Sermons

 

In the Christian tradition, this past Weds marked the beginning of Lent; the 40 day period leading up to Holy week, and Easter. At our Fat Tuesday dinner before Ash Wednesday, someone turned and asked to to explain Lent. I can’t remember what I said, but I’m sure what I said was not very eloquent, mostly because I was more interested in eating BBQ ribs with my fingers. But the question itself came as a reminder to me that that’s where the church is these days. The church is no longer made up of people who grew up in the church. And this church in particular has a Pastor who also didn’t grow up in the Protestant church. I was raised Catholic until 3rd grade when my parents gave up Catholicism. My mother eventually became a Sufi, my father became an atheist and married a Jewish woman, my oldest sister became Bahai, and my other sister converted to Judaism so I grew up a kind of faith mutt. Which was a wonderful experience. Without trying, I learned how to love the customs and traditions of whatever home I was in. And the town I grew up in on Long Island was divided into north and south. The north was primarily Italian and the south was Jewish. There’s an old joke, that says what’s the difference between a Jewish grandmother and Italian Grandmother. The Italian Grandmother says, eat if you don’t eat it’ll kill you, and the Jewish grandmother says eat if you don’t eat it'll kill me.

I’m sharing this because of my understanding of the psalms. This tremendous collection that lives in our Bible is the largest book of our Bible but it is also some of the most expressive and honest reflections on the human experience. And our Protestant tradition is sometimes uncomfortable with that level of expression. We tend to be refined and reserved. But Jews and Italians generally are not. As an Italian, I’m loud, I’m easily annoyed, I’m exuberant at times, frazzled, I complain, But I also tell stranger show beautiful they are, I say I love you to friends on the phone, I scare young mothers because I want to hold their babies and if they’re fat I want to bite their cheeks… I embrace people with hugs probably more than people want to be embraced. This is in my DNA. Then I married a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. (Wasp) And I remember the first dinner with them and how quiet it was. People took turns talking and no one used their hands….so I learned over time, how to refine, how to filter what I was thinking. And occasionally failed miserably. (Rosalind story…) Did I mention I'm no longer married?

Here’s my point, because I actually do have one… I celebrate the psalms because this is how I understand our relationship with God. God gave us this enormous capacity to feel every emotion. Not just the happy ones, or the polite ones. But all of them; anger, complaint, lament, anguish, fear, and more. They are all God-given. Why would God have created us to feel all of these emotions if we weren't supposed to feel all of these emotions? That’s not the same as getting stuck in them, or being controlled by them…but by bringing them to God, sharing them with God, we praise God.

Psalms as songs, as poetry lives inside of us as prayers, because they hit us at our core, our gut. Psalmists speak, sing, lament, rejoice directly to God, in an unedited full expression of who they are, and when we pray the psalms, we are invited to engage with God in full expression of who we are, who we are created to be, the good, the bad and the ugly. Thanks be to God.

Psalm 130 is no exception.

This particular psalm is commonly read at Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and it’s also read during Lent. You see Jews do in one day what it takes Christians 6 weeks to do. This psalm is placed there because of the overtones around iniquities. Iniquities, guilt, and blame, what Christians sometimes translate as sin…

In our Reformed tradition, of which Presbyterians are apart…at the risk of oversimplifying, we don’t confess our sins in order to win favor with God. We understand God as a merciful God who loves and forgives us unconditionally. We confess to bringing us back to right relationship not because it changes God, but because God’s unconditional forgiveness changes us.

verse 4-

But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be revered. Not I hope there is forgiveness. Not, if I confess or if I do something, earn something… there just is. This is who God is. And if we fully take in that kind of love, that steadfast love, a reverence develops. We are not “good” not so that God will love us, we are “good” because God loves us.

~~~~~~~~~~

Each week, for those that don’t know I send a weekly email to members and friends of St Luke. This week in reflecting on this psalm I wrote…

The psalms, reach into our being and pull at our heartstrings. It’s easy in our reserved and polite protestant ways, to miss how gratifying it can be to express everything to God; every complaint, every request and every affection. I imagine God takes great pleasure in our engaging fully with God, honesty and sometimes even with a sense of humor.

Then I directed everyone to a link, as an example of a sense of humor, to Zero Mostel from Fiddler on the Roof singing If I Were a Rich Man. It starts with him looking up, addressing God directly, the way I imagine the psalmists, looking up, to where we think God lives, on a mountaintop, a temple mount, a kingdom in the sky, that’s what we do, out of the depths we climb towards God, which why this psalm is referred to as a song of ascents. And here is Mostel, as Tevya, looking up to God, expressing his wishes….

Dear God, you know you made many many poor people…I know its no great shame to be poor…but it’s no great honor either… would it have been so terrible if I had had a small fortune…If I were a rich man…

That’s a beautiful simplistic unedited kind of dialogue. And I say dialogue because when we understand psalms as a prayer it requires a great deal of listening…for God speaking back… We hear the listening for God in the psalmist’s underlying hopeful expectation… The hopeful expectation is not the same as waiting passively.

5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
6 my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.

This repetition is perhaps my favorite part of this psalm. Because of the persistence, the level of frustration that I hear in that repetition…in case you didn’t hear me, God, let me tell say it again… more than those who watch for the morning.

“Those who watch for the morning” refer to guards. Those who guard through the long night that’s filled with unknowns, danger, and threat…The morning brings relief, that’s the hopeful expectation. Those of us who toss and turn at 3 am knowing that…..the promise that everything will look a little better in the morning because the sun will rise…. Out of the depths of illness, the depths of grief, the depths of guilt, in all of our suffering, in the depth of it, lives hopeful expectation of our covenant with a God who loves us unconditionally and will see us through.

When a person is in the depth of it, literally or spiritually, we participate in getting what we need. We get in there. Change doesn’t happen when we’re comfortable. And the world has never been changed through passive waiting. The world changes through relentless troublemakers who like the psalmist “cry from the depths” and keep their eyes wide open. When the psalmist cries “Lord hear my voice!” she’s not waiting patiently. She’s actively participating in hopeful expectation…and not just for herself but for her entire nation…

7 O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.

O Israel, hope in the Lord….

Because if we don’t, we might stay asleep and miss the sunrise. We might forget to change anything, to hope for anything passionately, and what’s more we might forget, that to hope, requires something from us, something resembling “crying out from the depths.”

~~~~~~~~~

Let us pray…Take our lips and speak through, take our eyes and see through them, take our hearts and set them on fire. Help us to be the masters of ourselves, that we might be servants of others. Amen.