You might find yourself looking at the world right now and feeling a certain stuckness, a sense of being trapped in circumstances beyond your control, watching fear spread like fog across the landscape. The psalmist knew this feeling intimately, describing it as a desolate pit and a miry bog, images that capture not just the difficulty of the moment but the terrifying uncertainty of whether escape is even possible. Yet what’s remarkable about Psalm 40 is that it isn’t written from within that pit. It’s written from the other side, from the vantage point of deliverance, where the psalmist speaks of God putting a new song in his mouth and of finding his place within a great congregation.
The roots of the United Church of Christ stretch back through five distinct traditions: German Reformed, Evangelical Synod, the Christians, African traditions born in balconies and brush arbors, and the Congregational tradition that eventually planted churches in places like Denver. Every single one of these predecessor groups emerged from conditions of crisis: religious oppression, political violence, slavery, and economic turmoil. They all held at their center an idea about justice, an insistence that following Jesus meant seeking transformation for a broken world. That inheritance flows directly into this present moment, offering resources for the living of our own difficult and fearful days.
“The great congregation exists because community is the antidote to fear. Solidarity is the best way to oppose terror and oppression. Togetherness is the best way to remind ourselves that we are never alone, even in the pit.”
You are not the first to live in times of trouble, and you will not be the last. The thread connecting ancient psalmists to enslaved people worshipping in secret to those detained in immigration facilities today is the universal human experience of feeling lost, forgotten, and helpless.
But what the ancestors understood, and what Psalm 40 proclaims, is that deliverance speaks in the language of belonging. When you gather in community, you gather not only for yourselves but for everyone still wandering through the miry bog, so that no one needs to feel alone and no one stays long in any desolate pit.
