do not enter into judgment with your servant." And Calvin's answer is worth hearing: David is not claiming to be perfect. On the ledger of his whole life, Calvin says, David's only refuge—and ours—"is the mercy of God."

Here's what I've learned, and I learned it the hard way: When you have been slandered, the judgment of God stops being a scary idea and becomes the best news you've got. Because a judge who tests our minds and hearts cannot be fooled by a photograph, or an online petition, or a frequently repeated story. "Judge me" is not a prayer of arrogance. It's a prayer of surrender: Lord, I am done trying to win in the court of public opinion. I'm moving my case to your bench. Rule whenever you're ready. I can wait.

And if you want to know what that looks like when it's done perfectly—better than David did it, better than I ever have—look at Jesus. He was slandered all the way to a cross; the whole case against him was words. And Peter tells us he did not retaliate, did not threaten, but rather he "entrusted himself to the one who judges justly."

Now... I'm not Jesus, to be sure. That online petition with my name on it is still out there, collecting random signatures. On my worst days, I still feel pretty wounded about that. But on my best days, I've made my peace with it all. Even if that petition ends up outlasting my entire ministry here, and is the only record of me left online... I find peace in knowing that the case was transferred, long ago, to the only court that truly matters.

Some of you are living under words you cannot answer: A story that isn't true, an accusation you can't rebut without making it worse, a wound with no earthly remedy. So take David's song home with you:

Pray it staggering—with all the confusion and disappointment and hurt you feel in the moment.

Check your own hands and your own heart first; be honest about your role in the situation.

Then move your case to the higher court, and dare to pray those three dangerous words: Judge me, Lord.

You may never get your apology. You may never get the vindication--or the vengeance--your heart desires. But you'll get something infinitely better: Like David, you can start your song running from a lion... and end it standing still—no longer swinging, but singing.