Rich Man, Poor Man (2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a, Proper 13B, August 5, 2012)

Rich Man, Poor Man

2 Samuel 11:26—12:13a
Proper 13B
August 5, 2012

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

While we’ve been dallying among the psalms, by turns delighted and dismayed, the lectionary has been trudging on.  In the Hebrew Bible readings, which we take up this morning, the lectionary has been following the history of the early kings of Israel.  First Israel was warned against having a king at all—more on that in a moment.  Then Samuel anointed Saul as king because the people insisted on it.  Then Saul was found to be unfit for the office and David was anointed in his place. 

Several unpleasant things happened as the former-but-not-yet-removed Saul attempted to hold on to his throne while the anointed-but-not-yet-ascended David attempted to get the throne by waging a sustained guerilla campaign.  Saul was killed.  David was crowned.  He was the king.  So, he settled down to enjoy being the king.

And then comes the episode with Bathsheba.  Bathsheba fascinates us.  There have been novels and paintings and movies.  We are fascinated and appalled because we are fascinated by sex.  Our popular culture remembers this story as a seduction with Bathsheba as the villain of the piece.  It sees David as in some sense the victim: the victim of Bathsheba’s wiles, the victim of the unlucky chance that had his gaze alight on Bathsheba as he was pacing on the rooftop of his palace, the victim of his own weakness, the victim of temptation. 

We see this is as an episode of mostly sexual sin, the sort of thing that happens far too often, that we happen to know about because it involved a king.  In spite of an attempted cover-up, God saw what had happened.  God sent Nathan the prophet to confront David.  David, repenting, said, “I have sinned against the Lord.”  Nathan reassures David of God’s restoration to God’s favor: “The Lord has removed your sin.” 

We see this as an episode of sin and exposure, of repentance and restoration.  It is primarily an individual’s story—an individual who just happens to be a king.  Really, it’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.  “Lead us not into temptation,” we pray.  And we mean it.

Unfortunately for this way of reading the story, the prophet Nathan sees matters differently.  And so, we must conclude, does God.

To see what Nathan sees, we need to back up, way back to 1 Samuel 8.  It seems that the people of Israel wanted a king like all the other nations had.  Samuel saw this request as a rejection of God’s rule over them: they didn’t need a king; they had Yahweh.  If they wanted a king it was because they didn’t want Yahweh.  Samuel warned them of what a king would be like:

He will take your sons, and will use them for his chariots and his cavalry and as runners for his chariot.  He will use them as his commanders of troops of one thousand and troops of fifty, or to do his plowing and his harvesting, or to make his weapons or parts for his chariots.  He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, or bakers.  He will take your best fields, vineyard, and olive groves and give them to his servants.  He will give one-tenth of your grain and your vineyards to his officials and servants.  He will take your male and female servants, along with the best of your cattle and donkeys, and make them do his work.  He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and then you yourselves will become his slaves!  What that day comes, you will cry out because of the king you chose for yourselves, but on that day [Yahweh] won’t answer you.[1]

There is a down side to having a king.  With their power they get wealth.  With their wealth they get power.  But they are never satisfied.  There is no end to what they want.  Pretty soon, the life of Israel in the land of promise will look a lot like the life of the Israelites under slavery in Egypt.  Only this time, Yahweh will not answer their cries.

But Israel insisted, so Samuel gave them a king.  First there was Saul and then there was David.  That is whole story by itself, one that won’t be told this morning.  Instead, we’ll fast forward to 2 Samuel 11 where we read these really interesting words:  “In the spring, when kings go off to war, David sent Joab…But David remained in Jerusalem.”[2]  Kings go off, but David remained.  Kings have duties, expectations that they must meet, but David was having none of it. 

Besides, he had his general Joab, who could engage in the mostly pretty boring work of laying siege to the enemy city of Rabbah, while he, David, would relax and enjoy life in Jerusalem.  Except, of course, that life in Jerusalem was pretty boring what with the army gone and all.  So that led to David pacing back and forth on his rooftop.

“Bored, bored, bored.  What to do?  What to do?  Hey, now!  What’s this?  C’mere, c’mere!  Who’s that?  The wife of Uriah the Hittite?  The wife of a foreigner?”

Do you remember that the preoccupation of God in the Hebrew Bible is with the widow, the orphan, and the foreign worker?  Because they lacked extended family connections, people in these categories were especially vulnerable in ancient times.  The rich and the powerful can take advantage of them and they have no one to come to their aid.  And Uriah is one of them.  Add to that the fact that Uriah was a member of David’s elite household troops, his body-guard, the so-called Thirty[3], and is therefore someone David can influence directly, and this is a situation that David can exploit.  And exploit it he does.  A little harmless amusement for the king who is burdened with the affairs of state and bored besides.

But then Bathsheba sent word to David: “I’m pregnant.” David wasted no time.  He sent to Joab at the front to send him Uriah the Hittite.  There would be no questions asked since Joab was more loyal to David than David was and Uriah was a member of the Thirty.  Uriah arrived and David asked him how things were going at the front.  How is Joab?  How’s the battle going?  And, why don’t you go home and “wash your feet” (wink, wink)? 

But Uriah didn’t go home.  “Uriah, my good man, why didn’t you go home?”  Uriah’s reply showed that he was a better soldier than David was a king, “The chest [that is, the ark of the covenant] and Israel and Judah are all living in tents….How could I go home and enjoy my wife?”

David had a problem.  His cover-up plan was going nowhere.  “Okay, I’ll tell you what, stay another day.  I’ll send you back tomorrow.”  And then David got Uriah drunk.  But Uriah did not go home.  “Fine,” said David to himself. “You asked for it.”  And David wrote a letter to Joab the gist of which was this: Put Uriah in the front of the battle line and then, when the battle is raging, pull back and leave him alone with the enemy.”  And, perversely, he had Uriah carry the letter—his death warrant—back to Joab.  And Joab did exactly as his king had told him.

And that brings us back to the present.  David has gotten what he wanted.  Well, most of what he wanted.  I doubt very much whether he intended to have another wife, especially one who came with no connections or political usefulness at all.  On the other hand, here was the pregnant wife of a dead war hero.  He could pose as the protector widows and orphans as he looked after the family of Uriah the foreign worker.  He was doing God’s work!  So Bathsheba came to live in the palace and when she gave birth, it was a son.  All’s well that ends well. 

However.  Isn’t that a great word sometimes?  However, “what David has done was evil in the Lord’s eyes.”  Enter Nathan, the prophet.

Now Nathan is in a bit of a pickle.  He’s a prophet and therefore has a duty to speak on God’s behalf, whether this pleases David or not.  On the other hand, David pays his salary.  So Nathan didn’t come to the king and accuse directly: “This thing you’ve been up to with Bathsheba is wrong and you are in trouble with God!”

Instead, Nathan told a story.  And notice what sort of story it is.  A rich man had a house guest and was therefore obligated to feed him.  But instead of feeding him from his own flock he stole a ewe lamb from a man who was so poor that this lamb was the family pet. 

David was corrupt and ruthless, but he was also a child of the Torah.  And he knew an injustice when he heard it.  And this was an injustice.  And he said so: “He must restore the ewe lamb seven times over because he did this and because he had no compassion.”

“You are that man!” Nathan told him. 

Now I notice two things here.  The first is that, as far as Nathan is concerned, the story of David and Bathsheba is not about sex.  It’s about power.  The prophet Micah describes an ideal world as one in which every person “shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”[4]  That is, the ideal life is one in which each of us has enough and we are content with it and are able to live with our neighbors in such a way that we neither threaten them, nor they us.

In the Hebrew Bible there are two threats to this ideal.  The first, as we have already heard, is the king, who will want our fig tree and our vine, or at least a tenth of our figs and a tenth of our grapes, as well as our children to fight his wars and do his work.  Samuel has warned us about kings.  The second threat comes from the rich.  They want to own everything they see.  In the words of the prophet Isaiah, “[they] join house to house, [they] add field to field, until there is room for no one but [them], and [they] are left to live alone in the midst of the land.”[5]

I’m taking a risk by making an observation.  If you’ve been watching any television at all you’ve been flooded with campaign advertisement.  Mostly we’ve been “muting” them, but sometimes they get through.  We have two parties contending for the grand prize.  My observation is that both parties want us to be afraid of something or someone.  One party wants us to be afraid of big government.  The other party wants us to be afraid of big money.  One party wants us to believe that, if they lose, we’ll be defenseless against the government.  The other party wants us to believe that, if they lose, we’ll be defenseless against the major corporations.

But to the prophet Nathan, it doesn’t really matter.  He can tell a story about a rich man and the government correctly comes to perceive that it is about him.  To Nathan, power is power.  To Nathan the biggest threat to a life of sitting under our own fig tree comes from power and it doesn’t really matter if that power is primarily economic or primarily governmental.

Now that’s the first thing I notice.  The second is that, while the movie producers see this as a story about David and Bathsheba, a story about sex.  I’ve already said that I think it’s a story that concerns the king and his power over a foreign worker, but I think that in the end, it’s not so much about David as it is about Nathan the prophet.  At least, I think we can and should read it that way.

Nathan is in the uncomfortable position of having to tell truth to power and that, I think, is where we find ourselves today as the people of God.  Our nation’s political class is obsessed with an election and they want to believe that this is a choice between two political parties, and our choice is either a Democrat or a Republican.  But, God is not a Democrat.  Nor is God a Republican.  Neither party nor any faction thereof speaks for God.

But someone needs to speak for God and for God’s priorities.  Someone has to be the prophetic voice as our nation and our world wrestle with questions like, when is it acceptable for a nation to use military violence against the people of another? And what is the meaning of wealth, what is it for, and who should control it? And who speaks on behalf of today’s version of the widow, the orphan, and the foreign worker?

I don’t know who is going to win in November, but I have a pretty good idea it won’t be God.  And I also have a pretty good idea that whether it’s the party of governmental power or the party of financial power, it will be a mixed bag for those who hope to sit without fear under their own fig tree.

One party or another may try to invoke care for the widow, the orphan and the foreign worker, but I am convinced that it will fall to Nathan to speak the truth.  If the people of God don’t take up Nathan’s task, I am certain it will not get done.

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.

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[1] 1 Samuel 8:11b-18.

[2] 2 Samuel 11:1.

[3]  2 Samuel 23:24-39

[4] Micah 4:4.

[5] Isaiah 5:8.

Right in Front of My Enemies (Psalm 23, July 29, 2012)

Right in Front of My Enemies

Psalm 23
9^th Sunday after Pentecost
July 29, 2012

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

It takes a lot of chutzpah to preach the twenty-third psalm.  I’m not the first one to notice the difficulty.  One author says,

Deep familiarity with any text--including and perhaps especially this one--can insulate us from being touched by its eloquent message.  To preach on such a foundational text is to run the risk of either trivializing the sublime, of turning the sermon into an autopsy on a beloved passage, or of trying to do too much to wring some new profundity from the text.[1]

This psalm is familiar and beloved.  If there is one extended passage of the Bible that we can quote from memory, it is this one.  Even in a congregation that has had little to do with the Bible or with the church—and this happens sometimes at funerals or memorial services—all I have to do is to give people permission to join in and launch off with “The Lord is my shepherd,” and they will join in.

If only for its role in sustaining us through death and grief, Psalm 23 would have a special place in our hearts.  The measured cadences of the King James Version translation connect us to a deep tradition of piety at one of the few times in our lives when we actively seek to be sustained by that tradition.  

Artists have painted this psalm.  Preachers through the centuries have preached it.  Expositors have expounded it.  Poets have poeticized it.  What could I possibly say that would render this psalm in any way new and fresh?  What could I say, that is, that would not “trivialize the sublime” or try too hard to wring something new from these old words?

Maybe nothing at all.  Maybe that’s the better option.  After all, the psalm has done a pretty good job of speaking to our hearts all on its own, as I suspect any text so long used and so well-loved would do.

On the other hand, just because this is a well-loved text does not mean that is a well-known one.  The psalms in general are under-known in the Christian community and this one is no exception.  Perhaps we can appreciate it a little more when we come to know it better.  I hope so, since Psalm 23 is a remarkable achievement that will not be any less so for our understanding a little better how it achieves what it does.

I can at least share a few things that I have learned as I have prepared for this sermon.  The psalm is just six verses long, but it manages to move quite a distance.  It begins in a pasture and ends in the Temple and moves by way of a banqueting table.  Along the way it takes us through the “valley of deepest darkness” and right under the nose of an unnamed enemy.  At the beginning we are being led along by a shepherding God.  By the end we are being hunted and pursued by that God’s goodness and mercy, like deer being chased by a pack of hounds.

It covers this distance using two metaphors for God.  God is named as a shepherd and as a host.  One struggle we have is that neither of these metaphors is very familiar.  Even if we know something about sheep we are not likely to know much about shepherds, at least not the kind of shepherd the psalm knows.  This sort of shepherd lives with the sheep twenty-four seven, through fair weather and foul.  This sort of shepherd leads from behind the flock where he can keep an eye on it and direct the dogs who do most of the actual work.

If God is shepherd then the psalmist is a sheep that trusts the shepherd to do this well, leading where there is rich fodder and fresh water by paths that are true.  Are these “paths of righteousness” as the King James Version has it or simply “right paths”?  The word could be translated either way, depending on the context.  Does the context her require the moral overtones of “righteousness”?  Probably not, so “right paths” is probably a better translation.  On the other hand, justice (the other way to translate tsedek) is a sort of path, and a good one at that, even if it doesn’t really fit the shepherd/sheep metaphor.

These true or right paths might lead through some really dark places, even the darkest valley.  Here is another translation question, since the King James has “shadow of death” where most modern translations have “darkest.” I prefer the modern translation. The “darkest valley” covers a lot of spiritual and emotional real estate, not just those times when we or the people we love are in danger of dying, though it certainly covers that.  

But whether it is in the “darkest valley” or in the “valley of the shadow of death,” it is precisely there that the turning point of the psalm is reached.  Up until that point the psalmist has been talking about God:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. 

² He makes me lie down in green pastures;

he leads me beside still waters; 

³ he restores my soul.

He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

But in the darkest valley—the valley where those right paths have led—the psalmist stops talking about God and, for the first time in the psalm, speaks to God:

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,

I fear no evil;

for you are with me.

“You are with me!” In Hebrew it’s just two words: ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me.”  Here is the moment that changes everything.  Up until now, the psalm has been very fine theology, done poetically.  Everything that has been said up until now is perfectly true, but it’s all outside the speaker; it’s objective; it’s at arm’s length.  With these words what has been true but exterior to the speaker is now internalized.  The psalmist has left speaking about God and now speaks from inside her relationship with God.  The psalm has moved from theology to prayer and this is what transforms her situation.

Over the years I have learned to pay attention to the little words in a biblical text, the words that connect one phrase to another.  Those little words make all the difference.  Here the words “even though” are the ones I mean here.  The psalmist is led through the darkest valley.  That should be a cause for alarm; she should be afraid.  But she is not.  Why not?  Because ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” It is the “You are with me!” that puts the “Even though” in front of the darkest valley and allows the psalmist to move without fear.

The valley is still there.  It’s still dark, darker, darkest.  But it causes no fear.  Because “you are with me!”

And, just in case we haven’t gotten the point, the psalmist changes metaphorical horses in the middle of the stream.  Now God becomes a host.  This metaphor, too, is mostly strange to us, because we have a weak notion of hospitality.  If we invite someone to share a meal with us, we are obligated to provide food that they can eat.  If, for example, our guests are Muslims, we won’t serve them pork.  If we know that they are lactose intolerant, we will take measures to make sure that our guests don’t have to choose between offending us by refusing our food or offending their bodies by eating what is harmful to them.  If we serve alcohol, we will make sure that they are safely sober before they leave or we will make other travel arrangements for them.  Our rules of hospitality are significant, but they are not extensive.

In the world of the psalmist, however, the notion of hospitality was much stronger.  If we invited someone to dinner we were not only obligated to feed them, but, the instant they came under our roof, we were obligated to protect them from anything or anyone who might threaten them.  In fact, there were some circumstances under which a mortal enemy could become our guest and, if that happened, we might have to defend them against their enemies who might happen to be our friends.

Hence the power of the newly introduced metaphor:

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

The enemy is still there, but like the darkest valley, poses no threat.  There is nothing to fear: “You prepare a table before me.” You are my host.  You will defend me.  The enemy is powerless to harm me.  The situation is transformed because “’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” 

’Attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” is the good news of this text.  It is the gospel of Psalm 23, but it is not the gospel proclaimed.  It is the gospel embraced and accepted.  This is evangelical religion in its finest and truest form —not that corrupted version of it that people claim for theological and political advantage.  This is truly good news.

But it doesn’t end there.  The prayed exclamation ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” doesn’t end with the psalmist and God permanently locked in a mystical union or some kind of Vulcan mind-meld, impervious to the outside world, oblivious to the rest of life.  In the psalm it leads to the Temple or, more correctly, to “Yahweh’s house.” 

The metaphor of the host/guest relationship continues.  The psalmist will become Yahweh’s permanent guest.  God will act as host for as long as the psalmist lives.  And while that relationship continues, the psalmist will be—not followed, which is far too weak a translation—but pursued, chased, even hounded, by goodness and mercy.

The metaphor continues to govern the relationship, but with a difference, since the scene has shifted from an imaginary table set in an unspecified place, to an actual building in a particular place that you can point to on a map and go to in person.  Yahweh’s House is not an abstract idea.  It’s a building made of stone.  It is the place where the covenant community gathers and worships.  It’s a building that is often filled with people, not all of whom have bathed recently.  They rattle their bulletins.  They make comments during the sermon.  They have bad breath.  They sing out of tune.  And they, too, are guests of the same host and so the laws of hospitality require us to treat them as if they were our guests, too, even though we didn’t pick them.  Remember, we do not get to pick whom God invites.

So, ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!” leads us to God’s House.  And there it leads us to address each other in the same way: ’attah ‘immadi, “you, with me!”  So maybe the reason that we are able to eat right in front of our enemies without being afraid is that we have both been invited to the same table by the same host and our enemies are obligated not to harm us.  And maybe they feel the same way about us because they, too, have had a table set before them.

God’s hospitality transforms our enemies into dinner companions.  And without enemies, we can no longer fear the darkness.

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.

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[1] Rolf A. Jacobson, “Psalm 23,” in Psalms for Preaching and Worship: A Lectionary Commentary, edited by Roger E. Van Harn and Brent A. Strawn (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 101.

Mourning into Dancing (Psalm 30, July 22, 2012)

Mourning into Dancing

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 30
July 22, 2012

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

In the grammar of the psalms, the past tense of lament is thanksgiving.  In the grammar of the psalms, the past tense of lament is thanksgiving.  Nowhere is this clearer than in Psalm 30.  In fact, we could pretty easily construct a typical lament from Psalm 30 simply by changing some verb tenses.

Psalm 30 has, “Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.  O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol, brought me back to life from among those going down to the Pit.”  The lament would read: “Lord my God, I cry to you for help; heal me.  Lord, bring up my soul from Sheol, bring me back to life from among those going down to the Pit.”

In a lament the psalmist promises that she will give praises to God, if she is healed.  On the other side of deathly illness and recovery, she keeps her promise and invites the whole community to join her: “You who are faithful to the Lord, sing praises to God; give thanks to God; give thanks to God’s holy name.  God’s anger lasts only for a second; but God’s favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay all night, but by morning, joy!”

There are even some sections of the Psalm 30 that could be dropped into a lament with no change at all.  The psalmist describes the complacency that characterized her life before the crisis: “When I was comfortable, I said, ‘I will never stumble.’ Because it pleased you, Lord, you made me a strong mountain.”  And then the hammer fell: “But then you hid your presence; I was terrified.”  The psalmist found herself on the brink of death and cried out, “What is to be gained by my spilled blood, by my going down into the pit?  Does dust thank you?  Does it proclaim your faithfulness?  Lord, listen and have mercy on me!  Lord, be my helper!”  All of that could have been drawn from a lament word for word.

The literary relationship between laments and psalms of thanksgiving has long been recognized among scholars.[1]  But I’m more interested this morning in what makes them different.  How is it that the psalmist can move from lament to thanksgiving?

We can see exactly where the move takes place.  It’s right between verses 10 and 11.  Verse 10 reads, “Lord, listen and have mercy on me!  Lord, be my helper!”  She has been reduced to complete dependence on God for any reversal of her crisis.  If she is to live at all, it will be because God acts and only because God acts.

Then in verse 11 we read, “You changed my mourning into dancing.  You took off my funeral clothes and dressed me up in joy so that my whole being might sing praises to you and never stop.”

She cries out for God to act.  And the next thing we know, she’s dancing for joy.  And in between, what?

It’s possible that all that was needed was for the psalmist to admit her dependence on God for her to find herself restored from the self-sufficient complacency she expressed when she said she would never stumble to the covenant faithfulness of the one who offers praise at the end.  She has certainly changed her orientation toward God and toward her own life in the course of the psalm.

But I suspect there is more to it than that.  Her problem wasn’t just that she needed an attitude adjustment and managed through the course of the psalm to talk herself into one.  No, she was also sick, at death’s door.  She describes herself as being among those who are going down to the pit.  She reminds God that, if God allows her to die, she will be nothing more than dust and therefore unable to offer the praise that God presumably wants.

No, something happened between verses 10 and 11: she got better.  The crisis abated.  The threat of death retreated.  She was restored to life.

I think something else happened as well.  I think she heard God speaking.  I think so because of the way the Bible’s central stories are put together.

Consider the story of the move from slavery to freedom.  Early in the book of Exodus, the Israelites are living in slavery, building warehouse cities to store the plunder of empire.  They are building the warehouses of sun-baked mud bricks that they must make.  They have quotas to fill.  They are driven to produce more and more.  When they organize a collective bargaining unit, their masters retaliate by requiring them to gather their own raw materials while meeting the same quotas.  In short, their masters oppress them. 

The Israelites have forgotten their own God and it was clear that an appeal to the Egyptian gods would be useless, so they cried out, not to anyone in particular.  They just cried out.  And the next thing you know they found themselves free and singing, “Sing to the Lord, for an overflowing victory! Horse and rider God threw into the sea!”[2]

Well, that’s true enough, isn’t it, but I left out some stuff, the things that came between crying out and singing a victory song.  And what were those things?  There were two that stand out.  First, God heard their cry, knew their suffering, and came down to save.  But that saving effort on God’s part came through human agency; it came through Moses.  God sent Moses to announce both to the Israelites and to their Egyptian masters that God was about to free the Israelites.  The Egyptians could cooperate or they could resist, but freedom for the Israelites was going to happen.

Moses announced this so that when it happened, Israel and Egypt would know who had done it and for what purpose it had been done.  It wasn’t just so that Israel could sing, Yippee, skippy! and go their merry way.  It was so that Israel could sing to God as only the covenant people can sing.

These are the two elements in the story that come between Israel crying out and Israel singing praise: God heard and responded; and, God sent Moses to announce good news.

Consider the second central story of the Bible, the story of exile and return.  In the fortieth chapter of Isaiah the exiled community of Judah is grieving in Babylon.  The next thing you know, Judah is back home in Jerusalem.  Well, not quite.  First, God notices Judah’s grief.  Second, God gives Judah a prophet to announce homecoming.  “Comfort, comfort my people! says your God.  Speak compassionately to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her compulsory service has ended, that her penalty has been paid…”[3]  Now, the text doesn’t say that God noticed Judah’s grief, but “comfort, comfort my people” wouldn’t make much sense if God hadn’t noticed. 

And the same holds for the third central story of the Bible, the story of death and resurrection.  The women were grieving Jesus’ death and had come to his tomb to prepare his body for burial.  Then, the next thing you know, they are dancing around and shouting, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”  Not quite.  First, God has acted—God has raised Jesus from the dead.  Second, God has announced this decisive action by sending two messengers who announce to the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”[4]

Here’s the pattern that we see in each of the three central stories of the Bible, the stories that shape our understanding of everything else: The people cry out, God hears and acts, God announces good news, the people give God praise in a dramatically changed circumstances.

These stories (or at least the first two) have become the template that lets the psalmist understand her experience of deathly illness and healing.  She was desperately ill.  She cried out to God.  God heard her cries.  God acted by healing her.  In some way she understood that it was God who had acted.  In response she gave God public thanks and praise.

This is all very nice for her, but so what? 

Well, in the first place, we could very well find ourselves in the psalmist’s place.  We can be going along, minding our own business, pretty well convinced that we’ve got life under control.  And then we, too, may discover with the psalmist, that we are not nearly as in charge as we think we are.  Serious illness is still a reality as it was then.  No matter how far advanced medicine is or ever gets, there will always be limits.  

When you’ve reached them, then what?

Well, then, if you’re like the psalmist, you cry out to God.  Now here is where it gets tricky, because while I’m convinced that God always hears our cries and always responds to them, the response is not always what we are looking for.  I will also say that, strangely, sometimes even those responses are found to be more than adequate to convey the depth and constancy of God’s love.

But sometimes, God’s response is restoration and healing and, when that happens, Psalm 30 gives us a pattern to follow: we can back to the congregation for whose prayers we asked and say to them, “Join me in giving thanks and praise to the God who has restored me to life!”

That’s one thing for us.  But there is another:

This Book is ours.  We belong to it and it belongs to us.  We have shaped it and it continues to shape us.  We are the people whose mourning is turned into dancing.  We are the people who know that God is able and willing to respond to the cries of all of creation, our own cries included. 

Friday we got the news of the mass shooting in Aurora, CO.  The reasons or motives may never be known.  There were fifty-eight people wounded.  Twelve were killed.  One of them was Matt McQuinn who was celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday.  He shielded his girlfriend and her brother with his body.  Veronica Moser was another victim.  She was six and had just started swimming lessons on Tuesday.  Her mother is in ICU, drifting in and out of consciousness.  She asks for her daughter, but she hasn’t been told yet.

What does the biblical testimony have to offer us and the survivors?  That is, beside its indictment of our culture’s love affair with violence and its refusal to know this about itself.  Psalm 30 tells us that our anguish is real, our grief is real, our sorrow is real.  Now is the night of weeping. 

But morning will come.  Not this morning, but it will come.  Morning will come when joy is reborn.  We are the people of hope.  We know that no situation is ever hopeless, even when it calls for resources that we do not have.  We do not have to resign ourselves to the inevitable. 

Beyond our resources, beyond our vision, beyond our understanding, out of sight, behind the scenes, God is at work.  The God who turns mourning into dancing is for us.  The God who sends joy in the morning loves us.  And there is nothing we can do about that.  If we have to resign ourselves to something, let’s resign ourselves to that!

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.

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[1] Claus Westermann, Lament and Praise in Israel (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1981).

[2] Exodus 15:21b.

[3] Isaiah 40:1-2.

[4] Luke 24:5b.

Darkness Is My Only Companion

5th Sunday after Pentecost
Psalm 88
July 1, 2012

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

And here we are—back in the abyss! Like last week’s psalm, this one is located firmly in a pit. But things have gone from bad to worse. In Psalm 130, the psalmist understood that his suffering came from his own failure to keep covenant, he owned his guilt and he looked to God for forgiveness and rescue, confident that God would hear and respond. If this isn’t entirely comfortable for us—after all we are not fond of feeling guilty—at least we meet a familiar pattern. This is the pattern of the prayer for forgiveness and absolution. We meet that pattern in Advent and Lent and occasionally in other seasons. We recognize that we have failed to keep covenant. We name this failure before God and each other. We ask God to be restored to our covenant relationship. We then hear God’s forgiveness announced, both from the pulpit by the prayer leader and one-to-one as we share Christ’s peace with each other. We sin. We ask for forgiveness. We are forgiven. We go on. It is a clear—maybe the clearest—case of answered prayer.

Psalm 130 is a lament, but it has a happy outcome. About this the psalmist is completely confident. There is no such happy conclusion to Psalm 88. This psalm begins in the usual way. After you’ve read fifty or sixty laments you begin to see the pattern. This psalm begins with a cry to God, this one comes at night when all our problems seem bigger and our minds worry over them in circles without getting anywhere. The psalmist pleads for God’s listening ear.

Then, as we expect, the psalmist moves on to lay out the situation, the reason for the lament. The psalmist has a troubled heart, but perhaps there is more to it than that, although a troubled heart is no small matter. There is a great deal of death talk here: “my life draws near to Sheol (that was ancient Israel’s term the place of the dead where those who had died maintained a shadowy existence), I am counted among those who go down to the Pit...like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.” Is the psalmist sick with some deadly illness? Or is he “dying” in some other way, perhaps because he has for reasons unknown become a social outcast? We don’t really know. The psalms work because they are detailed without being specific.

After the usual cry to God and the description of how things are for him, we begin to see just how much different this psalm is from Psalm 130. There the psalmist accepts the blame for her situation. Here, however, it is not the psalmist who is responsible for the approach of death. It is God who has caused it, God who is responsible for it, God who is being held accountable for it:“You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep. Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves.”

The worst of what God has done is to cause the alienation of the psalmist’s friends: “You have caused my companions to shun me; you have made me a thing of horror to them.”

Now, at this place in a lament we expect a shift: the psalmist should move on to make a request, listing the reasons why God should grant the request. And then comes a vow to offer praise and thanksgiving when the request has been granted. And finally, as if the request has already been granted, there is praise in the past tense.

But none of that happens in this psalm. Here the psalmist cries out again: “Every day I call on you, O Lord, I spread out my hands to you.”

Confronted with God’s silence, the psalmist doesn’t go away or—which amounts to the same thing—come up with all sorts of theological reasons why God won’t answer or perhaps already has. The psalmist can no longer afford polite conversation with God. The psalmist has cried out and God has not answered and when God does not answer, the psalmist calls out again.

This time it’s become desperate. There is time for God to act, but not much. A series of rhetorical questions makes it clear that if—or maybe it’s when—the psalmist dies, it will be too late. “Do you work wonders for the dead?” No. “Do the shades rise up to praise you?” No. Is your steadfast love declared in the grave or your faithfulness in Abaddon?” No. “Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?” No.

No, if God is going to act, it had better be soon. Soon it will be too late even for God’s power to make things better.

But there is still no answer. So the psalmist cries out again and the kid gloves come off: “O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?...Your wrath has swept over me; your dread assaults destroy me....You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me; my companions are in darkness.”

That last phrase is sometimes translated as “darkness is my only companion.” Whichever it is, the last word in the psalm is darkness. I can’t help but be reminded of the darkness at the beginning of the book of Genesis, the darkness that was upon the face of the deep, the darkness that was dispelled when God spoke light into being. The psalmist has been returned to that primordial, chaotic darkness, before the world that could sustain human life was called into being. The psalmist has been unmade and no longer lives in the world that is home for the people of the covenant God.

Three times the psalmist has cried out to God, each time more urgently than the last. Three times the psalmist has been met with silence. The psalmist begins in the darkness of the abyss and ends in the abysmal darkness. The word of God for the people of God: Thanks be to God!

What is this psalm doing in the hymnal? To be sure, it’s not in our hymnal. It’s not in lectionary. But here it is in the Bible. What’s it doing there? It is after all, as Walter Brueggemann puts it so subtly, “an embarrassment to conventional faith.”1

He’s right. The conventions of faith are rather well established, if nowhere written down. That’s the thing about the things that go without saying: no one needs to say or write them. But we know that it’s not polite to address God as if we expected God to respond. It isn’t polite to address God with our raw and naked needs. It isn’t polite to bring our inability to manage without God’s help into the gathered assembly and lay it out in front of God and everyone. We feel a little embarrassed—or maybe it’s ashamed—about a breach of decorum of this magnitude.

We pray carefully. And if we are too overwhelmed to be able to pray carefully, we stay home, away from public worship until we get over it. We who would scream our lungs out at a football game or a swim meet, prefer our emotions in worship to be cooler and under our control. Yes, this psalm is “an embarrassment to conventional faith.”

But the psalmist doesn’t have time or space for worrying about conventions. The psalmist is not concerned with embarrassment, her own or anyone else’s. We know how much pain it would take for us to be in a place where we stopped worrying about convention or about being embarrassed.

The difference is, when the psalmist is in that place, he doesn’t dial 911. Or maybe I should say that he doesn’t just dial 911. He cries out to Yahweh. And when Yahweh doesn’t answer, he cries again. And when Yahweh still doesn’t answer, he cries yet again. He will keep crying until there is an answer. And silence is not an answer; silence is silence; silence is the failure to answer.

What’s this impolite prayer doing in the Bible? Well, to begin with, it’s telling the truth. Or at least a truth. Life is sometimes just like this. If you’re a seventh grade girl whose social life is subject to the strange winds that blow through middle schools and suddenly find yourself on the outside of every clique in school, the subject of chatter on Facebook, so that even your best friend is afraid to be with you, and you’ve done everything you know how to do and you’ve even prayed for things to change, but they don’t, then you know that this psalm tells the truth.

If you’re a man whose wife is dying of cancer, but the doctors make vague promises about new treatments, but they don’t work, and you’ve prayed, but she’s dying anyway, and your friends from the Thursday morning coffee shop group have stopped calling because they don’t know what to say, and you know that she’s dying and that you’ll dying with her, then you know that this psalm tells the truth. Biblical faith tells the truth, even when the truth is ugly. And sometimes the truth is ugly and the psalmist knows that it must be told.

But the psalmist also knows that this truth is not an abstraction and it’s not an objective fact. The truth isn’t just told; it’s told to someone. And the psalmist knows that the someone above all to whom the truth must be told is the covenant God of Israel.

Up against the wall, down a deep deep hole, on the brink of death, the psalmist knows that Israel always has to do with Yahweh, the people of God have to do with the God of the covenant, or, to move this to our own context, the Church of God always has to do with the God of the Church. Even when our backs are up against the wall. Especially when our backs are up against the wall, when it looks as though God has fled from us, forgotten us, or forsaken us. The psalmist does not have to figure it out. Sometimes, especially when the truth is ugly, it can’t be figured out. But even then, God can still be addressed, summoned, called and recalled into conversation.

Sometimes, when the truth is very ugly, and conventional faith has failed, and it’s time for impolite and desperate speech, the only faithful thing we can do, the faithful thing that we must do is to tell the truth of what it is like to be God’s people to the God whose people we are. And when that time comes, Psalm 88 will be here in the Bible right where it belongs. When that time comes, and we share the same anguish that led the psalmist to write it, it will become the vessel that holds our deepest pain and offers it to God. And then we will know why Psalm 88 is here and we will be able to say and from the heart,
The word of God for the people of God
Thanks be to God!

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.

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.