21May2000sermon.htm

"The rest of the story"

Sermon for Easter 5, Year B (Revised Common Lctionary), 21 May 2000

Princeton University Chapel, NJ

Reading: Psalm 22:25-31

There are some times when I wonder
if we know what we are doing
when we read the bible.
We pick up this book,
turn its leaf-thin pages,
and begin to read.

Sometimes
what we read
makes no sense
whatsoever;
sometimes
it kind of makes sense,
but seems so far from anything and everything that we know
that we close it up again and put it back on the shelf.
But sometimes, just sometimes
it makes so much sense
that we want to throw our arms around it and begin to dance,
or, more often, run away into a corner and hide.

Last week, when I picked up my bible
to begin preparing this sermon,
my experience was pretty much the second one.
I read the four readings suggested by the lectionary for today,
read them again,
and
put my bible
away.
The next day
I did the same thing.
They were all kind of interesting, I guess,
but nothing was really exciting, nothing
grabbed my attention
and demanded
that I face up to what it was saying.
By day three, I was beginning to get a bit worried
So I sat down again,
and this time
I let my attention drift.
I kind of wandered my way through the bible, flipping through the pages
before and after each reading, hoping
I might find a clue
to what to preach today.
And what I found
was not so much
some earthshaking discovery,
a new bit of text
which I had previously overlooked,
as something
about the way we read, something
which makes it difficult
to find any sense
in the words of Scripture.

You see, most times we read five verses here, ten there,
a bit of a psalm.
And then we wonder why
its difficult
to get any sense
of what's going on.
We read in little chunks,
and when you read in little chunks
you only get part of
the story.

Which brings me to the text I want to talk about today.

It was four weeks ago
that we heard
the other part
of this story,
four weeks ago
that the words
were spoken in this place:
"eli, eli, lema sabachthani?
"My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?"

Hanging on the cross,
bruised, torn, bleeding,
from the parched throat and blistered lips
of a dying
Savior:
"My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?"

Those words
are the first words of the psalm
which we read from today; they
are the rest
of the story.
You see, the psalm as we read it,
is a psalm of praise.
It speaks words of thanksgiving;
it is full of confidence.

But if you are anything like me,
such words of confidence
seem just a little misguided.
I look around me, and I don't see a world
where the poor eat
and are satisfied;
I see a world
where they don't eat,
and where hunger and dysentery
gnaw away their lives.
I don't see a world
where the ends of the earth remember
and turn to God;
I see a world
where God has become little more
than a swear word.
I don't see a world
where God rules over the nations;
I see a world
where chaos reigns,
and in countless places
people are at war,
fighting
in the name of faith.
And most of all
I see a world
which is not entirely convinced
it wants to have anything to do
with my God.

It seems like this is not just misguided confidence, but maybe even
triumphalism, maybe even arrogance,
the words of an exclusive religious fanatic
who has no time
for the realities of this world.

But placed alongside that first verse,
placed alongside the first part of the psalm,
the rest
of the story,
maybe, just maybe
things are different.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" the psalmist writes,
Why are you so far from helping me,
from the words of my groaning?
O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer;
and by night, but find no rest...
But I am a worm, and not human;
scorned by others, and despised by the people.
All who see me mock at me;
they make mouths at me, they shake their heads;
"Commit your cause to the LORD; let him deliver -
let him rescue the one in whom he delights!" ...
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint;
my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;
my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my
jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death.
My hands and feet have shriveled;
I can count all my bones."

This
is the voice
of one
who has suffered.

And what a different perspective it is
from the one we got in the other part, the part that was read as our reading
today.
Here
there is no false certainty, no fanciful visions
of a wonderful world.
Here
there is pain
and grief
and a life which is full
of struggle.
The anguish
is not mediated,
it is not softened by religious words.
We hear the full force of the speaker's desolation.
Here is one
who knows far too well
the absence
of God.

And that
makes me want
to run away into a corner and hide.
Because part of me knows
this feeling too well, part of me knows
the fear
and the anger
and the pain.
And that's a place
that I don't want to go to
ever again,
even
in the words
of a psalm.

And if that
were all there were
to this psalm,
I would all too easily join the psalmist
tumbling in a fast-spinning spiral
of despair.

But that
is only part
of the story.
Because interspersed with those words of desolation
are other words, words which put
a different spin on things,
words of hope.

"Yet you are holy," the psalmist says,
"enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In you our ancestors trusted;
they trusted, and you delivered them.
To you they cried, and were saved;
in you they trusted, and were not put to shame...
Yet it was you who took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother's breast.
On you I was cast from my birth,
and since my mother bore me you have been my God."

There is a confidence here, but its not the strident,
loud,
confidence
of those verses we read earlier;
the confidence here
is quieter,
more tentative,
trying to remember
what it was like
when God was not silent,
what it was like
to know
God's care.
Trying to remember,
what has been in the past
and surely will be again.

It is taking life
step by step,
inching the way
from desolation
to survival.
Another part
of the story.

And its only then,
when we've been through desolation
and survival, that we can return to
those final verses
which were the reading for today
Tempered
by the realities
of pain
and hope,
they are no longer
the triumphalistic
and arrogant claims
of an exclusive fanatic,
but the hopeful celebration
of a wounded and broken person
who wants to know
that things will get better
who wants to feel
the active love of God
in this world,
who wants to be sure
that God will not always
be silent.

In this psalm,
grief and hope and celebration
exist
side by side.

Which, it seems to me,
is pretty much
what life is like.
We don't have the freedom
of taking it
one chunk
at a time,
we don't have the choice
of working through each little bit
in isolation.

Life
is a lot more muddled
than that.

And so my best friend
just last week
on Mother's Day
greived for her mother
who died of cancer
just over a month ago,
and at the same time
celebrated with her little boy
who has just turned three,
and held the hope within her
of the baby
she is carrying.

It's not nice and neat.
Because life isn't nice and neat.
We live the whole story
in its confusing entirety, not just nice
discrete
parts of it.

If your life
isn't like that
then I guess this psalm
doesn't matter.
But if it is,
if your life is as confusing
and muddled,
as grief-filled
and hope-filled
and celebration-filled
as mine is,
then this psalm
gives me the hope
that this is what life
is really all about.
That the passions of my heart and mind and soul
which feel like they pull in so many directions
are really not tearing me apart
but making me whole.

And that in those passions
we meet
with the passion of God,
God, who in the desolate agony
of death on the cross,
and the quiet hope
resurrected life
and the fiery celebration
of holy spirit,
is not silent
but speaks into our world
and into our lives
with the passion
of love.

That's
the rest
of the story.

Raewynne J. Whiteley
21 May 2000