Hebrew Scripture Reading—Psalm 25: 1-10
When a life crisis hits, finding the right words can be difficult. I remember when I first began working in a hospital chaplain’s office some years ago. I felt like a prayer machine going in and out of the rooms of patients. I sometimes would invite the patients to pray along with me, but often they felt as if they did not possess the language or qualifications necessary to pray. It is a sad commentary on the state of lay empowerment in our churches when people feel like only ministers can pray.
Little did the patients know that I myself was struggling with how to pray. I would cogitate endlessly about how to pray for the sick in a way that was comforting and encouraging but did not offer empty platitudes or false promises of recovery. After all, I did occasionally encounter patients who were still angry about platitudes and promises that had let them down in the past. Ultimately, in my prayers I decided I would just have to pray as best I could by focusing on the real signs of love, hope, and healing that I could see in the care given to patients by family and friends, nurses and doctors.
Some people like to say that prayer is poetry and all of us our poets. I am not sure all of us feel exactly like poets, so I like to think of prayer as a love scribble to God. It doesn’t matter if we get the words exactly right. It doesn’t matter if it would be considered theologically sound by others. I don’t even think it needs to be done down on one’s knees at night with hands folded, even though that may be right for some. Finally, I don’t even think words are always required. Whether it is staring at the bud of a rose or pondering upon the beauty of creation while fly fishing, prayer is whatever connects you to God.
Our scripture reading for today is a prayer, and from a certain vantage point, it might at times seem like a bit of a bumbling prayer. As our Tuesday morning Bible Study noted, there are parts of it that sound like an attempt to flatter and bargain with God. “O God, you are so good and loving, how about forgiving me of my sins?” This is coming from the same pslamist who almost in the same breath wants God to shame others for their sins. Instead of looking at this as a bumbling prayer, however, we might instead look at it as a very human love scribble to God. When hard times hit, a lot of us are at a loss for what to do or say. As books on the stages of grief tell us, we might even try bargaining with God. We might also try pointing fingers.
In thinking of our psalm, we might additionally keep in mind that this love scribble relates more to our situation today then we might initially think. An important aspect of our psalmist’s prayer is that it is written in the voice of an entire nation. The psalmist is personifying Israel. It is Israel that has gone down the wrong road. It is Israel that needs to be delivered from “all its troubles.” I am not sure about everyone here, but I know that over the past few months I have at times felt like our own nation could use a collective prayer for deliverance from its current economic crisis. Even though the psalmist may have had trouble getting the words right at first, I like where the psalm ultimately leads us. The psalmist’s foremost desire is to get the nation back on track, to get it on the right path.
This past week I have been trying to figure out what would get our nation back on the right path. I have read policy prescription after policy prescription about what to do with the banks. Should our government nationalize banks? Should it take temporary control of big banks in the same way that the FDIC takes over insolvent banks every week? Should it perform surgery on the banks by saving the parts needed for the economy while dispensing of the toxic parts devoted to speculative gambling? I will not pretend to have the specific answers this morning, but I have come to the conclusion that the psalmist was on to something. The psalmist knew what the marks of the right path were. They were the marks of righteousness and justice, love and faithfulness, and they were applied to an entire nation. In looking at the economic crisis, we might ask ourselves, “What policy best displays these values in its service to the common good? What policy addresses institutions not in terms of personal gain for the few but rather in terms of public utility for the many?”
Another aspect of our psalm that I like is that it looks back over the past and confesses where things went wrong. The psalmist points to the sins and transgressions of Israel’s youth. In pinpointing the origins of our current crisis, economists have pointed toward the removal of financial restrictions beginning in the mid-1970s. For you history buffs, I am talking about the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system. The removal of these restrictions allowed for what economists call the under-pricing of risk with regard to its social cost. Huh? To put it in more simple moral terms, unrestrained greed led to risky investments that caused various bubbles and crashes throughout the world while ultimately leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces and pay the tab. All of this suggests to me that in asking questions about what is best for the common good we will need to look beyond the question of saving our banks to the question of regulating our banks and financial markets so that unrestrained greed does not lead to our ruin again.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the psalms do not give us a detailed blue print for public policy, but I think they do provide us with something of a spiritual blue print. The psalms were not only prayers. They were also songs. As such, they were a spiritual practice that comforted and lifted a people. When it comes to expressing our selves in relation to God, music often achieves what words alone cannot. The legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson realized this when she talked about the songs of the civil rights movement. She said, “The ‘Freedom Songs’ have caught on because music speaks a language to individual souls that cannot always be expressed by the spoken word. There’s something about music that is so penetrating that your soul gets the message… Some who didn’t believe in God have found [God] through music.” Indeed, not long before his death author Kurt Vonnegut, who described himself as an “unbelieving believer,” declared that he wanted his epitaph to read, “The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.”
The music of the “Freedom Songs,” however, was more than a doorway into faith. It helped people through hard times. Jackson recalled how people discovered that “no matter what trouble” came their way music could help them face it. She also saw the strength the “Freedom Songs” gave people to take risks during the civil rights movement. She saw how the “Freedom Songs” began in churches during the Montgomery bus boycott so that people could “keep up their courage.” She saw how they were then sung by students arrested at sit-ins. She saw how they continued to spread and give more and more people courage. She declared, “Now all through the South [black folk] are singing. They sang while they were put in jail by the hundreds and sometimes the power of their music was so great that the white guards began singing right along with them. They sing in churches and in mass meetings while deputies and sheriffs go around taking names and white gangs burn up their cars.” Jackson recalled that one civil rights leader averred that “without music” the Albany Movement would never have existed in Georgia to challenge segregation.
Today, our nation could use a psalm, a song of faith, a song that helps us through hard times, a song that gives us the courage to take risks, not the risks of investors seeking personal gain, but the risks of those seeking justice. With such a song, maybe then we will begin to experience God anew and find ourselves on the right path. Amen.