There is smoke. People are running. Weeping rises in the air matching the upward flow of dust. An uneasy tension permeates the very core of a person’s body seeping deep within it. Questions spew forth like a summer rain storm from nearly every person.
What will happen next? Where is a brother, father, sister, wife, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother, grandfather? How could this have happened to us? How will we live? How will we know what to do? Will I ever feel safe again? Where is God?
Underlying the questions are the emotions washing over each person like a spring flood in a dry riverbed. Anger, fear, sadness, despair, abandonment, vulnerability, uncertainty, uneasiness, loneliness, denial, bewilderment, disorientation.
The weeping, the questions, the dust, and the emotions congeal together into the loud cry of lament, “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces. She weeps bitterly in the night. She has no one to comfort her. Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude. My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is, so I say gone is my glory.”
In 587 BCE Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and ashes. The Temple was destroyed and all the royal family, the high government officials, priests, and craftspeople were led off as prisoners by the Babylonian army to nakedly walk the arduous journey to Babylon. It will become the Hebrew trail of tears. Their prayers in psalms of lament tell later generations of their suffering. Laments that cry out, “Why have you forgotten us completely? My groans are many and my heart is faint.” Psalms that ask, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?’ Psalms that tell us the story, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
Their homes are gone. Their land is gone. The Temple is gone. The priests are gone. No longer will they bring sacrifices to the Temple. No longer will Passover be celebrated as it was. Gone are most of the external symbols that gave them identity and defined them as a people. The structured and reliable world that gave their lives meaning and coherence is gone. Their trusted religious symbols are mocked, trivialized, and dismissed. And, worst of all the Babylonians think it is self-evident that their god is stronger and more powerful than the Lord. After all, it is the victors who write history, not the vanquished. Israelites knew how the world was supposed to work, how their life was oriented in a direction they understood, lived, found comfortable and meaningful. But, not now. Now, all they feel is disorientation.
We know how they feel, don’t we? Their plight, their tears, questions, and emotions are all familiar to us because we too have felt them in some way. We have felt dazed, angry, abandoned, vulnerable, scared, uncertain, uneasiness, loneliness, and bewilderment. Whether it was the aftermath of 9/11, a train wreck or a car wreck. We have all experienced loss whether a friendship breaking apart, moving to a different place, disease robbing us of the ability to do that one thing we have a passion to do, or even the death of a father, mother, brother, sister, husband or wife.
I don’t know about you, but when I have those questions, then I recall the Israelites’ situation the one question that comes to my mind is, “What did the Israelites do at this moment of exile?” This moment when, as Alan Mintz writes, “the catastrophic events of exile shattered their existing paradigms of meaning?” What made it possible for them to cope in a strange, foreign place?
Well, strangely enough the answer dwells in one of the psalms of lament, Psalm 22. When I read this psalm I am struck by the anguish and the pain of the first 20 verses because they are so brutally honest and evoke a measure of vulnerability in telling the truth. Verse 21 is split in two with a space between the first half, “Save me from the moth of the lion!” and the second half “From the horns of the wild oxen you have rescued me.” From the second half of verse 21 onward the psalm is one of praise and gratitude for new life.
Many commentators have suggested, as I do, that the space between the first half and the second half of verse 21 is where God acted to transform and heal the psalmist. Nothing is ever said about what God did or how God did it or even when God acted, but clearly God did act. The “how” and the “why” and the “what” are not important. What is important is that God heard the psalmist’s lament and responded to transform and heal the situation. For me, this is a lesson of hope. No matter what the situation I find myself, I can lift up my laments, my concerns, my struggles, my praise, my gratitude and God will hear me and respond to me in some way, which remains a mystery, but will be transformative, healing and generative of hope. This comprehension of hope leads me to the tranquility of peace.
The psalmist’s lesson of hope leading to peace reminds me I am part of a long story of God’s people and that those who lived before me in this story teach and mentor to me as much as those who have been my teachers and mentors in faith and ministry. It is the reminder of what Cornel West said during his speech at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly that we are not self-created. Somebody gave us language, somebody loved us, somebody cared for us, somebody was attentive to us. Somebody taught us how to live faithfully. It is the truth of Nguni Bantu proverb, “I am because we are, we are because I am.” and the irish proverb, “it is in the shelter of each other that people live.” We are not alone, but are part of a community that stretches back in time and place and reaches out into the future through our children and grandchildren.
Knowing this, I think ought to compel us to be mindful about both being learners and being teachers and mentors within an ecosystem of integrity, truth-telling and commitment to love God and neighbor with the courage to speak and act, so faith may be received as a gift from God in the same way that grace is a gift from God. We are to be love letters from God to our children and grandchildren, so that they may be love letters from God for their children and grandchildren in continuing the story of God’s people as a community of hope and peace committed to self-giving love.
Reblogged this on Sojourning to Sabbath.
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