Psalm 142

“I am very weak”

Tradition describes the setting of Psalm 142 as a song David composed while hiding in a cave. This could have been the cave in Adullam (1 Samuel 22) or En-gedi (1 Samuel 24). Given that location, there is a lament over social isolation and rejection:

no one stands up for me;
there is no refuge for me;
no one cares about me.

In light of our loneliness epidemic, the cry “no one cares about me” speaks to many hearts. I was struck by the two mentions of weakness. One in verse 3: “my spirit is weak within me.” The other in verse 5: “Listen to my cry, for I am very weak.”

This week I had a few conversations about how to do evangelism in an increasingly post-Christian culture. How do you reach liberal humanists?

One lamentable strategy has been to double down on the culture wars. Lambast the feminists, the Woke, the progressives, progressive Christians among them. But I’ve never seen othering denunciation win over many hearts. As an evangelistic posture, it’s just a complete failure of missiological imagination.

Imagine the Woke as a tribe and you show up on their shores as a missionary. You spend some time listening to their passions and concerns, along with their sorrows and pains. There are some things you see that are very good. These people really care about the oppressed and the vulnerable. You sense a moral congruence with the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. But you also notice a lot of mental health problems and crises of meaning. And so, what are your first moves as an evangelist and missionary?

Well, you don’t start thumping your chest with war cries that you’ve arrived to wage war against them on behalf of Western Civilization. Or tell them they’re going to hell. And yet, this is precisely what so many are trying to do right now in regards to evangelism.

Listen, I get that you cannot evangelize liberals with liberalism. The decline of the mainline is a cautionary tale here. But you’re also not going to evangelize liberals with Trumpy evangelicalism. (Especially since Trumpy evangelicalism is as heretical as the Woke.) So what to do?

Let me suggest that Psalm 142 opens a window. People are in pain. The lament “no one cares about me” is everywhere. The mental health crisis rolls on. We find ourselves in a very dark place and cry out “I am very weak.” Let me suggest starting a conversation about God right there, in that place of darkness and weakness. It’s the strategy I use in The Shape of Joy. You start with the Ache I describe in Hunting Magic Eels.

You don’t evangelize the Woke with liberalism. And you don’t evangelize the Woke with culture warring. You evangelize the Woke by listening to the hurt and binding up the wounds.

There is a balm in Gilead. Share the medicine.