6th Sunday after Epiphany - B
Psalm 30
February 12, 2012
Weeping May Linger for the Night
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
It started for the psalmist as a common cold. Will Rogers once remarked on the wonders of modern medicine. Why, he said, it used to be that it would take two weeks to get over a cold, whereas now, with all the advances in medical science we can recover in a mere fourteen days.
Colds have been around for a long time. Ancient Egyptians had a hieroglyph for the cold. Hippocrates described the cold. John Wesley believed that cold baths were an effective preventative and that colds were caused by being chilled while Benjamin Franklin theorized that it was spread through the air by being confined with people who had colds.
However the psalmist thought of it, it didn't end after two weeks or fourteen days. She tried her community’s folk remedies without success. Is it “feed a cold and starve a fever” or “starve a cold and feed a fever”? I can never remember.
Her cold settled into her chest and it became bronchitis and then pneumonia. She was no longer able to go about her normal chores and was confined to bed. Her family became worried and sent for the village wise woman and then for a physician from the nearest market town. Despite their confidence in their treatments, however, there was no improvement, only a steady decline.
What began as an inconvenience, a piece of common misery, had become alarming. As she sank it became clear that her life itself was threatened. How quickly she had moved from securely healthy to desperately ill! She lived in an age without antibiotics. Had she lived today she would doubtless have had a different story. We modern Americans are, on the whole, pretty complacent about our health, expecting as we do that if we get sick there will be a pill or a procedure that will fix us up just fine. But there are limits to what medicine can do, even for us, and in the long run the mortality rate is still one hundred percent.
It is amazing sometimes just how rapidly and suddenly our lives can be turned upside down. We're going about our business, living our life, in pretty good health. Okay, so we're carrying a few extra pounds and we're not getting exercise quite as regularly as we should, but we pay our fees at the gym on time every month. That should count for something. The heart attack we never saw coming completely changes things in a few seconds.
Even if we know it's bad theology we have a hard time imagining that God isn't out to get us. Why is God so angry? What have I done? What have I failed to do? I'm sure a “fearless moral inventory”, as they call it in AA, would reveal more than a few failings. But they don’t seem to add up to deserving this...cancer, divorce, job loss, foreclosure, or the death of our wife or husband or child.
An angry God out to get us may not be good theology, but it's easy enough to see why she went there, as she struggled for her breath. Besides, the notion that we just had some bad luck doesn't really satisfy our need for someone to hold accountable.
The beauty of the psalms is that the psalmist is perfectly willing to hold God accountable. The psalmist expects to die eventually, but a long life is a covenant expectation. When that looks threatened, the psalmist is quite willing to put the monkey on God's back.
That's what she did as lay on her sick bed. There wasn't anything to treat her pain, no oxygen to make breathing easier. She reflected on how complacent she had been before this started. She had been secure. She had been safe. She had been as unmovable as a mountain. This sort of thing never happened to her. Other people got sick. Other people got divorced. Other people got fired. Other people had kids with drug problems. These things never happened to her. Until they did.
Maybe she realized then just how tenuous our lives really are. Whole industries are built around making us safe and giving us security in one form or another. But in the end we don't end up with the security we pay for. Life is fragile. I am confident that there is other life in the universe, but I'm persuaded that it is pretty rare and the night sky is mostly dead. Life is therefore precious. But we tend to take it for granted. She certainly had.
But not now. Not now when it looked as if she might not survive this. Her back was against the wall. She was willing to do most anything, even play hardball with God.
Remember, in the mainline denominations we have invested a lot in keeping our relationship with God civilized and tidy. We don't make many demands and we don't expect much. We act like good people, and what we want in return is to be comfortable. We want comfortable homes, comfortable jobs, comfortable relationships and comfortable religion. But this woman was not in the place where comfortable would cut it. Her family was making her “comfortable” and that was prelude to death. Comfortable was not a luxury she could afford.
It was time to get uncomfortable with God. And if it made God uncomfortable, well then, there are two parties in this covenant.
What good is this doing you, God? Part of my covenant obligation is to praise you. How will I do that if I'm dead? Part of my covenant obligation is to give testimony to your mighty acts. How about giving me some mighty acts to give testimony about? Otherwise, I won't be able to do that. My testimony won't be very convincing coming from the grave.
How's that for “down and dirty” with God?! It's audacious. But it's consistent with the whole of the Hebrew Bible (New Testament, too, I believe, but that's a different sermon). Walter Brueggemann, my favorite Old Testament scholar, says in summarizing what Israel has to say about God, that God, in Israel's testimony, is characterized by two things: 1) a passionate commitment to justice, and 2) a massive self-regard. Here she is appealing to God's massive self-regard. What do you gain if I die? You'll lose out on my praise. And you'll lose out on my public endorsement.
And then there is another appeal, an appeal to God to be self-consistent, an appeal for God to behave like God. “Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!” You are the gracious helper God of the covenant, so be who you are: be gracious, be my helper!
Isn't that what it comes down to, when our backs are against the wall? Isn't that how Jesus taught us to pray? “Your name is holy, so let it be made holy! You will the good, the perfect, so git 'er done! You're the king, so take charge!” Jesus didn't invent this kind of praying; he inherited it from a woman on her deathbed, too sick to be polite with God.
The psalm records the human side of the interaction. It's not a complete transcript. There are gaps. There's a gap between verses seven and eight, between when the psalmist experiences God's face as hidden and when the psalmist cries out to God in distress.
The other gap in the psalm is where the story gets to be wonderful or unbelievable, depending on your point of view. There is a gap after verse ten. A sick woman cries out to God, points out to God how unprofitable her death will be, and prods God to act in accordance with God's nature.
And then something happens: God acts. The woman falls into a restful sleep and wakes up the next morning feeling a little better. As the days progress her symptoms recede and her strength returns.
We can come up with explanations if we want. And I'm sure that, biologically, physiologically, there are ample explanations. There is no need to claim that some sort of miracle has happened. Her immune system responded and health returned.
But she's not interested in tracing causes. She's not interested in finding explanations. For her this took place within a covenant relationship. It doesn't really matter what happened or how. She knows who and that's all that matters. God has acted. God has raised her back up to life. God has “brought up [her] soul from the Abode of the Dead.” God has “restored [her] to life from among those gone down to the grave.” How God might have done that is inconsequential. She was in danger. She cried out. God acted. That's what matters.
We, of course, are cooler than she. Our self-deception about our supposed security is better constructed than hers. Our unwillingness to name our own desperation is greater than hers. Our unwillingness to leave self-control and middle class respectability behind when we cry out to God in pain is greater than hers. So all in all, maybe we don't trace the same path over the landscape that she traveled.
But if we did, if we really understood how precarious and precious our lives are, if we were more willing to name our desperation, if we weren't quite so wedded to our middle class sensibilities, we would know something that she knows and we do not. When her life was turned upside down, when she was at her limit, when she got down and dirty with God, when God acted, there was only one thing she could do. She had to dance. She had to dance her joy. She had to dance her testimony. God's anger, if that's what we want to call, is not God's last word. No, “weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”
We don't dance much, we Methodists. In fact, the oldest among us can still remember when their Catholic and Lutheran friends would go to dances, but they wouldn't because, well, Methodists didn't do that sort of thing. Some of us dance sometimes, but we're mostly not very good at it, because we're mid-westerners.
When God turned her mourning into dancing, I don't think she cared how well she did it. I'm sure God didn't care. Sometimes that's the only thing you can do. Yes, there are times when we are foolishly complacent. There are times when our worlds are turned upside down, when we are up against the wall. There are times when we can do nothing but cry out to God and none too politely either. We weep through the night, maybe through a night that lasts for weeks or months.
The psalmist's testimony is that after the long night, morning comes. And with the morning comes joy, joy that God has heard our cry, joy that God has not forsaken us, joy that God has remembered and acted. When it happens we are astounded. And whether our arms and feet move or not, we dance.
Yes, “weeping may linger for a night, but joy comes with the morning.” Joy comes with the morning.
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