The Tribulation Of Our Present Circumstances

Sunday 22 February 2026
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury

Deuteronomy 6: 4–9, 16–end
Luke 15: 1–10

‘Praise him who promises, praise him who calls us, praise him who encourages us, praise him who is our helper; and be sensitive to the tribulation of your present circumstances’

St Augustine served as a bishop in northern Africa in the early fifth century and is honoured as one of the great fathers and teachers of the western Church.  The words with which I began are drawn from his exposition of a psalm often sung at Evening Prayer on the First Sunday of Lent.  They serve as the summation of his understanding of it.  It is Augustine’s account of the first fifteen verses of Psalm 50 that we will explore this evening (you may find it helpful to have the psalm open before you: it begins on page 407 of the Book of Common Prayer).

Augustine insists that the psalmist’s principal concern in these fifteen verses is to ascribe to God his rightful place in our received cosmology and theology.  Briefly, there is none higher: God calls the world from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.  God is the unimpeachable sovereign – God is the unimpeachable judge.

God’s unimpeachable supremacy is therefore the context for a consideration of animal sacrifice which occupied the psalmist after these opening declarations.  Verse eight reads ‘I will not reprove thee because of thy sacrifices, or for thy burnt offerings’.  I will not reprove thee…Augustine plainly enjoys interpreting these words for his readers.  What God is saying, he writes, a smile playing across his lips; what God is saying is, ‘I will not say to you, Why have you not slaughtered your sleek bull for me?  Why did you not select the best buck from your flock?  Why is that ram roaming about among your ewes, instead of being laid on my altar?’  God will not complain about receiving or not receiving this animal or that animal from our hands – God will not complain because they all belong to him, every last creature, as the psalmist goes on to make clear.  Domesticated animals are God’s; wild animals are God’s; the birds of the air are God’s.  He does not need any of these to be offered to him by the men and women he has made.

In which case, Augustine continues ‘Ask him then:  O Lord our God, what payment do you exact from your people, your Israel?’  The psalmist’s answer comes in verse fourteen: ‘Offer unto God thanksgiving’.  Nothing beyond our means is asked of us; nothing that we once had but have now lost.  What a reassurance this should be.  ‘We need have no anxiety’ writes Augustine: ‘we do not need to travel to Arabia to find frankincense; we need not ransack some miserly merchant’s bundle.  All that God demands of us is a sacrifice of praise’.

God is supreme and needs nothing from us but our thanks…except one more thing.  ‘Call upon me in the time of trouble’ writes the psalmist.  Augustine understands this as further evidence of God’s mercy; what God is saying, writes Augustine, is ‘You should not rely on your own strength’.  Just as we need not worry about giving God valuable gifts, so too we need not depend on whatever resources we happen to have when trouble engulfs us.

Augustine is familiar with trouble.  He recalls financial loss, bereavement, exile.  ‘When can any mortal be free from sorrow?’ he pleads.  The answer is that no mortal ever can – and so, when troubles of this sort find us out, we are to call on God.  God is strong enough to teach us how to bear them, or strong enough to heal them when they have been borne.

But there is a further kind of trouble, Augustine continues, and it is one that we must look for.  It won’t come and find us; we must find it.  This – I think – is what makes the psalm and Augustine’s exposition of it a valuable source of reflection for Lent.  The further kind of trouble is, in his words, ‘…this very fact that we are not yet at home with God, that we are tossed about amidst temptations and vexations, that we cannot be free from fear’.  Even the good works we do are a reminder of the fragility of our condition.  Poverty stirs us up to works of compassion, but how much better it would be if there were no poverty, if we were in a country where ‘…all things are perfect, all are true, all are holy, all are eternal.’

‘If we think about where we are now’ writes Augustine, ‘and reflect carefully on it, and then remember where we shall be…we discover how grave is our trouble in our present condition’.

And this leads him to the summation with which I began:  ‘Praise him who promises, praise him who calls us, praise him who encourages us, praise him who is our helper; and be sensitive to the tribulation of your present circumstances’

We offer the God of all our thanksgiving and our praise –and we are, or we should be ‘…sensitive to the tribulation of our present circumstances’.

We acknowledge God’s sovereignty; we call for God’s help; and we recall that it is to the perfection of life with God that we are ultimately called – and that is our eternal destiny.  Beyond Lent; beyond Passiontide; beyond Easter.