The uncomfortable and disturbing psalm 137

Pentecost XX - Psalm 137

The psalm appointed for today, Psalm 137, is a psalm of lament and curse.

It’s an uncomfortable psalm,

with some of the of the most disturbing verses in the Old Testament.

We have a problem with it because we all learn at an early age

that wrath is one of the 7 deadly sins

and that Jesus said very clearly that we should never ever ever

take revenge against our enemies…

So at a first reading this psalm goes against anything we believe is good christian behavior.

And we have to wonder why it was included in the Psalter

and therefore in our Christian lectionary.

Yet, just as all desire is not necessarily lust, or all gourmets gluttons,

all anger is not sin and maybe we can find some grace even in the psalmist’s curse.

More about this later. First let’s put these words in their context.

Psalm 137 is dated during the Babylonian exile of 587-539 BCE,

also known as the Babylonian Captivity.

During the 7 and 6 centuries, the Near East witnessed an extraordinary political upheaval

with the rise and fall of superpowers.  

The Assyrian empire, Babylon, Egypt were fighting each other for land and power

and the smaller kingdoms, like Judah, had to change masters and allies very rapidly.

In 597 BCE (this is before Jesus so we have to count backward)...

In 597 BCE, Judah, the southern Kingdom of Israel, miscalculated the strength and power of Egypt, picked the wrong ally, and revolted against Babylon.  

That started a complex chain of events that I will keep short by telling you that

in 586 Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, after a long siege,

• razed the walls of Jerusalem
• devastated the Temple, the place of YHWH’s assured presence, together with the houses of the most important citizens,
• blinded and took to Babylon king Zedekiah, thus nullifying the Davidic dynasty
• and the once independent kingdom of Judah became a Babylonian province.

All of the elite, the teachers, business leaders, landowners, artists,

all of the prominent people were taken to Babylon.

The peasant classes were left behind, where they commingled with other tribes in the region, and by all means and purposes disappeared from the official, normative history of Israel.

Now this is history.

Theologically, according to Scripture,

this disaster of epic proportion happened because the people of Judah

had stopped living according to the Covenant.

Exile from the land of milk and honey was punishment for these unreliable,

unresponsive, and disobedient people

who had chosen to believe the words of false prophets

and ignore and ridicule the true ones,

sent by YHWH to warn them again and again and again.

Enter our psalmist.

The people of Judah are on the banks of the rivers of Babylon -

the Euphrates, and the Tigris -

and they have nothing left but their tears and their curses.

This language is not their language. This food is not their food.

The stories told to their children are not their stories.

The values put on family and community are not their values.

And worst of all, these gods are not their one Lord God YHWH.

They have no idea how long it would be before they could return to their beloved homeland.

And I know this is hard for us to understand,

but exile for the people of Judah had worse implications than for anybody else,

because Jerusalem was not just any city,

but the place where God had promised to dwell in the Temple,

so displacement meant not only degradation and loss of identity as a people,

but also being removed from the presence of YHWH.

In captivity they had lost all that identified them

as the chosen nation under God’s holy rule.

No wonder this uncomfortable, disturbing psalm

is also one of the most inspirational in the psalter

and its images have been put into music and song and arias.

These words are among the best ever used to describe the feeling

of utter alienation and despair

experienced by those who are forced to leave their homeland.

This is the cry of the Pilgrims, of the Kurds, of the Native Americans, of the Tutsis

and of all those who desperately try to make a life in refugee camps all over the world.

Garret Keizer in his book The Enigma of Anger

describes anger as an expression of unresolved loss.

He maintains that often we grow infuriated at one thing because we are not done

- or perhaps we haven’t started - mourning another.

So in a way, we could say that many of our angry outbursts

are the result of grief that never comes to sobbing.

Well, here is your example.

The psalmist mourns the loss of Jerusalem and everything she represents.

And his intolerable pain explodes in the last 2 verses

in merciless resentment against the Babylonian overlords.

This doesn’t make the last verses any easier to digest.

And it doesn’t stop us from wondering how this song of lament and curse

made it in the canon of Christian Scripture

Walter Brueggeman, the famous theologian,

in his Conversations among Exiles

says that From Israel the church (us, the body of Christ)

can learn a better way to deal with grief and rage.

It can learn to address these emotions to God…

Ancient Israel broke the pattern of denial by engaging

in speeches of complaint and lamentation

that dared to say how overwhelming was the loss, how great the anxiety,

how deep the consequent fear and, I add, the consequent rage and desire for revenge.

Quoting Bruggeman again,

Such cathartic utterances are also an honest and courageous practice of prayer.

They offer an opportunity for turning brutalizing loss into an act of faith

that may in turn issue into positive energy.

These speech practices give us a way to vent our rage at loss

without letting it escalate into actions that will hurt our neighbors.

The point is that the Psalms are not only about how we ought to feel

or what we wish we believed. They are about who we really are.

And we, created by God in God’s image yet limited in our humanity,

have plenty of angry thoughts and feelings especially when we are in pain.

The Psalms address not only our individual but also our collective pain,

our collective rage, the cry for justice of all human beings who are oppressed,

and of all human beings who come face to face with their limitations.

Maybe we have never experienced what the psalmist does,

but we can recognize his cry and own it,

and use his very words to express our lament, to confess our rage,

and to ask for forgiveness.

Italians have Dante, who as an exile himself, put all his enemies in hell.

The first verses of the Divine Comedy we all effortly remember from High School

are Dante’s bitter yet colorful imprecations against his enemies,

his only possible retaliation against their cruelty.

But both in the Comedy and in the psalm we find a promise of grace.

As the psalmist candidly confesses his anger, he is still ready to submit to YHWH.

He is not proposing to kill the children of Babylon himself.

Revenge is mine, says the Lord and the psalmist’s revenge is indeed left

into YHWH’s capable hands. There is no real violence here.

The circle of violence is actually broken because the desired brutal response is left to God.

It’s as if the psalmist were saying:

“This is what I wish for my enemies, o Lord, yet not my will but thy will be done.”

We may wish that God would damn our enemies to eternal fire and brimstone,

or send the pox to them,

but the moment we honestly confess that to our God,

we are submitting to God’s will, which is forgiveness and love.

In his Nabucco Giuseppe Verdi puts psalm 137 into amazing music,

the world famous aria is called Va pensiero,

but Solera who wrote the libretto changed the ending;

instead of wishing death and destruction upon the children of Babylon,

the exiles explicitly turn to God asking to be inspired to a new song,

“a harmony of voices which may instill virtue to suffering.”

Yet again, In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm, attempting to stir Macduff

against the tyrant who has slaughtered his wife and children urges him to

“dispute it like a man” to which Macduff replies

“I shall do so, but I must also feel it as a man”.

My brothers and sisters, our emotions are human.

And we can’t help but feel what we feel.

Grief, anger, even at times a violent desire to hit, to burn, to destroy.

Have no fear to put words to it and then let it go;

leave it to our loving, celestial parent.

Christ’s power, Christ’s love can redeem all that too.

Amen

Pentecost XIX - measuring tape

This is my measuring tape.

It comes from Europe, so it is slightly different than the ones you are familiar with. We have been using it a lot recently as my 6th grader is learning how the metric system works in her Science class. We have been measuring pencils and posters, furniture and stuffed animals, and even rooms. We now know that a regular pencil is more or less 20 centimeters long and that our coffee table is more or less 1 meter wide. She is also working on shifting from centimeters to inches… something that I’ve never really mastered.

Talking about measuring tape, I don’t know if you remember but in the Disney version of her story, Mary Poppins had a measuring tape too. She used it to measure the kids in her care, Jane and Michael, and the results of her measuring were out of the ordinary.

Michael measured “extremely stubborn and suspicious”

Jane measured “rather inclined to giggle. Doesn’t put things away”

And of course Mary Poppins measured “practically perfect in every way”.

We still use the phrase the measure of a man or of a person to talk about a person’s character. Of course, since we don’t have Mary Poppins’ clever tape, the “instrument” we use changes according to whom you ask.

For famous physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin, The true measure of a man is what he would do if he knew he would never be caught.

For English writer Samuel Johnson, The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Even J. K. Rowling tried her magic hand at measuring. She said that If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.

And finally, one of my favorite, Fr. Robert South, who said that If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives.

We all have different ways of judging other people’s character, don’t we?

And often the way we judge ourselves is wildly different than the way we judge others.

Be as it may, today we are confronted with how God judges humanity.

Once again Jesus is dealing with the very human Pharisees.

He has just told them a story with a difficult moral: “You cannot serve God and wealth”, he has said, and the Pharisees are making fun of him because - according to Luke - they are “lovers of Money”.

So right in the verse that precedes the beginning of today’s reading, Jesus tells them

“You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others,

but God knows your hearts.  

What is highly valued among human beings is detestable in God’s sight.”

And then he tells them the story of the poor man Lazarus and the rich man, traditionally known as Dives (which is nothing else but the word for “rich man” in the 4th century

Latin translation by Jerome).

Now, at a first reading we may start worrying about our own afterlife.

If the rich are going to be suffering the torments of Hades and the poor, the really poor

(not just those who cannot afford a fifth pair of shoes or tickets to the D-backs)

the really poor are going to be in the arms of Abraham or the angels, then we - all of us here today, I am afraid- have no hope of ending up in the clouds.

Because as far as I know none of us here is THAT poor.

But beware.

This story is meant to prove a point; Jesus is not after giving us a picture of the afterlife as he knows it. It is a parable. A parable meant for Jewish listeners.

First-century Jewish hearers of this parable would have assumed right off the bat

that the rich man was righteous and that the poor man was evil. Wealth in the ancient world was often viewed as a sign of divine favor, while poverty was viewed as evidence of sin. Just like sickness.

Remember how in the 9th chapter of John’s Gospel the disciples ask Jesus

who has sinned him or his parents that this man was born blind?

(John 9:2)

In that world, faith in God led to success: money, wives and children, land and health.

It’s pretty much like the prosperity gospel preached on Tv by the likes of Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar. I don’t agree, but this Christian religious doctrine maintains that financial blessing is the will of God for Christians, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries will always increase one's material wealth and success.

So in some circles things have changed but not that much.

Now I believe that in our story Jesus doesn’t care so much whether Lazarus is rich or poor but he cares deeply for his suffering. And I don’t believe that the rich man ends up in trouble because he is rich, but because in his earthly life he didn’t see Lazarus.

In spite of their proximity, in spite of the fact that Lazarus was there, hungry and in pain right outside his door day in and day out, the rich man is too busy congratulating himself on how well he is doing and celebrating with sumptuous feasts that he never even notices him.

Dives’ sin is not that he is wealthy, but that he is apathetic, indifferent to the plea of the poor. His wealth has distorted his vision.

When Jesus tells the Pharisees, You cannot serve God and wealth, he means you cannot focus your attention on both at the same time. If all our energy, all our care is on the task of making and administering our money to make more money and to purchase more than what we need while ignoring all others out there, far and near,

who can barely sustain themselves on 1 dollar a day, then there is something really wrong with our heart and with our eyesight.

And that is where Jesus is pointing the finger. That is what he is judging.

Those who watch the news and feel oh so bad for the poor and then go fix themselves another sandwich.

Those who read the papers and tell themselves that if they are so poor and so sick those people must have done something to deserve it.

Those who justify their indifference by telling themselves that the unemployed clearly do not want to work, but just to be a burden on society. Those who spend hours pouring over the pictures of Miley Cyrus twerking or trying to decide whether Miss America is indeed too dark skinned to be beautiful, but are way too sensitive to look at the faces of the suffering in Peshawar or in Nairobi.

I don’t know whether God has scales or if at our death we are neatly separated in rooms with different temperatures and levels of comfort.

I believe in a generous God, a God with an infinite amount of patience, a God who is ever ready to forgive even our worst crimes toward each other, when we repent and return to God’s path.

This is what I hear when Jesus talks.

But I know that if ever came a time when God took out Mary Poppins’ measuring tape

and called my name, I want to measure better than Dives.

I want to measure better than the Pharisees. And I am sure you feel the same way.

I am sure that deep in our hearts we all know what we would like to hear.

When and if God takes out the tape and measures me,

I want to hear something like this:

she does have many many faults and she definitely talks too much,

But she sees, and she gives, and she cares.

Amen

Ostracism and the Good Shepherd

In Athens, under the democracy, the Ancient Greeks had a procedure by which any citizen could be expelled from the city state for 10 years.

The procedure was called Ostracism.

The assembly would gather and every citizen would scratch the name of the one he wished to expel on a pottery sherd (ostraka) and put it in an urn.

6000 sherds with the same name guaranteed expulsion within 10 days.

In most cases this was not a punitive, but a preemptive procedure; a citizen was booted out not because he had caused problems, but in order to avoid potential trouble in the near future.

The property of the man banished was not confiscated and there was no loss of status,

but if he attempted to return before 10 years the penalty was death.

You have to admit that the Athenians had it right:

we are communal creatures, and the bonds of affection, the relationships that we form with each other are our most precious possession.

Expulsion from the group we belong to is the worst possible punishment.

No wonder the worst criminals are placed in isolation cells...

Our individual identity is so strongly tied into group identity that when we lose our community we lose ourselves, at least temporarily.

Nowadays we don’t use ostracism anymore, but we still have social rejection, which by definition is “any behavior in which a group or individual excludes and ignores another group or individual.” Social rejection happens to all of us at some point in life.

Unless we are extremely lucky, very naive, or totally unaware, sooner or later we find ourselves on the “wrong” side of some kind of wall.

It may happen at school, at work, in friendly or romantic relationships.

And it hurts.

If you don’t remember how much, ask any teenager you know.

As researchers have dug deeper into the roots of rejection, they've found surprising evidence that the pain of being excluded is not so different from the pain of physical injury. So when I say “it hurts”, I mean “it REALLY hurts.”

Rejection also has serious implications for an individual’s psychological state and for society in general. Social rejection can influence emotion, cognition, and even physical health. Ostracized people sometimes become aggressive and can turn to violence.

Human beings need community. It’s deep in the genes. We have a fundamental need to belong. Just as we need food and water, we also need positive and lasting relationships.

It goes back to the beginning of our evolutionary history, when co-operation meant survival and our instinct told us that the stranger was a threat.

As clever as human beings are, we rely on social groups for survival.

We evolved to live in cooperative societies, and for most of human history we depended on those groups for our lives.

A solitary human being could not have survived during the six million years of human evolution while we were living out there on the African savanna.

We still carry certain behaviors derived from our ancestral fears and needs.

Still we have to establish quickly whether someone we meet for the first time is friend or foe and nowadays we do that by figuring out whether the stranger we encounter knows somebody we know.

Watch people do it in any social context: “where are you from/What do you do”

are questions we ask to figure out not just whether we have something in common,

but somebody in common. The friend of my friend can be my friend too (even just the coworker, even the passing acquaintance).

I have lost count of the times I was asked whether I knew So-and-So in Italy

simply because I am Italian…

The triune God, eternally in relationship within the three persons of the Trinity

would never experience “social rejection”, but Jesus, God incarnate and made man,

knows and understands rejection and abandonment and all the feelings and the hurt that stem from there.

Through Jesus’ experience, God understands and shares the plea of the ones we call ‘the last, the least, and the lost’ those for whom nobody else cares.

And God cares deeply for those who are left outside of the circle, the ones the majority will work hard to forget.

In Jesus’ time it was the tax collectors and the sinners.

The first because they were doing something that no good son or daughter of Israel

would be caught dead doing, i.e. working for the hated Romans; the second because at the time sin was believed to be contagious in a very real way: consorting with sinners would render one impure and unfit for worship in the Temple.

Unfit for being close to God.

Jesus not only opened his arms of grace to them all, but went and sought them out, right there at the margins. Sharing time, empathy, food.

Today, social rejection affects the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the elderly

and also those who speak our language with difficulty or who dress, behave, think differently. They are ostracized by the majority, condemned to live at the margins of our circles of love, of our communities, of our society.

So the question that our Gospel reading poses for us today is: 

Who are the contemporary “good shepherds” who will go and meet the outcast on the way? Who is called to leave the comfortable and familiar behind and go out into the night to save the last, the least, and the lost from their very real pain?

Well, my brothers and sisters, you know it: that would be us - the Church.

Jesus calls US to acknowledge with gratitude how WE first have been welcomed in his circle, in his home, in spite of our many failings - that are well known to him - and to provide a similar circle of care, forgiveness, and love to others.

Jesus wants a missionary Church, a body that includes, that welcomes, that goes out into the broken world and brings the healing that only real acceptance and relationship can provide.

It is a tall order. It is a difficult call to put into practice.

Yet easy to understand and embrace when we remember how we were accepted first.

When we keep in mind that the good news for us and for the world is that God loves us first no matter what. It is totally doable (as my child would say), when together with Paul, the Apostle to the gentiles,we maintain the unshakable conviction

“that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

It is this conviction that gives us strength and joy in our mission in the world and to the world; this knowledge that pushes us out at there at the margins, where too many others don’t want to go. It is this love that makes us a community of healers, shepherds, and imitators of Christ where everyone, every single one is welcome.

Amen