From Lamentation to Light

In Seminary I remember my homiletics professor saying that there are only two ways to preach a really good sermon. Either we begin where we are and end in Jerusalem or we begin in Jerusalem and end our homily on the street where we live.

Lamentation

Today’s Psalm begins close to home. Most scholars think these words came out of the depths of the exile. Far from home God’s chosen found themselves in that hard place where they discovered it well-nigh impossible to sing the Lord’s song. This exile was a place called hopelessness—a region of enormous pain.

We’ve all been there. We struggle with unanswered prayer. We identify with the old spiritual, “Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen.” The old land marks seem to have slipped away. We worry about the shifting morals of our young, the old institutions of safety like banks and stocks. We lose sleep over terrorism, Alzheimer’s health care. We wonder if we will have enough to take us to the finish line. Looking around we find so little comfort we wonder if anyone has heard our moaning. Things are sometimes so hard that our prayers stick in our throats. The Psalmist laments could be our own: “Has his steadfast love ceased forever?” and “Are his promises at an end?” (vs. 8) This is the street where most of us live.

Sometimes I read the lectionary texts and wonder what possible connection our selected readings have to do with one another. Not so in today’s texts. Elijah could identify with Psalm 77. This faithful prophet found himself running for his life. Having offended the petulant Queen Jezebel—she had determined to kill him. And so Elijah hid in the wilderness and railed out words that could have been written by our Psalmist. “I alone am left, and they are seeking my life to take it away.”

This same sentiment can be found as we move to our Epistle reading. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians the personal pull of slavery was very real. The old gratification of self-destruction was ever-present: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, the list was seemingly endless. In his own life the Apostle had railed out much like the Psalmist: “Who shall deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7.24) “I do not understand my own actions,” he said, “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”

Doesn’t it all sound familiar? The Psalmist in Exile, Elijah afraid and desperate, Paul agonizing over the strictures of his own humanity. These are descriptions of the street where we live.

Our focus is on Psalms 77, a Psalm of Lament. There are more Psalms of Lamentation than any other Psalms. Walter Brueggemann writes that life is often savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence and hard lived asymmetry. Strange, he says that the church today opts usually for up-beat songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented.

Light

But we cannot stay on the street called lament. In the middle of the darkness of all these readings there shines a beam of light. From verses 11-20 the Psalmist moves from a time of stress much like our world to the strange hopeful world of the Bible. We find ourselves in Jerusalem of all places. Brueggemann says these latter verses give us a Psalm of Orientation.

Elijah discovered in the desert a highway to his God. All the valleys were not exalted and all the hills were not made low but God spoke in his darkest hour. He was fed by the hands of angels and a still small voice sent him back into the fight.

Out of his own life Paul discovered a word for the troubled Galatians. Slavery was not the last word, neither was idolatry, enmity or strife. But all these words gave way to the fruits of the spirit: love and joy and peace and patience.

So Psalm 70. 11 onward moves from the harsh, hard days of the exile to a vision of a far better world. In remembering the God who had acted in their history, they discovered this same God would act on the mean streets where they lived. What we have here is a change of perspective. One scholar says that in all these readings we see the movement from I to Thou. The hymn captured it well: “Thou in the darkness drear our one true light.” Even in the hard circumstances of their lives, the world became larger and filled with hope and mystery.

Ann Weems in her book, Psalms of Lament tells that in 1982 all the stars fell out of her sky when her son Todd was killed less than an hour after his twenty-first birthday. Nothing seemed to assuage her grief. Her friend, Walter Brueggemann, suggested that perhaps if she wrote out the laments of her heart she might find some comfort. And out of the pain of her own life she lifted up her anger and lamentations as she wrote page after page. This grieving mother discovered slowly that God really can wipe the tears from the eyes when no consolation seems to come. She ended her book of laments with the discovery she made in the depths of her darkness. God really does put the stars back in our skies.

The street where we live may just be a place that is hard and difficult. The testimony of the faithful remind us that this is not the last word. Beyond the pain of our lives there is a Jerusalem where we find hope and joy once more.

(The above article was written for The Christian Century and published June 15, 2010. It was written for the June 27th lectionary passage for the church. The text was Psalm 77.)