Ash Wednesday, "Necessary Songs," February 26, 2020

Psalm 88

O Living One, God of my salvation,
    when, at night, I cry out in your presence,
2 let my prayer come before you;
    incline your ear to my cry.

3 For my soul is full of troubles,
    and my life draws near to Sheol.
4 I am counted among those who go down to the Pit;
    I am like those who have no help,
5 like those forsaken among the dead,
    like the slain that lie in the grave,
like those whom you remember no more,
    for they are cut off from your hand.
6 You have put me in the depths of the Pit,
    in the regions dark and deep.
7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me,
    and you overwhelm me with all your waves.

8 You have caused my companions to shun me;
    you have made me a thing of horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
9     my eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call on you, O Living God;
    I spread out my hands to you.
10 Do you work wonders for the dead?
    Do the shades rise up to praise you?
11 Is your steadfast love declared in the grave,
    or your faithfulness in Abaddon?
12 Are your wonders known in the darkness,
    or your saving help in the land of forgetfulness?

13 But I, O Living God, cry out to you;
    in the morning my prayer comes before you.
14 O Holy One, why do you cast me off?
    Why do you hide your face from me?
15 Wretched and close to death from my youth up,
    I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.[a]
16 Your wrath has swept over me;
    your dread assaults destroy me.
17 They surround me like a flood all day long;
    from all sides they close in on me.
18 You have caused friend and neighbor to shun me;
    my companions are in darkness.

A Ash Wednesday BFC Psalms 2020

Psalm 88

February 26, 2020

Martin Tel is Princeton Theological Seminary’s Director of Music and one who regularly argues for the inclusion of the whole book of Psalms in the lectionary texts we read each year and as part of our regular prayer life.[1]  For we clean up the Psalms.  We sanitize the hard and difficult ones—ones that might not be tidy or agree with our sensibilities.  Particularly within a country and community that almost exclusively experiences peace and affluence, Tel argues, we might be able to hear the voice of others.  A Ph.D. student at Princeton from Latin America was researching the theology of Ignacio Ellacuria, a Jesuit priest who used his position in the church and academia to denounce massacres and disappearances at the hands of the El Salvadoran government.   This student came to Tel seeking a Psalm that might help him relate to his Princeton sisters and brothers some of the experience of what it means to be from Latin America.  They came upon a song for Psalm 94 put to the melody of Salvadoran composer, Guillermo Cuellar titled, “Vos sos el destazado.” 

           Tel asked the student to translate the title.  The student sucked in his breath and said, “You who are being butchered.”  The cantor went on to sing these words of lament from Psalm 94:  “O great God and Lord of the earth; Rouse yourself and demonstrate justice; give the arrogant what they deserve, silence all malevolent boasting; See how some you love are broken, for they know the weight of oppression; even widows and orphans are murdered, and poor strangers are innocent victims; Should the wrong change places with right; and the courts play host to corruption; should the innocent fear for their lives; while the guilty smile at their scheming; still the Living God will be your refuge, be your strength and courage and tower.  Though your foot should verge on slipping, God will cherish, keep, and protect you.”

           Tel wonders, “Is it even possible to find a community in North America that would understand or sing Psalm 94 out of its own experience?”  Yet, these are necessary songs we must sing to know that this is the experience of the Body of Christ  in other parts of our earth—whole communities and nations riven with tears and suffering. 

Maybe a place like Flint, Michigan, might know?  Where they still do not have clean water and children disappear in front of their parents?  Seeing the Canadian government run roughshod over the rights of the Wet'suwet'en where racism and colonialism bare their teeth in violence against indigenous peoples.  The photo in my mind of grief in India as anti-Muslim violence continues, the melting ice sheets in Greenland and sickness leading to death like the Corona virus then leading to anti-Chinese sentiment made all the more possible by climate change, and I remember the story of  a 9 year-old who saw his grandmother blown to pieces by a drone, as she was out in her garden trying to describe to Nabila the difference between ripe and non-ripe okra . . .  All of these are images from around the world that remind me of people who could pray and sing Psalm 94 with an authority unknown to people in our country. 

           The great German pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, killed in a German concentration camp, wrote that this is why the Psalms deserve their place in the community in a special way.  Even though a verse or a whole Psalm might not be my own prayer, it is certainly the prayer of another member of the Body of Christ.  And part of our faith is to hear the necessary songs of others, so that our own hearts might be transformed and softened. 

           There are people in our world who suffer calamity, terror, life lived on the edge of hell, not in a single moment, or during one stretch of their life, but on a daily basis.  The Psalms countenance this.  These are necessary songs such that we do not become imprisoned by our own experience, that we might not believe our perspective and our perspective alone carries divine truth.   We then know that when calamity does strike, terror does hit,  we have knowledge of what it is to live on the edge of hell, we know that story is told in holy prayer and song and that these ancient peoples and people around the world sometime not only survive but remain.  That too—that lament and cry—is authentic faith.  We learn by praying and singing the entire Psalter that someone’s experience, never before heard in our sanitized and comfortable worship is for the first time given voice. 

           Psalm 88 is one of those necessary songs.  Left without friend and ally, it is the prayer or song of someone who is hemmed in by life and thought to be cast away by God.  It is to know that when ruin comes to our lives, that there are others, before us, who have experienced life lived at the edge of hell and that there are others in the world who speak these words in prayer and give voice to them in song.  

           In the Netherlands under Nazi occupation, Martin Tel’s father related that his congregation could not sing anything that reeked of nationalism, for their captors and oppressors would not allow such singing to undermine their power.  They were allowed, however, to sing the Psalms, thought to be too innocent or lacking in any real power by which the people might hear God sympathetic to their plight.  Little did they know.  In morning worship they might sing strains of Psalm 68, of a God who would rise up and scatter the enemies.  God is our salvation, this prayerful song concludes.

           Then, at night, they would sing of those Psalms like Psalm 88 which conveyed their anger and hopelessness and lament.  Although Tel relates that his father told him he did not feel very Christian in offering up a Psalm like this, the realness of the Psalm gave them permission to speak of their plight with authority. 

           So tonight begins our work in necessary songs and prayers as we walk through the Psalms.  We recognize our humanness in them and know that they are not always our experience.  But as we sing and pray them, our hearts are given depth and pliability and softness for the calamities, terrors, and the edges of hell.  As the whole Psalter becomes a part of us, the walls we have built between ourselves and the rest of creation, our sisters and brothers in pain, is burnt to ash.  We also experience being anointed for whatever God would call us to do next.  These necessary songs rouse us, infuse us with courage, and we set our faces like flint to make the holy pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  We pray to join in solidarity.  We fast to detach ourselves and proclaim our souls free for the things of God. And now, God, who has been flexing muscles through our spiritual life, rises up and is ready to act.  Amen. 

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[1] Martin Tel, “Necessary Songs:  The Case for Singing the Entire Psalter,” Christian Century, December 26, 2013, http://www.christiancentury.org/Article/2013-12/Necessary-Songs .  (This sermon borrows heavily from this great article.)