THE PROMISE BROKEN

March 13, 1988, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
2 Chronicles 36:14-21
Psalm 137:1-6
John 3:14-21

“How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?"
-Psalm 137:4 (RSV)

"Being taken prisoner means being stripped
down. Suddenly everything you have come

to rely on is gone. Your possessions, your
job, your plans, those dearest to you, your
country - all these are; in a peculiar way,

no longer there. There's just you - and God?"

David H. C. Read, distinguished pastor of Madison Avenue Presbyterian
Church, New Vork City, wrote that in his autobiography. Read was a newly
ordained Church of Scotland pastor, a bright theologian with a promising
future, a chaplain with the British Expeditionary Force in 1939, and in
short order, a prisoner of war, He remained in prison in Germany for the
next five years. His account is honest and powerful. "There's just you -
and God?" he wrote. And it is a question, not-a-statement. He describes
how the experience of dislocation, exile, separation, homesickness, have a
profound effect on the depths of the human soul... "The experience of being
stripped of all the other things on which one normally relies does throw
one back on God in a very challenging way. Is God really there? Does God
care about what's happening?"

2,500 years earlier a poet in exile asked: “How shall we sing the
Lord's song in a foreign land?" Read tells about the 250 mile forced march
across France and how, when the march came to a town, : the British prisoners
straightened up and sang as lustily as they could - everything from the
23rd Psalm to "Roll Qut the Barrel!" That was a defiant singing of the
Lord's song in a foreign land, and -it disguised that deeper, universally
human pain ~— which comes when we are cut off from home.

3/13/88

“How shall we sing the Lord's song?" There will come a day when each
one of us will ask the question. In all probability it will not be as
dramatic or traumatic as the experience of prisoners of war. But there is
a universality about the experience of dislocation, exile, homesickness.
There will be, for each of us, a dark night, a separation, a loss, a
captivity in the midst of which we will hear, from deep within, our own
voice asking: “How can I sing the Lord's song here?" My guess is that
already there have been moments when we asked that, and sometimes, at
least, the only answer we received was silence.

The poet, John Crowe Ransom...

“Two evils,. monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going,
A cry of absence, absence, in the heart,

And in the wood: the furfous winter blowing."

Martin Marty chose A Cry of Absence for the title of a book written
about the Winter of the Heart: the times when darkness is more evident
than light; when we are exiles far from home; and when God is conspicuous
by his absence and silence.

My assumption is that all of us know about this experience. My
assumption is also that we attribute the experience to a weakness in our
own spirit — a theological vitamin deficiency. If we believed enough we
wouldn't feel abandoned, exiled, alone... What a relief to encounter the
integrity of the Bible.on.the topic. As he lived through a period of
profound grief, Marty turned to the Psalter and discovered that the sense
of "spiritual abandonment" is a major, perhaps the major motif in the
collection. Now, clergy who plan public worship liturgies and wish to use
the Psalms bump into that reality every week. If you assume that worship
ought to be a positive and uplifting experience, and that negativity is not
helpful or welcome in worship, you find yourself terribly limited when it
comes. to choosing Psalms. - Fully two-thirds of them, someone has
calculated, have something -to do with the down side of human life. There
are Psalms about death, suffering, sickness, defeat, captivity, exile,
homesickness: and godforsakenism. If you want only praise, thanksgiving and
cheerfulness, you have.to stay with one-third of the collection.

Or you have to engage in a little editorial cheating - censoring
actually, as we did this morning. Psalm 137 is one of the most powerful.
I am always moved by it..... But I don't think I ever heard it read in its
entirety in worship. If your eyes slipped down the page as we read
responsively, you know why. We stopped at verse 6. We-always do. Because
verses 8 and 9 say -

"O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall be he who takes your little ones
and dashes. them against the rocks!"

I've never read those words out loud in worship before. I don't
think I've ever read them out loud anywhere. I wish, with everything in my
heart, they weren't there. I can't understand why they belong there. They
are awful words, obscene words.

3/13/88

It is not one of the more noble moments in the Bible, someone said.
But it is there, and before you get carried away by our indignation please
allow these terrible words to show you that this Psalm is not mystical
religious poetry, but the deep and powerful and utterly human expression of
real human beings. If I can get past my squeamishness and moral outrage
and read it again I see that it is not a prescription for behavior, but an
almost understandable hatred which is growing out of an experience of
almost unspeakable pain. And if I can stay with it long enough and think
about it hard enough, I might even see in these awful words an important
idea; namely that this faith of ours is not an academic abstraction, but a
flesh and blood response to the realities of human life. I might even see
in these terrible words a faith so strong it is willing to entrust God with
everything in the human heart, even this passionate hatred. If I can stand
in this place long enough, I might even see here a spiritual depth,
integrity and maturity which stands in contrast to, and judgment of, the
superficiality of much of the religion of my culture which retains its
cheerfulness by simply refusing to acknowledge the human condition.

The promise was broken. God had promised to be God to them. God had
promised a land and a mighty nation. God had given freedom and food in the
wilderness and a law in which they could live with justice and prosperity.
The promise was broken... God's Covenant people, God's beloved had’ been
defeated in battle, ravaged, their capital leveled. Their pride, the apple
of their eye —- the Temple — where God's sovereign majesty and providence
and Covenant promise was proclaimed and celebrated by the mighty walls
themselves - was a hole in the ground. The people were stripped, lined up
- and driven across the desert to forced captivity in Babylon. And ‘there
in exile, cut off from home, the humiliation began. As the shock of their
defeat began to register, the degradation started -

"By the waters of Babylon

there we sat down and wept

when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there

we hung up our lyres

For there our captors

required of us songs

and our tormentors, mirth, saying

‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
{Psalm 137:1-3)

Is there a more poignant image than that? Can you see it? Hear it?

“Hey Jew - sing a little. Sing us the one about how glad you used to
be when they said, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!!"

"Or how about the one about your help comes from the hills... The one
about the Lord - your keeper, your shade upon your right hand... that's a
good one."

So, the Africans, hunted like animals,. caged, shackled, crowded into

holds of ships, sold inte slavery, and, the final indignity, forced to
respect and participate in the religion of their captors -— somehow heard in

3/13/88

that religion a truth that overcame the appalling sins of its white
adherents. The slaves heard the part about exile and homesickness and in a
foreign land they. began .to. sing the Lord's song.

"Swing low, sweet. chariot
comin for. to.carry me home"

and

“Sometimes I feel. like-a motherless child a long ways
from home" ;

The. Judeo-Christian faith includes the universal experience of exile.
Our religion does not.always provide easy answers to the difficult
questions.about. why human beings end up in exile: why the Jews were in
captivity, why slavery, why the holocaust... why the agony of brothers and
sisters in South Africa, exiles in their own land? Our religion dares to
speak of God who enters. into those questions, a God who weeps when his own
promises seem to be broken.

In the meantime the tendency in public religion, church religion, is
to lighten. up, accent the positive, be bright and cheerful, e.g. "A
sunbeam, a sunbeam, Jesus wants:me for a sunbeam." "Think positively..."
“Something good is.going to happen to you." The "Be Happy Attitudes.”

In Marty's book, which.I mentioned earlier, he confesses that this
"summery spirituality" of much American religion is simply inadequate. He
writes:

"The message in this world of spiritual best-sellers and large
audiences is consistent:... follow my prescription, think right thoughts and
all the chill wili disappear. Joy comes to those who prosper in faith:
Christ is said to be the answer no matter what the question is... God is
immediately present. ‘I know, I have talked with him,' says the evangelist
or the peddler. Send ten dollars, turn the dial to our program, buy the
book —- whatever the form of counsel, it always amounts to the same thing -
and the abundant life of sunshine and joy will. be yours." [A Cry Of
Absence, p. 6]

And then Marty speaks for many of us — with the integrity of this

terrible but beautiful Psalm. - "Many serious people who seek are repelled
by such appeals. They turn off the television station... They do not
belong, they feel, to the region where sunshine comes so easily." (Ibid)

Popular religion desperately wants to be cheerful. And, the market
wants religion to be cheerful.. The worid, after all, is sad enough. Who
needs any more of it? While there is truth there — while the deep heart
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is joyful hope ~ nevertheless, a religion
which intends to meet me where I live and take seriously my participation
in the human experience, must deal with me not only when I am at home but
but also when I am in exile. I cannot be honest and be a sunbeam for Jesus
every. day.

3/13/88

The idea of exile has been used frequently to describe the human
condition. The idea of separation from home — from structures of meaning
and sources of hope — is a metaphor for the universal human experience of
loss: loss of the past, (as we age) loss of an identity, a job, loss of a
life-giving relationship. “In your arms I'm home again," lovers say to each
other. And, loss of a dear one. Grief feels like homelessness:

Nicholas Wolterstorff, a Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College,
Grand Rapids, has written a wonderful book, Lament for a Son. His 25 year
old son was killed in a mountain climbing accident and Wolterstorff has
written one of the most honest and deeply spiritual books I have ever read
on the topic. He is a Christian —- but he is an honest Christian.

Trying to write about what it is like...
"There's a hole in the world now." [p. 33]

"Elements of the Gospel I thought would
console did not." [p. 31]

And then - this - so reminiscent of Psalm. 137 and the experience of
everyone of us.

"Let me try again, all these things I recognize. I remember
delighting in these - trees, art, house, music, pink morning sky, work well
done, flowers, books. I still delight in them... But the zest is gone.
My attachment is loosened. I can do without them. They don't matter."

“I've become an alien in the world.
I don't belong any more." fp. 51]

“How am I to sing in this desolate land?" [p. 61]

The ancient faith - the Covenant faith - with its honesty and
humanity, embraces the universal experience of grief and separation and
exile. The ancient faith does not shy away from the human experience of
abandonment. The ancient faith is so honest that it embraces even the
human experience of God's absence and silence.

The world has never understocd that. The Babylonians who forced ‘the
Jews to sing songs of Zion caused them incredible pain and stimulated
violent but understandable hatred. What they didn't understand, and what
the Jews in exile learned, was that God is never more immediate, never
closer, than in those incidents in which we experience abandonment. The
power of Israel's faith, compared to any other faith in the world, is’ that
it is precisely when there is no light —- when the darkness is thick and
deep - that God's love begins to go to work: healing, lifting up,
recreating new life.

The world has never understood that about us. The world wants us to
lighten up, be pleasant and cheerful. The world wants our music to be
lively, uplifting. The world feels much better when, if we insist on using
Psalm 137, we at least have the good taste to leave off the end.

3/13/88

I don't believe my experience is very different from most... But it
was a turning point for my spiritual growth when it finally dawned on me
that faith we espouse is everyday faith, not just “good day faith"; that
the depths of human emotion ~ grief as well as joy, despair as well as
good cheer - are acknowledged, celebrated, embraced, and encompassed by
that faith. It was an important turning point for me when I finally
realized that. I don't have to pretend to God; don't have to hold back from
God the depths of my own spirit. It was a good day for me when I finally
acknowledged that the thrust of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was not my
believing things about God - or saying I believed things on days when I
didn't believe anything. Rather the. Gospel is the incredible assertion that
God takes me absolutely as I am and believes in me - even when I can't
believe anything, and is there with me when I can't see anything but
darkness, or hear anything but silence.

Something like that happened for those who came to maturity in the
1960s. Faith in a God of providential love and parental care was one thing
in the 1950s. It was an altogether different matter in the next decade.
Faith in that time had to contend with a world turned upside down. It was
a time of darkness... a time I recall with lingering pain - the events
hammering at the human spirit, particularly for the young and optimistic
and sunny and cheerful.

The death of John F. Kennedy -

The violent deaths of Civil Rights marchers,
so idealistic and optimistic -

The death of Martin Luther King, Jr. -
The death of Robert F. Kennedy -

And then, in many ways, worst of all, My Lai,
the death of children, killed by American soldiers.

Faith had to speak its word in the midst of all that. If it was only
a sunny word, a superficially cheerful word, it didn't make it. What made
it was the strong integrity of Biblical religion; which points to a God who
participates fully in the pain of the world - and the pain of his
individual people.

There is a picture that remains in my mind as a symbol of that
critical theological discovery. It is not a religious picture. It won't
appear in an art gallery and I certainly wouldn't want to have to defend my
choice aesthetically. It is Bil] Mauidin's Chicago Sun Times cartoon at
the assassination of President Kennedy; a picture of the Abraham Lincoln
statue in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Mauldin's Lincoln is
hunched over, head in his hands, in the fullness of grief.

That was an icon for me: a picture of the God of the Bible, the God
the stories of Israel and the Covenant strain to tell us; a God who not
only loves them and sends them sunshine — but a God erieving over the

tragedy of his people.

3/13/88

It is the middle of Lent. Slowly we approach the end. And the end
of Lent is a cross. It is a silent event and there is darkness all around.
The only voice that dares speak is the one on the cross and he asks for us
all ~ for the whole world —- "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me."

If your God is not there with him ~- with you as you stand there, you
are missing something. He is not the God of the Bible. If your faith wili
not accompany you the rest of the way on this journey, you have never
allowed it into the depths of your soul.

That is the invitation, in the words of that oldest promise - to let
God be God to you at all times and in all places: in the secret places of
your soul; in your believing and your unbelieving: in your joy and in
despair; at morning and in the darkest night.

The Good News is not always easy news and it is not ever superficial
news.

It is that God is in every darkness.
Tt is that God is in every exile.

The Good News is that there is a promise which still stands when
every other promise is broken -

God will be God to usl...

Glory be to God. Amen.

#4 4 4 #4 #

Dear God of infinite lave: As we come closer to the cross, help us
see again - the light which shines in every darkness. Give us courage to
live fully in darkness as well as light - knowing that you are there,
always, forever; - that darkness is as light to you. Amen.

3/13/88