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| Finding our Identity |
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(please feel welcome to email a question or a response) January 18, 2009 – Memorial UCC Psalm 139 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. They are gathered at the cemetery, just the family and a couple of friends. The husband, the father of the two boys, had killed himself, a horrible end to what had been an unhappy life. It’s the last scene in Death of a Salesman, one of the great plays in American literature. Arthur Miller, the playwright, introduced the world to Willy Loman, a salesman with big dreams for himself, for his family. Dreams of prosperity, dreams of popularity. His dreams turned into a nightmare of failure at work, infidelity to his wife, antagonism from his sons. And so in the end, he drives off into the night and kills himself, thinking maybe his son Biff would at least be grateful for the $20,000 in life insurance proceeds. As they stand around the gravesite, Biff sums it all up: “He had all the wrong dreams, all, all wrong. He never knew who he was.” He never knew who he was. Willy Loman thought his worth was determined by the work he did, by the money he hoped to make. He might have done well to take a little time to read Psalm 139. In this time, when the economy around us is wreaking havoc with so many lives, we might do well to hang on to the words of Psalm 139 as well. And in this time when we are looking forward to a fresh start for our nation, we might also hang onto the words of Psalm 139 as we remember where we learn about our identity. It is important, after all, to know who we are. Part of knowing who we are is knowing who God is. And knowing how we relate to that God. And knowing whether we can trust that God to be with us when things go bad. The words “knowing” and “knowledge” are important words in Psalm 139. In the original Hebrew, they are used seven times – a number that suggests completeness, fullness. You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. Wonderful are your works that I know very well. God knows us -- and we get to know God through what we see around us. Martin Luther King Jr. knew something about God’s love and how that love could sustain him in the darkness and how it could be lived out in a way that could transform the world. Martin Luther King Jr. knew who he was and he had all the right dreams. In his book The Strength to Love, King tells about an encounter he had with Mother Pollard. She was this old woman who had been part of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the non-violent protest that helped catapult King to leadership in the civil rights movement. Black citizens of Montgomery walked to work instead of taking the segregated buses. Mother Pollard is the one who made famous the phrase, “My feets is tired but my soul is rested.’ On one particular Monday evening, after King had endured a week of being arrested, of answering threatening phone calls, he spoke at a mass meeting. He was a 26-year old pastor serving his first congregation. He wrote later: “I attempted to convey an overt impression of strength and courage, although I was inwardly depressed and fear stricken.” Afterwards, Mother Pollard came up to King and said to him, “Something is wrong with you.” He tried to hide his fears. He replied, “Oh, no, Mother Pollard, nothing is wrong. I am feeling as fine as ever.” She was not easily fooled. She suspected that he was afraid the people would not stand with him in this difficult struggle for justice. She suspected that the threats of the white power structure in Montgomery were terrifying him. She looked into his eyes and reassured him that the people were with him. And then he described what happened next: “Her face became radiant and she said in words of quiet certainty, ‘But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.’ As she spoke these words, everything in me quivered and quickened with the pulsing tremor of raw energy.” King wrote of the many difficult times he faced in the civil rights movement, but said that “as the years have unfolded, the eloquently simple words of Mother Pollard have come back again and again to give light and peace and guidance to my troubled soul. ‘God’s gonna take care of you.’ ” Those words were more than a personal consolation to King. They were also a guide as he prepared thousands to march into the face of hatred. He knew well how fear could replace a sense of God’s love with a sense of hatred for others. He knew how it easy it could be to cross that line. He trained protesters to hold their oppressors in love. It was a hard sell, but he did it. When Ann/Tia read Psalm 139 this morning, she only read the first three quarters of it. The folks who select readings for churches to use on Sundays left out the last quarter of this Psalm, perhaps thinking it might be too disturbing to folks gathered together in a spirit of love. But those words are essential to help us realize how close we all exist to the line that separates our sense of God’s love for us and our inclination to then hate others. Listen to these words: O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me — those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil! Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. The writer of the Psalm was very human. He told us about his sense of God’s continual and caring presence in his life. And then he turned his attention to his enemies, enemies he quickly defined as enemies of God. I’ve been delving into some of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr of late. He was one of the great theologians of the 20th century and he happens to be one of the thinkers whom Barack Obama cites as having a significant influence on our new president’s view of the world. This is not totally surprising. Obama, as you know, spent most of his adult life as a member of a United Church of Christ congregation. Niebuhr grew up and was a pastor in the Evangelical and Reformed tradition that shaped our own congregation and that merged into the UCC in 1957. When Obama described the thoughts of Niebuhr that have influenced him, he said "I take away the compelling idea that there's serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn't use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction." Niebuhr was a great advocate for Christians getting involved in seeking ways to address those evils that exist in the world. He also was fully aware that as we seek those solutions, we make mistakes along the way, we may make comprises that we wish we didn’t have to make. Therefore, Niebuhr wrote, the Christian who seeks to battle injustice need “divine mercy at much at the end as at the beginning of his moral endeavors.” That may be helpful to keep in mind as we watch Barack Obama being sworn in on Tuesday. Many people in this nation have invested a lot of hope in him. He himself has cautioned that he is an imperfect human being. Inevitably, there will be disappointments for him and for us along the way. He, too, will need God’s mercy at the end as well as at the beginning of his endeavors. Our challenge is to remember who we are and what defines our worth. Despite that vengeful little riff at the end, the writer of Psalm 139 had a sense of being a creature created in God’s image and under God’s care. The psalm writer knew that even when things seemed dark, when the light of hope seemed to be flickering, “the darkness is as bright as day for darkness is as light to you.” Martin Luther King clung to the words of Psalm 139 as he engaged the world. He wrote about his faith in God lighting up the darkness and said: “This faith will be a lamp unto our weary feet and a light unto our meandering path. Without such faith, man’s dreams will pass silently to the dust.” Think back to Willy Loman, his dreams turned to dust. He did not know who he was. And then think of yet one more figure out of recent history. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany in the 1930s. He came to the U.S. and studied for a while under Reinhold Niebuhr. Then he went back to his homeland, trying to keep Christians from being sucked into the evils of the Nazism. He became part of a plot to kill Hitler. Although Bonhoeffer’s role does not show up in the film, the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie is about that plot. Bonhoeffer wrestled intently with the notions of how one confronts evil in the midst of the Christian imperative to love one’s enemies. He was a living example of Niebuhr’s writings about risking moral purity in the pursuit of justice. The Nazis arrested him in April of 1943 and after the attempt of Hitler’s life that is portrayed in the movie failed – that was in July of 1944 -- Bonhoeffer’s situation became even more perilous. Hitler orderd the execution of all those involved in the plot. Bonhoeffer was killed on April 9, 1945, just days before Allied troops liberated the prison camp where he was held. While he was in prison, though, Bonhoeffer wrote a poem titled “Who Am I?” He wrote about the perceptions others had of him. He asked: “Am I then really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I know of myself?” A bit later, he asked more questions: “Who am I? This or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once?” In the end, he echoes the words of Psalm 139, of one feeling adrift in the world yet trusting in God’s love. Bonhoeffer concludes with these words: “Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.” And so are we all. |