From the Abyss (Psalm 130, June 24, 2012)

From the Abyss

4th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 130
June 24, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Many of the Psalms are poems of grandeur and beauty. They inhabit (or create) worlds of wonder and joy. When we read them they summon us to praise God for who God is, especially who God is revealed to be in the way the world is made. In Psalm 8 it was the objects in the night sky and even our own bodies that were the reason for our praise. In Psalm 119 it was the moral order of the universe that rewards the wise, the good, and the just and frustrates the foolish, the wicked and the unjust.

These two psalms and others like them reflect or fashion a world in which everything is orderly. In that world everything unfolds just as it should. Right effort is always rewarded. Wrong effort is always punished. This may not happen immediately. It may take some time for the accounts to be squared. The righteous may suffer for a while. The wicked may get away with it for a while. But sooner or later everyone will get what is coming to them. It will all come out in the end. What goes around comes around. Or, to put it in a single Sanskrit word: ''karma.''

The psalmists who wrote these psalms and the people whose lives were reflected in them lived in a stable, safe and predictable world. Lucky for them. One of their number put it this way:       
     I have been young, and now am old,           
          yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken          
          or their children begging bread.¹

And I always think to myself (and sometimes out loud), "You don't get out much, do you?"

There are certainly times when we do experience the world as stable, safe and predictable. But anyone who "[has] been young, and now [is] old," who "[has] not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread" has lived a sheltered life. They have lived a sheltered life and they have been very, very lucky. There is no reason why they should not thank God for their good fortune. There is no reason why ''we'' should not thank God for our good fortune.

But for most people some of time and for many people most of the time, life is not like this. For most people some of the time and for many people most of the time, the world that we live in is unstable, dangerous and arbitrary. There are people--invisible to the psalmist who has never "seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread"--who live, as Howard Thurman writes, "with their backs against the wall."²

Every society has its marginalized. It was true in the psalmist's day and it's true in ours. Some of these were born marginalized: the teenage boy growing up on the north side of Omaha who can't get to school because getting to the bus stop requires him to cross the territory of a gang that has threatened to kill him if he doesn't join them; or the little girl being sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend who falls through the cracks because a social worker missed the signs that will be clear in hindsight but who in the present is overwhelmed by a caseload that is just too big because politicians can only hear the drumbeat of "cut taxes" in their heads.

Some of the folks who have their backs to the wall become marginalized along the way: the sixty year old factory worker whose job was sent to China and who has been looking for work for going on two years and is a long way from collecting Social Security but virtually unhireable; or the twenty-five year old college graduate with a mountain of student debt who wanted her life to matter and had planned to teach special needs children but is now working part-time as a barrista in the local coffee shop.

In the midst of a world that might be stable, safe and predictable there is an abyss that people fall into. It's not just the permanently marginalized who find themselves there.

Sometimes it's just ordinary folks like you and me who fall into the abyss, people whose sights aren't set too high, people whose goal in life is to work hard doing something we can at least take some pride in if not always enjoy, to raise a family, to see our children grown and our grandchildren growing, to enjoy our retirement years. Like the people driving down a street in Duluth this week who suddenly found themselves at the bottom of a sink hole, we are living life according to the rules as we understood them, the rules that should gain us the rewards we have earned. And suddenly there is an abyss, a pit, a deep hole, that swallows us up.

Maybe there will come a time when we can look back on it and see it as a glitch, but that time is not now. A pink slip, a call from the doctor's office, a housecall from a military chaplain and we land at the bottom of a very dark and very deep hole.

Being the folks that we are we have a number of ways to respond. Some of us will assume that there is a rational way to deal with our situation and will set about charting a rational course out of it. This usually involves the making of lists. When that doesn’t work we will get depressed. We’ll feel inadequate to deal with the crisis and we’ll seek advice. We’ll note that we aren’t really coping very well and we’ll search out a therapist. We may apply to the appropriate governmental agency for assistance. Let me just say that, depending on what sort of abyss it happens to be (and the psalmist is not very specific), these are all appropriate ways of responding to finding ourselves in the abyss. For us, you may note, there are two “things” involved in our situation: there is us and there is the problem.

When things go wrong for us modern folks there are only two places to look for the problem and the solution. Either something is wrong with us. Or something is wrong with the world. For the psalmist it is always about more than that: There is us. There is the world. There is the God of the covenant. For the psalmist it’s always about the covenant. It’s always about the relationship between the psalmist and the God of the covenant. The heart of the covenant is that God has called the covenant people into a relationship with each other and with God so that a genuinely human life in community becomes possible, a life that goes under the label shalôm, a life of just and peaceful abundance. God provides the conditions under which shalôm can happen. The covenant people orient themselves to God, the universe, and each other so that they don’t put any obstacles in the way of that shalôm.

When shalôm is breached—when there is strife, violence, oppression, or scarcity—the psalmist knows that this breach is rooted in a rupture of the covenant. Most of the time, the psalmist looks at the situation, looks at her own behavior, and sees that the disaster seems disproportionate to whatever covenant failure she might be guilty of. Therefore, she concludes, while there may have been lapses on her part, the basic problem lies with the God of the covenant. God hasn’t been paying attention. God has failed to provide, failed to defend, failed to protect. So God must be recalled to the terms of the covenant.

Most of the psalms that scholars call laments are psalms in which the psalmist summons God to remember the covenant. But not all of them. Sometimes, after all, the fault is ours. Not often, but sometimes. When it is our fault, then a special kind of lament is called for: the prayer of confession. These are pretty rare, actually. Out of the eighty or so laments in the Psalms, only seven are what we call penitential psalms, prayers in which the psalmist names the situation, owns that the responsibility is hers, and summons God to respond with forgiveness.

We don’t know what difficulty the psalmist faced, we only know that out of that difficulty the psalmist cries out to the God of the covenant.

We don’t know what the psalmist's covenant failure might have been. We only know that the psalmist knows that the covenant is in trouble because of her actions. She doesn’t name them. But she knows what they are. And God knows what they are. And so God must forgive them.

God must forgive them because life without forgiveness is not possible: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord who could stand?” If God does not choose to forgive, well, God is free to do that, I suppose. But if that is God’s choice then it will mean that God has no covenant people at all, because there is no one who can live in the covenant without occasional failure. God can have a people who stumble or no people at all; that is the choice that the psalmist lays before God.

Having made her case, the psalmist waits for God’s response:
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in [God's] word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
Notice how this psalm has moved. The psalmist began by locating herself in an abyss, an abyss that is essentially one of her own making. She called out to God. She owned that her problem is one of her own moral failure and called upon God to forgive. Now she waits for God’s response. She has created the rupture in the covenant, she admits that and owns the responsibility for it. But only God can act to restore the covenant relationship. Until God does that she must wait the agonizing last hours of the night watch until the sun dawns on a new day. That sun will not rise for her until God responds to her cry and acts.

I note finally that this psalm was used as a processional psalm as the covenant community, now the worshiping community, makes its way up to the top of Mount Zion to God’s temple in Jerusalem. The very personal matters of the psalmist's covenant failure and the abyss into which that failure threw her are not in any way private. They are a matter with implications for the whole community. Her experience is shared as testimony: the God of the covenant can be trusted. The peaceful and just abundance of the covenant is possible because God is willing to restore the covenant even when we break it.

What would it be like to live in the strange and wonderful world of this psalm? The things that we think are important about religion would recede into the background and other things would become important, things that, well, are more than a little scary. In the world of this psalm beliefs about God are no longer what matters. Being nice is not what matters. Being “good people” is not what matters. Certainly being people who show by our comfortable lives how much God must love us doesn’t matter.

What matters is living our lives, facing our own abysses, from within our relationship with the God of the covenant. What matters in this psalm is relational honesty between us and God. What matters is our willingness to own the responsibility for our own covenant failures. What matters is our recognition that the power to restore a damaged relationship with God is not within our power, but it is within God’s power. What matters is that God is able to act. What matters is that God does act.
Out of the depth have I called to you;          
O God, hear my voice;          
let your ears consider well the voice of the my supplication.     
If you were to note what is done amiss,          
O God, who could stand?     
For there is forgiveness with you;          
therefore you shall be feared.     
I wait for you, O God; my soul waits for you;          
in your word is my hope.          
My soul waits for God,          
more than sentries for the morning,          
more than sentries for the morning.     
O Israel, wait for God,          
for with God there is mercy;     
With God there is plenteous redemption,          
and God shall redeem Israel from all their sins.³
 

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

1Psalm 37:25

2Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), 11.

3Psalm 130, Order of Saint Helena.

A Well-Lit Path (Psalm 119:105-112, June 17, 2012)

A Well-Lit Path

Psalm 119:105-112

June 17, 2012

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Some years ago our son Peter invited me to join him and the Boy Scout troop that he helped lead for a weekend at their summer camp out. It was chance not only to spend a couple of days with him, but also to be with our grandson Noah.

It was a kind invitation and I took him up on it. I had a great time. I say it was a kind invitation not just because of the invitation itself, but because he had invited me on a summer camp out. His favorite time of year for camping is winter. He likes the challenge of staying warm when it’s really cold. My way of meeting that challenge is to stay inside where it’s warm.

Now there are very few really dark places left in lower forty-eight states. That campground in Indiana is in one of them. Or maybe it just seemed that way the first time I tried to find my way to the restrooms in the middle of the night. There were a couple of those so-called security lights near the lodge building where the restrooms were, so I see my destination. The trouble was I was trying to walk toward them and they were all I could see. They were great for direction-finding but they didn’t help me find a path. The stars were shining about as brightly as they ever do, but without a moon, none of the light was getting down through the trees to the ground where I was trying to find a path. I could really have used my flashlight, but by the time I thought of that I was some distance away and didn’t want to go back to search for it.

Well, I did manage to find my way to the road with only minor injuries. Once there, the starlight was enough to see where the road went. As long as I didn’t look at the lodge lights or screened them with tree trunks, I could manage. The way back was easier with the lodge lights behind me. And besides, by that time I was wide awake. Still, it would have been good to have had my flashlight.

In ancient times, long before any of the Bible was written down and certainly before Psalm 119 was crafted, the people of God were wanderers. A statement like “the journey is our home” was not a metaphor for them but was the literal truth. The journey metaphor is a rich one and lends itself to all sorts of extensions. If you are on a journey, paths become very important. So do directions. We have Mapquest.com and GPS navigators; they had...what?

They had the torah. We usually translate torah as “law” and we’re no fans of law. Law sounds Jewish to us and Jesus was all about grace and faith, at least the non-Jewish Jesus taught to us by Luther and Calvin and the other Protestants reformers. Some of us can remember a version of Christianity from a half century ago or more. It had a lot of rules: No drinking, no dancing, no card-playing, no fun, especially not on Sunday. In fact, the reason why a lot of us are at First United Methodist at all is because the version of Christianity that we practice here doesn’t have a lot of rules. We don’t like rules.

Actually, that’s not quite true. We are fond enough of rules when they apply to someone else or when they protect us.My father-in-law used to complain about how much he had to pay in taxes on the money he made on the stock market. The money that he had invested had already been taxed, he said, when he earned it as salary. He couldn’t see why the federal government should want to tax it again when he made money on the market. After all, he said, the government didn’t have anything to do with his making money on the market. Well, that was the gist of what he said. His actual language was somewhat more colorful.

But the fact is that the federal government had a lot to do with his being able to make money on the market. After all, he was a very small fish swimming in a very large pond. The reason he didn’t get eaten by the big fish is because there are rules, rules that prevent insider trading, for example, or deliberately manipulating the prices of a stock by dumping shares or by floating rumors. The rules required companies to make reliable information available, information that he depended on to make his investment decisions. Those rules were put in place and enforced by the federal government so that investors like him have a level playing field. How much that might be worth is debatable, but it’s surely worth something. We never debated it, because I didn’t like to get into arguments with my father-in-law, but it was certainly not true that the federal government had nothing to do with his stock market profits.

How we feel about rules probably depends on how rich and powerful we are or aren’t. I suspect that the really rich and powerful don’t mind the rules very much because in most societies they’ve been able to buy their way out of having to follow them. They’ve been the rule-makers, so they’ve written the rules in such a way that they don’t really have to worry about them. Was it Anatole France who said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatole_France)?

I guess that the rich and powerful in most times and places do not so much love the rules as find them useful for controlling the lower orders of society. The lower orders probably mostly know this and regard the rules as intended to keep them in their place (while not seeming to). They may find following them prudent, but aren’t likely to love them.

It’s the folks in the middle, I suspect, that supply most of the lovers of the law. So, I further speculate, we may have found out the social location of today’s psalmist. Man, does the psalmist love the rules! This psalm is certainly a monument to them.

Let me ask something: How many of you have brought a copy of the Bible? How many of you at least know where your copy is and can get to it without having to guess which box it’s packed in? I ask that because there is something about this psalm we can’t really appreciate without seeing the whole thing in front of us,something we can’t do when we only print short sections of Scripture in our bulletin.

The psalm is massive, for one thing. It is one hundred seventy-six verses in length. Every verse contains a word that is a synonym for law: decrees, ways, precepts, statutes, commandments, ordinances, word and words, and promise. Each verse has one or more of these words. How many different things can you say about these? The psalmist found one hundred seventy-six.

This psalm has another special feature. Its one hundred seventy-six verses are grouped in stanzas of eight apiece. That makes twenty-two stanzas. There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and one of them is used to begin each verse of a stanza. Each of the first eight verses begins with the letter aleph. The next eight verses begin with beth. The next eight with gimel, and so forth, right through taw at the end. This form of poem is called “acrostic.”

Why would the psalmist go to the trouble? Because for the psalmist the rules, at least when the rules are God’s torah, aren’t just a list of things that must be done or avoided. Taken together they create a world in which there is order, predictability, justice and wisdom. They create a world in which the psalmist has found a home. The torah gives the gift of a life that is both human and humane. Torah for the psalmist is not just a collection of rules. The torah is a complete package of a way of life with God and with the other people in God’s covenant community. And the torah comes as a gift from God.

There is no plot to this psalm, no thematic progression, even. Nothing much happens in the world of this psalm,because that world is pretty good: any change would be for the worse. Torah supplies all that is needed.

If there is confusion about where to go and what to do, the torah provides clarity. If there is temporary injustice, the torah promises that it will be put to rights. If there is danger, the torah provides instruction. If the psalmist is surrounded by a web of conspiracy, the torah provides a refuge of safety. And, yes, if the way forward lies in darkness, the torah illuminates the path.

So the psalmist sings this complicated, well-organized and very long song to give God thanks for the gifts of torah, to celebrate the life that torah creates, and to make public a commitment to live within that gift of life. This is better that Mapquest.com. It’s even better than a flashlight on a moonless night.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 
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Star Gazing (Psalm 8, June 10, 2012)

2nd Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 8

June 10, 2012

Star Gazing

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The old nursery rhyme goes like this:

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned this, but I know that I was glad to get my hands on a technology for getting the things I wised for. (Heaven knows asking my parents wasn’t working out all that well.) It wasn’t just the nursery rhyme. There were rules that went with it. You had to be looking at the first visible star in the evening sky. I suspect that often I was in fact looking at Venus and I’m not sure that counted. The harder part—and it was a part I couldn’t control—was that you had to be the very first person to be wishing on that star that night. The star apparently had only one wish to grant each evening: it was first-come, first-serve. I had a lot of competition. This may explain why stars didn’t seem to be any better than parents for granting wishes.

I was delighted to discover that using a telescope let me see stars long before they were visible to the unaided eye. The trouble was my telescope could only see a tiny fraction of the night sky and I could not be sure that the star I was seeing was the visible first star in the evening sky. That telescope was so frustrating it’s a wonder I ever looked up again.
(May I just say, by way of hard-won advice, that if you are trying to stoke a child’s interest in astronomy—or even your own—do not buy a telescope. Unless you are willing to spend more than three hundred dollars, any telescope you will only frustrate and disappoint. A good star chart is a better investment and then, when you’re ready to move up, a pair of good binoculars.)
Anyway, I did look up again; it’s still one of my favorite things to do. As you know, Carol and I live east of Decorah on Ranch Road, east of the airport down two miles of gravel roads. We live in a little valley that screens the lights of other homes or towns. We have skies that are as dark as they can be in the United States outside of large tracts of wilderness. When it’s clear the night sky ranges anywhere from wonderful to spectacular.
Most of my time spent looking at stars is done with just my eyes. I take Angus out in the late evening, just before going to bed. When we step out into the night, Angus’s attention is focused on the ground. Mine goes upward. I love to find my old friends among the constellations and see where the visible planets are. At ten o’clock tonight, for example, Mars will be in the southwestern sky just below the constellation Leo. Saturn is directly to the south in Virgo just above Spica, that constellation’s brightest star.
Later in the summer, the Milky Way makes its way overhead. If you look toward the south, you will see the constellation Sagittarius. It’s supposed to be an archer, but it looks more like a teapot to me, with its handle to the left and its spout toward the right. Through a pair of binoculars the region around Sagittarius comes alive. It’s filled with clusters of stars and delicately colored gas clouds, star nurseries with hot newborn stars illuminating the dust around them.
But on a really dark moonless night, it’s not the individual sights that impress me; it’s the whole. There is only one proper word for it: awesome. I mean that word in its original sense—that which inspires awe—not in the sense it has when used by a seven year old with a new video game. The night sky gives rise to awe.
At least it would if we were able to experience it more often. A chaplain I worked with when I was in the Army told me that he had never seen the Milky Way. He was from Chicago and had never lived outside of city. On a particularly dark Kansas night I got to introduce him to the galaxy he lives in. He was awe struck. That is the correct response according to the psalmist “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” was how the psalmist responded.
Awe is the reaction we have to recognizing our own smallness. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime”¹ Awe means that we recognize that the universe is very big and very powerful and very beautiful and that we are able to recognize this even though we are very small and fragile. I believe that awe is a birthright of human beings. I suspect that the psalmist agrees.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

The psalmist is lost in awe, or nearly so. She can hardly form coherent sentences. There is something missing in these lines, but we can still get it.

Looking at the night sky gives rise to awe. Awe gives rise to wonder. Our puniness in the face of the vastness of the heavens is not the final word. Why should God be mindful of us? And yet, God is:

You’ve made [us] only slightly less than divine,
crowning [us] with glory and grandeur.
You’ve let [us] rule over your handiwork;
putting everything under [our] feet...

Small and weak though we are, we seem to occupy a special place in the world. I say “seem” because when I’m pressed to define just what I mean by that I find that I am not able to do it very neatly. We can alter the environment to suit our needs, but trees do that, too. We can change the world, but so can beavers. We can make and use tools, but so do chimpanzees. We are self-aware, but we cannot be certain that dolphins, for example, are not.

Perhaps it was more impressive to the psalmist, living as he did closer to the time when every predator was a threat and the natural world seemed more dangerous than it does to us. Maybe he better appreciated our hard-won control over animals that otherwise would have been a threat. For him the clearest evidence for our “glory and grandeur” is the respect—or maybe it’s just fear—that other animals have for us. We rule over all the domesticated animals—sheep and cattle—no surprise there. But we also rule over the wild animals, what another translation calls “the beasts of the field,” the fish of the ocean and birds in the sky. Everything except for cats. We don’t rule over cats. But except for cats, we rule over everything. I have no idea what the expression “the pathways of the sea” might mean, but whatever it means, we rule over whatever travels by them.

And this strange arrangement, too, gives rise to awe and then to praise. The psalmist knows what our place in the universe is. We are so small that we are in awe. We are so grand that we wonder. And, above all, our place gives rise to the praise of God. Awe and wonder and praise.

All of this sounds pretty unsophisticated, naive, even. We know so many things better than the psalmist. The universe is big, but it is also cold and mostly dead. If we see beauty in it, that is simply a matter of wishing upon a star, of projecting our own hopes for a welcome onto a universe that offers none, but simply is.

We know better than to think that we are the center of any universe, except for the one that exists only between our ears. We are creatures just like all the other creatures, engaged in a struggle for survival just as they are, finding higher purpose where there is none except for next quarter’s profits.

We have lit up the night sky. Awe is no longer necessary. We no longer wonder that we have seized the world as our own. We did it because we could and there was no one to stop us. In our sophistication and the maturity of our species we no longer need to praise.

The psalmist does not set out two ways of being in the world, except indirectly, by demonstrating one way, the path of awe, wonder and praise. The alternative path, a way we might simply label as “realism,” is lived out all around us every day. In the psalmist’s world we are motivated by the longing to praise that arises from the experience of a world that does not belong to us, is not answerable to us, and yet in which we have a livable home and an honorable place.

In the world that is not the psalmist’s world we are motivated by itchy fingers that grasp everything around us as if it could belong to us for the taking. We may take it do whatever we want to with it and answer finally to no one.

The psalmist has presented us with a world of awe and wonder and praise. We are invited to enter. Such is the gracious summons of the covenant God of Israel. The psalmist invites us to join her in singing, “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

1Merriam-Webster On-line, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/awe.