The path of descent
Psalm 1
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 13, 2018
The first hymn in any hymnal can be telling. Only one hymn gets to be first and a committee usually decides which one it is, intentionally or unintentionally setting the tone or at least implying what is of utmost importance. In both the Presbyterian and Methodist hymnals the first hymn is “Holy, Holy, Holy”, a hymn about the Trinity. In the Pilgrim hymnal, the one I grew up with, the first hymn is “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”, a good stalwart Congregational hymn. In our New Century Hymnal the first hymn is “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise”, which seems appropriate, given the wide theological diversity that is the United Church of Christ. In the Chalice hymnal of the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), the first hymn is “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”; they are practicing what it means to be “joyful though you have considered all the facts” (Wendell Berry).
Psalm 1 is no different, in that it sets the tone for the songbook of God’s people, Israel. The first word in this hymnal is “happy” or blessed, the same word used at the beginning of the Beatitudes. The Hebrew word for ‘happy’ or ‘blessed’ is ashar and it has less to do with the feeling of happiness but rather how you get there. C.S. Lewis once said, “I didn’t go to religion to make me ‘happy’. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” Like the teachings of Jesus, ashar is the narrow path, the direct path, allowing ourselves to be led by God rather than by our ego or the path without purpose or the guilty or wicked.
It’s a wisdom psalm, in that there is a forced choice: a wise way and a foolish way. The wise way, God’s way, leads to not only happiness and joy, but to being grounded, sustained, fruitful, to thriving; the other way leads to exclusion, destruction and death.
When I read this psalm earlier in the week, it sounded like so much good news, given the wicked and the wrongful that’s been happening in our nation and in our world. White people calling the police on people of color for cooking out in the park in Oakland, CA, for taking a nap in the common room of a dorm at Yale, for going to Waffle House after prom in North Carolina, for checking out of an Airbnb in California, for waiting for someone at Starbucks in Philadelphia. Those who act wrongly are carried off in the wind. I can picture certain folks being carried away in a tornado like the flying cow in the movie “Twister” or Miss Gulch in "The Wizard of Oz". The wrongful will not stand in the lights of justice, like cockroaches that will only come out under cover of darkness.
But then I realized I sounded like the Pharisee in the temple praying next to someone, thanking God that he was not like that sinner over there. And I was reminded of a verse from 1 John: If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. I may be trying to live on the direct and narrow path but I live in and benefit from a wicked and wrongful system. Even though the system is rigged against me in some ways—the Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass the Delaware Senate earlier this week—for the most part I live a comfortable life in this American empire. And comfort can actually hinder a true spiritual life.
I have to confess, though I am a Jesus nerd and a church geek, I am not consumed with the teaching of God; I do not meditate on divine wisdom both day and night. I know I’m supposed to use my own heart and brain to figure things out as much as I rely on divine wisdom. And yet my heart and brain can get caught up in my ego, my fears, my assumptions, my prejudices. So perhaps it’s no wonder that I long to feel like that tree that’s planted by the water, which yields fruit in its season, whose leaves do not wither. But the tree doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it grows from a seed, a seed that before it could become a tree had to first be buried and die.
We are pleasure-seeking, pain-avoidant creatures. We will do anything to preserve the status quo, to prevent failure and hold off death as long as we can. Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, says that failure, uncertainty, surrender, woundedness, relapse, death—these are our greatest teachers. Many of the stories coming to us now in popular culture, in movies and books, have an underlying theme of ‘burn it all down’ or the end of the world as we know it. In all its incarnations, empire fails as a system that benefits all the people that live in that empire. Religion as it currently stands fails as a system to transform our world to love our neighbor as ourselves, something all religions have in common. Democracy has failed in that it has not kept the corrupt and self-seeking as a manageable minority but rather allowed these elements to have more power than ever. If it feels like everything you thought you knew is unraveling, it’s because it is.
For millennia we have done our best to avoid this part of the Christian narrative: the way to resurrection, to renewal, is through the cross, through failure and death. The path of transformation is the path of descent. To find our true self, our whole life, we must first lose it.
St. John of the Cross put it this way:
To come to the pleasure you have not, you must go by a way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not.
I know. It sounds awful. This is the guy who wrote about the dark night of the soul, about how it is in the dark, when all our complacency, pretense, privilege and comforts are stripped away that we become fully dependent on God—on what is good, holy, and true. Our spiritual BS is transformed into true spirituality, into a relationship that allows us to change and grow into our authentic self.
In truth this really is so much good news, in that when we think we’ve lost our way, when we’ve hit rock bottom, when we don’t know what to do, that is when the path appears, when we’re ready to be more at home with the questions than requiring answers, when the power that created the cosmos and each one of us is more visible and active through us.
Resurrection, coming through the impossible, doesn’t make any sense until we know what it is to fail, to hurt, to die to ourselves, as individuals and as church and as a nation. Only then can something new come forth. Only then can we know that we belong to everyone and everything. Amen.
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 13, 2018
 |
| Sagrada Familia staircase |
The first hymn in any hymnal can be telling. Only one hymn gets to be first and a committee usually decides which one it is, intentionally or unintentionally setting the tone or at least implying what is of utmost importance. In both the Presbyterian and Methodist hymnals the first hymn is “Holy, Holy, Holy”, a hymn about the Trinity. In the Pilgrim hymnal, the one I grew up with, the first hymn is “Our God, Our Help in Ages Past”, a good stalwart Congregational hymn. In our New Century Hymnal the first hymn is “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise”, which seems appropriate, given the wide theological diversity that is the United Church of Christ. In the Chalice hymnal of the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), the first hymn is “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”; they are practicing what it means to be “joyful though you have considered all the facts” (Wendell Berry).
It’s a wisdom psalm, in that there is a forced choice: a wise way and a foolish way. The wise way, God’s way, leads to not only happiness and joy, but to being grounded, sustained, fruitful, to thriving; the other way leads to exclusion, destruction and death.
For millennia we have done our best to avoid this part of the Christian narrative: the way to resurrection, to renewal, is through the cross, through failure and death. The path of transformation is the path of descent. To find our true self, our whole life, we must first lose it.
St. John of the Cross put it this way:
To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not.
I know. It sounds awful. This is the guy who wrote about the dark night of the soul, about how it is in the dark, when all our complacency, pretense, privilege and comforts are stripped away that we become fully dependent on God—on what is good, holy, and true. Our spiritual BS is transformed into true spirituality, into a relationship that allows us to change and grow into our authentic self.
Resurrection, coming through the impossible, doesn’t make any sense until we know what it is to fail, to hurt, to die to ourselves, as individuals and as church and as a nation. Only then can something new come forth. Only then can we know that we belong to everyone and everything. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment