An Analgesic Faith: Reflections on Psalm 77

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. 

Rise Up: A Four Week Preaching Series

Church Anew is excited to provide practical resources to preachers and other church leaders including curricula, sermon series, and ministry ideas to spark imagination for your congregation. These are free to adapt and use in your context, with your people. 

This sermon series has been adapted from use at St. Andrew Lutheran Church, where it was used in May and June of 2020. These texts have provided a Spirit-filled online worship series for our community, and we hope that the adaptations made make it possible for you to use in your congregation as well. The descriptions of each week are not intended to provide rigorous textual analysis, but rather to ignite biblical imagination for preachers and faithful people.

Rise Up: Sermon Series Overview 

Rise up. From a song by singer/songwriter, Andra Day, that might as well be an anthem for this moment:

“When the silence isn’t quiet
and it feels like it’s getting hard to breathe
and I know you feel like dying
But I promise we’ll take the world to its feet
and move mountains.” 

Uprising is happening all around us. People on the streets, calling for a more just world. People in their homes, rising above the quarantine to love their neighbor. In this sermon series, we will closely study the story of the prophet Elijah from the Old Testament book of 1 Kings. This prophet enters a book that tells the national history of the people of Israel, chronicling the rise and fall of Israel’s kings. 

What can at times read like an ancient piece of national propaganda is radically interrupted by a narrative that takes a completely different turn. Elijah enters the story uninvited as “the troubler of Israel” (1 Kings 18:17). Together, we will study this ancient book and listen for God’s voice in acts of overwhelming kindness from a widow, dramatic debates with political leaders, displays of God’s commitment, and even the sound of sheer silence.

Week One: From Death to Life
1 Kings 17: 7-16 (and if time, 17-24)

Every hero has a backstory. Every prophet has a call story. Elijah’s call story comes when he is confronted by the suffering left in the wake of the political regime of Israel. Elijah doesn’t encounter this theoretically by reading a newspaper account or reading about it on Twitter. Rather, the Widow of Zarephath articulates the injustice in her being. Indeed it was the responsibility of the political leaders, the king, to care for the widows, orphans, and immigrants in the land. But it is God who brings life from death—food for the hungry, resurrection for the sick. Elijah’s short speech provide words to live by: “Do not be afraid.” If we name our fear, it no longer has power over us.

Week Two: From Fear to Hope
1 Kings 18: 1-10; 17-19

Elijah’s short sermon from last week (“Do not be afraid”) creates new possibilities in all of his interactions. As Walter Brueggemann writes, “This authorized utterance creates a new circumstance and a new prospect for well-being, especially among those who have no alternative resources of hope.”[1] The king is on the lookout for the prophet, calling him a “troubler of Israel.” Elijah’s curt response indicts the king on behalf of the widow and all those whom the government has left behind—forsaking the law is forsaking the call to care for the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant in the land. In a dramatic encounter with the most powerful person in the land, Elijah’s confidence creates a new possibility for well-being, and even for hope.

Week Three: From Unanswered to Eternally Spoken
1 Kings 18: 20-40

The prophets of Baal and the prophet Elijah stand for a showdown. Whose god will answer their prayers? This passage has a rhythm as Elijah taunts the other prophets: “How long will you go limping with two different opinions?” You can’t have it both ways! The prophets of Baal receive no response, no answer, no voice. Elijah’s speech, once again creates new possibility: “Answer me, O Lord, so that this people may know that you … have turned their hearts back.” In this dramatic display of God’s ongoing care of the people, we can trust that God will not go without voice. We follow a God with a living Word.

Week Four: From Justice to Peace
1 Kings 19: 9-13

A common chant in the protests these weeks has been, “No justice. No peace.” Some may read this text and hear God’s presence “in the sound of sheer silence” as a peaceful, airy sound. But this peace only comes through fire, earthquake, and hurricane winds. Elijah’s persistent call for justice for God’s people ends with a question that haunts us even today: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” What are each of us doing here? How are each of us responding to the call that comes uninvited, unbidden, and at times unwelcome?

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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.

Difference Is a Gift (Acts 2:1-11)

A sermon for Day of Pentecost for a world riven by division and injustice. God shows us a different path.

There's no better place to start a study of the Book of Acts than the account of Pentecost. Now, this is a moment we often identity as the birth of the church, that moment when God's blessings poured down upon us and the church tasted God's goodness.

But what happened that momentous day, and what does it all mean for us today? The story of Pentecost makes us wonder about a different world. Wouldn't life be easier if we were all the same? If we all spoke the same language, wouldn't we avoid so many of the conflicts and rifts that destroy our relationships? If we all shared a common culture, wouldn't we all be much better off?

I want to propose today that there are a number of problems with this line of questions. Initially, the question isn't as honest as it should be. The real question we ought to pose is: "Wouldn't life be easier if we were all just like me?" After all, that is so often what we really hope for. Too often, Christians have hoped for a time when our differences would cease, when in Christ we would all be indistinguishable. Such impulses are earnest but fundamentally misguided.

Many such interpretations emerge from a fervent hope that the specters of racism, sexism, and myriad other destructive "isms" would no longer bind us to cycles of violence and hate. Such interpretations imagine that becoming Christians means becoming all the same in all ways. But, nothing could be further from the truth.

Our adoption as children of God does not erase our differences. Instead, that adoption erases the need to claim superiority or inferiority based on these markers of identity. We are not the same, but we are reminded that our differences are not ways to measure our value in the eyes of God or in the eyes of one another.

The story of Pentecost in Acts Chapter 2 helps us understand how God sees our differences. Simply put, diversity is one of God's greatest gifts to the world. At Pentecost, God through the Spirit does not erase our differences but embraces the fact that God has made us all so wonderfully different.

First, a quick recap. The final chapters of the Gospel of Luke and the first chapters of Acts find the disciples and other followers of Jesus regrouping and discerning what a life of faith together looks like after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension. And, both at the end of the Gospel of Luke and again at the beginning of Acts, Jesus promises that he would grant this gathered community with the gift of the Spirit.

And that gift arrives in grand style. These early followers of Jesus gather in Jerusalem along with fellow Jews from around the Mediterranean world. They are gathered together in one place when suddenly tongues of fire descend from the heavens on the day of Pentecost. The gift of the spirit precipitates an extraordinary event. As the disciples proclaim the good news, everyone hears the good news proclaimed in their own language.

What might this all mean? After all, I don't remember the last time I was able to speak another language without a great deal of study and effort along with more mistakes than I can count. Speaking a new language always involves more than a few moments of embarrassment. And yet, none of that is narrated here. What then might this all mean?

Many interpreters have viewed this Pentecost moment as a direct response to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. That's a fantastic story that seeks to explain how a people once united by common ancestors eventually became peoples with many different languages. Some have forwarded that Pentecost reverses the punishment God meted out at Babel. Finally, we can understand one another because the Spirit enables all to understand one language.

But to me, this is a significant misreading of Babel. Is it really a punishment from God that we are all different, that we speak different languages and live in different cultures? That is, is difference a problem in need of a solution? I certainly don't think so, and the vibrancy of the world's cultures is evidence against the misreading of Babel.

Most importantly, if Pentecost were a reversal of Babel, if Pentecost undid the diversity of human languages precipitated by Babel, why would the Spirit enable everyone to hear the gospel preached in their own languages? Why not cause everyone to understand one, universal, heavenly language? Perhaps because Acts does not understand Babel to be a punishment God inflicted upon us. Perhaps because Acts understands Babel as an expression of God's greatest hopes for all of humankind, not a punishment. Perhaps because Acts understands God's commitment to our differences.

So, notice what happens at Pentecost. God, through the Spirit, chooses to meet us where we are: in the midst of a multitude of languages and experiences. The Spirit translates the gospel instantly into myriad languages. And if you think this is easy, then you have never tried learning a new language! You don't just substitute one word in one language for a corresponding word in another language. Language, as we know, is messy and it's intricate. Language is rooted in a wider and complex culture and way of thinking and living. Even when we speak the same language, don't we still have a hard time understanding one another? Imagine then the miracle of Pentecost and what it means for us today.

God meets us in the messiness of different languages and does not asks us to speak God's language. Instead, God chooses to speak our many languages. God does not speak in a divine language beyond our comprehension. At Pentecost, God speaks in Aramaic and in Greek and other ancient languages. And today, God continues to speak in Spanish and Greek and Hindi and Chinese alike.

At Pentecost, God makes God's choice clear. God joins us in the midst of the messiness and the difficulties of speaking different languages, eating different foods, and living in different cultures, and that is good news.

So, what would it mean for a church to be Pentecostal in this way? Well, first, like those early disciples, we might be accused of being drunks, but that's okay, I guess. That puts us in good company with the first Christians and even Jesus himself! But, more seriously, we might find ourselves surrounded by people and languages we don't understand; but we will also know that what sounds like babbling to us, that's sweet music in God's ears.

But most important is that such a church will open its doors and its people will open their arms as widely as possible. That church will seek out all kinds of people and not require them to become like us. That church will recognize that without "those" people we cannot be God's people. That church will take a risk, but a risk worth taking, a risk God has called us to embrace. And last of all, that church just might be changed by God at its core. And that would be the greatest gift of all.

Let us pray.

God, we are a people in need of a miracle. Ours is a world riven by division and injustice, but you, God, have shown us a different path. Lead us on the paths of understanding and love. Forgive us when we declare the differences you have created a curse. Teach us to cherish our differences as precious gifts. Amen.

Used with permission. Originally posted on Day1.org.

Eric D. Barreto

Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country.

Twitter @ericbarreto

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.

Pentecost, Prejudice, and Pandemic

A sermon for Pentecost,
May 31, 2020

Ahmaud Arbery

George Floyd

1,000 names

100,000 dead

(Silence)

Pentecost is the noisiest of all Christian holy days—a party, the “birthday of the church,” celebrated with banners, red balloons, and cake. We hear rushing wind, tongues of fire, and cacophonous crowds. We re-enact Acts 2 in multiple languages, reminding us that God sent all humankind a gift—the spirit with its promise of peace and portents of salvus for the healing of the earth.

Alleluia! The long awaited day of the Lord is here!

But this week, names:

A man, panting, running, and fighting for his life.
“I can’t breathe; I can’t breathe…” and, then, no breath.
A thousand names in print takes our breath away.
100,000 stopped breathing.

A celebration, a birthday?

No thank you.

I feel like we are being strangled, the life choked from us—disbelief, sorrow, fear, rage. Violence in the streets, jails, and cages at our border, targeting black and brown men, women, and children; a virus stalking us all, turning familiar comforts into threats. We are hunted and haunted by guns and germs, prejudice and plague. And the victims mount. Each with a name, many known, some known only to God. From a single name to the many to myriads, this unholy litany of grief.

Pentecost is no party this year. Indeed, this feast falls on the eve of a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, June 1, to be marked with silence at noon. Silence, more than shouting this year. Mourning, not celebration.

This discomforting Pentecost drew my attention away from the traditional readings. (Although I confess it would be tempting to preach on fire, myself wanting to call down the fire of heaven on this whole, unjust, unfair, unwelcome mess!) Of all the alternatives offered by the lectionary, a single verse—1 Corinthians 12:13—spoke to most deeply my heart:

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Pentecost is, of course, not only about birth but baptism. And here, in First Corinthians, Paul speaks about what it means to be baptized and to live in the Spirit. We are in one Spirit, with one body, he insists. And then, in words that sound familiar—he reminds of that oneness, whether we are “Jews or Greeks, slaves or free,” we all drink the same Spirit.

That short clause echoes Paul’s other (and more extended) use of those words, found in an older letter, in Galatians 3:27-28 —

“As many of you are were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female: for you are one in Christ Jesus.”

Galatians 3:27-28 has long been one of my favorite bits of Paul. And I’m not alone in that. The words have been referred to as Paul’s finest writing, his best religious vision and poetry, and the lens through which the whole of Pauline theology should be read. For centuries, Christians have drawn inspiration from them for causes of justice including abolition, economic reform, and women’s rights. Galatians 3:28 is Paul’s rallying cry to overcome divisions of race, class, and gender, poetically and theologically interwoven with baptism, proclaiming justice as heart of life in Christ.

Like most readers, I have attributed their lyrical and political power to Paul. However, New Testament scholar Stephen Patterson has recently offered a far more provocative understanding of the origin of these words. Paul, he insists, was not their author. Paul was quoting them from an older source. With close historical detail, reconstructing and comparing texts, Patterson argues that these words were the very first Christian creed. Paul was quoting an ancient liturgy dating from the earliest years of the Jesus movement, said by the first baptized, a credo that probably went something like this:

For you are all children of God in the Spirit.
There is no Jew or Greek,
There is no slave or free,
There is no male and female;
For you are all one in the Spirit.

This forgotten baptismal creed, with its powerful words, was perhaps shouted by some baptized on that very first day, the day of fire, wind, and water.

Patterson goes on to say: “If you are interested in the origins of Christianity, in those first ten to twenty years when the memory of Jesus was still fresh, before Paul came along and made his distinctive impact on the Jesus movement… In the earliest years of the Jesus movement it was repeated again and again by people who were baptized as followers of Jesus.”

And he continues, pointing out that this forgotten creed:

…is a statement of convictions of the Jesus people. It is not a statement about God, or about the mysteries of Christ. It is about people and who they are, really. In baptism, they were committed to giving up old identities falsely acquired on the basis of baseless assumptions—Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female—and declared themselves to be children of God. [1]

Of course, it is our “baseless assumptions” that made this week, these weeks, all the sorrows of human history, so unbearable. We assume we are better because, as our own president recently said, that “good bloodlines” make some smarter, more deserving. That breeding and wealth and blood entail status, naming some as superior and consigning others to less-than, less than privileged, less than human. This is the baseless assumption of Cain, that his offering was better than his brother’s, that he deserved more than Abel. Our baseless assumptions have dogged us since exile from Eden, we have almost forgotten how baseless they are.

Pentecost burns away those baseless assumptions in a fire from heaven. The Spirit incinerates our old identities—inherited status from our ancestors, our senses of innate superiority or inferiority, our privilege or poverty, freedom or bondage, the roles assigned to us by biology. Yet, this baptism leaves us not as ash. For the baptism of fire is followed by the more mundane one, the baptism of water. Fire is quickly followed by the flow, the pouring out of Spirit, the living water. We are washed, refreshed, and remade. We drink of one Spirit and find a new identity: Child of God.

We are named, each with our individual names, and with that familial name: Child of God. We have names. We share a name. We are fully ourselves; we are fully one with each other.

The ancient baptismal creed marked that new identity as neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. As Patterson points out, it proclaimed “a world in which...female slaves could be leaders of free men, where foreigners and native born stood with equal power and equal rights. ‘You are all one’ signifies solidarity.”

Our names are our individual beauty, uniqueness. And our Name is our solidarity.

Pentecost this year is not as much party as protest. To name is to mourn the loss of individuals with gifts and loves. But Pentecost calls us to take another step beyond our personal laments and to be found together in a shared name – child of God. In this relation, Pentecost emerges as human solidarity. We stand together, in the same family, the same name, with and for and (even) as victims of the violence sadly endemic in this broken world. We are all Ahmaud, we are all George, we are all the thousand, we all the 100,000. What happens to one, happens to us all. We are not separate, not really. The fire of God has burned into the world, reducing to ash all division. A new human family has been born: sons and daughters dare to prophesy; old and young dream dreams; and slaves, men and women alike, announce God’s justice in the world.

The great and glorious day is truly here: You are all children of God.

May we live in the reality of Pentecost. Even now. Especially now, children of God.

* * * *

A Prayer for Pentecost:

Spirit of truth:
guide us into all the truth;
consume the lies
that shroud the world in hate;
pray in us
with sighs too deep for words;
and let the victim’s voice ring out
with hope for a new world;
through Jesus Christ, who goes to the right hand of God.
Amen.

(from Steven Shakespeare, Prayers for an Inclusive Church)

[1] Stephen Patterson, The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism (Oxford, 2018), quotes from page 29. Patterson’s book won the 2019 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

Diana Butler Bass

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is a multiple award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality. She holds a doctorate in religious studies from Duke University and is the author of ten books, including Christianity After Religion and Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution. For more information on Diana and her work, see http://www.chaffeemanagement.com/dianabutlerbass

https://www.facebook.com/d.butler.bass/
https://twitter.com/dianabutlerbass

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.