Wadhams United Church of Christ
2569 County Route 10, Wadhams, NY 12993
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Sermon by Steve Smith Order of Service
August 3, 2008, Poetic Paradox
Before I launch into my topic this morning, I want to give a nod of thanks and gratitude to the author who inspired much of my thinking about the subject. Her name is Kathleen Norris, and she has a chapter in her book The Cloister Walk entitled “The Paradox of the Psalms.” Her reflections offer an opportunity to integrate our life experiences with our minds, our emotions, our spirituality, and the way we live. My quotes will be from her work. One experience that most of us share in common is that we began the habit of attending church from a very young age. Compelled by the discipline of our parents, we learned that going to church on Sunday was something that you did every week, whether we wanted to go or not.
Dressed in our Sunday best, we had to learn how to sit still for extended periods of time. For a child, anything more than five minutes is an extended period of time. We learned the language of the church as we absorbed its rhythms, its expectations, its obligations, and its way of organizing the world and the cosmos for us. It provided a stable and predictable haven amidst the unstable and unpredictable world that would surround us as soon as we left its protective folds. In short, we learned how to “do it right” as we practiced the unexplained and sometimes inexplicable spiritual disciplines that are embedded in a worship service.
Many of us, as Kathleen says so eloquently, absorbed a belief that one has to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to meet God. Another belief following closely on this one’s heels is the insidious notion that we need to be firm and even cheerful believers before we dare show our faces in “His” or God’s church. I keenly remember having parishioners ask me how I was doing, only to express shock and dismay whenever I admitted to my very human feelings of fatigue, or sadness, or irritability, or injury over some wrong done me. “It’s a bad witness,” one church leader counseled me. “Christians are supposed to be happy. Especially the pastor,” he continued. “People want to know that you’re above all this stuff.”
In essence, he was asking me to put on an act. In my mind, though, when people come to church to find a hiding place from the real world, they’re creating a worldview that cannot be sustained when we are confronted with pain, or sorrow, or an overwhelming thirst for vengeance and retribution. At heart, I’m like most everyone else: I want to live in a perfect world, where no one is ever hurt, or offended, or victimized, or slaughtered, or ravaged by disease. I very much want God to deliver me and my loved ones from anything tragic, or painful, or dangerous, or evil. As Kathleen says it, we want to conquer evil by being nice, and nice people don’t want to soil their clean white gloves or their crisply pressed dress shirts or blouses with the gritty anger of a cursing psalm.
“To the modern reader, the psalms can seem impenetrable,” says Kathleen. “How in the world can we read, let alone pray, these angry and often violent poems from an ancient warrior culture?” Why would we want too? I might add. Won’t they just reinforce the savagery we disdain? “At a glance,” she continues, “they seem overwhelmingly patriarchal, ill-tempered, moralistic, and vengeful, and they often seem to reflect precisely what is wrong with our world.” As a result, in case you haven’t noticed, the wild and contradictory poetry of the psalms is still mostly censored out of worship in America. I admit to following that trend, skipping over the uncomfortable sections that might offend our modern sensitivities. Some of the wilder sections seem too brutal for our politically correct world.
The result is that we get a sanitized version of biblical poetry. The psalms are in fact raw and unsettling in their portrayal of an inner world that bears disturbing resemblance to my primal response to the circumstances and events I encounter in day to day living. If parishioners can’t bear for their pastors to be human, how much more disillusioning to discover that our biblical authors could display such unseemly thoughts and attitudes as those we find in the Psalms. “The psalms make us uncomfortable,” Kathleen writes, “because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation into praise.”
The psalms disturb us because “God behaves in the psalms in ways God is not allowed to behave in systematic theology.” Our systematic efforts at understanding God allow us the luxury of explaining God in neat, tidy little packages. They help us to tame the whole concept of a divine being, because in explaining something, we are exercising control over it. Fortunately, God seldom behaves in such predictable and comprehensible ways. I say fortunately because the incomprehensible and unpredictable ways of God make us think more often about God in our daily living. A tame, housebroken version of God won’t serve us very well in a wild and tumultuous world that seldom stops to take account of how we’re feeling about things.
The God of the psalms disturbs us and unsettles us by pointing toward the shadow that lingers behind each and every one of us while we are directing our faces toward the sunny view of faith that makes us more comfortable. “The psalms reveal our most difficult conflicts,” she continues, “and our deep desire… to run from the shadow. In them, the shadow speaks to us directly, in words that are painful to hear…. The psalms are full of shadows…” Those shadows are present in times of grief and loss, in seasons of despair, and in times of anguish over the betrayal or the outright violence of someone we trusted or even loved.
The shadows encroach on our happy thoughts with fearful fantasies of how life might all come crashing down around us at any moment. They steal our peace and prey upon our doubts and uncertainties. They rail at the injustices of our world and even shake with dreadful rage when we feel like God has left us all alone in a terrifying world. They capture our ambivalence when we try to change our attitude or work on forgiving someone, only to find ourselves slipping into the old thoughts and harboring the same simmering resentments that have been eating away at us for ages. They dredge up the lifelong patterns of shame and guilt, and gnaw anxiously at our fearful worries that we still can’t do it right after all these years of trying, and maybe we’ll never be able to get it right.
Yes, the shadows are there, but the poetic paradox of the psalms reminds us that there would be no shadows if there were no light. The psalms remind us that we have a light to be drawn to, and that in the glory of that light, there is hope: the hope of healing, the hope of redemption, the hope of transformation, the hope that we will be able to prevail over the hardships of life and somehow emerge more confident in the goodness of God. The poetry of the psalms speaks to the depths of our beings, putting into words our deepest desires, our fondest dreams, our feelings of lostness, or brokenness, or alienation. The psalms give voice both to the darkness of the shadows that linger with us, and the brightness of the glory to be found when we come, just as we are, into the very presence of God.
By this, I don’t mean to imply that our shadows are going to mystically disappear when we discipline ourselves to pursue God through the shadows of life. But in coming to worship to be in community with others, and in hearing the word spoken in poetic paradox, we are reminded that we are not alone in life, and that others have endured the shadows, too. Our gospel lesson gives us a glimpse of this poetic paradox in the life of Jesus when he learns that his cousin John has been killed at the whim of a dancing girl. When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary, lonely place.
It was clear that he wanted to be alone to absorb what had happened. In my mind, he was shaken and disturbed, unsettled by this turn of events. The danger of what he was doing had just taken on a new and very real dimension. Like many people who experience grief and shock, he withdrew from the people around him. But as the story unfolds, we learn that the huge crowds followed him and were there waiting for him when he went to retreat from the pain of this world. Amazingly, the sight of a large, needy crowd stirred his compassion, and even in his raw grief, he was able to touch the lives of others with healing.
As the shadows lengthened and night drew near, the pragmatic disciples came to Jesus with their own compassionate thoughts: these folks didn’t bring anything to eat, so they need to be heading back down the road pretty soon, or they’re going to go hungry. Jesus, in the brokenness of his grief; Jesus, in the throes of his own inner storm over the death of a relative and co-worker in God’s field; Jesus, who had come here to escape these demanding crowds; offers another paradox: “They don’t need to go anywhere. You can feed them.” No doubt mystified by what he meant and what he intended to do, they followed his instructions, and saw five thousand people fed, with enough left over that each one of them had a basket of food, too.
So the psalms remind us that when we turn our gaze toward the distant glories of God in the midst of our storms of doubt, or grief, or pain, that God can take the little bit that we offer and bless others with it. The psalms hold out the hope that what we endure in the journey of life can be used to touch the lives of others with healing and grace. The gospel reminds us that Jesus gave out of his emptiness, that he extended his broken and bruised life in service to God’s greater cause, and God used it to bless those who were there with him.
So we gather at the table in the shadows of the literal storms hovering over us day after day. We gather at the table in the shadows of everything that hinders us and grieves us and lays us low, knowing that here in community, God can touch us with grace and mercy. So we come to the table of our Lord in expectant hope that whatever we bring, God can use it to touch someone else with wondrous gifts of love.
Order of Service August 3 , 2008 Back to Sermon
"NC" refers to The New Century Hymnal, The Pilgrim Press (1995)
Welcome, Announcements, Joys and Concerns
A Candle for Peace NC #575 (verse 1)
Call to Worship (Based on Psalm 17)
Leader: Call upon the Lord, and God will answer.
People: Give ear to us, dear Lord, and hear our prayers.
Leader: Show us your steadfast love, gracious God, this day and always.
People: You keep us as the apple of your eye; you hide us in the shadow of your wings.
Leader: Help us to walk in your paths, to keep your ways.
People: When we go astray, forgive us and bring us back to you.
Leader: May we see your loving kindness when we lie down at night and when we rise in the morning.
People: May your love be ever before us, that we may praise you in all situations.
Hymn NC #55 Rejoice, You Pure In Heart
Responsive Prayer
Leader: Loving God, you are not far from any one of us, but we distance ourselves from you by neglect of prayer, busy schedules, worrying minds, and a short measure of hope.
People: How often we have closed the door on you without even intending to, leaving conversation with you out of our daily lives.
Leader: If we have not done so before, help us now to make room and time for prayer. (Silence) Give us the sense that time spent in prayer is not duty but our daily bread.
People: We thank you that you continue to create in our hearts, the yearning that compels us to seek, ask, and knock until we find you, our heart’s true desire.
Leader: We thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit, whom you have promised searches our hearts, and when we don’t have the words or know how to pray, intercedes for us.
People: Deepen our trust, dear God, and by your Spirit, keep us in your boundless love.
Leader: We give you thanks for blessings we recognize and blessings we are slow to see. We thank you for mercies plain and mercies concealed.
People: Give us eyes to see your glory, ears to hear your Word, and faith to act on holy impulses when no guarantee of results is in sight.
Pastoral Prayer, Lords Prayer
Hymn NC #329 Jesus, The Joy Of Loving Hearts
Psalm 17, Genesis 32:22-31, Matthew 14:13-21
Sermon Poetic Paradox
Celebration of Holy Communion
Offering, Doxology, Dedication
Hymn NC #606 Nearer, My God, To You
Benediction
Leader: God’s steadfast love is our refuge.
People: May the compassionate love of Jesus be the example by which we guide our lives.
Leader: Go now in the love of God. May the deep peace of Christ be with you, the strong arms of God sustain you, and the power of the Holy Spirit strengthen you in every way
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