Part III of III in the series "Life in Exile"
Preached on October 17, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Revelation 21:1-2, 22-26
What if we decided that our vision in the church is to put the church out of business? What if that is God’s vision for the church?
The vision that is given to the people who struggle in exile, is that the day is coming when God will restore them to their true home. And in that home we will be so intimately related to, and connected to, God that there will be no need to teach about God because everyone will know God. God’s law will be written on our hearts. The vision is not just that they are going home to Jerusalem, but also that the day is coming when we will be as close to God as our own hearts beating within us.
At the end of the first century, several generations after the life of Christ, the writer of Revelation picks up on the idea of the exile because the early Christian church had the same feeling of being in exile, homeless in an empire that did not recognize them or give them any space to live in peace. And so we read in Revelation about God creating a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city of Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. And in the new Jerusalem there is no Temple, because just as Jeremiah had said, this new home is where all people will know God by heart. Our exile will come to an end.
Several days ago, in Chile, the 33 miners who were trapped for over sixty days were finally brought home to the surface. It occurred to me that when the mine caved in, those thirty-three men were cast into exile, cut off from their home. Very quickly, a small relief hole was drilled, and this small passage kept them alive during their exile. It brought them water and nourishment, and communication with their families. One of my favorite parts of the story is that someone figured out how to bake meat pies in the shape of a cylinder that would fit down the hole. That little hole kept them alive. But the real vision was the other, larger hole that they were drilling, the one that was just big enough to fit a metal tube that could carry the men one at a time to the surface. When the rescue hole was completed, it put the first hole out of business.
And that’s what I mean about putting the church out of business. The day is coming when we won’t need a sanctuary or temple because we will worship God and know God everywhere. We won’t need to learn about God because we will all know God by heart.
We have been thinking, these past weeks, about how you and I often feel that we are in exile, spiritually homeless, longing for the home that is true and secure. Sometimes we make a good home that may last for years or even decades, but nothing is permanent, and we soon we are looking again for a place to call home.
Our times of exile may be times to practice what it will be like when we are finally home. One day, we will know God by heart. Think about the other things you might know by heart: how to play an instrument, how to bake a pie, or swing a golf club. Think about what happens when you ride a bicycle. You keep your body in balance as your weight shifts from left pedal to right pedal. You must keep your legs moving in oppositional directions, alternating force from one foot to the other, and adjusting your speed of rotation according to the slope of the street, the traffic, and any turns you might make. These turns, by the way are made not so much by turning the handlebars as by leaning into the turn at a precise angle, and maintaining sufficient speed to avoid tipping over, and shifting at just the right moment from the braking to accelerating through the turn, and of course both your hands are operating these brakes and also shifting gears and signaling to traffic if necessary. Oh, and you’ll need to do all of these things by heart because your mind is busy remembering where you are going, how to get there, taking stock of your fatigue or need for water, and keeping an eye on your companions – especially if they are children. Now, how do we do all of these things at the same time, so smoothly and enjoyably? It seems miraculous. We do it because we have practiced it so well that it is a part of us. We know it by heart. That’s the vision.
Do you remember that Amish community in Pennsylvania, and the tragic day, three years ago now, when a man came to their school and killed their children and himself? The cruelty of the crime shocked us around the country, and then the Amish community shocked us again by their immediate acts of forgiveness for the shooter, and their compassion for the family he left behind. They comforted his wife, and offered support for his child. I can only think that this was possible because they have practiced their faith enough to make it written on their heart. Forgiveness comes to them as naturally as riding a bike comes to us after years and years of riding.
The church is where we practice, here and now, the home that we will one day have. Because we are now in exile, we have the church. This is the place to hear the vision of God’s power to make the world new. This is the place where we begin to act as if God has already made the world new. We’re not there yet, but we do have a home in the midst of the journey. When you are searching for your home, the home that is more complete than any home you have yet known, come and worship, and together we will find our way there.
There is a story of a man who was lost in a great woods. There were many paths in the woods, and he tried one after the other after the other. Sometimes he made his own paths, but none of these ever got him out. Finally, he caught a glimpse of a person ahead of him. He began to run and caught up with the other man in a clearing. “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “I have been lost for a long time, and I was worried that I’d never get out!”
The other man said “I’m sorry; I am lost as well. But let us walk together, because we can share all of the paths we have tried that didn’t work out, and together we will find a way home.”
Isn’t that a wonderful description of the church? We come together here, and in our lives we have all tried so many different ways to make a home where we are happy and secure and accepted, and here we come together to confess that we have not been able to do it on our own. Here we worship together the One who will bring us home to the place where we know God by heart, and we are welcomed home with open arms.
The visions that come to us in scripture are always attempts to capture something that is too wonderful, too big, too incomprehensible to be put into words. The visions that scripture gives us are glimpses of what God has in store. I’m thinking of the 23rd Psalm, and the house of the Lord where we will dwell forever. I’m thinking of Isaiah who speaks of a mountain where God removes the veil that covers all people. I’m thinking of Jesus who says “in my father’s house are many rooms.”
These glimpses can only be rendered poetically with the best images at hand: a house, a mountain, many rooms. They are meant to evoke a truth that his too big for words. There’s a wonderful movie, called The Postman, that tells the story of the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the postman who delivers his mail. They form a friendship of sorts, and as the postman begins to read Neruda’s poems, he comes him one day, points to one of his poems, and says “what does this mean?”
Neruda tells him “if I could say what it means in other words, I wouldn’t have written the poem.”
So it is with the visions of home in the scripture. These visions must be told in poetic language, metaphors of God’s law written on our hearts, or a city descending from heaven. These visions are true, not in the merely literal sense, but in the much grander sense of helping us to see a vision that is ultimately beyond our ability to see, at least for right now.
In Revelation, we are given a glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, and the new city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where the Jews exiled in Babylon wanted to get back to, and metaphorically, it is the heavenly city of God that will be the end of all our journeys, all our exiles. In Revelation we read that the new city of Jerusalem has its gates thrown open during the daytime, and that nightfall never, ever comes. It is always light in our new home. A poetic vision of a place where the gates are open during the day, and the gates never, ever close. In God’s city, you are always welcome home!
Maybe you have heard the saying that home is the only place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. Sadly, that may not be true for all of us. Sometimes we are not taken in by the places we have called home. But I can tell you this: God’s home, this new creation, is a place where you will be welcomed in.
I once conducted a funeral service, and in the service I described, as I always do, the glimpses of our eternal home that we read in scripture. I spoke of our faith that promises to us that God restores our lives, makes us new, and with love and grace God welcomes us into our eternal home. After the service, one man greeted me on his way out and said that he wished I had presented the gospel. I should have presented the gospel? I imagine that what he meant was that I should have told people the requirements that they must meet in order to be saved by God into God’s eternal home. But to me, the gospel, which literally means good news, is not a set of requirements that leads to salvation, like following a recipe that pays off with a fantastic pie. Gospel is the gift of God’s love, God’s merciful, compassionate, endless, grace-filled love. God begins with grace, and we respond with praise, thanksgiving, worship, faith. We respond by being in relationship with God, and learning to be God’s people.
Because one day our relationship with God will be so close, that we will do what we do in here all the time. On that day, we will give thanks for God’s goodness, we will experience forgiveness, we will clothe ourselves in God’s love, and we will praise God with our very lives, and we will do it all by heart. We will know that every place is a sanctuary of God’s presence. We ourselves, every one of us, will be a sanctuary of God’s presence.
Until then, this holy sanctuary reminds us of our potential and our gifts. Until then, we come to this sacred place because it helps us to see the sacredness of other places. We come together to praise God and experience God’s grace because from time to time we forget, and we need each other be the bearers of God’s vision.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sermon - While We Wait
Part II of III in the series “Life in Exile”
Preached on October 10, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Introduction: This is the second of a three week series called Life in Exile. The Biblical texts for this series are the passages that speak of the nation of Israel when they were taken as a people into exile in Babylon, an experience which reverberates throughout the Bible. The subtext for this series, and the real reason for preaching it, is that the experience of exile is a metaphor for our own lives, especially the difficult times when we do not feel at home even in our own homes.
There is an old folk story about the people of a small village who were suffering from hunger in a time when food was scarce. Each household had a bit of something or other leftover, some extra potatoes in one house, some extra onions or carrots in others, but not enough to make a good meal. Each night, people went to bed hungry. One day a traveler arrived, and began to talk in the village square about the wonderful soup that he was going to make and share with everyone in town. He set a fire in the square, and set over it a large pot, like a cauldron. He filled it with water, and then he pulled from his bag a very smooth stone. He eyed it carefully, sniffed it, and then dropped it into the pot.
“I’m making Stone Soup!” he said. “It’s going to be delicious!”
Well, people were excited about the offer of soup, for they were very hungry, but they were skeptical about the taste of stone soup. One person approached the traveler and asked how stone soup could be any good. The traveler said “I understand your hesitation, but I assure you that this soup is wonderful. You’ll be surprised and amazed at how good it tastes…although I will admit that it could use just a bit more to heighten the taste.”
“Well,” said the villager, “I have some potatoes at home, would that help?”
“Oh, potatoes, that would be the perfect addition!” the traveler said.
Another villager came by to check on the pot and express her doubts. “It doesn’t smell very good” she said.
The traveler said “oh, just wait, when it’s done you won’t believe how good it will smell and taste, although I will admit that it could us just bit more to enhance the flavor.”
“I have some parsley at home,” the woman said.
And so it went. Carrots, salt, onions, barley, pepper, cream: a great many things were all added to the stone soup, and when it was finished, every person in the village shared the best meal that they had eaten in weeks.
In times of hardship, in times of crisis, people often draw back and hunker down, focused on their own security. When tragedy strikes a blow to our lives, when we have lost something so important we become like a turtle, retreating into our shell, holding on to what little we have, when it would actually be better for us to do just the opposite. And that is what God calls us to do.
It was 2600 years ago that Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and took the people into exile. Their homes were destroyed and they carried great losses into their new life. They had to trust their grief and their anger to God, lest it destroy their spirits or destroy those around them.
In a way, we are also in exile. We might be in exile from the wonderful home of the good old days that we remember with fondness and sadness: the days when we could leave our homes unlocked, and trust the neighbors to look after our children as they roamed the streets; the days before the recession, or the terrorist attacks; the days when we went to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Or maybe we never had good old days, and we are in exile from a home we have never really known. Maybe we don’t so much look back at the home we lost, but search for the home we dream of that we have never found. In any case, when we are in exile, then we tend to become extra guarded about what little we have and to cling to it tight. Generosity seems like a risk. We have lost enough and we need to focus on keeping what little we have left.
Jeremiah knows that this is what the people in exile want to do. They want to huddle close together and tell themselves that their exile will only last a couple years, a few seasons. They just have to wait it out and everything will return to normal. So Jeremiah gives them a reality check. He tells them that the exile will last two generations. What this meant is that the ones who remember Jerusalem will never go home, but only their children and grandchildren. Jeremiah told them to make themselves at home in this new reality: to plant gardens, to give their children in marriage, and to seek the welfare of the city where they’d been exiled.
Seek the welfare of the city. Seek the welfare of the kingdom of Babylon. Seek the welfare of the people who had destroyed their homes and forced them to leave their land. Seek the welfare of the people you call your enemies! Last week, do you remember, they prayed to God that they wanted to turn the full force of their anger upon these people, and what happens next is miraculous: they seek the welfare of their enemies.
In our own exile, when we wish that someone would tell us how we can recover the home we have longed for, when we wish that religion offered a miraculous fix for our own hardships, God sends a prophet to tell us that he way through our own exile is to show goodness to other people. It is one of the great truths of our faith that the only things we really keep are the things that we learn to give. Our security comes not by what we get, but by what we give.
It seems like it’s just the opposite of what we expect. It seems like a mismatch of what should happen. Shouldn’t the ones who have suffered be the ones receiving help? When we lose something, isn’t it right for others to do good for us? How can we wrap our minds around this concept of giving to others as a way through our own hardship?
I know that many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. I see this wonderful dynamic of faith become real in your lives. In the last few weeks, my friend John Schluep preached about the blessing of the elders. I can tell you that some of our elders in this church have lost more in their lives than I hope the rest of us will ever have to lose. These people have had to redefine what home means again and again as their old homes were lost to them. And what they have done is miraculous. They have learned to seek the welfare of the people around them, and in doing so they have healed and they have been a blessing to others. I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to who tell me about their lives and then they lean in close and tell me, like it’s a great secret: “You know, I received more than I ever gave.”
I need to tell you the story of a man who made a lot of money in the stock market. This was the 1920’s, things were booming, and he did very, very well. He somehow got connected with a group in Africa that wanted to establish a university, and he gave them a bunch of money to get them started. You can guess what happened in 1929 when the stock market crashed. It was devastating. He lost everything, and lived for years in poverty.
Years later, this university in Africa was celebrating an anniversary - 30 years, or something – and the students said, where is this man, he should come. They finally found him in a tenement building on the south side of Chicago, and they invited him to come over for the celebration. He said “I can’t, I don’t have any money,” and they said “we’ll take care of that,” and they flew him over. In the middle of the celebration, with this wonderful music, and a crowd of alumni, and so many grateful people, this man turned to the president of the school and said, “you know, it’s strange: everything I kept, I lost. What I gave is all that I have.”
Seek the well-being of those around you, because in their well-being you will find your well-being. And now, here in this congregation we are working to send money toward a new school in Mali, in west Africa. I wonder how it will work that the welfare of Africa is related to our welfare? I can’t tell you exactly, but the words of Jeremiah, and the words of Jesus invite me to trust that this is so. The world is becoming smaller, and we are realizing more and more just how interdependent we are. We must realize that the well-being of people around the world, their peace, their security, their health, their prosperity, is where we will secure our own well-being. And it is also true right here in this community that we discover the same truth.
It was during their time in exile that the chosen people of God began to see that their identity was not to be people who were protected on Mount Zion by God’s strength, but to be people who created God’s reality wherever they ended up by the power of God’s goodness working through them. I think that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said that the kingdom of God is within you. If the kingdom of God is within you, than the kingdom is not built on the outside, with sturdy wall to keep the good people safe, and well fed. No, the kingdom is within us, so that wherever we are, even when we are in exile, we bring a bit of God’s kingdom into being by seeking what is good for our neighbors.
The kingdom of God is within you, and it is stronger than any kingdom built with strong walls and powerful armies. It is stronger because even when the walls come down around us and we lose our homes, we can still find ourselves in the kingdom of God, where we learn the miracle of having more by giving more away.
The stone soup is cooking on the fire. There’s enough for everyone.
Preached on October 10, 2010 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Introduction: This is the second of a three week series called Life in Exile. The Biblical texts for this series are the passages that speak of the nation of Israel when they were taken as a people into exile in Babylon, an experience which reverberates throughout the Bible. The subtext for this series, and the real reason for preaching it, is that the experience of exile is a metaphor for our own lives, especially the difficult times when we do not feel at home even in our own homes.
There is an old folk story about the people of a small village who were suffering from hunger in a time when food was scarce. Each household had a bit of something or other leftover, some extra potatoes in one house, some extra onions or carrots in others, but not enough to make a good meal. Each night, people went to bed hungry. One day a traveler arrived, and began to talk in the village square about the wonderful soup that he was going to make and share with everyone in town. He set a fire in the square, and set over it a large pot, like a cauldron. He filled it with water, and then he pulled from his bag a very smooth stone. He eyed it carefully, sniffed it, and then dropped it into the pot.
“I’m making Stone Soup!” he said. “It’s going to be delicious!”
Well, people were excited about the offer of soup, for they were very hungry, but they were skeptical about the taste of stone soup. One person approached the traveler and asked how stone soup could be any good. The traveler said “I understand your hesitation, but I assure you that this soup is wonderful. You’ll be surprised and amazed at how good it tastes…although I will admit that it could use just a bit more to heighten the taste.”
“Well,” said the villager, “I have some potatoes at home, would that help?”
“Oh, potatoes, that would be the perfect addition!” the traveler said.
Another villager came by to check on the pot and express her doubts. “It doesn’t smell very good” she said.
The traveler said “oh, just wait, when it’s done you won’t believe how good it will smell and taste, although I will admit that it could us just bit more to enhance the flavor.”
“I have some parsley at home,” the woman said.
And so it went. Carrots, salt, onions, barley, pepper, cream: a great many things were all added to the stone soup, and when it was finished, every person in the village shared the best meal that they had eaten in weeks.
In times of hardship, in times of crisis, people often draw back and hunker down, focused on their own security. When tragedy strikes a blow to our lives, when we have lost something so important we become like a turtle, retreating into our shell, holding on to what little we have, when it would actually be better for us to do just the opposite. And that is what God calls us to do.
It was 2600 years ago that Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and took the people into exile. Their homes were destroyed and they carried great losses into their new life. They had to trust their grief and their anger to God, lest it destroy their spirits or destroy those around them.
In a way, we are also in exile. We might be in exile from the wonderful home of the good old days that we remember with fondness and sadness: the days when we could leave our homes unlocked, and trust the neighbors to look after our children as they roamed the streets; the days before the recession, or the terrorist attacks; the days when we went to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving. Or maybe we never had good old days, and we are in exile from a home we have never really known. Maybe we don’t so much look back at the home we lost, but search for the home we dream of that we have never found. In any case, when we are in exile, then we tend to become extra guarded about what little we have and to cling to it tight. Generosity seems like a risk. We have lost enough and we need to focus on keeping what little we have left.
Jeremiah knows that this is what the people in exile want to do. They want to huddle close together and tell themselves that their exile will only last a couple years, a few seasons. They just have to wait it out and everything will return to normal. So Jeremiah gives them a reality check. He tells them that the exile will last two generations. What this meant is that the ones who remember Jerusalem will never go home, but only their children and grandchildren. Jeremiah told them to make themselves at home in this new reality: to plant gardens, to give their children in marriage, and to seek the welfare of the city where they’d been exiled.
Seek the welfare of the city. Seek the welfare of the kingdom of Babylon. Seek the welfare of the people who had destroyed their homes and forced them to leave their land. Seek the welfare of the people you call your enemies! Last week, do you remember, they prayed to God that they wanted to turn the full force of their anger upon these people, and what happens next is miraculous: they seek the welfare of their enemies.
In our own exile, when we wish that someone would tell us how we can recover the home we have longed for, when we wish that religion offered a miraculous fix for our own hardships, God sends a prophet to tell us that he way through our own exile is to show goodness to other people. It is one of the great truths of our faith that the only things we really keep are the things that we learn to give. Our security comes not by what we get, but by what we give.
It seems like it’s just the opposite of what we expect. It seems like a mismatch of what should happen. Shouldn’t the ones who have suffered be the ones receiving help? When we lose something, isn’t it right for others to do good for us? How can we wrap our minds around this concept of giving to others as a way through our own hardship?
I know that many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. I see this wonderful dynamic of faith become real in your lives. In the last few weeks, my friend John Schluep preached about the blessing of the elders. I can tell you that some of our elders in this church have lost more in their lives than I hope the rest of us will ever have to lose. These people have had to redefine what home means again and again as their old homes were lost to them. And what they have done is miraculous. They have learned to seek the welfare of the people around them, and in doing so they have healed and they have been a blessing to others. I cannot tell you how many people I have talked to who tell me about their lives and then they lean in close and tell me, like it’s a great secret: “You know, I received more than I ever gave.”
I need to tell you the story of a man who made a lot of money in the stock market. This was the 1920’s, things were booming, and he did very, very well. He somehow got connected with a group in Africa that wanted to establish a university, and he gave them a bunch of money to get them started. You can guess what happened in 1929 when the stock market crashed. It was devastating. He lost everything, and lived for years in poverty.
Years later, this university in Africa was celebrating an anniversary - 30 years, or something – and the students said, where is this man, he should come. They finally found him in a tenement building on the south side of Chicago, and they invited him to come over for the celebration. He said “I can’t, I don’t have any money,” and they said “we’ll take care of that,” and they flew him over. In the middle of the celebration, with this wonderful music, and a crowd of alumni, and so many grateful people, this man turned to the president of the school and said, “you know, it’s strange: everything I kept, I lost. What I gave is all that I have.”
Seek the well-being of those around you, because in their well-being you will find your well-being. And now, here in this congregation we are working to send money toward a new school in Mali, in west Africa. I wonder how it will work that the welfare of Africa is related to our welfare? I can’t tell you exactly, but the words of Jeremiah, and the words of Jesus invite me to trust that this is so. The world is becoming smaller, and we are realizing more and more just how interdependent we are. We must realize that the well-being of people around the world, their peace, their security, their health, their prosperity, is where we will secure our own well-being. And it is also true right here in this community that we discover the same truth.
It was during their time in exile that the chosen people of God began to see that their identity was not to be people who were protected on Mount Zion by God’s strength, but to be people who created God’s reality wherever they ended up by the power of God’s goodness working through them. I think that this is what Jesus had in mind when he said that the kingdom of God is within you. If the kingdom of God is within you, than the kingdom is not built on the outside, with sturdy wall to keep the good people safe, and well fed. No, the kingdom is within us, so that wherever we are, even when we are in exile, we bring a bit of God’s kingdom into being by seeking what is good for our neighbors.
The kingdom of God is within you, and it is stronger than any kingdom built with strong walls and powerful armies. It is stronger because even when the walls come down around us and we lose our homes, we can still find ourselves in the kingdom of God, where we learn the miracle of having more by giving more away.
The stone soup is cooking on the fire. There’s enough for everyone.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Sermon - Not At Home
Part I of III in the series “Life in Exile”
Preached on October 3, 2010 World Communion Sunday, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Lamentations 1:1-6 Psalm 137
Sometimes I wonder if our lives are normally stable and secure, only to be interrupted by problems that alter our lives, or if our lives are normally unstable and changing, and we try to carve out periods of relative security while the world shakes around us. Maybe it is a little bit of each. One thing we do know is that if we ever have a period of time when we feel stable, comfortable, and settled, it’s not going to last. Something always happens to topple that fleeting sense of being at home.
It happened in a very big way to the people of Israel in the year 587 BC, the year that the kingdom to their east, Babylon, came and conquered Israel, not only the villages and farms, but the very city of Jerusalem, the city of peace, built on the safe heights of Mount Zion. The city was destroyed; the Temple was torn down, and the its people were taken into captivity in exile in Babylon, while those who escaped fled to hide in other nations.
The people of Israel lost their home, and with it their religious and cultural identity. The prophetic book of Lamentations is a discourse in grief and anger at what happened to Jerusalem, and the words of Psalm 137 come from this very specific time and place. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept.
They wept, because the people who had captured them began to mock them, telling them to sing some of their songs of Zion. But those songs must be sung in Zion, those are songs of the Temple, songs of home. Those songs don’t make any sense in Babylon. Those songs are too heartbreaking to sing when their home has been taken from them.
There are many ways that our sense of being at home, safe and comfortable, can be cut away from us. The minister Frederick Buechner wrote about the Longing for Home, and he said that “To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them.”
Being homeless, even in our own homes, brings a sense of great grief. Some of the people who know the most about walking through grief in this church are those who serve as Stephen Ministers. One of the books that they have studied for their ministry of giving care has a title that would have made sense to the Israelites in Babylon. The title of the book is Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart. Sometimes we are in a place where songs don’t make sense. Sometimes we are by our own waters of Babylon, cursing whatever has happened to tear us from the life we used to have. Maybe you have been in a place of great grief, and you have had someone try to cheer you up in a way that seemed just totally false and unkind, even if well intentioned. Don’t sing songs to a heavy heart.
When we are hurting inside, what we most need is someone who is strong enough just to come be with us in that painful and difficult place, to remind us that we are not alone. This is the guiding principle of Stephen Ministry. The spiritual writer Parker Palmer was talking about the time when he suffered a deep depression. He said that when someone is depressed, they lose the ability to even experience the things that would normally bring joy: like sunshine, and a walk on a cool autumn day. There was a member of his Quaker church, one of the elders, who discovered the only thing that helped. This man would come, once a week, and without saying more than a few words, would sit across from him and massage his feet. It was the only way that Parker could be reminded that he was not alone.
The Psalm says that they can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. All they can feel is a rage against their enemies. The rage builds in this psalm until it ends with that last violent idea, imagining how happy it would feel to take the children of their oppressors and bash their heads against a rock. It is one of the most awful images in all of scripture, but also one of the most honest. Anger is what they feel! Beneath the sadness of their losses, beneath the grief for everything that has been destroyed, they are angry, and they want revenge!
I’ve seen that feeling. After the attacks of September 11, so much about our lives came to a standstill. We didn’t know how to go on with our lives. The things that seemed important suddenly seemed trivial, and the things we had forgotten became important. We couldn’t go on singing the same songs. We couldn’t go on as if life were the same, because the home we knew was gone. Home was not what we had thought it was.
I remember one day I went to a grocery store, and I was talking with the guy who was working the register while he scanned by purchases. Those were the weeks when you started talking to strangers sometimes as if you were continuing a discussion from the day before. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” “My neighbor was stranded for three days; he finally got a flight home.” Things like that. So we started talking, and this man said that we should go over there and kill the families of every man who hijacked an airplane on that day. Kill their families, their neighbors, and bomb their cities. Didn’t a lot of us feel that? Even if a part of us knew that it wouldn’t solve anything, that it would only intensify the vicious circle of violence, didn’t we have a sense of wanting to somehow lash out and make someone else more vulnerable than us? We lost our home in the United States as we had known it. And with the loss came anger.
There are too many ways for us to lose a sense of a home that is safe and secure. The tragedies may be national or personal. If not on September 11, 2001, maybe it was the financial collapse of 2008 and the loss of your retirement savings. Or maybe it is the somber doctor’s quiet diagnosis, the betrayal of a friend, the job layoffs, or the death of a spouse. When someone dies, sometimes there are songs that are too painful to hear, or places that are too painful to go. We can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.
Sometimes there is a target for our anger, and sometimes we lash out for any target that seems available: Wall Street, congress, co-workers, people who are different from us, or just a generalized anger that has no target. It just builds up and spills out onto innocent bystanders over minor inconveniences, or trivial misunderstandings. Sometimes our families get the worst of it.
This anger is nothing new. Scripture records the rage of the Israelites who were so deluded by their madness that they thought the massacre of innocent children would bring relief. “Bomb their homes into oblivion,” the man at the grocery store said to me. He might as well have pulled out a Bible and said “Happy are those who would dash their children against the rocks.” Those words are not in the Bible because they tell us something true about God. They tell us something true about ourselves. They tell us about how loss is connected to anger and how that anger gets directed at innocent people.
So how do we keep our anger from escalating in a never-ending circle of violence between nations, or between friends, or between brothers and sisters? How do we understand the violent image in scripture, and what do we do with these ugly feelings inside of us?
As I asked that question this past week, I had this memory of someone else asking that question. I remembered Mr. Rogers asking that question to children. You remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He’d begin each show with that song about the wonderful day in the neighborhood, and won’t you be my neighbor? And he’d hang his jacket in the closet and put on a cardigan, and his indoor shoes. Mr. Rogers wrote all of his own music for the show, including one that began with my question.
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems Oh so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you can go?
Did you know that Fred Rogers went to seminary? Got his Masters of Divinity; he was going to be a minister, but then his life went a different direction, into children’s television, but I don’t think he ever got away from ministry, because what he’s telling children – that they need a safe container for their anger – is the same thing that the scripture of Lamentations and the Palms tells us: We need a place that is strong enough to receive our anger safely. We need a way to get our anger out of ourselves, so that it doesn’t hurt us, and into someplace safe, so that it doesn’t hurt others. And that safe place is God. Be angry with God, because God is the only one who can receive the anger of the world without being killed by it.
In this culture, we in the church have lost our legacy of lament. We don’t do lament. When awful things happen, when we have suffered great losses, we want to go immediately to comfort, skipping over the stage of anger. Because we want to be strong; we want to be in control; we want to show how we can move on. We want to move right to comfort, but there should be a place in prayer, even in worship for us to be angry. Why have you allowed this to happen, God? It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! Send this suffering on someone else. Why aren’t you doing anything?
When Jesus Christ hung on the cross, he used the words of the 22nd Psalm to challenge God: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The anger of the world put him on the cross, but it couldn’t kill the life of God or the grace of God. And that is where our anger needs to go: to God. When you have lost something, be angry at God. Let anger take over your prayers. Feel anger within the safe walls of this sanctuary. Because no one else is strong enough to safely hold your anger and dissolve it into nothing.
John Schluep and others from this community are in Vietnam today with people who were enemies in a terrible war. He has told us how true peace will not be found until we heal the wounds of war, and part of the healing is being honest about the wounds.
We need to be honest about our losses, and this is the place to do it. Today is worldwide communion Sunday, and every time we come to the table, we are reminded of loss, the broken body and spilled blood of Christ. But we are also reminded that loss does not have the last word. And loss did not have the last word for the people in Exile long ago. The first step is to lament what was lost, to throw that anger at God so that you don’t throw it at anyone else. Next week, we’ll talk about what happened after the anger, but for now, know this: it was miraculous, and it couldn’t have happened if they had not found a place to be angry in safety.
Preached on October 3, 2010 World Communion Sunday, at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, UCC
Lamentations 1:1-6 Psalm 137
Sometimes I wonder if our lives are normally stable and secure, only to be interrupted by problems that alter our lives, or if our lives are normally unstable and changing, and we try to carve out periods of relative security while the world shakes around us. Maybe it is a little bit of each. One thing we do know is that if we ever have a period of time when we feel stable, comfortable, and settled, it’s not going to last. Something always happens to topple that fleeting sense of being at home.
It happened in a very big way to the people of Israel in the year 587 BC, the year that the kingdom to their east, Babylon, came and conquered Israel, not only the villages and farms, but the very city of Jerusalem, the city of peace, built on the safe heights of Mount Zion. The city was destroyed; the Temple was torn down, and the its people were taken into captivity in exile in Babylon, while those who escaped fled to hide in other nations.
The people of Israel lost their home, and with it their religious and cultural identity. The prophetic book of Lamentations is a discourse in grief and anger at what happened to Jerusalem, and the words of Psalm 137 come from this very specific time and place. By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept.
They wept, because the people who had captured them began to mock them, telling them to sing some of their songs of Zion. But those songs must be sung in Zion, those are songs of the Temple, songs of home. Those songs don’t make any sense in Babylon. Those songs are too heartbreaking to sing when their home has been taken from them.
There are many ways that our sense of being at home, safe and comfortable, can be cut away from us. The minister Frederick Buechner wrote about the Longing for Home, and he said that “To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not really to be home in any of them.”
Being homeless, even in our own homes, brings a sense of great grief. Some of the people who know the most about walking through grief in this church are those who serve as Stephen Ministers. One of the books that they have studied for their ministry of giving care has a title that would have made sense to the Israelites in Babylon. The title of the book is Don’t Sing Songs to a Heavy Heart. Sometimes we are in a place where songs don’t make sense. Sometimes we are by our own waters of Babylon, cursing whatever has happened to tear us from the life we used to have. Maybe you have been in a place of great grief, and you have had someone try to cheer you up in a way that seemed just totally false and unkind, even if well intentioned. Don’t sing songs to a heavy heart.
When we are hurting inside, what we most need is someone who is strong enough just to come be with us in that painful and difficult place, to remind us that we are not alone. This is the guiding principle of Stephen Ministry. The spiritual writer Parker Palmer was talking about the time when he suffered a deep depression. He said that when someone is depressed, they lose the ability to even experience the things that would normally bring joy: like sunshine, and a walk on a cool autumn day. There was a member of his Quaker church, one of the elders, who discovered the only thing that helped. This man would come, once a week, and without saying more than a few words, would sit across from him and massage his feet. It was the only way that Parker could be reminded that he was not alone.
The Psalm says that they can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land. All they can feel is a rage against their enemies. The rage builds in this psalm until it ends with that last violent idea, imagining how happy it would feel to take the children of their oppressors and bash their heads against a rock. It is one of the most awful images in all of scripture, but also one of the most honest. Anger is what they feel! Beneath the sadness of their losses, beneath the grief for everything that has been destroyed, they are angry, and they want revenge!
I’ve seen that feeling. After the attacks of September 11, so much about our lives came to a standstill. We didn’t know how to go on with our lives. The things that seemed important suddenly seemed trivial, and the things we had forgotten became important. We couldn’t go on singing the same songs. We couldn’t go on as if life were the same, because the home we knew was gone. Home was not what we had thought it was.
I remember one day I went to a grocery store, and I was talking with the guy who was working the register while he scanned by purchases. Those were the weeks when you started talking to strangers sometimes as if you were continuing a discussion from the day before. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.” “My neighbor was stranded for three days; he finally got a flight home.” Things like that. So we started talking, and this man said that we should go over there and kill the families of every man who hijacked an airplane on that day. Kill their families, their neighbors, and bomb their cities. Didn’t a lot of us feel that? Even if a part of us knew that it wouldn’t solve anything, that it would only intensify the vicious circle of violence, didn’t we have a sense of wanting to somehow lash out and make someone else more vulnerable than us? We lost our home in the United States as we had known it. And with the loss came anger.
There are too many ways for us to lose a sense of a home that is safe and secure. The tragedies may be national or personal. If not on September 11, 2001, maybe it was the financial collapse of 2008 and the loss of your retirement savings. Or maybe it is the somber doctor’s quiet diagnosis, the betrayal of a friend, the job layoffs, or the death of a spouse. When someone dies, sometimes there are songs that are too painful to hear, or places that are too painful to go. We can’t sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land.
Sometimes there is a target for our anger, and sometimes we lash out for any target that seems available: Wall Street, congress, co-workers, people who are different from us, or just a generalized anger that has no target. It just builds up and spills out onto innocent bystanders over minor inconveniences, or trivial misunderstandings. Sometimes our families get the worst of it.
This anger is nothing new. Scripture records the rage of the Israelites who were so deluded by their madness that they thought the massacre of innocent children would bring relief. “Bomb their homes into oblivion,” the man at the grocery store said to me. He might as well have pulled out a Bible and said “Happy are those who would dash their children against the rocks.” Those words are not in the Bible because they tell us something true about God. They tell us something true about ourselves. They tell us about how loss is connected to anger and how that anger gets directed at innocent people.
So how do we keep our anger from escalating in a never-ending circle of violence between nations, or between friends, or between brothers and sisters? How do we understand the violent image in scripture, and what do we do with these ugly feelings inside of us?
As I asked that question this past week, I had this memory of someone else asking that question. I remembered Mr. Rogers asking that question to children. You remember Mr. Rogers, don’t you? He’d begin each show with that song about the wonderful day in the neighborhood, and won’t you be my neighbor? And he’d hang his jacket in the closet and put on a cardigan, and his indoor shoes. Mr. Rogers wrote all of his own music for the show, including one that began with my question.
What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems Oh so wrong
And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do? Do you punch a bag?
Do you pound some clay or some dough?
Do you round up friends for a game of tag?
Or see how fast you can go?
Did you know that Fred Rogers went to seminary? Got his Masters of Divinity; he was going to be a minister, but then his life went a different direction, into children’s television, but I don’t think he ever got away from ministry, because what he’s telling children – that they need a safe container for their anger – is the same thing that the scripture of Lamentations and the Palms tells us: We need a place that is strong enough to receive our anger safely. We need a way to get our anger out of ourselves, so that it doesn’t hurt us, and into someplace safe, so that it doesn’t hurt others. And that safe place is God. Be angry with God, because God is the only one who can receive the anger of the world without being killed by it.
In this culture, we in the church have lost our legacy of lament. We don’t do lament. When awful things happen, when we have suffered great losses, we want to go immediately to comfort, skipping over the stage of anger. Because we want to be strong; we want to be in control; we want to show how we can move on. We want to move right to comfort, but there should be a place in prayer, even in worship for us to be angry. Why have you allowed this to happen, God? It isn’t fair! It isn’t right! Send this suffering on someone else. Why aren’t you doing anything?
When Jesus Christ hung on the cross, he used the words of the 22nd Psalm to challenge God: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The anger of the world put him on the cross, but it couldn’t kill the life of God or the grace of God. And that is where our anger needs to go: to God. When you have lost something, be angry at God. Let anger take over your prayers. Feel anger within the safe walls of this sanctuary. Because no one else is strong enough to safely hold your anger and dissolve it into nothing.
John Schluep and others from this community are in Vietnam today with people who were enemies in a terrible war. He has told us how true peace will not be found until we heal the wounds of war, and part of the healing is being honest about the wounds.
We need to be honest about our losses, and this is the place to do it. Today is worldwide communion Sunday, and every time we come to the table, we are reminded of loss, the broken body and spilled blood of Christ. But we are also reminded that loss does not have the last word. And loss did not have the last word for the people in Exile long ago. The first step is to lament what was lost, to throw that anger at God so that you don’t throw it at anyone else. Next week, we’ll talk about what happened after the anger, but for now, know this: it was miraculous, and it couldn’t have happened if they had not found a place to be angry in safety.
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