Faith, Hope, Love, and Amazing Grace: One Army Chaplain’s Favorite Psalms

By Les D. Maloney Ph.D.

This brief sharing of my experiences as an active-duty and reserve Army chaplain has been years in the making. While there are far more joyful memories than sorrow-filled memories, the latter are painful and some of them were not comfortable to revisit—especially the memories involving families who lost their soldier.
The time frame for this story is my service as an Army Reserve chaplain from 1991–2013, including over seven years on active duty. It has been my observation that a majority of the general public (and in fact, a lot of military service members) do not understand what a military chaplain does—other than the insights provided by the TV series M*A*S*H and the character of Father (chaplain) Mulcahy.
My hope in publishing this book is that people will gain a deeper insight into and appreciation for the work of military chaplains, my brothers and sisters in ministry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664239760

Les D. Maloney Ph.D.

Chaplain (LTC) Les Maloney, retired, is a graduate of Baylor University (PhD, 2005). He published an earlier book on the psalms titled A Word Fitly Spoken: Poetic Artistry in the First Four Acrostics of the Hebrew Psalter (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009). In 2003–2004, he wrote a series of articles on the army chaplaincy ministry in Iraq, published in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper. In the civilian part of his life, Chaplain Maloney preached for local churches in Iowa, Arizona, and Texas. Chaplain Maloney is also a graduate of Harding School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee (MA; MTh) and Lubbock Christian University (BA). Lieutenant Colonel Maloney retired from the army reserve chaplaincy after twenty-two years of service (including more than seven years on active duty) and moved to Oklahoma City to be close to the grandchildren. His wife, Margaret, is a middle school computer science and math teacher. Dr. Maloney also serves as chair for the Professional Advisory Group, Clinical Pastoral Education program, Christus-Spohn Hospitals in Corpus Christi.

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• Scripture quotations marked RSV are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of

Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked CEB are taken from the Common English Bible, Copyright ©

2011 by the Common English Bible Committee. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright

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Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, Copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale

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Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian

Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from The New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962,

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ISBN: 978-1-6642-3975-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-3976-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021913692

WestBow Press rev. date: 07/26/2021

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For my family, whose encouragement enabled

the sharing of these experiences after all these years.

Contents

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Introduction

Chapter 1     No Person Is an Island

Chapter 2     In All the Earth

Chapter 3     The Lord Is in Control

Chapter 4     God’s Saving and Sustaining Grace

Chapter 5     Those Who Seek the Lord Lack Nothing

Chapter 6     Bless, O My Soul, the Lord!

Chapter 7     Weeping with Those Who Weep

Chapter 8     We Are Going to Do Right by This Family

Chapter 9     Those Who Gave the Last Full Measure of Devotion

Chapter 10   The Lord Saves Those Whose Spirits Are Crushed

Chapter 11   He Who Keeps You Will Not Slumber

Chapter 12   God’s Faithful Love Lasts Forever

Chapter 13   Ministry to Those Downtrodden in Despair

Chapter 14   From Wailing to Worship (Psalm 77:5, 6, 11, 12)

Chapter 15   The Relationship

Chapter 16   Freedom Rest

Chapter 17   Chaplain, I Don’t Think It Was Us

Chapter 18   Lord, Help Us Quickly!

Chapter 19   Community Support as Grace

Conclusion

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Introduction

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These are the favorite psalms of one US Army chaplain. Many of these choices undoubtedly would be in my list of favorite psalms even if the Lord had not led me down this career path. I was a Bible reader and a believer long before I became a chaplain. I remember a small green spiral memo book—one of those notepads that fits snugly in your shirt packet. My little notepad was my companion when I read scripture. At the prompting of a spiritual mentor who helped me through high school, I wrote down in my notebook the promises of God that I came across in my readings and prayers.

Of course, the promises of God that I came across in scripture were not limited to the book of Psalms—comforting, healing, and restorative words. Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go (Joshua 1:9 NIV), a promise that I and thousands of others wore on a dog tag around our necks, comes not from Psalms but from the Former Prophets in the Hebrew Bible—the book of Joshua. This promise of the LORD’s/Yahweh’s presence—the promise of his protection—found its way into my pocket notebook of God’s promises.

But many of my most treasured promises of God did come from reading the psalms, so captivating, perhaps, because these promises of God appear in the midst of the struggles of a life of faith and the spiritual victories arising out of doubt and weakness. There is something special about faith that confesses and proclaims the promises of God after experiencing the promises of God as existentially, personally true, and dependable. Such is the faith of many of the psalmists. The book of Psalms is the book of spiritual life. It has its mountain peaks bathed in bright sunlight, and it has its dark, doubt-filled valleys drenched in lightless gloom. A perfect example of the latter is in Psalm 10, "Why, LORD, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself ¹ in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1 NIV), followed quickly by the mournful complaint, (the wicked man) lies in wait near the villages; from ambush he slaughters the innocent person" (Psalm 10:8 NIV). And like genuine, true spiritual life, the book of Psalms sometimes walks one through both experiences—both exhilarating in one breath and then disheartening in almost the next breath. Indeed, dozens of the lament psalms share both the joy of certain faith and salvation and the sorrow of doubt and disappointment within the same song! In his works on Psalms, the sixteenth-century Reformer Martin Luther writes:

Where does one find finer words of joy than in the Psalms of praise and thanksgiving? There you look into the hearts of all saints, as into fair and pleasant gardens, yes, as into heaven itself … On the other hand, where do you find deeper, more sorrowful, more pitiful words of sadness than in the Psalms of lament? There again you look into the hearts of all saints … Hence it is that the Psalter is the book of all saints; and everyone, in whatever situation he may be, finds in that situation Psalms and words that fit his case, that suit him as if they were put there just for his sake.²

Actually, there is not just joy in praise psalms and sadness in lament psalms. Many of the lament psalms move back and forth between celebration and sadness, ending, however, almost always, on the side of celebration, faith, and trust. But is this not the way life and spiritual life as well really are? Isn’t life a mixture of the bitter along with the sweet? In a well-known study of the psalms, Walter Brueggemann makes the following observation:

The faith of Israel, like all human experience, moved back and forth between the polar moods of … deep anguish and misery and … profound joy and celebration. In this back-and-forth movement the people of Israel worked out the power and limits of their faith … It is the lament [psalm] that preserves for us Israel’s most powerful and eloquent statements of the effort both to survive and to be transformed as a people of faith … Israel characteristically met the hurtful dimensions of existence head-on, viewing them as faith crises, times of about God and God’s fidelity, but also as faith opportunities.³

The psalms are about real, day-to-day experiences—both positive and negative. As real as the joy that comes from baptizing a soldier in a makeshift baptistery, constructed by a helpful first sergeant, out of an old, galvanized storage container, with the help of some tin snips and some green ninety-mile-an-hour tape to cover the sharp edge left by the tin snips; as real as the sorrow of visiting a double-amputee (above the knee) soldier in the burn unit in San Antonio, Texas. Such a mixture of emotions and spiritual ups and downs is found in my first favorite psalm, to which we now turn our attention.⁴

Chapter 1

No Person Is an Island

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Psalm 3

Psalm 3 is an individual lament or complaint psalm, or a plea-for-help psalm in which the worshipper⁵ cries out for help to Yahweh, the God and Savior of His people! But even these individual songs pleading for help in the Sepher Tehillim, the book of Praises, are sung in the context of community. Bellinger discusses the overt individualism that soaks Western civilization and observes that, from the very beginning, the book of Psalms is overtly community orientated.⁶ This realization was earlier emphasized in a groundbreaking book on the praise of God in the psalms by Claus Westermann, a professor of the University of Heidelberg who was interned in a Nazi prison camp during World War II.⁷ The opening two psalms deal with choosing the correct path and the correct (righteous) king to follow. Also, these two psalms are widely regarded as an introduction to the entire collection of 150 songs! We should read Psalms 1 and 2 in the social setting of community (Psalms 1:1, 5; 2:1–2, 10–12). Moving along to the interior of the book, in Psalm 3:8 we find a reminder that the individual psalmist’s heart and soul (while pained and stressed with his own personal crisis) is also burdened with the pain and stress the crisis is placing upon your people [O LORD].

What is the lesson for the modern, individual servant of God? No believer is an island; we are all interconnected, interdependent, and so we cannot afford (spiritually or emotionally) to be individualistic and isolated. A good illustration of the importance (life-and-death importance!) of interdependence is a military convoy in a combat zone. My army reserve unit adopted three primary schools in Iraq in 2004: one school in southwest Baghdad; one school out in the Al-Manamah neighborhood—out close to the Abu Ghraib marketplace (open-air street market); and a countryside school out southwest of Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). This was in addition to our unit’s mission of providing command and control (i.e., supervision) over several army engineering units as they worked to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure.

I collected school supplies, math kits,⁸ soccer balls, soccer cleats, toys, and clothing from churches, businesses, and concerned individuals in the US. When we had collected a five-ton truck worth of supplies, Colonel Ron Diana, our commanding officer, would authorize a convoy and accompany us out to the schools. We, of course, did not go to all three schools on the same day but would keep track over the months of what we had delivered to which school and try to be fair in our distributions. And, by the way, this distribution of donated supplies to the children of Iraq