March 8, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

The Way of Fidelity

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 22
Genesis 17:1–8
Mark 15:25–34

What is given in the covenant is always God’s word. The word is backed, it is true, by mighty deeds: offspring are conceived in old women; slaves are liberated from hopeless bondage; people lost and wandering in a desert are finally led home; one who dies is raised from the dead. Yet God does not always do the deeds that are expected, even when they are desperately needed. Often, as it is recorded by the biblical authors, what the people seem to have is only God’s word. . . . Their struggle is to believe in it.

Margaret A. Farley
Personal Commitments

For Christians Lent is the darkest season of the year. When we walk through Lent, we follow Jesus to the end of his life. We retell the story of Jesus crucified. We remember the anguish, suffering, and alienation of Jesus. Had we been there, at the foot of his cross, would we have been able to lift our heads to look upon him, or would it have been too much for us—too much blood and guilt, too much sorrow and tragedy—to face?

There are, in life, events that are horrific, with pain so raw and messy that it spills out in every direction. The crucifixion of Jesus was surely such an event. For the family and followers of Jesus, for Jesus himself, the injustice, cruelty, and senselessness of how his life came to an end must have been utterly stunning. So stunned are we every year on Good Friday, even though we have heard the story told before, that we don’t know what to do.

The struggle to know what to do and where to begin in response to events that should never have happened is something that victims of violence and soldiers of war know intimately. As recent news stories have made us aware, the number of suicides among U.S. military men and women who have served in Afghanistan and Iraq has grown alarmingly high. Military officers, chaplains, and health care providers, the VA, and families of American soldiers have expressed the urgent need to provide venues of care for our soldiers. Counseling, peer groups, the support of family and society—these are all needed.

Earlier this week I heard a story on National Public Radio that spoke of the isolation felt by soldiers when they return from duty. One person interviewed explained that the last thing soldiers want to do is to expose their loved ones to the horrible things that they witnessed in war. They don’t want to “contaminate” the lives of their loved ones with their pain. So they are not likely to talk about what happened, and this, experts and loved ones say, is a problem. In this news story, I learned about the Vet Art Project, which is based on the belief that veterans must share their stories not only in therapeutic settings and peer groups, but also with the broader community. The project connects veterans to the community via art. Through writing, acting, singing, sculpting, and painting, veterans express their pain and share their stories with the community.

That the arts can play such a significant role isn’t surprising. Many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with the novel Night by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel. Liberated from Buchenwald in 1945, Wiesel was silent for ten years about what he experienced in the Holocaust. Finally, in writing Night, he broke his silence. So depressing was its subject matter, the book almost didn’t get published. Thank goodness it did, because in it, as one critic wrote, anguish is “metamorphosed into art.”

In Night, the young Jewish boy narrating the story recounts what happened in a concentration camp on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the last day of the year. While the Jews in the camp, gathered to attend the solemn service, spoke aloud “Blessed be the name of the Eternal!” the boy, with every fiber, rebelled. “Why should I bless him? Because he had thousands of children burned in his pits? Because he kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? . . . Who chose us from among the races to be tortured day and night, to see our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory?” (Night, p. 64).

Questions of rebellion against God were not the only kinds of questions raised. There were also questions about God’s absence. Where was God during such suffering? Why did God not intervene? Why did God not speak? Survivors of the Holocaust and the many thinkers and writers, some of them Christian, who have responded to the genocide have raised and grappled with these questions. Of course, they are not the first to do so. The sentiment behind these questions is expressed in the ancient psalms in verses like these: “How long, Yahweh? Will you ignore me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:2) or “O God, do not be silent; do not hold aloof; do not be quiet, O God!” (Psalm 83:20) or “Rouse yourself, why do you sleep, Yahweh? Awaken, do not reject us forever!” (Psalm 44:24).

In the psalm we read responsively today, Psalm 22, the psalmist wrote, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” This is the verse that, according to Mark’s Passion narrative, Jesus cried out in his final moment. When we read the Passion narratives of the Gospels, we find that the gospel writers drew on multiple psalms. More frequently than any other psalm, however, we find that the gospel writers relied on Psalm 22 to tell the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. Not only are Jesus’ words taken from the opening words of the psalm, but we can also see a resemblance between the Passion narrative and the psalm’s description of the psalmist’s experience of suffering. Mark expresses Jesus’ pain in the words of the psalmist, and Mark portrays Jesus’ pain as the psalmist portrayed his pain. Like the psalmist who complains, “All who see me mock at me; they make mouths at me, they shake their heads, saying ‘Commit your cause to the Lord; let him deliver—let him rescue the one in whom he delights!’” Jesus is portrayed as being mocked by passersby, chief priests, and scribes, who, shaking their heads, say, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” and “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe.”

When we see how the gospel writers portrayed Jesus’ suffering unto death in terms of the psalms, we gain some insight into how we can respond in situations when pain and suffering spill out into every direction. Like the gospel writers, we have inherited the psalms. Drawing upon them, we can let the psalms lend shape to the messiness of life. When you read the Old Testament, you can see that ancient Israel never tried to hide the raw data of life. With grit, the Israelites accepted reality, with all of its joy, anger, confusion, pain, betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, danger, and hatred. The psalms didn’t, however, just mirror the messiness of real life. Rather the psalms gave the messiness shape. Through the artistic form of the psalms, the ancient Israelites could express their suffering, and because of the artistic form of the psalms, those experiences, as painful as they were, were bearable in the community. In his book The Psalms and the Life of Faith, Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann writes,

The faith of Israel, like all human experience, moved back and forth between the polar moods of, on the one hand, deep anguish and misery and, on the other hand, profound joy and celebration. In this back and forth movement the people of Israel worked out the power and limits of their faith. In the process they also worked out a pattern of rhetoric that shaped their anguish and brought it to expression so that it could be dealt with [in the community]. (The Psalms and the Life of Faith, p. 67)

The psalms of lament, as Brueggemann puts it, preserve “Israel’s most powerful and eloquent statements of the effort both to survive and to be transformed as a people of faith” (The Psalms and the Life of Faith, p. 67). And yet, as he and other psalm experts have noticed, the lament psalms have been largely purged from the life and liturgy of the church. Too often pastors and congregants are inclined toward worship that conveys a lighter, more optimistic mood. When the church doesn’t carve out room in its liturgy for psalms of lamentation, it misses the opportunity to shape grief. “Grief,” Brueggemann writes, is formful” (p. 86). Grief can be shaped by a community according to community forms that make it bearable in the community.

What Brueggemann says about the psalms reminds me of what James Cone says about spirituals in the African American church tradition. James Cone, who has come to be known as the father of black theology, wrote a book entitled The Spirituals and the Blues. He wrote that when he was growing up in a small town in Arkansas, black music was essential for the survival of the black community. This form of music was that significant. The spirituals made it possible for the black church to preserve its faith and to pass it down to their children rather than to be overcome and destroyed by all they had suffered for being black in America. Like the psalms, black music was able to hold together the extremes in life. That is why Cone calls black music “unity music.” “It unites,” he writes, “the joy and the sorrow, the love and the hate, the hope and the despair of black people” (The Spirituals and the Blues, p. 5). Its ability to hold these extremes together is what explains its usefulness to the survival of a people.

Before I wrote this sermon, I was asked to give it a title. I entitled it “The Way of Fidelity.” At the end of writing it, I want to entitle it “The Way of Survival.” In a way they are the same thing, or at least closely related: when people of faith suffer and God doesn’t do the deeds that are expected, when all people seem to have is God’s covenantal word, thank God there is still a way. In the songs of Israel, the Passion stories of the gospels, the spirituals of the black church in America, we find a way for our faith to survive. Amen.