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.