PSALM 22, Sunday 10/27/19
Have you ever been to an HR training?
Or a leadership development session?
They tell you.
if you are seeking to give someone “Constructive Feedback”
which is HR speak for critique,
they say you’re supposed to make a “compliment sandwich.”
Like, “Eric, three things:
1. great work on the year-end report last week.
2. Your verbal abuse of your deskmates is proving a distraction.
3. I’m loving the office birthday parties you plan.
There are many ways to interpret Psalm 22.
Which seemingly takes a dramatic turn
around verse 25:
Individual and then communal
past and then present.
present and then future.
But I like to think of it as a compliment sandwich for God:
God:
1. you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.
2. trouble is near, there is no one to help. I am poured out like water. I cry but you do not answer.
3. In the midst of the congregation, I will praise you.
And like the HR version of the sandwich,
the important bit
is the middle. The meat.
(Or the cheese, in my case.)
God, I am poured out like water.
you’ve felt this way?
I think we all have.
God: If there is one more massacre in a synagogue or church or mosque.
one more member of my family falls ill.
One more medical bill.
One more doctor’s appointment with no result.
One more internship rejection.
One more crisis email.
One more paper, one more meeting,
One more tweet.
One more diminishment of historical evil.
if things continue to spiral out of control,
in Syria,
and Ukraine,
and the halls of our very own Congress.
God, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
I am poured out like water.
I am, like Bilbo Baggins, “Butter scraped over too much bread.”
The world is hard and the news is terrible,
and bad things happen to good people.
where are you, God?
Why have you forsaken us?
I’ve felt this way.
You’ve felt this way.
And so has the Psalmist.
My God, My God, why have you forsaken me,
is our scripture’s question of Protest, and lament.
of suffering and evil.
Why do good things happen to bad people?
How can there be so much suffering?
And how can we believe in a good and powerful God in its midst?
Actually, the question is one of a bunch of versions of this question
in our scripture.
The Psalmist asks it
as the subject of at least 8 different Psalms in a number of ways.
Why do you hide your face? (44)
Have you not rejected us, O God? (60)
O God, why do you cast us off forever? (74)
How long, oh Lord? (79, 90)
Will you be angry with us forever? (85, 80)
Job asks it as practically the whole text.
and my second-favorite version
comes from the prophet Habbakuk,
who is wildly underrated in the biblical pantheon.
Probably because we can’t decide if it should be pronounced,
HAbakkuk or haBAKkuk.
2 O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you ‘Violence!’
and you will not save?
3 Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
4 So the law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous—
therefore judgement comes forth perverted.
That feels just about right.
But the best version,
of course,
comes from Psalm 22,
which Jesus quotes on the cross,
in Mark and Matthew’s Gospels.
the seeming last words of a short life,
and a violent death,
Intimate, and heartfelt, and serious:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.
I lead, by all accounts, a blessed and lucky and good life.
I, and the people I love most,
have been incredibly healthy,
and well-fed,
and surrounded, by and large,
by the people we love most.
I am not an underdog story,
nor a tale of victory over strife.
My life has been far more full of grace than trial,
and I wake up grateful each day.
And even I have experienced countless dark nights of soul,
missed opportunities,
lost loved-ones.
My heart has been broken,
and it has broken with people I sit with,
and it has broken over events in the world to which I am connected,
only by virtue of being human.
I wonder regularly: Why, oh God, have you forsaken us?
Indeed, I wondered so significantly,
that the so-called “problem of evil”
became the subject of my college honors thesis.
And I never quite learned the lesson,
that you aren’t supposed to write,
about questions that can’t be answered in the time allotted.
But no matter the timescale,
there is no simple answer to this question,
that does it for me.
But I do think a few observations matter a lot:
First, Lament is important to the life of faith.
If Job and Jesus,
and Habbakuk and a solid 10-15% of our Psalms call God to question,
so can we.
so should we.
And Lament needn’t be answered simply.
Psalm 22 does not tell us everything happens for a reason.
And it does not try to convince us that suffering is necessarily redemptive.
It is not arguing for “a greater good.”
It is simply noting that a) evil and suffering are real.
and b) God is, and can be questioned.
second, as Paul and Augustine noted long ago:
we can’t look out at the world and wonder why it’s so bad,
without looking in.
And when I look in,
I note that I too am full of shadow and selfishness.
More interested many days in hiding my ignorance than overcoming it.
My most popular multi-faith gathering in the history of Colby College,
surrounded the question: Why do people suck?
And a very earnest student member of our team of fellows
and stalwart member of the student congregation,
corollary to this inclusive, Ecumenical congregation
asked me: Do you think you suck?
and do you think your children are evil?
And I said, “Yes. I believe he seeds of good and evil are,
within the best and the worst of us.
Come to our house sometime,
between 7 and 8 pm when everyone’s getting tired,
and see what my lovely, loving, thoughtful, well-behaved children can be like.”
I was once in line,
after a long, tired, day.
at the grocery store awaiting a self-check register –
(a clear sign that evil is in our midst)
because there were seemingly no human cashiers on hand.
I was resisting the urge – for the 20th time –
to shout “YOU HAVE TO PUT THE ITEM IN THE BAG.”
when an angel appeared –
a human cashier.
and waved me over.
An elderly gentleman,
quicker than I thought possible in his frail body,
darted in front of me.
His only items:
3 large handles of Vodka.
And he proceeded to shut down the entire lane,
for what felt like many minutes.
by forgetting his ATM pin.
Now, am I confessing to you that I would have done violence to this man,
in a universe without consequences?
No.
But can I be sure I wouldn’t have?
Also, no.
Countless studies in the wake of Stanley Milgram’s,
and countless historians like Christopher Browning,
teach us plainly,
that given the right circumstances,
most humans will be willing to do terrible things.
Now, that I contain all evil needs within me,
does not answer today’s question.
But it might create the space within us,
a halfway home, as Augustine scholar James Smith calls it,
[editor’s note: this is a good article]
to be able to hold these two ideas:
Suffering is real and it is bad.
And God is and is good.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence, said F Scott Fitzgerald famously,
“ is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
if we can get to this brain place,
this halfway home
I think,
we note,
that we don’t have to answer the question of suffering,
the problem of evil.
Because the Psalms don’t really.
And I’m not even sure God does.
Instead of answering evil,
God responds to it.
Because evil is not –
as it was in my college mind –
primarily a mental challenge.
It is a lived experience.
And instead of answering the question,
God comes to us in human form.
God takes evil upon God’s very self in the person of Christ,
and on the cross.
God, the Psalms, Jesus,
counter to our very human instinct,
don’t attempt to wrap the question up and put it aside.
But rather say,
that they are real.
And that God is responding.
“God doesn’t stop the bad things from happening;”
says Madeleine L’Engle,
“that’s never been part of the promise.
The promise is: I am with you. I am with you now until the end of time.”
And I think it’s in that space,
where we can name evil as evil,
and suffering and suffering,
and God as God,
that we can shift our sights,
toward that which is good and beautiful,
and delightful and glorious.
No matter how persistent death is,
or how universal evil is,
it always seems like disruption,
always feels other.
And that I take as a sign,
that though it is all real,
it is not nearly so real as beauty and love and hope.
Here is the world:
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Do not be afraid. (Buechner.)
I don’t know if that’s good enough.
But it’s enough for me today,
to join the great congregation,
which is encouraged both to praise
and to question.
To rejoice and lament.
And to at least the question, “How Long, oh Lord, must we wait?”
We hear the earnest and serious answer.
Not forever.
For I am with you even unto the end of the age.
Amen.