Standing at the edge
Lent 2 Text: Psalm 77
If you’ve ever had a crisis of faith, you may well recognize something of your own voice in that Psalm … the anguish, the crying out that’s met with stone cold silence, the distress, finding on your lips questions you never hoped to ask, coming to that place at the edge where everything --where you’ve been, where you are, where you’ll be --where everything is up for grabs; and it’s not yours to resolve so much as to endure … endure the waiting for what can only be given in a way you can’t control or foresee.
The word crisis, we‘ve come to understand, is comprised of 2 words: danger and opportunity. A crisis of faith, if we’re able to ride it through, promises all of that. And what a ride!
In describing Psalm 77, Walter Brueggemann uses the phrase “a speech pilgrimage.”[1] What a beautiful way not only to frame this particular Psalm, but it’s so helpful, I think, in giving us perspective, a way to meet and move into crises of faith as they arise for us.
Let’s think about that for a moment.
A pilgrimage is a journey in which we venture from one place to another place, carrying in our being an openness to be met somehow by the holy; recognizing before we ever set out that there will be difficult stretches, blistered feet, thoughts of quitting, turning back. There will be times when it will ask of us everything. Disillusionment will happen. There may be companions, some who are helpful and some not at all. Taking breaks will be important, finding rest.
A speech pilgrimage then is this journey we take in stages by way of our words …words which bring us from one place to an entirely different place. And just as a pilgrimage isn’t simply about going for a walk, we can imagine there’s more to a speech pilgrimage than simply talking ourselves into or out of something. We can imagine a holy accompanying of sorts. There will be words that stop us in our tracks … words that bring us to our knees, bring us to the edge … and if we stay with it, words that open up, make a way … words that land us into new vistas.
In the Psalm we have this morning, clearly, something has happened to plunge this person into a state of desperation. The voice of the Psalm begins from that place of utter self-preoccupation ...
I cried aloud
I seek the Lord
my hand is stretched out
my soul refuses to be comforted
I think of God
I moan
I meditate
my spirit faints
I am so troubled I cannot speak
I consider days of old
I remember years past
I commune within my heart
I, I , I …
whatever has happened, this person is caught in the finely focussed world of his or her all-consuming struggle. And all the seeking, all the crying and calling has brought no relief. And so from there arise these questions about God … voiced not to God but about God ...
Will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favourable?
Has God’s steadfast love ceased forever?
Are God’s promises at an end for all time?
Has God forgotten to be gracious?
Has God in anger shut up his compassion?
Something’s wrong. This person knows what God is like and therefore how it’s supposed to go --you cry out, God responds. Except that’s not what‘s happening. So now where are we?
We’ve come into this place where this person’s innocent faith is beginning to crack. Doesn’t God care? What does it mean that God isn’t doing something?
This is dangerous new territory.
And then comes the next statement, which is difficult to translate.
What we read was from The New Revised Standard Version:
It is my grief, that the right hand of the Most High has changed.
The Jerusalem Bible renders it:
“This,” I said then, “is what distresses me; that the power of the
Most High is no longer what it was.”
More poignant yet is The New English Bible translation:
“Has God’s right hand,” I said, “lost its grasp?
Does it hang powerless, the arm of the most high?” [2]
The “right hand of the Lord” is the term in the Hebrew scriptures for God’s power and readiness to deliver God’s people from distress.
It’s unsettling … even shattering to allow for God to change, for God to be free, to be more or different from what we thought, from what we knew. How then do we relate? To whom are we relating? Do we want to? Is it worth it? Where will this take us? Standing in this risky place, there’s no telling ahead of time if it will mean the loss of faith or an opening for new faith beyond where we have been.
Do you know that place of asking what if God isn’t who I thought God was? … have I been sold a bill of goods … what if it’s not for real -- this hope in Christ? this Love of God? To honestly ask is to find ourselves in a frightful place.
I’ve spoken before about one of those times in my own life ... some years ago now, when the United States was on the brink of a second invasion of Iraq. For weeks I felt this growing despair … not just at the prospect of war, but wondering where on earth is God in all of this? If Love is stronger than death, what’s with all this death? Why isn’t God doing something? You can hear it can’t you … “Has God’s right hand lost it’s grasp? Does it hang powerless, the arm of the most high?” (That’s really what I was asking.) And if so, then what?
It was a Sunday afternoon … I had come home from leading worship … and as Bev heard me in my despondency she said, “I think we should call your Dad and ask him to come over.” Which we did and he came. Sitting there on the couch, he and I, I told him what I was feeling … what I was wondering. And from that place of his deep listening he said “I wonder if this isn’t something of Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane?”
With that something happened for me … something shifted. There wasn’t just me in my own experience … but a sense of being joined by Jesus. The recollection of the story somehow made him present. How did that happen? I don’t know. It was pure gift.
From there I remember Bev and I having more conversation …theological conversation … what was Jesus about? … what was God about in Jesus? … what does that mean for our life? and the world? We were working our way, finding our way into a new and I think truer, more daring place in how we perceived God to be at work in the world. The whole process in fact, now as I see it, beginning from my despair to this new found, energized place, was a speech pilgrimage!
Just so, the journey continues for that person in our Psalm … in some ways along a similar path. From that place of daring to wonder is God up to anything anymore? what comes next is this leap from I, I, I, to Thou … the leap from the narrow world of his or her own distress --what I know and what concerns me-- to You … You, Holy One in your freedom, to be who you are and how you are in ways beyond what I have claimed and presumed all along.
There’s no telling how that move was made from I to YOU … how it came. And maybe just as well or we might grab hold of it as though our deliverance was ours to manage, when the truth is, we live by gift --not grasp. By surrendering and receptivity.
And just as Gethsemane was the opener for me through which so much more flowed into my being, so for this person there comes the recollection of another powerful formative story -- the Exodus story, where God makes a way for a people out of an impossible place, through an impossible path. That story re-membered, re-collected, somehow brings into his or her own presence a taste, a feel, the reality of God’s delivering, saving grace.
The Psalm comes to an end rather abruptly. We don’t hear what happens next in this person’s life; what becomes of his or her situation. I love how Walter Brueggemann puts it … “nothing has been resolved, but everything has been recontextualized.” [3]
Sometimes that changes everything.
One of the gifts of this Psalm is the witness it offers us, in case without it, we might never imagine it possible …that we could somehow break out of that cramped space of our own despair and find ourselves in the wide open spaces of God’s grace.
Indeed, God’s Word is Life!
[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995, p.258
[2] Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith, p.261
[3] Walter Brueggemann, The Psalms and the Life of Faith, p.266