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A Cry From the Dark | Lamentations1:1-6 | October 7, 2001 |
This cry from the dark street in Manhattan was a cry many of us cried out as we saw images that created a dark place in our spirit.
I don’t know about you but I found myself dumb struck and numb. Almost unable to take in the horrific information and unbelievable images. I met my classes and took time to try to seize what we in education call the “teachable moment.” But I was as confused as my students and not at all happy with the expressions of rage, rumor, misunderstandings, speculations that we shared. I felt like the character Casy the ex-preacher played by John Carradine in the film Grapes of Wrath. You may recall that while returning from prison to his family’s desolate dust bowl farm, Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) meets Casy at the beginning of the film. The ex-preacher says he has lost the call. A preacher is supposed to have answers and all he has are questions. He says, “I lost the spirit. I got nothin' to preach about no more, that's all. I ain't so sure of things.”
So I empathize with the disciples plea to Jesus to give them the extra large, super-size, jumbo version of faith so they can do the work they are supposed to do.
Interpreters differ on whether Jesus’ response to them is a rebuke or encouragement to risk exercising the faith they do have. I hope it is the latter. I know there are plenty of examples of faith.
Robert Coles, the Harvard psychiatrist tells the true story of Ruby Bridges, the African American child, whose trust in God’s love for her and confidence in the power of God’s love allowed her at age six to desegregate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans single-handedly. Her faith was sufficient to allow her to walk through a gauntlet of angry, loud women and men every morning and afternoon accompanied by an armed guard but to also pray for those who shouted hateful things at her. Of course Ruby’s faith arose from the formative influences of her family and church. She illustrated the fact that the life of faith Jesus was inviting his disciples into was not a solitary matter. We, at some level, know that our faith is sustained by the life of a community of faith. That is probably why there were so many here for worship the Sunday after the terrorist attack. We needed to be together. But I confess, as helpful as that service was, I was still not doing too well. Fortunately no one asked me how much faith I had that day.
I confess that I have felt uneasy these last several days. I know part of it is the shock we all feel. As Emily Dickenson wrote in her poem After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes
AFTER great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
I heard the recent national poet-laureate, Robert Penske, read the poem The House On the Hill by E. A. Robinson which gave expression to our collective astonishment and loss.
THEY are all gone away,
The house is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one today
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away.
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
When I looked at the lectionary readings for this Sunday I discovered poetry from scripture that gives expression to the cry from the dark. Hear this poem of lament from the first chapter of Lamentations:
How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become a vassal
She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
she has no one to comfort her;
There is a lot of darkness in the Bible. Job, in utter despair, mentions darkness three dozen time in his howling lament. Darkness is like creation reversed. Remember how Genesis describes the beginning of God’s creative action with “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” And when Jesus’ twelve best friends, who had just shared a meal with him that we remember in our Communion, fled when the soldiers came to seize Jesus, it was night.
William Willimon tells of Elizabeth whose husband had died a horrible, painful death after a long illness. When he died it was as if a light had gone out in her soul, so deep and dark was her grief. Her grief was made worse by her having been taken on as a project by a fundamentalist Christian church on the edge of town. The guy she had dated in high school had been “saved,” and had become insufferably pompous. Now he and his wife and all their new Christian friends were out to save her. Elizabeth hides from them when they come to call. While she longs to climb out of her grief, she doesn’t want them with their grinning talk of Jesus. “They refuse to look on the dark side of things, and they want her to blink it away, too. If she can smile in the face of loss, grief, and death, so can they. They’re like children in a fairy tale, singing songs, holding hands. Never mind the dark wood, the wolves and witches. Or birds that eat up the bread crumbs.” (Mary Ward Brown, “A New Life,” The Atlantic Monthly, 1991)
But the scripture does not try to blink away pain, sorrow, or anger in loss. Hear another of today’s lectionary readings from Psalm 137:
By the rivers of Babylon–
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take
your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
Here is a cry from the dark. Here is a Jew exiled in Babylon. He has seen the destruction of his country, of his home, of the temple where he worshiped, and of all that he held dear. He is homesick, heartsick, filled with both longing and anger. Here is an honest cry from the dark.
The poetry of the Bible recognizes and gives voice to the dark places in life. But throughout the Bible, light is the quality of God. In a few weeks we will doubtless hear in the Advent scriptures the familiar words. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region of the shadow of death light has dawned.” (Mt.4:16). And from John’s gospel “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”
What we affirm as Christians is that the Light of God meets us in the darkness and we are not overcome by the dark. I am persuaded that the stories of the great prophets like Jeremiah and the ministry of Jesus indicate that as the faithful enter into human suffering they enter more deeply into the heart and mind of God. Out of that experience emerges for us what Marcus Borg calls the “Fellowship of sympathy.”
Christians through the centuries have met and shared the elements of Communion as we do today to affirm our “fellowship of sympathy.” And to affirm, often in the face of tragedy that the one whom we remember promised us his spirit of peace. In the 3rd chapter of Lamentations the writer says,
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord in my portion,” says my soul
“therefore I will hope in him.”
A friend sent me a copy of last Sunday’s sermon by John Mack,. the pastor of the First Congregational United Church of Christ of Washington D.C. In it he says, “What I really want and can’t ask for is comfort. Can you imagine that? A U.S. citizen, one with so rich a life, needing even more comfort? . . . .I don’t want to be patronized. I don’t need a spiritual coach to tell me about life, or the politically astute to give me a lesson on world politics. I don’t even want a lesson in conflict resolution or peacemaking. I want to be held and sheltered, rocked and sung to. I want reassurance that it’s going to be okay, that they can’t get to me, that I’m safe.”
On Friday night after that Dark Tuesday I babysat with my grandsons so that their mother and father could go to Shabbat services. You see my son-in-law had been in tower one on the 100th floor just the week before. I realize that as I rocked nine-month old Benjamin and sang “Rock a my soul in the bosom of Abraham ” it was a cry from my darkness and a prayer for me, for him, for us all.
Amen.
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2001 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |