From the Pastor's Study - July 2020
How long, O Lord; will You ignore me forever?
How long will You hide Your face from me?
How long will I have cares on my mind,
grief in my heart all day?
[…]
But I trust in Your faithfulness,
my heart will exult in Your deliverance.
I will sing to the Lord,
for He has been good to me.
Psalm 13
The other day I once again hit that all too familiar wall of feeling like “how long, God, is all of this going to go on?” The uncertainties of living in an altered world are exhausting. If the pandemic hasn’t worn us out, then certainly the challenges of protests and calls to address a deep history of racism and the outgrowths of deep historical inequalities weigh heavily on the heart and soul. There are calls for us to be moving toward a different way of being in our world, but those calls always mean that we need to be willing to grow and to be transformed in our ways of thinking and being on every front. That challenge quickly feels overwhelming and I find myself hearing again the words of lament that play out throughout the Psalms and much of scripture. But what I love is that almost always those words of lament conclude with words of trust and faithfulness, singing and goodness. Psalm 13 contains that dichotomy so beautifully. In those words I hear not only a proclamation of hope, a way where we see no way, but I also hear a tendency that scripture offers in lots of different ways – whether it’s multiple stories of creation, or multiple accounts of kingdoms, or multiple accounts of the life of Jesus that are each unique and often different enough that they beg not to be simply harmonized. It’s a lesson that we could learn a great deal from in our own world in these moments when the polarization seems to have grown ever greater on so many fronts. I keep feeling a deep resistance to the binary thinking that is being so constantly fueled in our world. The simplicity of us and them, of self-righteousness or demonization, feels so counter to God's witness of love.
I preached a few weeks ago about the power of a spirit of curiosity. I had that Psalm running through my head this week and smiled as I entertained that spirit of curiosity about how the Psalmist could proclaim abandonment and lament right alongside of faithfulness and exultant singing. If two such potent emotions can exist alongside one another, then why not engage our spirit of curiosity with some of the other things that seem destined to strain our beings?
Jesus tells us that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves… he teaches us to pray Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done… there’s this beautiful challenge for us to treat the other as a reflection of God. To learn and listen from those who may see the world very different from ourselves. To counter everything from pandemic restrictions, to race relations, to questions about how to handle monuments to an imperfect history with the kind of generous curiosity that might help us to learn God's ways.
Most weeks you will hear me praying in church for justice. Theologically justice aspires to treat everyone and everything as God-breathed. For people it is the understanding that we carry the very image of God in our being. It pushes us to work toward a fairness that honors and learns to love and cherish the story of everyone, as well as to understand that God's blessings have not been equally shared through the ages.
We have a lot of work to do in growing into the responsibility of reflecting God's love… this week I’m feeling like part of that begins by again practicing holding both/and instead of either/or thinking. By grace God has called all of us to be the body of Christ, when we work together in all of our diversity, and honor all the parts of that body, then we draw a little closer to that kingdom proclamation of walking in God's faithfulness and knowing the song of God's goodness in our lives.
God’s Shalom I pray,
Pastor Eric