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An Analgesic Faith: Reflections on Psalm 77
Lent has recently become Dr. Michael J. Chan's favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment.
Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash
Lent has recently become my favorite season in the church year. The 40 Lenten days commemorate Jesus' time in the wilderness, where he was tempted both by the devil and the harsh environment.
Lent is bookended by bleak events: it begins with Ash Wednesday, reminding us that we are but dust (Gen 2:7; 3:19) and ends just before Holy Week, which highlights Jesus’ execution and resurrection.
In the season of Lent, death is everywhere.
No wonder Psalm 77 found itself into the lectionary’s daily readings. Verses 2-3 capture the spirit of the psalm and of the season:
In my day of distress I seek Yhwh;
At night, my arms are stretched out without ceasing
my soul refuses comfort
I think of God and I groan
My spirit meditates and becomes feeble. Selah (my translation)
But the spirit and season of Lent are often far removed from the experiences of many American Christians, and most especially those whose traditions are not structured according to traditional church calendars.
Too often American Christians as asked to numb their pain. Instead of a faith big enough for this whole human life, broken-hearted people are offered shallow platitudes like “God has a plan” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” so stop asking questions.
This is an analgesic “faith.” But a faith numb to the world is no faith. It’s a delusion.
If all our faith can do is numb pain, then it’s a faith worth rejecting. Lent is there to remind us of what a durable, trustworthy faith should look and feel like.
If Christian faith has no room for broken hearts, messy human stories, and scarred bodies then it is precisely the kind of religion that Karl Marx described when he said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
We must do better.
“Things Take the Time They Take”
Unlike American culture, Lent doesn’t ask us to hurry up and get over sorrow or to paper over the shocking violence of this world. Lent doesn’t shuffle us along from sorrow to happiness.
It’s worth remembering that Jesus’ own 40 days in the wilderness evokes the narrative of Israel’s much longer 40-year period in the desert, known especially from the book of Numbers. Jesus relives those years of wandering, adversity, and delay. The season of Lent allows us to experience these narratives according to ritual time.
Lent creates space for us to sit with life’s pain and to feel it fully and collectively. The author of Psalm 77, for instance, does not end in praise or thanksgiving, like other laments. It turns to the memory of God’s actions in the past (see vv. 11-20), but the God of memory never materializes in the present. At the end of it all, the psalmist’s sharp-edged questions still stand: “Will Yhwh reject forever? . . . Has God forgotten to be gracious?” (vv. 7- 9).
The fact that Lent is a season for the entire church also tells us that we aren't meant to sit in this heaviness alone.
We aren’t meant to rush through the darkness to get to the light. We can’t speed the night in order to get to morning. You can’t rush your way to Easter.
When you try to shortcut the journey you never actually leave the driveway.
As Mary Oliver puts it: “things take the time they take”
The Spirit of Lent, the Spirit of Lament
As a church we often fail tender-hearted people. Instead of offering a faith that is spacious enough for all of human life, we hand them a cheap plastic mask and call it, “faith.”
Doesn’t the world feel so much better when you wear it? Isn’t the world so much happier and sunnier when you choose the blue pill, rather than the red pill? (The Matrix, 1999). Go ahead. Forget reality and live in a dream.
But poet Cleo Wade is correct when she says, “You can either have a mask or a real life. There isn’t a Third Option.”
Lent is a season to recover a real life. It’s a season of self-reflection and of turning away from the things that leach life away.
If Lent is the season for recovering honesty, psalms of lament (like Psalm 77) give us the language for doing so. Laments are poems in which human beings complain about this world, one another, and of course God. Laments are the human clapback to God, who is often accused of being distant and unresponsive.
Lent gives us permission to sit in dust and ashes but also to push back against a culture that is so deeply uncomfortable with pain, disruption, loss, and death.
A Worthy Rebellion
Just because Lent is a season of sorrow, lament, and self-reflection, however, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also a season of hope.
But Lent teaches us something important about the shape of hope: True hope always has scars.
That may be the difference between hope and optimism. True hope comes from tilled soil. It springs up out of broken ground. Like all green and growing things, hope takes time. It’s a seed. Seeds begin their lives in darkness.
But hope doesn’t always arrive on our timeline. We don’t get to control when the light arrives. In that way, it’s less like the sun and more like a lightning strike.
Hope also takes honesty. But honesty is hard and painful, because it requires us to look at ourselves and our world through clear, undistorted lenses. We can’t get to the lands of hope and healing without first crossing the bridges of honesty. There are no detours, no shortcuts, and no alternate routes.
People often give something up during Lent. Instead, I’ll ask you to pick something up--a worthy rebellion: This Lent, don’t settle for an analgesic faith. Insist on a kind of faith that is spacious enough for this entire life—the mess, the joy, the hurt, the injury, and also the recovery.
Deepen Humility and Compassion with the IDI
As Christian public leaders we are often learning new ways to navigate conversations and relationships with people of diverse cultures across churches and communities. Every interaction is an intercultural interaction, whether we realize it or not. Even if it seems like there are many shared cultural expressions (such as food, music, or dress), beneath the surface there are always deeper cultural dynamics and how we respond could make all the difference in someone understanding a sermon or feeling authentically welcomed into a congregation.
How to Lead More Effectively
One tool that can help us gain deeper insight about how to effectively engage culture is the Intercultural Development Inventory, a research-based assessment of intercultural competence. As a qualified administrator, consultant, and coach of the IDI, I’ve had the joy of working alongside church leaders as they discover a new cultural self-awareness and understanding of others. This work is developmental, meaning it involves an ongoing process of learning and is “about the journey, not the destination.” None of us knows everything about our own culture, let alone others, so the journey requires humility and compassion.
We can offer an authentic welcome and genuinely meet people where they’re at with practices that respond to the multiple dimensions of our cultures—honoring the ways we are alike just as much as the ways we are different. The research suggests that if we overemphasize our cultural differences it can result in fragmentation, but if we overemphasize our commonalities it can result in conformity. The sweet spot is finding a balance in how we approach cultural sameness and difference, developing behaviors that are cross-culturally responsive.
One Body, Many Parts
We can respond in ways that are culturally specific only when we learn the specifics of other cultures. As faith leaders, our context may include people who are more diverse than we even realize. Beyond the easily observable differences of race, gender, and age (which can each be complex in their own ways), a closer look may reveal there are also differences such as:
Family background
Education
Work experience
Socio-economic status
Sexual orientation
Abilities/ disabilities
Many others
Increasing our awareness of these differences and learning how to respond in ways that are affirming and accommodating can help deepen a sense of safety and belonging within any community.
The apostle Paul paints a vivid image of what this culturally-response community can look like in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. He wrote this letter during a time not unlike today, when faith leaders were asking how to respond to the differences they found in the church.
Should they deny and dismiss differences?
Uphold one way of being as better than the other?
Treat them all as the same?
Or is it possible to embrace the unique particularity of each and over time, learn how to adapt for their sake?
While all of the ways may have worked for them in various spaces, Paul’s invitation was to practice living as “many members of one body.” He emphasized that each member’s individual differences didn’t make them any less valuable as part of the body. In fact, he further asserts, the diversity of each member is vital for the body to function properly. And if one part is in need, it serves the well-being of the whole body if that part is given specific attention and care.
This is also the developmental journey we are invited to take through the work of interculturality. It becomes an ongoing process and practice of learning how to more intentionally respond to culturally specific differences with compassion and humility. In many ways, it is learning how to love more deeply.
Beloved Community
Intercultural development can be one tool that helps us live more fully into the vision given to us in scripture. What Dr. King and others called the Beloved Community, a culture and society of equity and justice, becomes more possible when we lovingly tend to both the ways we are alike and the ways we are different—appreciating commonalities while adapting to differences.
Of course, this takes patience and grace. More than anyone else, Jesus showed us how to embody this way of being. He moved across cultures with a profound self awareness and a transformational empathy, always able to illuminate the particularity of his experiences to speak to a universal truths. When we deepen our work of engaging culture, we not only deepen the impact of our ministry, we also follow Christ in bringing us closer to the Beloved Community God has called and created us to be.
Connecting With Others
We don’t do this work alone. There are a number of extremely helpful tools and resources in the field of interculturality. When engaging with the Intercultural Development Inventory it is important to do so with a Qualified Administrator who has the training to accurately interpret the results given by the assessment. They can serve as consultants and coaches providing learning opportunities and sharing best practices to support you on your developmental journey.
Both QA’s ourselves, my friend David Scherer and I are offering a second round of our sold-out course on interculturality and anti-racism online this October. There are two tracks: Faith Leaders Course and Standard Course.
This article originally appeared on The Faith+Leader and is republished with permission.
Joe Davis
Joe Davis is a nationally-touring artist, educator, and speaker based in Minneapolis, MN. His work employs poetry, music, theater, and dance to shape culture. He is the Founder and Director of multimedia production company, The New Renaissance, the frontman of emerging soul funk band, The Poetic Diaspora, and qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory. He has keynoted, facilitated conversation, and served as teaching artist at hundreds of high schools and universities including in New York, Boston, and most recently as the Artist-in-Residence at Luther Seminary where he earned a Masters in Theology of the Arts.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Resist Nihilism
“It’s all a matter of opinion, right?”
Try this line in a biblical studies classroom if you’ve never witnessed spontaneous combustion. It will set the professor’s hair on fire. This is a repeatable experiment. I hope my students aren’t reading.
I hope Dr. Eric Barreto’s are.
When someone says, “It’s all a matter of opinion,” conversation stops. If it’s all a matter of opinion, evidence doesn’t matter. Reason doesn’t matter. There’s no point in listening to one another. We might as well give up.
We resort to “It’s all a matter of opinion” when facts make us uncomfortable.
Students use it when course content stretches their faith. In the Covid-19 age, people use it when the demands of safety threaten our businesses and when we want social interaction. We trot out “It’s all a matter of opinion” to wiggle out of tight spaces.
Danger alert: “It’s all a matter of opinion” is nihilism in action. And nihilism is deadly.
Discernment is healthy. We have strong theological reasons to be skeptical of our values, our assumptions, and our capacity to know the truth. Jesus warned the Sadducees, “You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 12:24). We’re in the same boat. Our perceptions are limited. Moreover, our perceptions are clouded by sin. It’s like we’re looking into a distorted mirror, dimly lit (I Corinthians 13:9).
We must also confess, most important things do involve opinion. This is true for theology, ethics, biblical interpretation, and even history. Experts disagree. One reason we can’t find common ground on the Covid-19 pandemic is that science involves opinion: the experts’ opinions have changed as research expands. That’s confusing for all of us.
But cynical people, many of them extremely well paid, are at work to promote nihilism in our society. They want us to give up on the distinctions between true and false, between right and wrong.
“Some people say.”
“Many people do that.”
”The experts have been wrong before.”
“The science is unclear.”
These are wolves in wolves’ clothing. Wolves wear fine dresses and suits.
The wolves want us to give up on truth: What can we really know, anyway? They would have us set aside ethics: It’s all relative, isn’t it? They deny the possibility of dignity: Look at those sorry dogs over there. Even beauty means nothing to them: smells like money.
The wolves sure don’t want us looking out for one another, fostering the common good: It’s survival of the fittest, baby. Dog eats dog.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, guards us from the wolves. And he demands that we too protect the vulnerable: “Guard my sheep” (John 21:16). Wise as serpents and harmless as doves, we do not abandon integrity.
Now, biblical authors love tricksters. Jacob wears animal fur to trick his father into mistaking him for Esau. Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute, then holds to Judah’s ring and staff as security. Jael allows Sisera into her tent, gives him milk and a blankie.
But another thread runs through scripture. Integrity. Proverbs instructs, “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.” (12:19,). Jesus expects his disciples to speak a direct yes or no, no frills (Matthew 5:37). Paul insists on the integrity of his communication (I Corinthians 4:2). Revelation acknowledges disciples who bear the testimony of Jesus, no matter what the cost (12:11).
Educational psychologists have identified a common pattern among college students. College introduces them to diverse and conflicting points of view and to problems that haven’t been resolved. A natural reaction is to embrace relativism: “It’s all a matter of opinion.” Hopefully, students remember the lessons of relativism. There really are diverse perspectives, and they do have value. But then they learn to embrace commitment in the face of complexity. Some answers are better than others. Some are just wrong. Evidence counts. And the truth does matter.
For those of us in the United States, the next few weeks will bring a blizzard of bull. Followers of Jesus will not be deterred. Our calling is to foster truth, grace, dignity, and beauty in the midst of confusion. In so doing, we can contribute to the healing of a broken culture.
Greg Carey
Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary and an active layperson in the United Church of Christ. His books include studies of apocalyptic literature, the parables, the Gospel of Luke, and the ethics of biblical interpretation. His most recent books are Stories Jesus Told: How to Read a Parable and Using Our Outside Voice: Public Biblical Interpretation. In addition to serving on multiple editorial boards, Greg chairs the Professional Conduct Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature and serves on the Leadership Team of the Open and Affirming Coalition of the United Church of Christ.
Facebook | @gregc666
Twitter | @Greg_Carey
Facebook | @LancasterTheologicalSeminary
Twitter | @LancSem
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.