"Learning The Clutch"
Ecclesiastes 3:5-6
Ever had to teach someone how to drive a stick shift? Like a family member? It's one of those things you should never do for a family member. It's similar to wallpapering with your spouse. You just don't do it. It does not enhance marital bliss. Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift does not create a fun bonding time.
Nobody taught me how to drive a stick shift. In our white bread, suburban neighborhood there was one little grocery store. My next door neighbor owned it. Medina Grocery. I started working there when I was 12 or 13. I continued working there through my first year of college.
I started out as a stock boy and a bag boy, carrying groceries out for all the characters that came into that little, oil wood floor store. People didn't come in just to get groceries. They came in for the experience. For the conversations around the produce section, or a cup of eggnog in the back room. Eggnog that had extra ingredients.
Medina Grocery also had a home delivery service. People would call in their orders. I'd get a grocery cart and get all their list of stuff off the shelves, and put it in a box on the back table. Write their name on the outside of the box. Organize the table filled with boxes for the delivery guy, in the order he'd be delivering them.
The delivery truck was an old Dodge panel job. Fire engine red. Medina Grocery printed on the side with a picture of a cartoonish guy running with a bag of groceries, some of which were flying out of the top of the bag.
By the end of my working tenure there, I was the delivery guy. The first time I was the delivery guy, I wasn't the delivery guy. The regular guy was sick, and John Frost, the owner, asked me if I knew how to drive a stick shift. I said, "Sure." I didn't. That's what I mean when I said no one ever taught me to drive a stick shift. I taught myself on that maiden delivery run. I taught myself out of my own teenaged arrogance and fearlessness.
It was a three-on-the-tree. If you don't know what that is, don't learn. Just stay away from it. You'll be fine.
How many of you have been to Seattle? I'm not sure if you noticed, but it's a rather hilly place. So on my first ever delivery run, driving a three-on-the-tree stick shift, I was going up this hill. There's a stop light a fourth of the way up the hill. I got stopped by the red light.
When the light turned green, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and killed the engine. Did it again. And again. And again, about six or seven times. The light turned yellow, then red. I'm still there. About 10 cars are lined up behind me. I did that through three cycles of green to red lights. The line of cars behind me was a quarter of a mile long.
I'm in a red panel truck with Medina Grocery painted on the sides. Everyone knows where it's from. Finally, at the next green, I gave that thing all the gas, popped the clutch and squealed the tires of the Medina Grocery truck for about a block up the hill. I was now an expert stick shift driver.
I didn't know anything about stick shifts and clutches and how they worked. I'm not even sure if I understand them now, and I drive a six speed stick shift in my truck. The nice thing is, I don't have to be worried about being trapped at a light on a hill in Kansas.
But the way I understand it is, when the clutch peddle is pushed in, it releases the transmission's effect on the drive train. Think of the drive train as a spinning plate. The clutch pads are on both sides of that spinning plate. When you push in the clutch peddle, the two clutch pads get pushed away from the spinning plate. Put the drive train in gear, or change gears. Then let your foot up slowly on the clutch peddle, easing the two pads back on to that spinning plate.
If you let up quickly on the clutch peddle, the pads grab too quickly and violently on the drive plate and the engine dies. That's what I was doing in the Medina Grocery truck.
So it's a two step process with the clutch. It's letting go. And then easing back on. Letting go. And easing on. In learning to drive a stick shift using a clutch, (and I'm not teaching anybody, so don't get any ideas) the hardest part is the easing back on. Letting go is easy. You just push on the clutch peddle. Simple. It's the easing back on to the source of power that's the toughest part to learn.
It's the opposite in life. In life, the letting go is the hardest part. The releasing. The pushing back from. The changing. The divorcing. The teenager driving on their own for the first time. Or, the child going off to college. The retiring. The misheld expectations or assumptions. The dying. It's that hand opening release on the power that drives our life that is the hardest.
Ranier Marie Rilke has the poem:
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting go.
For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.
Animals have it easy. They run on instincts. They gather food. They find a mate. They make babies and take care of those babies. They defend their turf, nests and territory as best they can. The live, they die. They eat or get eaten. Certainly they deal with resistance, pain, and struggle. But they do all that on an unthinking, instinctual level.
But humans. We do most of the same things. But along with all that comes self-reflection. Self-awareness. Along with that comes blame, guilt, self-pity, worry, and resentment. Both animals and humans have memory, but memory works different for us. Our memory can be used to inflict emotional pain on ourselves. Our memory serves to hold on to certain recollections that do nothing more than make us feel bad about ourselves. We just can't or won't push the clutch peddle in and release those things, so we can change gears and move forward differently.
That's why I like these verses in Ecclesiastes, made popular in the song, "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds back in the '60's.
For everything there is a season,
a time for every matter under heaven:
...a time to gather stones together,
and a time to cast away stones;
a time to embrace,
and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek,
and a time to lose;
a time to keep,
and a time to cast away...
I like the back and forth in this poetry. It's like the motion of working the clutch. There is the pushing in of the clutch--the releasing, the freeing, the letting go. And there is the easing back out the clutch, the easing into new ways to grab hold of, to live and move through this life. There's a rhythm to this letting go, and easing back into a hand hold.
The problem is that we humans want to grab and hold on as much as we can. We don't like having to do the other: the letting go. Think of all the grasping and grabbing that happens: Our country as number one in the world and the force that needs to be exerted with which we uphold that status. Holding on to our standard of living which, in order to do so, creates economic exploitation, greed and over-consumption.
When suffering or sick, the fear that comes with illness causes us to hold on to health or life--and certainly that is a good thing to do. We don't want to give up and let go every time we have a cold, or face some kind of illness (or heart condition).
When facing death our cultures whole stance is death-denying, in an attempt to hold on to that last breath. Everyone around the dying person plays a part in that conspiracy of denial, which makes it all the more difficult for the dying person to let go.
We want, as the poem in Ecclesiastes states, the gathering, the embracing, the seeking, the keeping. It's much harder to open up and allow the casting away, the refraining from embracing, the losing, and the casting away.
There are some paradox's to the act of letting go. One woman I dealt with a number of years ago just couldn't relax. We talked about different relaxation techniques, but try as she may, she couldn't get there. What I discovered, in dealing with her, is that trying doesn't produce relaxation. Trying is just another form of the energy of control. If she controlled all the facets of her relaxation techniques, then it should work, right? But just the opposite happened. The more she tried to relax, the less relaxed she became. Especially when what she tried didn't work.
The paradox was that in order to relax she had to let go of trying to relax. She had to let go of her sense of control over her relaxation. Relaxation was only going to come by just letting go.
The more controlling we are, the more grasping we are, the more we become unyielding and unopen. In one of the monasteries I was in, there was a beautiful chant the monks recited. It was in Latin, and is much more beautiful in Latin, but the English translation is:
Come Holy Spirit
Bend what is rigid in us,
Melt what is frozen.
I really loved that chant, because it reminded me that the more rigid and frozen we are, the less yielding we are to God's Spirit, and God's work in our lives. The more we are unwilling to open ourselves up and let go, the more we try to be in control, the less we will simply relax into the Spirit of God.
Yielding and opening up to God has the element of allowing in it. As we let go, and yield ourselves to God and God's Spirit, that means we are allowing that to happen. We have an attitude of receptivity, rather than grasping. You can only receive something, if your hands were already full, by opening your hands up and letting go of what we are holding on to so tightly.
Yielding to God means allowing ourselves to take God as God presents God's self to us, and to take life as God presents life to us, rather than trying to control our experiences with God, and everything else about our lives. Yielding and allowing means embracing God as God is, not as we think God and life should go.
And then a huge part of this yielding and relaxing into God means trusting that God is at work in the letting go. If we are experiencing too much stress and strain in life, it may be a sign or signal that, when we should be yielding, it has degenerated into control.
In one of the silent retreats I was on, the monk instructed us to think about this question: "How do you practice with the Cross?" I thought, That's a really weird question. But of course I couldn't say that because it was a silent retreat.
But the more I thought about it, I realized it's an awesome question. The Cross is the prime instance of yielding, letting go, and total relaxing into God. It is the trusting and confident abandonment of self into God. Without the Cross, we lose touch with our understanding, capacity, and need to yield before God.
And in that yielding is an expression of the deepest love. Love is precisely a yielding--a letting go of a space we have filled with self, and once emptied, we can then invite and receive the beloved into that space. That is the kind of self-emptying, letting-go-love of Christ on the Cross.
One woman, whose young child had died, said, "My heart is broken, but it is broken open..." That's a beautiful expression of allowing God, when we have been hurt deeply, and our empty places are filled with pain, to break that space open, so the pain can go, and the love of God can fill that emptiness. To clutch the pain, to grasp for it, to hold it in, will never allow us to be open and yielding to the loving God who wants to come to us with compassion.
That Medina Grocery delivery truck and I became friends after a while. I learned the rhythm of totally releasing, and then easing into the grabbing hold of the power drive. But I had to release first, totally let go, before I could then reaccess the power. As I said, that's the hard part for us--releasing, yielding, and letting go. Releasing is the only first step in going forward, and going smoother.
Monday, July 22, 2013
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Two Important Questions
"Two Important Questions"
Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2
Genesis 1:1, 31-2:1
Psalm 24:1-2
The earth is in disaster mode. It isn’t because the earth itself is a disaster. It is because humans are making it so. Global warming, caused by our industrialization, driven by burning fossil fuels, is resulting in dramatic climate change, the destruction of the ozone, the near total melting of polar ice caps, and more, has pretty much put us past the tipping point.
My son, whose specialization is sustainability, who has a brain that sees the big picture of all the interrelatedness of what’s going on, who researches a huge number of reports from disparate sources, summed up our state of affairs in a conversation I had with him recently with the statement, “We’re screwed.”
From floating islands of garbage the size of Delaware out on the Atlantic Ocean, to deforestation in South America, to China and the United States gobbling up a huge majority of the worlds natural resources, to the internal combustion engine that propels all of our vehicles, to the coal fired plants that provide our electricity, and more, all adds up to a catastrophic mess.
Sustainability experts talk about the “tipping point”. It’s like when it snows, and the tiny, individual snowflakes begin to pile up on a branch. Thicker and thicker they accumulate. Until finally, one too many alights on the pile, and the branch breaks. That’s the tipping point. Too many negative effects pile up on the earth, until one too many begins the process of a broken world, and it’s too late to make it right. The world, like Humpty Dumpty is having a great fall, and all the kings men and all the kings horses can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
In the book, Limits To Growth, about the world over-population problem--that feeds into all the other problems I’ve listed so far--the authors use the illustration of a farm pond. The farm pond has lily pad plants growing on it. The lily pads double their coverage of the pond every day. So, on what day does the farmer need to clear the lily pads if she doesn’t want her pond totally covered? The answer is the day the pond is half covered. But if the farmer looks at her pond, without thinking about the doubling rate of growth, she will think, “Oh, half the pond is still clear; I have plenty of time.”
It’s called, the exponential growth of disaster. Or, as I have mentioned, the tipping point. We’ve gotten our selves and our world in an inescapable mess. The pond has already been half covered and we are in the next 24 hour period, so-to-speak, when the ecological disasters will fully take over our earth.
How did we get to this point? A large part of it, for me, has to do with the answer to a couple of questions. They are primary questions that arise out of the first verses of the Bible. They are questions that form the foundation of one of the most important themes in scripture. We can’t avoid these questions. These two questions are asked of us continually by scripture. The problem is, if we answer these questions wrong, everything else in our lives--including our relationship to the world--will end up in a mess. So the answers to these questions will determine the wellness or disaster of our personal and global life.
The first question is (drum roll, please): To whom does all this belong? “All this” includes you. To whom does the earth and all in it belong? It’s a question of ownership. Like I mentioned, if you answer this question wrong, everything else will go wrong. Not only ourselves, but the earth will suffer. And suffer it has, which lets you know humanity has been getting the answer to this question wrong for a long time.
The right answer is that humans do not own the world, or any part of it--especially ourselves. As the opening to Psalm 24 states (as in the rest of the Bible):
The earth and everything on it
belong to the Lord.
The world and its people
belong to God. (CEV)
There are a couple of words in both Hebrew and Greek for our word “everything” or “all.” There is a separate word if I was talking about all of you in this sanctuary. But there’s another word that is used as a universal all, meaning all people everywhere and at every time. That is the word used here--the universal “everything” that encompasses literally everything. Everything belongs to the Lord.
So, it comes down to what I call theological math. If everything in the world, including every person in the world, belongs to God, what else can belong to us? It’s pretty simple math. God has ownership over EVERYTHING. That leaves NOTHING for our ownership.
Ownership implies power and control. That’s why we like ownership. When you think about it, a great deal of our human laws hold up the concept and rights of ownership, especially land ownership. But in the law of the Bible, the 25th chapter of Leviticus, for example, underscores what God thinks about land ownership: “The land is mine; with me you are but sojourners and tenants” (vs. 23).
If there is nothing in this world that is ours, but everything is God’s, then that changes us from owners to tenants. We have been given everything we have, by God the owner, to take care of it for God and on God’s behalf. If we thought we were owners, then we also mistakenly thought we only have to answer to ourselves about what we think we own. But if we own nothing, and we are only caretakers for God, the real owner, we have to answer to God for what we do with what is Gods.
This correct, Biblical perspective changes everything in terms of how we interact with the world--that is not ours. Think of what that means. If God owns everything, and everything is God’s, how we treat everything is making a statement of what we think about God and God’s ownership. To abuse the world, to fill it with toxicity, to lay it waste, to trash it, to erase it’s protective abilities to sustain all life, is to say to God, “I don’t care a twit about your ownership of this planet, and therefore I don’t care a twit about you.”
The other danger is to claim ownership, which gives people the false sense of power and control over what they think they own, and therefore do as they please with it. That attitude sends the same message to God: “You, God, don’t factor in at all with what I’m doing and the decisions I’m making with what I think is mine.” You have no say, God, because I own it!”
So the destruction we have wrought upon nature and the world and each other and ourselves is not just bad stewardship. It isn’t just stupid economics. It is the most horrid of blasphemies. It is flinging God’s gifts, owned by God, into God’s face, as if they were of no worth beyond our own self-acclaimed power to destroy them. Dante and other Christian thinkers have been unanimous that “despising Nature and her goodness was a violence against God.”
The awful question then becomes, how can modern Christians have so solemnly folded their hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed? And further, not only how have we just sat by with folded hands, but how have our hands been complicit in claiming ownership, and by that claim, do what we want with God’s world?
All this leads to our second big question. Remember I said there were two important questions--it’s in the title of this message anyway. It’s a very similar question to the first. It is: Whose story are we really living? If we can yank ourselves from the mistaken notion that we own anything in this world, and give in to the truth that total ownership belongs to God, then what does that say about how we live? What does that say about the decisions we make about our lives? What does that say about the story we are living? Is it our story, or does even our story belong to God?
It becomes just as huge a question as the first (To whom does the world belong?) If that first question shocks us awake, then the second tandem question should do the same: What sort of life story would be the most responsible in a world that is totally God’s? What is, then, the life of a tenant and not an owner in this world?
I hope you’re beginning to get a glimpse of how radically different life would be, in answer to these two questions, not only in your individual life story, but in how we treat God’s world. Can you get a glimpse of how messed up we are, and how far we have strayed from anything God intended and designed?
How are we going to stand before God and give any kind of plausible answer to his two questions, when we, and all those others in the world are living by destroying God’s world, and who see the murder of Creation as an OK way to live? How can we even lift our heads to God’s gaze, as God looks at a world that God, at creation, called entirely good, but we have taken that goodness, by our own sinful grasping at ownership, in order to pollute it entirely and destroy it piecemeal?
The creation destroying machinery of the industrial economy has been instrumental in making legitimate this form of blasphemy before God and God’s good world. In it’s stance before the world, this creation destroying machinery, fueled by our misguided sense of ownership, and the lostness of our personal story, has treated neither God nor God’s world with the respect the true Owner deserves. There is no awe, reverence or cherishing in such machinery leveled at God and God’s world. There is only a sinful show of contempt.
I confess, I’m more cynical than I used to be, in relation to a few things. One of those is hope about the world. That is, my hope in people to turn around and quit raping God’s creation. On a macro level, it’s never going to happen. That is, unless God turns his world loose on humanity, wiping most of us away and starting again.
My hope still remains, though, on a micro level. On a personal level. I think we can make major turn-arounds in terms of our individual life story, to live in a way that honors God’s ownership of all we have; to live into a story that is God’s story and not our own; to live responsibly as stewards and tenants in God’s world, in the location we find ourselves. That would give honor to God, and end the life of blasphemy. It would give us the confidence to stand before God both now and in the end, and be able to say: “Here is what you gave me, Lord; I give it all back to you cared for, cherished, and whole.”
Monday, July 8, 2013
The Laughing Donkey
"The Laughing Donkey"
Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126
I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends. Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God. It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge. We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us. We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.
So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it. If we can do that. If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.
Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent." They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm: that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.
From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up. They are ascending. The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built. The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem. They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120. As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.
Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors. The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in. It was all quite dramatic.
Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement. The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God. These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.
William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote: "They are not monuments but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.' While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"
Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause. At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade. They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.
A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California. And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.
We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move. Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college. What was I going to do? Where was I going? What shape would the ministry take for me in the future? I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.
So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that. I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose. Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future. To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice. It was a Psalm 126 time for me.
In just those three days I was able to do some assessment. I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places. I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.
And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time. To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace. All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been. I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my journey.
Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details. For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm. This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.
Verses 1-3 are in the past tense: God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang. This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm. In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians. Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Past and future of a culture seemed gone. Revenge seemed the only response.
But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves. The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home. God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.
So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction. Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through. And it is to God that the processing people give the glory: "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."
At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense: "we are glad." Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.
Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion. The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present. Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.
Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense: will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing. The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do. If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future? NO! As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."
The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful. Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel. A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape. I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures: 129 degrees! Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there. But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring. Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley. People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.
That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.
The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming. It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation. All the farmers I know plant in hope. Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different. The hope of a good harvest.
The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro. With a sense of aimlessness. Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway. Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.
Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future: from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.
The future of God is filled with laughter. Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us. Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."
God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace. God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried. When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair. God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be. God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.
We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter. We never know exactly where to look. In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find." I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives. If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.
One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."
The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress. She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.
Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes. They are standing in perfect choral formation.
In the background are the men, solemn and removed. Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance. Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.
The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like. The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?
All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled. That is, all except one. In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey. With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.
In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey. It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.
It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God. Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.
If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.
Genesis 21:5-7
Psalm 126
I wanted to put last week's sermon and this week's sermon together as bookends. Last Sunday's sermon was about revenge, and turning our desire for sweet vengeance over to God. It's an immensely difficult task to let God handle our lip smacking revenge. We pray for vengeance, but then we want God to allow us to be the answer to our own prayer, and exact those just desserts upon those who have hurt us, humiliated us, or taken advantage of us. We're even unsure we want to turn our retribution over to the "justice system" and the courts, lest they not do what really needs to be done--in our eyes.
So, today, we will look at another Psalm that is the result of doing what God wants in terms of our vengeance--letting God handle it. If we can do that. If we can, with trembling hands and bitten lips, turn our ideas and desire for retribution over to God, Psalm 126 is what will happen--what God will do.
Psalm 126 is in a cluster of Psalms, called "songs of ascent." They range from Psalm 120 to Psalm 134. Each of these Psalms is a processional Psalm: that is, it's sung or shouted as a group of people walk along in parade fashion.
From the title, "song of ascent" you can figure out that the people are parading up. They are ascending. The place the people are ascending to is the temple on the hill upon which Jerusalem is built. The people, on high festival days, would start at the bottom of the hill, down near the garbage dump of Jerusalem. They would start marching up the hill, singing or shouting Psalm 120. As they ascended, they would take each of these 15 Psalms in order, and sing them as they paraded up to the temple.
Once they arrived at the Temple, the doors would be closed, and the High Priest would be standing in front of the doors. The people would sing Psalm 134, and the Priest would swing the doors open and the people would process in. It was all quite dramatic.
Eugene Peterson calls these Psalms, "Pilgrim Psalms," because they are about movement. The Psalms of Ascent are about people going someplace--towards God, towards the presence of God. These Psalms are about a faith journey, enacted by a long processional, uphill, with singing, all by a large group of fellow worshippers.
William Faulkner, in writing about these Psalms, wrote: "They are not monuments but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far.' While a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.'"
Psalm 126, the Psalm we're looking at this morning, served as a pause. At this point the people would have been almost half way up the hill in their parade. They would be able to see from whence they came, and how far they yet had to go.
A number of years ago, I went to something called, "Pause For A Purpose," out at Azusa Pacific University in Southern California. It was the year before Ryan, Kristin and I ended up moving out to California. And Azusa Pacific ended up being where Kristin went to College.
We were living in Nebraska at the time, and The Lord was preparing the three of us for a move. Ryan and Kristin were going to be going out to California to college. What was I going to do? Where was I going? What shape would the ministry take for me in the future? I had a desire to do something entirely different than what I had been doing.
So, during this three day conference, "Pause For A Purpose," I did just that. I removed myself from my ministry in Hickman, Nebraska and paused for a purpose. Just a short pause, in the company of many other Christians who were doing the same thing, simply stopping from their everyday life, and taking some intentional time to reflect about past, present and future. To stop, if just for a short time, to still all other voices, and listen intently for God's voice. It was a Psalm 126 time for me.
In just those three days I was able to do some assessment. I pondered the scenery of where I've come from--the places where I've been, and what happened in each of those places. I was able to gain perspective of how far I've actually come.
And in that Pause For A Purpose, I was able to celebrate in worship with other believers, not my own progress, but what God has done to get us all where we were at the time. To look back, from this present moment, and see God--celebrate God's acts of salvation and grace. All of that looking back, gave fresh energy to where I felt God was leading, based on where I had been. I returned to Nebraska, ready to make new decisions, and move forward, simply because of my Psalm 126 pause in the middle of my journey.
Much of the message of Psalm 126 is in the details. For example, pay attention to the verb tenses in this Psalm. This Psalm is not just one of many creating movement, but there is movement within the Psalm itself from past to present to future.
Verses 1-3 are in the past tense: God returned Zion's exiles...we laughed, we sang. This is a Psalm that is the flip side of last weeks Psalm. In last weeks Psalm, we heard the depression and anger of a people who had been taken away as captives to the Babylonians. Children and old people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Past and future of a culture seemed gone. Revenge seemed the only response.
But 70 years later, Cyrus the Persian, with his steam-rolling armies flattened the Babylonians. Cyrus issued an edict freeing all Babylonian slaves. The Israelites who were still alive, and still remembered Jerusalem, were allowed to go home. God had indeed, through Cyrus and his armies, inflicted the revenge the Israelites prayed for through last weeks Psalm.
So Psalm 126, sung during the processional up the hill, is a symbolic looking back at a terrible time in a history of a people, when they experienced total disruption and destruction. Trusting God with their desire for retribution, God came through. And it is to God that the processing people give the glory: "God returned the exiles," "the LORD has done great things for us."
At the end of verse three, the tense shifts to the present tense: "we are glad." Looking back during this pause, halfway up the hill, remembering the past, makes the people feel gladness right now.
Present joy and laughter can't be separated from a past full of exile, drought, tears, even Crucifixion. The present tense, the present moment, acts as a scenic overlook, that creates awe and wonder and most of all joy, in the present. Joy and laughter lives in the present, but that present is bordered on one side by memory of God's saving action in the past; and on the other by hope in the future--God's future, just as the past had been God's past.
Then verses 4-6 make the shift into the future tense: will shout hurrahs...will come home with laughing. The midway pause has served to create anticipation for what God is going to do. If this is the way God acted in the past, do we have any reason to believe the Lord will change his way of acting in the future? NO! As in the Message translation, the future tense is signaled by laughing phrase, "And now, GOD, do it again!..."
The metaphors used to describe God's future are powerful. Rain and streams in the Negeb, a southern desert in Israel. A sudden, unexpected outpouring of rain that is able to transform the landscape. I read this week that Death Valley has had record high temperatures: 129 degrees! Idiots are driving out there to get their picture by the large digital thermometer they have there. But I remember a few years ago when record rainfalls were recorded in Death Valley in the Spring. Wildflowers that hadn't bloomed in decades were like explosions of color on the hillsides and floor of Death Valley. People were traveling from all over the world to witness this exceptionally rare event.
That's the powerful image Psalm 126 is picturing about God's future activity--God's grace and life, suddenly, beautifully, powerfully transforming the landscape of beaten down people's lives.
The other image of God's future in Psalm 126, is that of farming. It seems to me, now that I've lived around farming operations most of my ministry, that cropland is a place of intention and expectation. All the farmers I know plant in hope. Whether they are planting into dust or mud, whether they are planting after a harvest of tears, either from hail or drought, even though they may plant with tears in their eyes, there is still the expectation that this year will be different. The hope of a good harvest.
The Hebrew term that is translated, "he that goes forth weeping" literally means to go to-and-fro. With a sense of aimlessness. Of not knowing exactly what you're doing, or why you're doing it, but you're doing it anyway. Even then, says Psalm 126, we plant in God's future, under God's sight, in God's story.
Notice the emphasis on the swing of the people's disposition in God's future: from sowing in tears to reaping with joy; from weeping to laughing; from being heavily laden to singing for joy while carrying a different kind of load in God's abundant harvest.
The future of God is filled with laughter. Frederick Buechner wrote a new beatitude that has to do with living into God future, of recognizing and laughing about the power of God to break the chains that imprison us. Buechner wrote, "Blessed are they who get the joke."
God's hilarity delights in life, and freedom, and grace. God delights in making us laugh about life, even after we've just cried. When we least expect it, especially in the face of difficulty and despair. God's hilarity confronts and confounds the powers that be. God's hilarious grace is God's favorite modus operendi for breaking through the barriers that have either been constructed around us, or that we ourselves construct around ourselves.
We never know, either, when God's hilarious future will infect us with laughter. We never know exactly where to look. In a Bill Moyers TV special called, "The Urge To Create," Moyers was told by one of the artists, "If you know what you're looking for, you will never see what you do not expect to find." I think it's a great statement of how God's laughter comes in our dry and desperate lives. If we "know" how God will appear in our lives, we will never see or experience God in unexpected times, places, or guises.
One of the best illustrations of this is a painting by Renaissance painter, Piero della Francesca, titled, "The Nativity."
The infant Jesus is laying on the ground, cushioned by a part of Mary's long dress. She is dressed elegantly, with every hair in place as if she's come not just from childbirth, but the beauty salon.
Five angels dressed in Renaissance garb are standing over the babe, carefully grouped together, singing quietly accompanied by lutes. They are standing in perfect choral formation.
In the background are the men, solemn and removed. Joseph is seated, turned away from Mary and the Christ-child, staring off in the distance. Two shepherds are at his side, one with fingers pointing to heaven, just in case we don't quite get what's going on here.
The terrain is bleak and austere--desert-like. The little shelter looks like it has holes in the roof, and why are Mary and the newborn baby Jesus outside of the shelter, exposed to the elements?
All the elements in the painting are tightly controlled. That is, all except one. In the very back, peeking out over the shoulder of an angel is a donkey. With its head thrown back, mouth wide open, teeth gleaming, it brays in laughter, freely, gloriously.
In all this order, Piero, has for me, painted a great picture of the unexpected incursion of the laughter of God, depicted by the laughing donkey. It is the hilarity of God, that pushes its way into our seemingly mundane, orderly (or disordered) and serious lives.
It is only at the points in our lives when we pause, and take a look around us, how everything seems to be so serious, so solemn, trying to bring order out of disorder, looking back at an aimless, wandering past, and looking forward to an unknown future, only in those times of pause--a Psalm 126 time--do we see the laughing donkey of God. Over and over, God breaks through with a glorious bray and a grace-filled laugh.
If we can pause, catch a glimpse of and the sound of God's laughter, and most importantly, join God in that belly laugh, we will be able to move into the future--God's future--much lighter for the remainder of the journey, until we meet The Lord of laughter at last.
Monday, July 1, 2013
Don't Get Even; Get Mad
"Don't Get Even; Get Mad!"
Psalm 137; Matthew 5:38-39
Ten mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot dead by a new faction of the Taliban. The climbers were rounded up by this militant group, blindfolded, forced to kneel and then were all shot in the head. The message the Taliban gunmen was the foreign climbers were killed in revenge for drone attacks on Pakistan. Should there be revenge for their revenge?
Edward Snowden, a contract worker for the National Security Agency is charged with disclosing secret U.S. surveillance programs. Is he a hero for freedom of information and government spying, or a goat who betrayed his government? Should there be revenge against not only him, but China, and Russia for shielding him? In one article this week it said the US government would take “a restrained approach to any retribution” against China and Russia.
Two brothers let off bombs at the Boston Marathon. Marc Fucarile was one of the victims injured in the bombings. His right leg had to be amputated, and his left leg was badly damaged. It’s not clear if he’ll have use of it. The full consequences of his injuries may not be known for years. What should be done to the bombers? What kind of revenge?
And all the shootings: Gabby Giffords in Arizona; the Newtown School in Connecticut; the theatre shooting in Colorado; the Santa Monica shooting in California, and on and on. What kind of revenge should be had on such heartless killers?
And another article this week about two teenaged girls, who took a third girl out to a remote location and stabbed her to death. The three girls were close friends since they were eight years old. The two girls counted down, “3-2-1” then took out their knives and brutally stabbed their friend to death and left her body under a pile of branches. No one knows why, and her parents are understandably in shock and horror. What form should their revenge take?
Heinrich Hein once wrote:
My nature is the most peaceful in the world. All I ask is a simple cottage, a decent bed, good food, some flowers in front of my window, and a few trees in my yard. Then if God wanted to make me wholly happy, he would let me enjoy the spectacle of six or seven of my enemies dangling from those trees. I would forgive them all wrongs they have done me--forgive them from the bottom of my heart, for we must forgive our enemies. But not until they are hanged!
Or as Calvin, in the “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon speaks for most of us:
That’s what we want. Incineration. Swift and painful justice. Or a posse, a tall tree with sturdy branches and a new rope.
Our two major reactions to these kinds of events are horror and revenge. It’s the second of these reactions--revenge--that I’d have us think about this morning.
Psalm 137 is a perfect piece of poetry reflecting the deep sadness and the unremorseful desire for revenge. The situation behind the Psalm is this: The Israelites had been enslaved by the Babylonian armies. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed--literally leveled. Only the strong, able-bodied adults were allowed to live, being marched off to serve as slaves in Babylon. Children, babies, old people were massacred.
As a form of totally insensitive mockery, that only an arrogant victor could muster, the Babylonian captors asked the slaves to sing songs from their homeland. But how could the Israelites sing to captors who killed their children and their grandparents? All they could think of was revenge--to see the Babylonian’s babies smashed against the walls and rocks, as was done to their own.
In one science fiction movie, a mad scientist figured out how to make a serum that would bring inanimate objects to life. He tried his serum out on a statue in the town park of a great general. Sure enough, the statue gave a quiver and the general, creaking a bit at the joints, climbed down from the pedestal. The scientist was overjoyed. “I have given you life,” he exulted. “Now tell me, what is the first thing you are going to do?”
“That’s easy,” rasped the General. “I’m going to find a gun and shoot as many pigeons as I can.”
When we get dumped on by someone, the natural reaction is to figure out a way to dump back.
That’s why I like the Psalms. As Bernhard Anderson wrote in his commentary on the Psalms, “The laments of the Psalter are raised from the depths of human misery from which the emotions of bitterness and hatred often well up” (page 89).
The psalmists--indeed all of scripture--takes evil seriously, as well as the emotions evil evokes. Enemies are taken to be more than human. Such enemies are seen as representatives of all evil forces that threaten life and God’s good order. Such enemies are so powerful, and we become the victims of the structures of their power, that we, like the psalmist, end up feeling helpless a lot of the time. We rage with vengeance because something we love, or about our love, has been hurt or destroyed.
One of the reasons we feel helpless is because of the randomness of such brutal power. Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” We are surprised, in a very pleasant way when we are the recipient of some unexpected kindness.
And we are horrified when we are the recipient of some unexpected abuse or ugliness. It creates massive insecurity. We never look at the world quite the same. We will always be looking over our shoulder, wondering.
That’s the power of the enemy and of evil acts done by demented people: its randomness. All it takes is one such person to walk into a political gathering, a movie theatre, an elementary school, and all our sense of security goes out the window. Our political leaders try to reassure us, but their words sound hollow and are only received with skepticism. We are told that we are safe. But are we?
The sobering truth is, no one can be proactive against such random evil. We can only react after it has had its day. The majority reaction is revenge. “We got Osama bin Laden!” We got revenge. But then mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot in the head. Car bombings have increased in Iraq--1000 people were killed just last month alone. Where does it end?
A man noticed the following classified ad in the newspaper: “For sale. Mercedes Benz 450 SL. $50.” Although he was certain it must have been a typo or misprint, the man decided to answer the ad. The seller was a middle-aged woman. She showed the car to the man. It was a beauty: very low mileage, mint condition.
The man said, “It’s a beautiful car, and I would like to buy it, but the price--$50? What’s the catch?”
The woman answered, “There’s no catch. You see, my husband is in the process of leaving me for another, younger woman. He doesn’t know I know. They are on a trip together now. Three days ago, I received an email from him saying, ‘Sell the car and send the money.’ So I am.”
Revenge can be so sweet.
We even have scripture to back up our revenge. It’s called the “law of retaliation.” It’s in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy: “Don’t feel sorry for the person: It’s life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deuteronomy 19:21)
But in Psalm 137, the psalmist seems unwilling to exact the revenge themselves, but hopes someone else will do it.
And you, Babylonians--ravagers!
A reward to whoever gets back at you
for all you’ve done to us;
Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies
and smashes their heads on the rocks!
By inference, it seems she wants someone else (God?) to carry out the vengeance for her. She concedes her wish for retaliation to the all-powerful hand of God. She unashamedly expresses her vengeance honestly before God, and then entrusts her precious hatred to God, hoping that God will take it seriously.
But we wonder. Can God be trusted with our precious hatreds and desires for revenge? Deep down, we have an understanding of what God will do with our desire for retaliation. God will take our wishes seriously enough to recast them, change them. Maybe even change us. The law of retaliation makes us smile with a smile of contented justice. Makes us smack our lips at the taste of revenge. But we know God. And we know God speaks other words. God speaks of justice. Justice is vengeance that has learned wisdom from God.
Yes, God speaks other words. Words like Leviticus 19:18, “Don’t seek revenge or carry a grudge against any of your people. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.”
And Paul to the Romans, “Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. ‘I’ll do the judging,’ says God. ‘I’ll take charge of it.’” (Romans 12:19)
And, of course, Jesus, as was read earlier, “Here’s another old saying that deserves a second look: ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ Is that going to get us anywhere? Here’s what I propose: ‘Don’t hit back at all.’ If someone strikes you, stand there and take it.” (Matthew 5:38-39)
This difficult teaching of Jesus is meant precisely for the moments in which the urge to avenge is strongest. We are getting slapped around. We are being disrespected. Humiliated. Taken advantage of. Respect in our world is communicated through power. Weakness or passivity--just standing there and taking it--invites others to take cruel advantage. It is precisely in those moments of cruelty that Jesus is asking us to stand fast, but not hit back. And he doesn’t ask us to do anything that he himself didn’t end up doing in his trial, whipping and Crucifixion.
The psalmist behind Psalm 137 lets us know that we are certainly allowed to plead for divine vengeance. But we aren’t supposed to be the answers to our own prayers. We are allowed, as this Psalm is an example, the “speech of assault.” We are allowed to get mad. To yell it. Scream our desire for revenge. Even sing it. Certainly vent it. Bring it to speech. It’s OK. Because speech isn’t fatal. Getting even is what turns brutal and lethal.
With God, all subjects and all emotions, even the darkest ones, are legitimate material for conversation. Putting up a pretty front, in the face of our anger and feelings of retribution, may not yield much with God. Let God know exactly what’s going on in your head and heart.
We all operate out of the sense, when wrong or hurt has been done, that the moral order is out of balance, so we think we need to make it right again. Until the offender has gotten his/her just desserts, the moral universe will be askew. So we justify to ourselves that vengeance is not the end in itself. Something larger is going on: the maintenance of the moral coherence in creation is at stake! And we think we get to be the ones who restore that coherence.
But one of the themes of the Bible is that vengeance doesn’t get to be human business. We don’t see the big picture. Only God does. And it is into God’s hands that we are to place our words and feelings of revenge, and let God handle it from there. Can we trust God with something as precious as our need to strike back at those who hurt us, humiliate us, offend us?
That’s where the Psalmist takes her anger--to God in prayer through the poetry of this Psalm. Prayer is the most powerful place available, given us by God, for the transformation of our vengeance. Because the transformation of our vengeance has to start with our heart--not the aggressors actions. The only way we are allowed by God to enact revenge is through prayer--talking it through with God. And then, out of our prayerful conversations with God, reaching out not to strike back, but to serve in acts of hospitality and concern for the abusive one.
That’s the tough part. Can you do that?
Psalm 137; Matthew 5:38-39
Ten mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot dead by a new faction of the Taliban. The climbers were rounded up by this militant group, blindfolded, forced to kneel and then were all shot in the head. The message the Taliban gunmen was the foreign climbers were killed in revenge for drone attacks on Pakistan. Should there be revenge for their revenge?
Edward Snowden, a contract worker for the National Security Agency is charged with disclosing secret U.S. surveillance programs. Is he a hero for freedom of information and government spying, or a goat who betrayed his government? Should there be revenge against not only him, but China, and Russia for shielding him? In one article this week it said the US government would take “a restrained approach to any retribution” against China and Russia.
Two brothers let off bombs at the Boston Marathon. Marc Fucarile was one of the victims injured in the bombings. His right leg had to be amputated, and his left leg was badly damaged. It’s not clear if he’ll have use of it. The full consequences of his injuries may not be known for years. What should be done to the bombers? What kind of revenge?
And all the shootings: Gabby Giffords in Arizona; the Newtown School in Connecticut; the theatre shooting in Colorado; the Santa Monica shooting in California, and on and on. What kind of revenge should be had on such heartless killers?
And another article this week about two teenaged girls, who took a third girl out to a remote location and stabbed her to death. The three girls were close friends since they were eight years old. The two girls counted down, “3-2-1” then took out their knives and brutally stabbed their friend to death and left her body under a pile of branches. No one knows why, and her parents are understandably in shock and horror. What form should their revenge take?
Heinrich Hein once wrote:
My nature is the most peaceful in the world. All I ask is a simple cottage, a decent bed, good food, some flowers in front of my window, and a few trees in my yard. Then if God wanted to make me wholly happy, he would let me enjoy the spectacle of six or seven of my enemies dangling from those trees. I would forgive them all wrongs they have done me--forgive them from the bottom of my heart, for we must forgive our enemies. But not until they are hanged!
Or as Calvin, in the “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon speaks for most of us:
That’s what we want. Incineration. Swift and painful justice. Or a posse, a tall tree with sturdy branches and a new rope.
Our two major reactions to these kinds of events are horror and revenge. It’s the second of these reactions--revenge--that I’d have us think about this morning.
Psalm 137 is a perfect piece of poetry reflecting the deep sadness and the unremorseful desire for revenge. The situation behind the Psalm is this: The Israelites had been enslaved by the Babylonian armies. Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed--literally leveled. Only the strong, able-bodied adults were allowed to live, being marched off to serve as slaves in Babylon. Children, babies, old people were massacred.
As a form of totally insensitive mockery, that only an arrogant victor could muster, the Babylonian captors asked the slaves to sing songs from their homeland. But how could the Israelites sing to captors who killed their children and their grandparents? All they could think of was revenge--to see the Babylonian’s babies smashed against the walls and rocks, as was done to their own.
In one science fiction movie, a mad scientist figured out how to make a serum that would bring inanimate objects to life. He tried his serum out on a statue in the town park of a great general. Sure enough, the statue gave a quiver and the general, creaking a bit at the joints, climbed down from the pedestal. The scientist was overjoyed. “I have given you life,” he exulted. “Now tell me, what is the first thing you are going to do?”
“That’s easy,” rasped the General. “I’m going to find a gun and shoot as many pigeons as I can.”
When we get dumped on by someone, the natural reaction is to figure out a way to dump back.
That’s why I like the Psalms. As Bernhard Anderson wrote in his commentary on the Psalms, “The laments of the Psalter are raised from the depths of human misery from which the emotions of bitterness and hatred often well up” (page 89).
The psalmists--indeed all of scripture--takes evil seriously, as well as the emotions evil evokes. Enemies are taken to be more than human. Such enemies are seen as representatives of all evil forces that threaten life and God’s good order. Such enemies are so powerful, and we become the victims of the structures of their power, that we, like the psalmist, end up feeling helpless a lot of the time. We rage with vengeance because something we love, or about our love, has been hurt or destroyed.
One of the reasons we feel helpless is because of the randomness of such brutal power. Maybe you’ve seen the bumper sticker, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” We are surprised, in a very pleasant way when we are the recipient of some unexpected kindness.
And we are horrified when we are the recipient of some unexpected abuse or ugliness. It creates massive insecurity. We never look at the world quite the same. We will always be looking over our shoulder, wondering.
That’s the power of the enemy and of evil acts done by demented people: its randomness. All it takes is one such person to walk into a political gathering, a movie theatre, an elementary school, and all our sense of security goes out the window. Our political leaders try to reassure us, but their words sound hollow and are only received with skepticism. We are told that we are safe. But are we?
The sobering truth is, no one can be proactive against such random evil. We can only react after it has had its day. The majority reaction is revenge. “We got Osama bin Laden!” We got revenge. But then mountain climbers in Pakistan are shot in the head. Car bombings have increased in Iraq--1000 people were killed just last month alone. Where does it end?
A man noticed the following classified ad in the newspaper: “For sale. Mercedes Benz 450 SL. $50.” Although he was certain it must have been a typo or misprint, the man decided to answer the ad. The seller was a middle-aged woman. She showed the car to the man. It was a beauty: very low mileage, mint condition.
The man said, “It’s a beautiful car, and I would like to buy it, but the price--$50? What’s the catch?”
The woman answered, “There’s no catch. You see, my husband is in the process of leaving me for another, younger woman. He doesn’t know I know. They are on a trip together now. Three days ago, I received an email from him saying, ‘Sell the car and send the money.’ So I am.”
Revenge can be so sweet.
We even have scripture to back up our revenge. It’s called the “law of retaliation.” It’s in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy: “Don’t feel sorry for the person: It’s life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deuteronomy 19:21)
But in Psalm 137, the psalmist seems unwilling to exact the revenge themselves, but hopes someone else will do it.
And you, Babylonians--ravagers!
A reward to whoever gets back at you
for all you’ve done to us;
Yes, a reward to the one who grabs your babies
and smashes their heads on the rocks!
By inference, it seems she wants someone else (God?) to carry out the vengeance for her. She concedes her wish for retaliation to the all-powerful hand of God. She unashamedly expresses her vengeance honestly before God, and then entrusts her precious hatred to God, hoping that God will take it seriously.
But we wonder. Can God be trusted with our precious hatreds and desires for revenge? Deep down, we have an understanding of what God will do with our desire for retaliation. God will take our wishes seriously enough to recast them, change them. Maybe even change us. The law of retaliation makes us smile with a smile of contented justice. Makes us smack our lips at the taste of revenge. But we know God. And we know God speaks other words. God speaks of justice. Justice is vengeance that has learned wisdom from God.
Yes, God speaks other words. Words like Leviticus 19:18, “Don’t seek revenge or carry a grudge against any of your people. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.”
And Paul to the Romans, “Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. ‘I’ll do the judging,’ says God. ‘I’ll take charge of it.’” (Romans 12:19)
And, of course, Jesus, as was read earlier, “Here’s another old saying that deserves a second look: ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ Is that going to get us anywhere? Here’s what I propose: ‘Don’t hit back at all.’ If someone strikes you, stand there and take it.” (Matthew 5:38-39)
This difficult teaching of Jesus is meant precisely for the moments in which the urge to avenge is strongest. We are getting slapped around. We are being disrespected. Humiliated. Taken advantage of. Respect in our world is communicated through power. Weakness or passivity--just standing there and taking it--invites others to take cruel advantage. It is precisely in those moments of cruelty that Jesus is asking us to stand fast, but not hit back. And he doesn’t ask us to do anything that he himself didn’t end up doing in his trial, whipping and Crucifixion.
The psalmist behind Psalm 137 lets us know that we are certainly allowed to plead for divine vengeance. But we aren’t supposed to be the answers to our own prayers. We are allowed, as this Psalm is an example, the “speech of assault.” We are allowed to get mad. To yell it. Scream our desire for revenge. Even sing it. Certainly vent it. Bring it to speech. It’s OK. Because speech isn’t fatal. Getting even is what turns brutal and lethal.
With God, all subjects and all emotions, even the darkest ones, are legitimate material for conversation. Putting up a pretty front, in the face of our anger and feelings of retribution, may not yield much with God. Let God know exactly what’s going on in your head and heart.
We all operate out of the sense, when wrong or hurt has been done, that the moral order is out of balance, so we think we need to make it right again. Until the offender has gotten his/her just desserts, the moral universe will be askew. So we justify to ourselves that vengeance is not the end in itself. Something larger is going on: the maintenance of the moral coherence in creation is at stake! And we think we get to be the ones who restore that coherence.
But one of the themes of the Bible is that vengeance doesn’t get to be human business. We don’t see the big picture. Only God does. And it is into God’s hands that we are to place our words and feelings of revenge, and let God handle it from there. Can we trust God with something as precious as our need to strike back at those who hurt us, humiliate us, offend us?
That’s where the Psalmist takes her anger--to God in prayer through the poetry of this Psalm. Prayer is the most powerful place available, given us by God, for the transformation of our vengeance. Because the transformation of our vengeance has to start with our heart--not the aggressors actions. The only way we are allowed by God to enact revenge is through prayer--talking it through with God. And then, out of our prayerful conversations with God, reaching out not to strike back, but to serve in acts of hospitality and concern for the abusive one.
That’s the tough part. Can you do that?
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