Psalm 6 (translated by Ellen Davis)
2LORD, do not in your wrath chastise me, and do not in your fury discipline me. 3Be gracious to me, LORD, for I am languishing. Heal me LORD, for my bones are rattled. 4And my being is very rattled. And you, LORD—how long? 5Turn, LORD, deliver my being! Save me for the sake of your covenant loyalty! 6For in death there is no remembrance of you. In Sheol, who gives thanks to you? 7I am exhausted with my groaning. I make my bed swim every night; With my tears I melt my mattress. 8My eye is worn out from vexation, grown old because of all my foes. 9Get away from me, all you workers of iniquity! For the LORD has heard the sound of my weeping. 10The LORD has heard my plea-for-grace; the LORD takes up my prayer. 11They will be confounded and very rattled, all my enemies; they will turn and be confounded in an instant. I. Before I jump into this sermon, I want to say a few things. First, perhaps I should have preached this sermon last week, but I simply wasn’t ready to do so. So I appreciate your patience and understanding. Second, I have decided to throw out the lectionary for this week and focus only on this one psalm. For those of you who are fond of the lectionary, I’m sorry. I promise I haven’t abandoned it. Finally, my sermon today is only the beginning of a conversation. I invite you to give me a call sometime. We might not be able to meet in-person, but I think we need to keep talking about these things. If you like what I have to say, tell me. If you don’t like what I have to say, tell me. The only way this goes anywhere is if we keep talking about it. Let’s pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. II. I believe that the attitude of a Christian on this day, January 17th, 2021 should be one of lament. I will even go so far as to say that lament is the only faithful attitude a Christian can possess today. Wherever you may stand politically, whatever you may believe, there is no cause to look at the current state of our country and our world and feel anything but lament. I have heard this past week that many are proud of the insurrection that took place at the capitol on January 6th. There is nothing good about the illegal obstruction of our democratic process. There is nothing good about our leadership encouraging violent and uncivil behavior. There is certainly nothing good about the death of officer Brian Sicknick or Ashli Babbitt. There is no cause for pride or praise or celebration. I have heard this past week that many are excited about the president’s second impeachment and the bipartisan support for it. The impeachment of a world leader is no cause for celebration. It is a sign that things that so many things are wrong. No president of the United States has ever been impeached twice before now. We are not in a good place. There is no cause for pride or praise or celebration. What there is cause for is lament, grief, and sorrow. 24 million people have contracted coronavirus in this country alone, and 94 million worldwide. 396,000 people have died from it in this country alone, and over two million worldwide. Roughly 4,000 people are dying every day in this country; that’s more than the total number of victims of 9/11 every. single. day. And yet we have leaders who call it a hoax, downplay its severity, and obstruct the processes of prevention, treatment, and healing. As a result this pandemic has gone on longer and been far worse than it ever had to be. There is cause for lament. On Wednesday, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. And while that day is sure to be filled with celebration, it will also be a day of great division. Even though Biden won the election, about 75 million people didn’t vote for him. We are still a nation divided, as the events at the capitol have shown us; and these divisions will not simply disappear on inauguration day—far from it. During these last years, family members, friends, and coworkers, have been pitted against each other, their political differences dividing them in ways that they haven’t for a long time. Those kinds of divisions do not heal quickly or easily. There is cause for lament. In America today people say black lives matter, blue lives matter, all lives matter, and yet for most it seems only my life matters. We seem incapable of empathy and compassionate conversation. Everyone is desperate to be seen and to be known and to be validated and to be safe and to be free and to be loved. Yet none but a few saints are willing to do the hard work of truly seeing other people so that they themselves might truly be seen. And so we walk around blind with our fists up. There is cause for lament. Last week a confederate flag was paraded around the U.S. Capitol for the first time ever. This is a travesty and far from the kind of allegiance we are encouraged to pledge to the American flag. Around the country the confederate flag, which was used to champion slavery, has somehow become synonymous with freedom. But not the kind of freedom that will extend to all. And at the same time, many are calling for the complete erasure of any hint of the confederacy from our national history, further embittering a group of people who already feel cast aside and downtrodden. There is cause for lament. I could keep going with example after example of all that is wrong with the world, with America, with our community. But you already know all this stuff. You’re drowning in news updates, and, I hope, your heart is grieved. There is cause for lament. III. There is cause for lament and this is bad news, my friends, because we Christians are terrible at lamenting. We always have been. I don’t fully understand why: maybe we feel it is unfaithful to express sadness to God; maybe we’re too uncomfortable with grief; maybe our doctrine of salvation by grace has made us incapable of really feeling regret. Who knows? But we American Christians are losing the luxury of that ignorance. Unless we become exceptional lamenters soon, there may not be any American Christianity left. So let’s talk about lament. In order to become exceptional lamenters, first we need to know how to do it. And there is no better place to turn for such instruction than the Book of Psalms. One commentator says that, “ancient Israel believed that the kind of prayer in which we most need fluency is the loud groan” and the Psalms give us plenty of examples of how to groan (Ellen Davis, Getting in Touch with God, 15). There are essentially two kinds of Psalms: lament psalms and praise psalms. The lectionary does not reflect this, but there are actually more lament psalms than praise psalms in the Bible. That means that the majority of the psalms are filled with people expressing their anguish to God. We read this morning together from Psalm 6 which is a great example of a lament psalm. The person who wrote this psalm was in deep distress. “I melt my mattress with my tears,” they write, “My bones are rattled…I am languishing.” The person who wrote this psalm took an honest look around and said, “Things are not going well.” But instead of writing off their misery with a phrase like, “All things work together for good!” the writer is honest: “things are not working together for good!” Martin Luther says that a theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is. This means that if something seems bad, then we call it bad! This psalmist has seen evil and has called it evil. What’s amazing about this psalm, and I think this is the part that we Christians get uncomfortable with, is that the writer of the psalm seems to blame God for their plight. “My being is very rattled” they write, and then with an accusatory jab they add, “And you Lord—how long?” How long will you let this go on, God? How long are you going to let me suffer? It’s as if the writer of this psalm is taking God to task for all that has gone wrong. “For in death there is no remembrance of you,” the psalmist writes. They lay it all on the line: if you let me die, God, then there will be no one around to offer you praise—and then where will you be? IV. If we are going to be exceptional lamenters, then we need to tell it like it is and tell it to God. Here’s how that sounds: “And you, Lord—how long? How long will you let these divisions continue? How long will you let this pandemic continue? How long will you let racism continue? How long will you let poverty continue? How long will you let injustice continue? You could do something, God, but you haven’t. And I’m tired, I’m so very tired. So why don’t you just do something!” Does such a prayer make you uncomfortable? If the psalms teach us anything, it’s not just that such prayers are okay, it’s that we have a responsibility to pray those kinds of prayers. When something isn’t going right, we have to lament to God. That is the only faithful response. And no matter what you may believe, no matter what side of the aisle you stand on, you have to admit that things aren’t exactly going right in America right now. So when things do not go the way we had hoped, when we encounter injustice or illness or irritation, the Christian response is not to storm the capitol building; the Christian response is not to slander your opponents on Twitter or Facebook; the Christian response is not to revel in the defeat of others. The Christian response is to lament, to cry out to God about all that is wrong with your life and the world, and to invite others to do the same. V. The best kept secret of the Psalms, that isn’t actually a secret at all, is that lament can lead to healing. With the exception of only two lament psalms, almost every single lament psalm ends with praise. Psalm 6 ends with these words: "Get away from me, all you workers of iniquity! For the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping. The Lord has heard my plea-for-grace; the Lord takes up my prayer." There is nothing in this psalm to indicate that the writer’s challenging circumstances have ended. It seems, actually, that the suffering might be ongoing. However, the very act of naming everything that has gone wrong seems to open the writer up to the possibility that things could one day go right. To paraphrase the psalmist’s words: today I feel the wrath, but tomorrow I will feel the grace. While it is true that healing comes when our lament turns to hope, I think one of the reasons we Christians are so bad at lament is that we want to jump to hope too quickly. Looking at the cross makes us uncomfortable; we’d rather jump straight to the resurrection. But there is no resurrection without the cross. There is no hope without lament. Unless we can become better at lamenting, better at calling out the faults in ourselves and the world, better at asking God to step in and do something, then all our hopes will ultimately be empty. VI. No matter where you stand on all that is going on in the world, I am calling you to lament. That is your homework for this week, and next week, and the week after that. Learn to lament. Read Psalm 6 every day. Make this ancient prayer your own prayer. When you turn on the news and see something you don’t like, curb your anger; let it turn instead to lament, grief, and sorrow. Confess to God everything that brings you pain. When you open your Facebook and read something that makes you mad; don’t fire off an insult or a trite response. Let your anger melt into lament. If you can’t do something that builds a bridge between you and those with whom you disagree, then don’t do anything at all. And we may just find that lament is that bridge. Can you imagine how powerful it would be if we Christians, instead of participating in the vitriol, the vilification, and the violence chose to publicly lament? What if the world saw us weeping for the state of things instead of trying to defend our own selfish and sinful actions? What if instead of standing outside abortion clinics jeering at the women who come and go we instead went and wept with them? What if instead of bullying transgendered people, we sat and listened to their painful stories? What if instead of beating police officers on the steps of the capitol building we sat down and confessed to each other all that is wrong with what we see? What if instead of gunning down black men and women in the street we invited them into safer places and wept with them for all they have suffered? None of these things is possible without lament. Only in acknowledging what is wrong can we look for what is right. Only in confessing our grief can we look forward in hope. VII. I’ll end with this personal observation. I’ve realized that right now, I cannot see what God is doing. I look around me and see all that is going wrong—the pandemic, the politicking, the riots, the insurrection—all of it seems completely and utterly devoid of the presence of God. I’m tired. I’m burned out. I’m anxious. I’m confused. I have no idea what to say to people or what to do to help make things right again. And to me, God is nowhere to be seen. I don’t tell you this to get your pity. In fact, I suspect many of you feel the same way. I tell you this because it is true. I tell you this because a theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is. Everything that’s happening right now, it all sucks. And I don’t understand why God is letting it happen. We have prayed for deliverance. We have prayed for change. We have prayed for everything. Yet we have received nothing. And so all we can do is lament. Because there is cause for lament. My being is very rattled. And you, Lord—how long? How long? |