Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | February 25, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

Second Sunday in Lent
February 25, 2024

The Only Safe Place for Hate

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

1 John 4:7–12
Psalm 137

The psalms are the hymnbook of scripture. And like our hymns, they are often turned to for comfort. The psalms sing praise to God. But Psalm 137 is a psalm of lament, a psalm almost too hard to sing, because the dust of grief is caught in the throat.

Israel had been conquered by the Babylonians. They razed the city of Jerusalem. They burned the temple. They gathered up the leaders of Israel, and they marched them east to Babylon, where they were captive. The children of Israel could work in Babylon. They could worship in Babylon, albeit without a temple. They just couldn’t go home.

The crisis was not just military; it was theological. Where was God in all of this? Like Jesus on the cross, they wondered why God had forsaken them.

Listen to Psalm 137:

Their captors taunted them: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. Where is your God? But their songs of worship had left them. They ask, how can we sing in a foreign land? Their songs replaced by tears.

I am sure you have known grief in your life. Perhaps you are walking that path right now, and you know that grief is a long and sloppy walk. The emotions defy control. They seem too big for our bodies. Loss brings sadness but also, at times, a loss of perspective. This can be particularly true when grief is tied to the unfairness of life, when the moral arc of the universe seems to have tilted in the wrong direction.

These were the questions of exile. Has God forsaken us?

My friend Tom Long was a teacher of preachers at Emory University in Atlanta. He tells of a time, as he says, “he had a run-in with the law.” He was crossing a few lanes of traffic in Atlanta, and the car in front of him stopped. He had the nose of the car in one lane, the tail of the car in another, and a police officer right behind him. Tom got a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic. He says, “As a young man you get a ticket for speeding in a convertible, but when you are sixty-rive you get a ticket for being in the way.”

He is a professor, so he went to the law library to look up the law. He decided he could make a case that he did not impede the flow of traffic. He found case law. Precedent. He had a folder of information two inches thick. His wife said, “Why are you putting all this effort into this? Just pay the ticket.” “Oh no, there is principle at stake here. I did not impede the flow of traffic. I want my day in court.”

He went to court. His name was called. He grabbed his folder. The judge said, “The officer who gave you a ticket no longer works for the county. There is no one to bear witness against you; you are free to go.

Tom said, “Wait a minute. You can’t just dismiss my case like that. I have a folder here. I’ve already planned to prove my innocence” (Tom Long, 2009 Tom Currie Lectures. Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary).

When we feel that things have gone wrong, we want them to be made right, and when they aren’t or can’t be, we grieve.

This is the grief of exile.

How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?

Two Sundays ago we held our annual congregational meeting. It was a good meeting. So much to celebrate here. That evening I watched the Kansas City Chiefs win another Super Bowl. Some with whom I was watching were misguided and were cheering for San Francisco. It’s OK; as my friend Rodger says, they are ones for whom Jesus also died.

It was a wonderful week. And then Wednesday I got a text from my son. “Letting you know that I am safe. I left the Chiefs’ parade before the shooting started.”

I went cold. My knees grew weak knowing that crowd was filled with people I love. We learned that a dozen children were shot and wounded, and some reports are children were among those who drew weapons. You know this nightmare. Almost every day our newspapers in Chicago report a shooting here or there. This is the fifty-sixth day of 2024, and according to Gun Violence Archive there have been fifty-seven mass shootings with four or more victims. In fifty-six days more than 200 children have died in this country from gun violence (gunviolencearchive.org). And I don’t know how you think about all of this, but I am beyond weary of the national shrug of the shoulders at this uniquely American scandal. No nation of honor sacrifices her own children this way. No nation of honor would look away.

As I watched my phone last Wednesday, praying that I did not learn that someone I loved was hurt, tears were close. You know that feeling.

Sometimes the tears come because the pain is too deep to speak. Because the poets have not invented the vocabulary to express our brokenness. So we weep.

But the way of grief means that our emotions do not always stop with sadness. What we witness in the psalm is that the tears turn to rage.

When we read the psalm, I did not read the last verse. I couldn’t without at least trying to prepare us a bit. As the rage spills over, the desire for vengeance is so graphic. One scholar stated the last verse is the moral low point in scripture.

The psalmist rages, “Happy shall they be who pay you back. Happy shall they be when they take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”

It’s hard to read that in church. It is hard to find prayers like this in scripture. How can anyone pray for the destruction of children. These are unholy words. They are found in the holy book, but they are not holy words.

I hate this psalm. But I must admit, sometimes I need it. Because as repugnant as these words may be, they speak the truth of us at times. This psalm is not exemplary; it is cautionary.

We see this psalm coming to life in front of us every day in the Middle East. You pick whom you want to blame and with whom you want to sympathize, but this slaughter of children on all sides is only planting the seeds for tomorrow’s violence.

But it’s not just there. Such unchecked vengeance is commonplace. Neil Steinberg, writer for the Chicago Sun-Times says, “We are in the gold age of vindictiveness. … The only question is who is the object of retribution this week?” (Neil Steinberg, “Should America Care about Felons?” Chicago Sun-Times, 21 February 2024).

Happy shall they be when they dash your little ones …

I hate this psalm. But I confess my need for it. Because I am not above hatred. I often believe my hatred to be righteous, and indeed it may be. But hatred is risky. Hatred has the seductive power to cause me to become that which I claim to hate. At best, I become a worst version of myself, rather than a best version of myself.

That’s why I need this psalm, because while the scripture does not advocate vengeance, it does name that the desire for vengeance is real. Sometimes prayers like this are the best we can do.

Thirty years ago I was serving a church in South Carolina and was pastor to a young man, Kyle. Kyle worked for the State Law Enforcement Division. He was part of the team called to find two little boys that allegedly had been kidnapped in a carjacking in a small South Carolina town.

Kyle said within ten minutes of interviewing the mother of these little boys he knew in his gut there had been no carjacking. They looked for days for a make-believe suspect, but in the end it came out: Susan Smith killed her own children.

Kyle sat in my study and wept. He and his wife had longed for a child, and none would come. And now it was his job to interview this woman who had drowned her own children. He told me, “Tom, I scared myself. I was so enraged. … I wanted her to hurt like she made them hurt.”

It doesn’t have to be that dramatic for us to want someone, sometimes anyone to hurt like we have been hurt. We have those feelings of rage sometimes. Even when our rage is righteous, it seldom leaves us as our best self. And yet sometimes rage is the best we can do.

The question is, when our grief turns to rage, when our emotions are filled with hatred, what do we do?

This is complicated. Sometimes our response is to deny our hatred. We tell ourselves we don’t feel the rage we feel. We push unseemly feelings down, pass them by. But that is dangerous practice. For those feelings of pain will erupt, they will come out, and when they do, we may cause damage to ourselves or those we love. When it comes to emotions, living in the land of pretend doesn’t work.

On the other hand, some make no effort to deny the rage but choose to lean into these feelings: striking back, striking out, making someone else pay. Sometimes just making anyone pay. This is dangerous as well.

If I understand the teaching of this psalm, it has given us another option. The teaching of the psalmist is that the healthiest thing, the most human thing, is to bring our hatred, bring our rage, to God. The safe place for hate is with God.

We cannot always be holy before God, but we can always be honest. When we pray honest prayers to God, even if they are the lowest point of our hearts, God receives them. So when we want to bash someone against the rock, the best thing is to tell God we want to bash someone against the rock.

Several years ago, Carol and I attended a fundraiser for the Midwest Innocence Project. Our friends were the hosts of the fundraiser, so we got to sit at the table with the keynote speaker: author John Grisham. Carol sat next to Mr. Grisham. I sat next to a man named Denis Fritz. Grisham’s only work of nonfiction, entitled The Innocent Man, was written about Denis Fritz. Fritz was wrongly convicted of murder. As I visited with him, I wondered how I would handle being put in prison for a crime I had absolutely nothing to do with. I think I might go crazy.

He wasted in prison for eleven years.

I would have been so bitter, but the man I dined with was gracious, peaceful, even joyful.

I asked him about it. “Aren’t you angry? You can’t get those days back; don’t you hate those who did this to you?”

“I did. Man, did I hate them. There was a day when I wished they would pay. But I have to tell you, that hatred just made a mess out of me. I was at a pretty low point, but Reverend, that’s when I remembered my faith. So I took my hatred to God and asked God to take it from me.

“But you are a Reverend, so of course you know about that.”

I’m not sure I do, but I want to know about that.

When I’m at my worst, I sure hope I can leave it with God.

Happy are they who dash the little ones against the rock. There is nothing holy about this prayer, but it is honest, and honest prayers, even from the worst in our souls, can lead us to a better day.

If your heart is heavy, maybe even raging, if hatred is dancing a little too closely to you, I think God is saying, “Bring me your brokenness. Bring me your pain. Bring me your rage. Bring me your hatred. I can take it. And in time I might even be able to take it from you.”