Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Palm Sunday, Psalm Series, "God's love endures forever," April 5, 2020

Sunday, April 5, 2020

Palm Sunday, Psalm Series, "God's love endures forever," April 5, 2020

A Lent Palm Psalm 118 BFC 2020

Psalm 118

April 5, 2020

On Good Friday in 1964, just as the sun was softly setting on the horizon of Anchorage, Alaska, an earthquake with the magnitude of 9.2 shook the city for a full four and a half minutes. Buildings rocked off their foundations, split in half, or fell into themselves. Street lights swayed and then flew. Cars were swallowed and then spit back up. Two entire blocks in the city’s central downtown area just dropped into a jagged chasm. A theater marquee came to rest even with the street. It was almost possible for anyone to imagine it. One witness said of the downtown area, “It looked like the devil ground his heel into it.”[1] The question hung in the air, “What will Alaskans do now?”—just five years into statehood, their most modern displays of progress in Anchorage now lying in rubble.

Sociologists from the newly formed Disaster Research Center at Ohio State, left for Anchorage expecting to find havoc, chaos, and pandemonium. What they found instead, 28 hours later, was an amazing amount of cooperation, collaboration, and compassion. Ordinary citizens found their agency and organized mutual aid for one another. People began immediately looking for others among the debris. When the local Presbyterian Hospital filled up with gas, Boy Scouts walked the 22 occupants of the hospital down three or four flights of stairs to an armada of taxis and other drivers waiting to take them to another hospital across town. All over town, neighbors fed and housed the displaced. When the local fire department failed to offer anything significant, a local psychology professor organized his mountaineering group who had experience saving people off of ledges and caught in avalanches. Everybody jumped in to do a little bit of everything.

Genie Chance, the only female newscaster in Alaska, a working mother who had been passed over for lesser male counterparts at local KENI, became the voice of Alaska, as she learned how to curate the necessary details for the general public. She was the steady hand in the small of Anchorage’s back shepherding her city with the necessary information they needed to remember their humanity—moved the city away from its loneliness and despair. Once she knew her own family was safe, she headed to the downtown area.

. . . [s]he began working with the police chief, the fire chief, and various officials. As soon as KENI was back on the air with a generator, she began broadcasting the essentials of survival: where to take shelter, how to purify snow for drinking water. She instructed people to limit the use of candles to the bare minimum of necessity — candles were a fire hazard, the city had just evaded a conflagration by what seemed like a miracle, and the water supply system was too savaged to fight a fire outbreak.[2]

Genie Chance became the hub for the human information that was so important to her city.

“A message to Clyde Wythe at Homer: Your daughter is OK.”

“We have received a call from Joe Fernbeck who said that he’d gotten word on his radio from the oil crews at Beluga and Tyonek. They want their families to know that they are all OK.”

“We have a message reporting that an elderly lady at 216 East Eighth Avenue who lives alone. We have no name on her, but we do have a request for somebody in that neighborhood to please check and see if the sweet lady is all right.”

What happens, Rebecca Solnit writes, is that while the powers and principalities that have been promising salvation are often revealed for their empty promises and lack of resources, in disasters or calamities people become aware of their own possibility for personal agency and collective power. A spontaneous commons arises in such situations. A new normal can be established.

So it was in the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco. Amelia Hoshouser marched out of her home just after the devastation and set up shop in a central area of San Francisco, a little lean-to called “Mizpah Café.” There she fed thousands of people. She just went out and did it. It was in her Meanwhile, throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins. It was in that climate that Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, developed an imagination for what people could do collectively and cooperatively from what she witnessed as a child after that 1906 earthquake. Day asked herself why this cooperation and mutual aid could not be who we were all the time.[3]

Almost all of the Psalms reference the two great stories of the Jewish faith—Exodus and Exile. Both of those events are about a bondage, constriction, or a captivity of community life. Psalm 118 references the Exodus and the political danger and public threat the whole community experiences as governments or nations are like bees ready to attack or a fire of thorns that encircle and trap. Salvation and deliverance are found in verse 5 where the Psalmnist cries out in distress and God answers to set the whole community in a broad place for community life and conduct. The bondage, constriction, and captivity fall away. While that threat and distress and attempt to surround and press and push the Psalmnist on all sides with fear may seem ever-present, there is a deeper narrative that is repeated five times for emphasis in Psalm 118, “God’s steadfast love lasts forever.” Let all of Israel say, let all the religious officials say, let those who fear the Living God say, God is good, let all the people, say, “God’s steadfast love endures forever.”

God’s steadfast, loyal love will not quit, will show up, and is on the move. It does not win. It doesn’t play that game. God’s love endures. So when calamity and disaster come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures. When disease and death come, God’s steadfast, loyal love endures. When governments fail us, press us, surround us on all sides with their cruelty, indifference, and falsehoods, God’s steadfast, loyal love[4] endures.

Do not let others tell you that this is a otherworldly, “spiritual” love. Spiritual or spirituality, Biblically, was not about “otherworldly” but was about something that was more than at the surface or skin-deep. Spiritual was about core, about depth, about a transcendence that could not be bottled or contained. The praise for God in this Psalm is about concrete action in the commons, God acting on behalf of the people in a public, political, continuing way deeper than any disaster or domination.

“This is the day the Living God has made,” the Psalm says, or, better put, “This is the day our God acted! Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”[5] Hear what is being said in this Psalm. This is a collective voice praising God not for all of the beauty and wonder and bounty they see around them. On the contrary, the Psalmnist is hemmed in on all sides, feels isolated and constrained, and remembers the deep truth that God is acting and that Creator’s sustained, steadfast, loyal love endures forever.

And today God is acting.

Sisters and brothers, siblings and cousins, here is the really good news, that enduring love is in us! Ready to manifest itself on God’s good earth! All of creation was woven together on the loom of justice as the fundamental fabric of the universe! This is the default switch ready to be pulled when all else falls away and calamity and disaster and virus come and we recognize our personal agency and collective power.

If there was anything that was central to Jesus’s teaching it was this. You are not, instinctually, the barbarians the State makes you out to be, recognizing the State’s need for control and domination. Rather, in the violence and devastation that was First Century Rome, Jesus brought connection and communion to establish a new normal over and against the chaos of his time You are, collectively, what Jesus told us, you are the Kingdom of God. And that sustained, loyal, steadfast love is found in your mutual aid and common endeavor! (pause)

I know the other side of this too—a system full of practices and policies that is also seeking to maintain an old, dying, death-giving system. Naomi Klein regularly writes about The Shock Doctrine--how our federal government will use disaster and calamity to push ahead an agenda of violence and war. Just this week I posted on Facebook a Twitter thread from 350.org co-founder, Jamie Henn, which chronicled the numerous ways the fossil fuel industry and the Trump Administration are seeking to take advantage of the virus to make cuts to funding for environmental protection, push through funding for the fossil fuel industry, undercut the protests of Native leaders defending the environment, and bleed the last bit of money out of a dying industry. Not only here--another indigenous leader, land protector, Zezico Guajajara, defending the Amazon was assassinated in Brazil this week.[6]

But this I know. They will not endure. This will not endure. And we must use the knowledge of Creator’s love stirring in us to affirm what will endure going forward toward a more collaborative and cooperative future.

The week after the 1964 earthquake in Anchorage, Genie Chance’s mother wrote her and encouraged her to fly the children down to Texas for their safety. Genie Chance wrote back to her mother recognizing that on that Good Friday night, the first, dark cold night, there would be struggles ahead for her community for years to come. “But,” she wrote, “this was just a fleeting thought in a weary mind.” Her letter went on:

I would have been ashamed of myself had it not been for the next thought that came so swiftly: We must be together… That night I saw strain, heavy hearts, and fear in people separated from their loved ones by the sudden disaster… As long as we are together, we are confident of the future…

That Good Friday night I knew that we had survived miraculously. And for this reason, there must be a purpose to our lives. Apparently the children must sense this, too. For they have remained calm. . . . I would not undermine their confidence in the future — in themselves — by sending them away for safety.

What is safety, anyway? How can you predict where or when tragedy will occur? You can only learn to live with it and make the best of it when it happens. These children have learned this — and they are all the better for it. They were in the midst of devastation. And they feel that they are a part of the tremendous task ahead in rebuilding this land we love… The children are not afraid. Their father and I are not afraid. Please, don’t you fear for us.[7]

Jon Mooallem, author of a book about the aftermath of the Anchorage earthquake wrote about what he believed to be the meaning of Genie Chance and her work,

But [Genie Chance] also recognized a way of surviving such a world. It was what Genie had created in Anchorage that weekend by talk- ing on the radio, and what she planned to stay focused on now: not an antidote to that unpredictability, exactly, but at least a strategy for withstanding it, for wringing meaning from a life we know to be unsteady and provisional. The best she and her family could do was to hold on to one another.

Our force for counteracting chaos is connection.[8]

Calamity, disaster and domination, earthquakes and shock, pestilence and pandemic will come. There will be imperial rulers that will constrict, push, dominate, lie, and maybe even lead us into captivity. But God seeks to set a broad space for our community life. God’s steadfast love endures forever.

Let that be the message that emanates from Billings First Congregational Church. That the worst may come to us, but we will counteract chaos with connection to share that God is good and that we are reaching out our arms to our community once again in mutual aid because the steadfast love of God, acting through us, endures. It endures. Amen.