Broken

Propers: The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Fifty-Fourth Psalm is a psalm of lament—which is remarkable in and of itself.

The Book of Psalms, or Psalter, is the hymn book of the Bible, containing 150 separate songs, or in some cases collections of songs, dating from two-and-a-half to three thousand years ago. Many are attributed to King David himself, a noted musician. There are individual psalms and communal psalms; psalms of thanksgiving and psalms of praise; psalms for the royalty and psalms for the liturgy, to be sung in the great Temple at Jerusalem.

The Psalms give us a vocabulary with which to speak to God. They give us permission, as it were, to say things we might not otherwise say. There are psalms of romance, which get rather steamy. There are psalms of rage, which get pretty dark. And then there are psalms of lament, which may be the ones we need to hear most of all.

When tragedy strikes, we are tempted to say stupid things, in order to make sense of the senseless. We attempt to lessen the horror, not so much for the sake of the victim as for our own. A child dies, and some well-meaning fool says, “I guess God needed another angel.” Someone gets cancer, and we say, “God has a purpose for your life. This is part of God’s plan.” And so we present God as a sort of divine vivisectionist, the very notion of which is far more terrifying than any devil could ever be.

I get the impulse. I get that we want to assert God’s sovereignty by insisting He’s still in control. We want to grant comfort—if mostly to ourselves—by purporting a divine plan hidden beneath the appearance of calamity. The grace of God is always intact, it seems, until something happens to us. Thanks be to God that the psalms of lament blow all of our nonsense right out of the water.

The psalms of lament are clear that suffering is not God’s will, period. God doesn’t give us cancer. God doesn’t steal our children. God’s will is that we may have life and have it abundantly, period. Death was never part of the plan. Despair was never part of the plan. We weren’t meant to suffer. We weren’t meant to die. We sure as heck weren’t meant to lose the ones we love.

All this stuff happens because it’s a broken world, a world that went off the rails a long time ago, long before we came into being. It was broken on the very first day, when God separated the light He had created from the darkness He had not. We do have a hand in it, of course. We have yet to encounter any situation so messed up that humanity could not make it worse.

But this is not the world as God willed it. The things we suffer fall not from above; they boil up from within and below.

I take great comfort in this, myself. I take great comfort in the fact that God looks at our horrors, our diseases, our wars and our greed, the natural disasters that befall us, and says definitively, “No! I did not want this, I did not make this, and I will not let this stand!” God does not condone all this hell on earth. I take great comfort in the fact that when we are angry, when we are fearful, when we are sad, this is no lack of faith—failing to trust in some awful, inscrutable plan—but rather our anger and sadness and fear are part of our relationship with God. We grieve in the same way that He grieves, lamenting over the brokenness of ourselves and our world.

I know this because the psalms of lament tell me so. They give me permission to be angry, to be fearful, to mourn, despair, and grieve. They give me the vocabulary I need to yell at God—accuse God!—because these are the very words of Scripture that He has given us to do precisely that. Raise our laments up to paradise! Pound your fists on Heaven’s gate! Tell God to get off His throne and do something, say something, come down here and make it right!

Fix it, God! Fix us all! You’re the only one who can. Lord knows we wouldn’t set it right even if we could. That ship sailed a long time ago, the night before the sabbath.

Now, I know that elsewhere in the Scriptures there are passages of God striking down the wicked, of executing justice upon the nations, of making both weal and woe. But not here. Not in the psalms of lament. Those other stories try to make sense of God’s responses to a fallen, broken world: a blighted vine in need of pruning; impure metal needing flame. But these psalms hearken back to a truer primordial past, before sin rent the world in twain, before man fell for power and pride.

God did not make evil, does not want evil, will not countenance evil of any sort. So why then is the world still fallen? Why does God not come to save? You can ask Him yourself in the psalm: “Save me, O God, by Your Name, and vindicate me by Your might. Hear my prayer, O God.” Then comes the trust so certain that the Psalmist can look back upon his petition as though it were a promise already fulfilled: “For He had delivered me from every trouble, and my eye has looked in triumph on my foes.”

When then are these psalms answered? When will God set all aright? I do hope the answer ought to be clear by now, for it is none other than Jesus Christ. Jesus is God Himself, God in the flesh, come down off His heavenly throne, down here in the mud and the blood, to do something about it, to set everything aright. He comes down without vengeance, without violence, without judgment. He comes down not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him.

And well He knows that He will be handed over, as the Gospel states, “into human hands, and they will kill Him, and three days after being killed, He will rise again.” Interesting, isn’t it, that He will be betrayed “into human hands”? Not into God’s, nor even the devil’s, at least not in Mark’s account. Crucifixion is not God’s idea. He doesn’t require suffering. That’s not His modus operandi. It’s ours. We require suffering, the suffering of our victims, of our neighbors, even of our God. How telling that when Abraham was willing to sacrifice his only son, God would not have it so. But here we are demanding the Father’s only Son from Him.

Brothers and sisters, when we suffer, when we perish, when we mourn, this is not God’s will. He’s not the one who does this to us. There isn’t some mysterious plan that we need to accept sight unseen. Bad things happen not because God wills it so, but because this is a broken world, a world that has rejected the love and will of God. And in response to our rejection, God pours out His own infinite life from the Cross into this world’s brokenness, to seal up the chasm torn open by sin and to give all the world a new birth in Him.

Now, it’s true that good things can come from suffering. There is no situation and no individual so twisted and broken that God cannot extract good from him. God heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and raises the dead from their graves. He can take your pain, take your suffering, take your wounds, and make those into the portals through which He enters your life. There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. But twisting evil into good is not the same thing as willing that evil in the first place. God is not a sadist. God is not so cruel.

So to all of you who suffer, all who struggle in grief or pain, know that God is with you. He grieves with you, suffers with you, laments with you. He did not will this evil; He does not will your pain. And you aren’t upsetting or betraying Him when you ask of Him, “What the heck?” He’s a big guy. He can take it.

In Christ, God has entered into our own pain. And in Christ He will raise you up to a world in which pain and tears and grief and suffering and loss shall come to an end, shall be no more. Then the world will be as it should be, as it was meant to be all along. And all the dead shall rise, and God at last will be all in all.

For He has delivered me from every trouble, and my eye has looked in triumph on my foes.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.