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 paired with a wee dram 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 they grew up with, but who 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. That's how slander works--it rarely invents something completely new, but instead reframes and distorts the truth in self-serving ways. The story behind the petition stems from an incident a few years ago 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 full well--the only "financial improprieties" originated from the employees who were fired. That vindication, however, came at a tremendous cost to the church, and at the end of the day, 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 first one to go through it--I suspect most of you can think of times in your life when you have been wrongly accused, or judged unfairly in the court of public opinion. And 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, but in this case probably before he became king, while he was still serving as a commander in the army of his predecessor, King Saul.

Second, (heres' the first mystery) there's that strange word shiggaion. It appears only time in the entire Bible, and honestly? Nobody knows what it means. Not the rabbis, not the Reformers, not the scholars with all the letters after their names. 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 a man who can't quite find his footing. Because he can't. That's what slander does to you. Hold onto that thought, because we'll come back to it.

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 a new technology. It's at least three thousand years old.

David never got to confront his accuser. What he did instead... was sing.