Postgame Interview Christianity

Psalm 40

 If you continue reading Psalm 40 to its conclusion, which I recommend you actually do if you’re looking for something Bible-y to read in the coming week, one thing you’ll discover is that the Psalm finishes with this declaration, “As for me I am poor and needy, but the Lord takes thought of me. You are my help and my deliverer; do not delay, O my God.” This got me thinking… on this business of being poor and needy versus rich and blessed, how often do we prefer to label ourselves as the ones in need rather than the ones with power, and what does that say about us?

            There is one place where this shows up again and again, and that is when athletes are interviewed after a game. Some of you have undoubtedly had the pleasure of being that person with a microphone shoved in your face thirty seconds after an emotional high, dripping in sweat, and with muscles drenched in lactic acid, so you know it is exactly in that moment that you want to explain how you are feeling. We all know there is nothing more pointless than athletes being interviewed after a sporting event.
            In that moment, has any anybody ever said anything the least bit enlightening? It’s always “I’m just glad the team won” and “I just want to thank God for this opportunity” or “We left it all on the field/court/diamond/pitch today” or “We’ll get them next time.” Real enlightening stuff. But the funny thing about this is that if an athlete answers in any non-approved way; in essence, if they say anything that doesn’t stick to this boring, repetitive, pointless script that tells us absolutely nothing original; we bring out the pitchforks and insist that they get hanged from the nearest pole. This is all very stupid, but it’s also very interesting because we insist that our heroes stick to what is often an outright lie in their faux humility. We want them to downplay their success and to lift up how good the other teams are; we want them to play the underdog card, the “nobody believed in us” card, even sometimes when the vast majority of people believed in them. We don’t want the truth; we want a narrative that makes us feel good.

Faith is the absence of control

Psalm 27

Faith is the absence of control.

            That was the sermon.

Now spend fifteen minutes thinking about that.

            Or I guess I can talk about it some more; I’m just worried that the more I say the more I will distract from the message: Faith is the absence of control.

            I had those words written down after text study on Tuesday, feeling pretty confident that that was where I was going after reading Psalm 27: wait on the Lord, the Lord is the stronghold of my life—whom shall I fear? What I didn’t know is what would follow; how that idea would reverberate in my head as I reflected on what happened in Charleston, S.C. this past week and what I could faithfully say about it.

            Most of the time I don’t preach on the news. I tend to find it contrived and pretty easily transparent when pastors do that, like you can see what my agenda pretty clearly is. So, I hope that reluctance to preach on the issue du jour buys me a little bit of credibility when I say that I feel compelled to talk about Charleston today. That this isn’t just an issue for people across the country; it’s an issue here, and we need to be reminded of the specter of racism in this country all the more because we live in a place that is so homogenous.

Lament (or approaching pain and suffering honestly)

Psalm 69:1-16

            If there’s a single thing that strikes us most about the Psalms it has to be the brutally honest emotions that the Psalm writers use. We don’t read much that is so raw in our culture today. The closest corollary we have to modern Psalms are hymns or praise music, but, while hymns might be a little more far-reaching, almost all of our Christian music lives with a fairly narrow set of emotions—joy, thankfulness, relief, maybe even a kind of submission that is not as much emotion as outlook on life. You can listen to any Christian radio station or praise band, or sing along at most worship services, even at traditional churches, and hear largely these sentiments. The Psalms, however, go well beyond the bounds of what we normally feel as part of our standard religious practices.

            I’m not sure if this is more of an issue for the church or for our country. We tend to use language that disassociates us from our pain and we offer assurances that things will get better, even when reality points to the contrary. Ours is a culture of platitudes—things that sound nice but are only about as deep a kiddy pool in the ocean’s depth of what we feel. I can’t tell you how many times I hear from people who are in pain that “some people have it much worse.” That’s undoubtedly true but also not really the point. You aren’t some people; you are you, and what you feel is real, no matter what others are feeling.

There’s a part of us that always feels like it’s somehow inappropriate to say, “God, I just hurt right now,” as if we are just being too ungrateful. We say it in private and we say it to trusted friends and confidants, but we don’t say it loudly enough for anyone else to hear. Rarely do we pray, saying, “God, I don’t understand, and, frankly, I’m pretty upset. I hate this. But still all praise to you.” We’ve grown up with an implicit understanding that the reason we praise God is because God blesses us. On the cross, sure, but also in our lives. The Psalms, then, are one of the few places we can turn that approach pain and suffering with honesty.

            It actually sounds kind of funny to our ears when we follow lament with praise, but the Psalms do this over and over again. They cry out, they say they don’t understand, they lay out their frustrations and angst… and then they end with a word of praise or even thanks. There is some serious wisdom there. In fact, I think it’s the only way to effectively do lament, because when lament lacks that final word of thanks or praise it become self-centered, less honest, and it lays an expectation on God that God has never promised to deliver. I don’t mean that people who are sad or have experienced loss need to pick themselves up and feel better—actually, exactly the opposite—I mean they need to understand that even in lament—perhaps especially when we do not understand—God promises to be present and to hurt with you. We are not promised we will feel better, or that those with strong faith will not be in pain; only that God is with us when we are.

Reclaiming the "p" word: Praise as humility put into action

Psalm 113

As many of you know, words sometimes mean something a little different in some places than they do in the rest of the world. For example, today’s Psalm is about praise. In most places in the world—with most people—praise is a word that evokes images of joy and worshiping with abandon, but in this part of the world I’m come to find that praise is looked upon with something else—something more like suspicion. So, today, I’ve invited my cultural translator, Samantha, to translate Psalm 113. I’ll read. She’ll translate.

Ready?

Frank: ¹ Praise the Lord!
Sam: Sit still and think good thoughts.

Frank: Praise, O servants of the Lord;
   praise the name of the Lord.

Sam: Sit very reverently. Don’t make eye contact. God doesn’t like eccentricity. Just chill.

Frank: ² Blessed be the name of the Lord
   from this time on and for evermore.

Sam: <whisper> God is good all the time… just as long as I don’t have to talk about it.

Frank: ³ From the rising of the sun to its setting
   the name of the Lord is to be praised.

Sam: At least ten times a day I will consider saying something about God, then reconsider because I don’t really know what to say, because it’s better to be silent than to say the wrong thing.

Frank: ⁴ The Lord is high above all nations,
   and his glory above the heavens.

Sam: God is way up there somewhere, so dancing and clapping and whatnot are kind of pointless, because God hears me whether I whisper or carry on like a lunatic, amirite?

Frank: ⁵ Who is like the Lord our God,
   who is seated on high,

who looks far down
   on the heavens and the earth?

Sam: Rhetorical question! Like all the ones the pastor asks!

Frank: ⁷ He raises the poor from the dust,
   and lifts the needy from the ash heap,
⁸ to make them sit with princes,
   with the princes of his people.

Sam: Good, good, raising up the poor. But I’m not sure about this prince thing. That sounds like something for those people on the coasts. I mean, what would the neighbors think?

Frank: ⁹ He gives the barren woman a home,
   making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord!

Sam: <monotone> Amen. Hallelujah.

           

Thank you to Sam, my cultural translator.