DIGGING DEEP MYSTERY

October 3, 2010
Pentecost 19
Psalm 137
Luke 17:5-10
(prayer)
By ... the wa...ters, the wa...ters of Babylon;
Whether it’s that traditional Israeli melody or Boney M’s disco version:
By the rivers of Babylon;
where we sat down;
Or even my own feeble attempt at song-writing almost thirty years ago:
My river cries a tear,
songs of home don’t reach my ear.
The notes they play amongst the trees,
Their melody won’t set me free.
The 137th Psalm begs to be sung. After all, it is a psalm about the painful result of being forced to sing folk songs, which simply reminded the exiled Judeans how far they were from home as they sat by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Babylon.
However, I have yet to see a musical version of Psalm 137 (including my own) which included the final verses of the Psalm. Boney M didn’t sing ...
By the rivers of Babylon,
We plot our revenge,
We’ll take your kids,
And bust in their heads!
I guess it’s just easier to pretend that the psalm ends at verse 6, instead of verse 9.
//
Today, the Lectionary invites us to look at some hard scripture passages to hear.
Anguish and Anger are the themes of Psalm 137 – cries of lament and cries for revenge.
And what about the example Jesus used to make the point that there were obligations to being a disciple. He is completely complicit with the institution of slavery. “Look, no slave would expect any reward or appreciation for simply doing the jobs their owners demand. Disciples are like worthless slaves: just do what you’re supposed to do, don’t ask for any reward!”
//
It would have been nice if Jesus had spoken against slavery.
But in all fairness, it did take the rest of us almost 2000 more years to get to that point – and we still have places in our world where slavery – or near slavery – is accepted and expected.
Here’s a hard question: if we say that slavery is immoral and Jesus is complicit with slavery, are Jesus’ ethics out of whack?
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This is a perfect example of the dangers of a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. In fact, passages like those in Luke 17 were used to justify the slave trade for centuries.
The simple fact of the matter is in the Biblical era (before and after Jesus’ time), in the context of empire politics, the institution of slavery was so culturally entrenched that there was no coherent movement challenging it.
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If we get stuck on the hard, uncomfortable part of some of our Bible passages, we may miss out on some deeper mystery that can be relevant in our time and worldview, which is so different from Jesus’ time in the first century AD or the Babylonian exile in the mid-500s BC. That might take some digging.
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Let’s look at the surface of the Luke passage: the disciples ask Jesus, to “increase their faith.” And Jesus responds by telling them, they barely have any faith, not even a mustard seed’s worth. And furthermore, they shouldn’t be asking to be rewarded in any way (even thanked) for what they are doing because they are only doing their duty.
Now, these two parts of the passage don’t necessarily go directly together when we think about when these words might have been actually said to Jesus’ disciples. Matthew has a parallel to the first part about mustard seed faith, but the slave-section is found only in Luke. This tells us that they weren’t always told together in the early church communities. Even so, whatever their original context, Luke has chosen to join them and that tells us something about what Luke wanted the early church readers to get from these teachings.
I find it interesting to speculate what might be behind the apostle’s request to “increase our faith”. A desire to learn shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, should it? I doubt if that was the intent of the request that Jesus would have responded so harshly.
And so I wonder ... Did they think they had mastered all they had learned already and were in need of something more? Or were they asking for a quick painless upgrade: “Jesus, you do the work for us, just (magically) give us greater faith.” I’m sure they would love the power implied in a faith that could uproot trees with only a word.
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The second part of Luke’s narrative seems to lean toward my first speculation – that the apostles felt in need of something more than they had. That hard language about the worthiness of slaves could be implying that the disciples were not necessarily making the full use of the faith they already had.
When I think of this passage like that, I can see a positive spin on the hard language – you don’t need to ask for more faith, you have more capabilities inside you that you have not fully explored yet.
Maybe, after a little bit of digging, it is fair to say that Jesus expects his followers to not hold back (or ask for quick, easy, painless fixes) but to put all of their faith and effort into the gospel which they share. That is the cost and the duty of choosing discipleship.
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As many of you know, I am a football dad, with two young players in our family now: one in high school and one playing peewee football. Did you see the footage of the San Francisco area game where the coaches from the two teams started fighting with each other?
And hey, we live in Canada, we’ve all seen (or heard) examples of the out of control, hockey-parent.
I’m a non-repentant sports fan, but as the years have passed, I have given up most my fanaticism (the strikes and lockouts, the Pocklington moving the Oilers fiascos and the last half decade of Eskimo and Oiler seasons have given me perspective). I still enjoy the games; I believe in the life lessons of personal discipline, teamwork and sportsmanship; I love to watch “my” team play well and win, but losing sleep over a loss or a bad play or wanting to yell at the ref or attack a parent or coach – that’s not me anymore, if it ever was.
But I also know that there are still seed of obsessive behaviour within me and I certainly see it amongst some of the more “intense” fellow parents on the sidelines. As a team director a couple of years ago, I had to move quickly to calm down a parent as she was hurling a blue streak of insults at a 14 player on the opposing team.
I have seen the anger, the intensity, the desire for retribution or revenge. When rationality is able to re-enter the situation, there are very few who would say that acting on those hard emotions was justified. I don’t like it, but I understand it.
In the same way, as I try to get down to why the author of Psalm 137 needed to express those thoughts of revenge.
The exiles were pawns in the games of empires. Judah has the hard luck of being located at the centre of three continents. The paths between Europe, Asia and Africa meet in Judah. Empires are built on the ability to move armies and wealth around. Judah was a victim of this reality of conquest.
It wasn’t their fault that they were exiled. Someone else was to blame for their hardship. The just thing to happen would be for those others to suffer as they had.
There is an ironic truth in the common saying that “misery loves company”. For some reason, we are better able to endure difficult times, if others have to go through it with us. And there is even an odd satisfaction when the ones who cause the suffering are forced endure some suffering of their own; Indian mystics would call that simply part of Karma: the cycles of cause and effect – an English language proverb says, “what goes around comes around”.
In the hard experience of suffering, the Judeans hope for the cycle to come around for their captors who treat them harshly (we might say, ‘as less than human’).
Although it was only about a century earlier that Judah had held back, while its neighbour to the north (Israel) was similarly overrun by the Assyrians, the psalmist wished for calamity to come to their south-eastern neighbour Edom, for the Edmoites support of the Babylonian invasion and conquest of Judah.
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It tormented the Judean people to have to sing the joyous songs of home in this land of exile. And we do well not to ignore that this torment fuelled anger as well as sadness; revenge as well as lament. The songs not only brought tears of regret to their eyes but revenge-filled visions of innocent Babylonian babies suffering and dying as payment for the Judean’s exile.
If we are able to dig deeper than our disgust with the violent desires, we might be able to understand the depth of the impact of the loss of identity being experienced by the exile.
As we uncover the historical context of this period in Hebrew history, we can recall that some four-plus centuries earlier, there was unity and prosperity for the people under the reigns of Kings David and Solomon. Israel was the dominant power in the region, while, they never gathered an empire as vast as the Assyrians or Babylonians would, they expanded their borders farther than any other time in their history. David established and built Jerusalem, as the centre of power and religion. During Solomon’s reign, a permanent stone temple was built to replace the canvas and wood tent tabernacle that had served as the centre of Hebrew worship since the time of Moses.
Even in the divisive years following Solomon’s death (where the nation was split in two with different rulers, different places and practices of worship: Israel in the north and Judah in the south), there was a sense of purpose and growing invincibility of the people and their way of life. As I noted before the northern kingdom got their lesson in humility in 721 BC when Samaria fell to the Assyrians. From the southern perspective, this was more evidence that they had been right all along, that God was really on their side. There is some speculation among biblical scholars that Judah must have made some kind of pact with the Assyrians to not help Israel in exchange for keeping their autonomy. If that was the case, the Babylonians weren’t going to honour that deal when they became the dominant region power in the 6th century.
When Judah fell, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, when the temple was looted and left in ruins, more than rocks came crashing down. The people had lost their identity. Weren’t they God’s favoured people? Hadn’t several hundreds of years’ history been testament to that?
There is a line in Psalm 137 that says:
“how can we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land (v4)?
I suspect that the deeper meaning here was not just that based on homesickness, but a crisis of faith. Does God exist for us in Babylon? There was a theology that had developed that God physically dwelled within the temple; could God even exist now that the temple was in ruins? A prophet of the time, Ezekiel even had a comforting vision where he witnessed the Spirit of God rise up out of the rubble of Jerusalem and physically move to Babylon. I don’t think the psalmist felt the same was as Ezekiel.
‘How can we sing the LORD’s song’, might mean, ‘what’s the point in singing the LORD’s song anymore.’
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Both of today’s scripture passages give us a glimpse at a difficult prospect of faith. Have we reached a point where a deeper connection to the source of our faith is no longer possible?
Do we long to have our faith increased by some outside influence, because we feel stuck and lacking where we are -or- do we feel that the foundations of what we thought we believed have been taken away from us and we aren’t sure what is certain anymore?
Under the layers of these readings today, I believe is a deeper mystery – ultimately, we all long to have an identity that gives us purpose to life – and we long for God to love us and support us and be with us as we struggle.
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My initial instinct was to finish this sermon right there - end with questions and mystery. But the pastor in me also holds hope in the midst of questioning, and so I want to add...
If the only words we had to go by were these two scripture passages suggested for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in year C, we might feel as lost as a demoralized exile or a worthless slave; but we have other voices, other experiences that have been passed on to us.
The history of the Bible notes that, although extremely challenging, the Hebrew people came through the exile with a faith in God intact. There were changes to practices and dogmas, but faith endured.
Jesus’ disciples would be left fearful and ready to run on the Sabbath that followed Jesus’ crucifixion, but within days, they were risking ridicule and arrest/death themselves proclaiming that the essence of who Jesus was and his vision of how God and humanity can intersect did not die on the cross. Things were going to be different, there was a challenge of a new inclusivity that would rock the church over its first few decades, but faith endured.
So dig deep; find the faith, hope and compassion that endures.
Let us pray,
God,
Be with us, even when we have little time for you. Amen.