July 7, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Great Reversal

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 30
Isaiah 66:10–14
Luke 10:1–11

“You have turned my mourning into dancing.” Psalm 30:11 (NRSV)

Mine eyes have seen the glory
. . . of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage
. . . where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
. . . of his terrible swift sword;
His truth is marching on.

Julia Ward Howe

If you happen to be new to Fourth Church or visiting us this morning and you’re not aware of what happens around here you might think it’s somewhat incongruous that a Scotsman should be in the pulpit this Fourth of July weekend. My wife, Missy, wondered if I would be addressing you this morning as the congregation or the colonists. Interestingly, I received an email early this morning from one of my colleagues, Ann Rehfeldt, who is our Director of Communications here at Fourth Church. Ann happens to be in Scotland, on vacation with her family these next couple of weeks, and she was worshiping at Hope Park Church of Scotland in St. Andrews this morning. She emailed me to say that the congregation sang lustily four verses of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord.” (That hymn is not even in our hymnal!) Ann wrote, “The sermon was replete with quotations from the Declaration of Independence and Washington’s first inaugural. A splendid day at church,” she says.

She also gave me permission to use whatever Scottish references I would like in the sermon this morning, as that seemed only fair. And so, of course, I do have a number of Scottish references.

One of the Scottish references is from a historic document from way back in 1320, just after the Scots had been engaging in the wars of independence against the English and against King Edward. The nobles of Scotland who had put in place their chosen king, Robert I, Robert the Bruce, wrote a letter to the pope, a letter known today as the Declaration of Arbroath. There are scholars and historians who believe that the writers of the Declaration of Independence in the newly formed United States were aware of this document. There is some lovely language in it. In claiming for themselves freedom and independence from England, the nobles wrote, “It is in truth not for glory nor riches nor honors that we are fighting but for freedom alone.”

It certainly is the case that the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence was a Scotsman, John Witherspoon. And Witherspoon was probably aware, too, of the work of the great Scottish poet Robert Burns. Now Burns was a person who believed deeply in the rights of man, of humanity, who supported freedom movements such as the French Revolution, and he was very much in favor of the American War for Independence. He wrote this poem entitled “An Ode for General Washington’s Birthday,” sending Washington birthday greetings. In some beautiful language, he refers to the United Stated in the female personification of Columbia.

But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia’s offspring, brave as free,
In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!

Burns plays with this concept of royalty, endowing it not just in one figure but seeing it as part of what it is to be human. That is a theme that continues throughout Burns’ works, his songs and poetry.

And recently I came across a fascinating article. It dates from 1963, written by Archibald MacLeish, the famous poet and playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner, whose father was born in Scotland. He wrote it as a response to the rioting that happened in Oxford, Mississippi, against the entrance of a black student to that university in 1962. The essay is called “Must We Hate?” and in it he picks up, I think, on what Burns was writing about in his poem. MacLeish talks about the “American Idea.” He writes, “The American Idea quite literally and realistically is America. If we had not held these truths to be self-evident, if we had not believed that all men are created equal, if we had not believed that they are endowed, all of them, with certain unalienable rights, we would never have become America.”

I chose to preach today on the Thirtieth Psalm, the psalm that we read responsively together earlier in the service. And my reason for that is that of course the psalms are important in our faith, in our tradition. But also because I believe that Psalm 30 picks up some themes that reflect that concept of the American Idea. Early on in the Reformed tradition under Calvin and Knox they believed that in praising God you could only use the psalms in worship, that the psalms were given to us for that purpose, to sing praise to God. Calvin did not believe in singing hymns that had been written by human hands. And indeed, still today there are some parts of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland where on Sunday morning the congregation will only sing psalms and sing them unaccompanied.

There’s been a resurgence of interest in the psalms, in these poems and songs and how they speak to us of our relationship with God and of the human condition. There are a number of new collections of different settings of the psalm for use in congregational singing. One of my favorites is by the Scottish minister John Bell, a collection he calls Psalms of Patience, Protest, and Praise. Think of that as a way to understand the psalms: Psalms of Patience, Protest, and Praise. The Thirtieth Psalm is very much a praise psalm, a psalm of thanksgiving. And I think there are also resonances with this marking of the Fourth of July holiday. Psalm 30 is a psalm that celebrates the movement from oppression to freedom, from brokenness to wholeness, from hurt to healing. Many people believe it is a psalm about recovery from grave illness. And yet we’re also told that it is a psalm that was to be sung at the dedication at the temple, so there’s something profoundly communal about the experience of the psalmist.

Now just a little Psalms 101 for you: when we read the psalms—as we do every Sunday when we gather in worship—we are reading poems, and so as we do when we’re reading poetry, we’re looking for clues from literary movements, for things that the psalmist is using in order to get across the point of the psalm. One of the very common types of literature that the psalmist uses is parallelism, the psalmist saying the same thing but twice in different ways. So if you look at Psalm 30, in the third verse you’ll read, “O Lord, you brought up my soul from Sheol [from the place of the dead] / restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.”

In verse eleven, the climax of the psalm, “You have turned my mourning into dancing; / you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”

Mourning into dancing, sackcloth into joy. See that parallelism? The psalmist is affirming the goodness of God in this psalm. Clinton McCann Jr., a scholar of the Old Testament, writes this about Psalm 30: “The existence of suffering does not negate the good news that life is a gift from God.”

Psalm 30 is the psalm about the great reversal that God has planned. It doesn’t pretend that suffering and hurt and brokenness are not real. It stares them in the face but celebrates the promise of that great reversal—that our mourning will turn into dancing. There is a famous saying of Martin Luther King Jr. that King actually borrowed from nineteenth-century Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker. King on a number of times spoke about how “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

We might appropriate that language and say that what Psalm 30 says to us is that the arc of salvation history, the arc of how God works in the world and in our lives, is long, but it tends towards restoration, towards the restoration of God’s love in a broken and fearful world. It speaks to us of what literary scholars might call the metanarrative of the scriptural witness, the overarching story of scripture rooted in the foundational story of the Exodus, of the restoration of freedom to the children of Israel who have been in slavery. We find the arc in the call of the prophets and in the prophets speaking God’s word to the world—a word of hope and restoration, perhaps none more so than in Isaiah’s words about the restoration to Jerusalem of the exiles. It’s there in the ministry of Jesus, in Jesus’ inclusive love reaching out to the margins of society, in Jesus sending out the seventy to tell people the kingdom of God has come near. And that arc bending towards restoration of course is present in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, that which gives us hope for the future. It’s present in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

A concept of hope for the future is central to the American Idea. I’m not a great believer in the concept of Manifest Destiny, but I think we can see in American history how there has been that movement towards wholeness and healing and restoration. This year we’re celebrating not just the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence, but marking the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. That tragic and dreadful, but crucial event during this country’s Civil War. I went back recently to read about Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg in the fine book Lincoln at Gettysburg by Gary Wills, a noted historian and writer, a professor of emeritus here at Northwestern, a neighbor of ours.

I am sure you know that Lincoln went to Gettysburg some months after the battle there had caused the death or wounding of more than 50,000 Americans. He went to dedicate what had become a mass graveyard. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men, all of humanity, are created equal.” That’s how it starts. It went on for only ten sentences, 272 words, and yet Wills said that what happened in the delivery of that address is that Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality of the battlefield into something rich and strange. Wills writes that in the Gettysburg Address Lincoln essentially reinterpreted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the country to focus it on seeing the world through the lens of equality.

Psalm 30, this wonderful psalm of restoration, is a reminder to us that God’s purposes are for the good. God’s will for us is for healing and wholeness, for restoration and love even in the presence of the suffering and brokenness that we might know because God is “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.