RVCC Pastor's Sermon

Sermon - March 8, 2009

“The Despair and the Dance”

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Psalm 22:1-2, 19-31

We have said it before here in church. When we look to the Bible for words to express our deepest and highest emotions, more often than not, we turn to the Psalms. These ancient poems are indeed songs of human passions. Whether we use them for public worship or private devotions, the Psalms span the entire spectrum of our experience as men and women – from the celebration of our most joyful exuberance to the lament of our most painful despair.

To relegate the psalms to the simple-minded category of “praise songs”, as we are sometimes wont to do, castrates their meaning and limits their effectiveness as tools of worship. In addition, as John Bell writes, doing so “shows a frightening blindness to the content of the poems (and) also belittles the experience of Jesus Christ. When, on the cross, he used the words, ‘My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?’ was he singing a happy chorus?”

It is through the Psalms that we offer to God all that we are – not for God’s approval but because when we do so, we ensure that our relationship with God is an honest and open one. The Psalms reflect that which lies deepest in our souls – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and so perhaps for that reason alone, they are fitting to take with us on our Lenten journey.

After all, our journey to Easter is about being truthful to ourselves and so honest before God. Therefore, just as we focused on a Psalm last Sunday as our Scripture reading, we will continue to do so for the next couple of weeks of Lent.

Our Psalm today is both a cry of anguish and a song of praise. Scholars think that perhaps the two divergent themes of despair and celebration at some ancient time were actually two songs, two songs that ages ago were merged into a single poem that powerfully both asks and answers a question that is fundamental to human existence.

Though we do not know that for sure, what we do know is that we most often associate this psalm with the utter abandonment and dereliction of its first verses. It is a Good Friday psalm because, of all the Psalms, this was the one that Jesus chose to scream in agony as he hung, tortured and dying, on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Any memory of the good times – the laughter around the evening campfires, the teachable moments in the vineyards, the hands of healing, the indescribable feeling that he was doing what he was called to do, that he was in the right place at the right time – were erased, extinguished, obliterated by the pain – the pain of flesh torn by nails, the unbearable thirst, the oppressive heat – but also the pain of being so very much alone – betrayed on so many different levels by his friends and followers, but not only that - betrayed by his God who had disappeared as surely and completely as had Peter, James, and John.

The enemies are all around and closing in, the Psalmist says – and perhaps Jesus was thinking that too as he hung dying. Like a pack of dogs (a derogatory term among the Israelites), the enemies surround and “size up” their prey before they attack. Like vultures, they wait to feast on the dead – perhaps the greatest humiliation of all.

But humiliation is part of what crucifixion is all about. It is certainly what this particular execution was about – what with the crown of thorns, the gambling for pieces of his cloak, the vile and spit and venom – and for all intents and purposes, it appeared that humiliation would be his destiny. No wonder he cried out in desperation and utter aloneness.

Without a doubt, the beginning of this Psalm makes for painful reading. The Hebrew poet pours out his heart to God, and his candor is both touching and also like a knife stabbing our own hearts. The Psalmist angrily argues with God. He dares to put it all out there for the creator of the universe. He shouts his nightmarish fears of dogs and wild beasts. He screams his aloneness because God apparently is not only remote, but God is silent – and that is the most terrifying thing of all. The pain is winning - hands down. There is no contest.

Do tears come to your eyes on Palm Sunday or Good Friday or whenever it is that you take the time to remember the story of Jesus’ Passion in its entirety? They do to mine – year after year. Whether or not we believe that Jesus knew what it really meant to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life, surely we can agree that, at the very least, a good man, an innocent man, died a horrific death that day.

And maybe, just maybe, our tears flow freely or just prick the corners of our eyes because each one of us knows in our heart of hearts that even if we have not already been, we will undoubtedly someday be, crucified too. We also will know the unreachable pain, the terrifying fear, the utter aloneness, the silence of God.

We too will be victims. We will sit in a doctor’s office and be told we have an incurable cancer. We will grasp the deathly cold still hand of a child and know that as parents we can not protect them after all.

We will watch the ones we adore and the things we love slip away until there is nothing – only silence. And all that is left for us to do is to strike out against God, to hurl all of our pain and anger at the Almighty One and scream out like Jesus did – “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?”

That is probably the question that God hears most often from all of creation. And there is no answer. For now the only solace we can give one another nailed on our respective crosses is that we must be a peace with the notion that there are only questions.

Frederick Buechner once speculated that “if you take three facts, God is good, God is great, and the innocent suffer, you can only reconcile two of those. You can never, ever reconcile all three. The Bible never gives an answer” - not to Job sitting on his ash heap, not to Jeremiah by his potter’s wheel, not even to Jesus.” (Gerald Mann)

Some people hear that predicament and conclude that there is no God – or at least not one worth believing in or praising. However, because we come through those doors clinging to our crosses and we gather together each week to worship the God whom we can not deny was silent before Jesus on the cross and has been in some way, shape, or form at times silent before us as well, surely simply being here in spite of all that is a sign that we have chosen to believe otherwise.

At the outset we said that this Psalm 22 is quite likely the merging of two more ancient poems – the one which is a cry of anguish and the other which is a song of praise. “Future generations will remember the Lord. From every part of the world they will turn to him” – as the Psalmist concluded, perhaps with tears still streaming down his cheeks and mixing with his beard as he acknowledged that somewhere there is hope.

Like the Psalmist, we too have chosen to believe deep in our hearts – or at least seriously entertain the notion - that despair and pain and abandonment do not have the last words. There is yet cause for celebration. As Russell Mase wrote, “the guarantee of our faith is not freedom from pain but companionship. When your world falls apart…you are not alone. You do not sit desolate, like Job, on an ash heap amid the ruin of his life. Whatever befalls you, God is there in the midst of it…God is there, wonderfully there, that abiding presence that hurts where you hurt, a God for losers, and what you've lost God has lost, but you can get through it because this same God will restore. The cross wasn't the end; the despair was real, but temporary.”

The Psalmist first - and later on, down through the ages, Jesus himself - and two thousand years later you and me – we look God straight in the eye and ask the big question – why weren’t you there when I needed you? We are brutally honest - and then we cry out for deliverance.

And out of the silence comes an answer, but it is not an answer in words – and certainly not the one we would expect. Jesus dies on the cross before a silent God. There is no doubt about that.

The answer, however, is quietly born in an action that has rocked and shocked the world. Three days later just at first light when the mists began to rise, the power of the Holy Spirit was at work, and, in a way we can not possibly fully understand, it was pulsating through the grave yard, dancing away the silence, replacing it with a joyful song of praise and of life itself – “People not yet born will be told, ‘The Lord has saved his people.’”

And so as you continue on your Lenten journey, know that the desolation that you might feel seeping from your very soul, and the awful feeling that you get when you realize all the things you know you could have done differently if your priorities had been more aligned with the Gospel, and the hurt that strangles your heart at times, and the feeling that God is silent before you in your pain – all this is real. But it is not the end.

I sometimes wonder if that desperate question that Jesus screamed aloud from the cross was all he remembered of the Psalm – or if in the poverty of having nothing left as he passed on to whatever it is that comes next – he was uplifted by other words, perhaps even whispered other words through his own parched lips so softly that no one even heard, words from the second part of the Psalm – “He does not neglect the poor or ignore their suffering; he does not turn away from them, but answers when they call for help.”

Did he remember that this 22nd Psalm has two parts – a question which seems so obvious so much of the time - and an answer too? I like to think that he did because then you and I have reason to remember as well the experience and action of our God whose Spirit still pulses through us – nudging us and reminding us that we do not travel alone and that when perhaps we least expect it, we will find ourselves filled with life again – and somehow – like a miracle - the silence will have been danced away!

Sermon - March 8, 2009

“The Despair and the Dance”

By Rev. Nancy Foran Psalm 22:1-2, 19-31

By Rev. Nancy Foran
Psalm 22:1-2, 19-31