The Great Reversal

Several years ago a YouTube video of Bono and Eugene Peterson was downloaded and played thousands of times. It is about twenty minutes or so long and showed a great friendship and respect the famous singer and famous Bible scholar and translator had for one another. It is well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l40S5e90KY  

One of the things I remember Bono saying was that he wished contemporary Christian artists were as “honest about life as the psalms are.” They talked about the proper role of lament in the lives of God’s people

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We don’t do well with lament.

A contemporary Christian song I hear often is I Called, You Answered. It is a Hillsong United song based on Psalm 138:3, which says, “On the day I called, You answered me; You emboldened me and strengthened my soul.” (ESV) The lyrics of the song are nice and the tune to which they are sung, at least to me, has a kind of haunting quality.

Obviously this isn’t a “song of lament!” Its recurring theme is “you came to my rescue and I wanna be where you are.” (I’m too old to be fond of “wanna be” as a replacement for “want to be,” but those are the lyrics!)

But recently, in my personal reading of Scripture, while reading from Isaiah, I came across two different texts that are a bit of a reversal from the hope, joy, and thanksgiving of Psalm 138. Isaiah 65:12 says, “I have destined you for the sword, and you all shall kneel to be slaughtered, since I called and you did not answer, I spoke and you did not hear, and you did what was evil in My eyes, and what I did not desire you choose.” And then, in Isaiah 66:4, “I, too, will choose their rank acts and what they fear I will bring upon them. Because I called and none answered, I spoke and they did not listen, and they did what was evil in My eyes, and in what I did not delight they chose.” (Translation from Robert Alter, A Translation with Commentary.)

That sounds like Lament!

Isaiah introduces a kind of great reversal at the beginning of Isaiah 65 – “I yielded oracles when they did not inquire, I was found when they did not seek Me. I said, ‘Here I am, ere I am’ to a nation not called by My name. I spread out My hands all day long to a wayward people that walked on a way not good after its own divisings.” (Alter) God speaks when we don’t ask, is found when we don’t seek, prays (spread out my hands) for wayward people who travel a path that isn’t good. God will have a people, but it may not be the people who think they are His people. 

What would a Hillsong United tune and lyrics on these texts look and sound like?

I’m certainly not suggesting we go around in “sack cloth and ashes” twenty-four hour a day, nor am I suggesting that somehow it is less than spiritually appropriate to celebrate the presence of God in our lives as Psalm 138 does. But . . . shouldn’t it break our heart that in these Isaiah texts, it is God who calls, but we don’t answer. It is God who speaks, but we don’t bother to hear.  Instead of “answering and listening” we choose “to do what is evil in His eyes.” 

Robert Goldingay (The First Testament, 648) suggests that the message of Isaiah 56-66 “relates to the situation of Judah when people have been free to return there after their exile but where things are not as wonderful as they might have expected.” It seems certain that Judah has experienced a kind of forgiveness out of the exile but has returned to its former way. 

In a great reversal – rather than Israel calling on God, He calls on them. They don’t answer.

Lament.

Rather than Israel praying, it is God whose hands are spread out all day long for a wayward people.

Lament.

I look forward to the next time I am with God’s people and we sing, I Called, You Answered.

But I’m wondering if our culture – church-going and non-church going – couldn’t use a song or two of lament and repentance.

Perhaps Bono was right. We need contemporary artists who are as honest as the psalms – and as Isaiah is!

Creation and Reboots

For Christmas this past year, my wife gave me a “squirrel-proof hanger for my bird feeders.” It’s deluxe! In fact, it is so nice that I decided I had to buy new feeders to use, the old ones looked too tired and worn. It really works – squirrels are yet to find a way to the feeders.

Since late December when I installed it and filled the new feeders with really good bird seed, I have seen all sorts of birds. I’m writing this is mid-August and I am still putting seed in the feeders and seeing an impressive gathering of God’s original orchestra and choir: birds!

I can step out of the garage onto the drive way and quietly stand and watch. There is a kind of rhythm to their eating that is impressive. Certain birds prefer certain feeders. The murder of crows (yes, a “flock of crows” is a “murder of crows.”) are too big for the feeders so they are around the feeder on the ground eating what the smaller birds scatter as they eat. Two different species of Woodpeckers have visited us during the summer.

If you go out just before sunrise, the music is amazing.  Little wonder Psalm 19 begins with “the heavens are recounting God’s splendor, . . .day by day it points out speech.”

Another early morning practice for me is Scripture reading. I am striving to be very disciplined about this. If Scripture really is what God says it is, then there is no reason I should ignore it. The more I pay attention to creation and Scripture, the more convinced I am that I should be doing at least some reading outside – in creation. When I do that, I am hearing the heavens (creation, even birds!) declare God’s glory as I read His Word, which this same Psalm (19) says “The Lord’s instruction has integrity, bringing life back . . . is trustworthy, making the naïve smart.”

I love that phrase “bringing life back.” That sounds like a worthwhile kind of reboot. What I have finally learned is that when I pay attention to the world God made and take time to engage His word that the Spirit gave – that can “bring life back.” It is the kind of daily reboot that makes life worthy living and allows us to experience a kind of significance that beats achievement any day of the week.

Not surprisingly, Psalm 19 ends with “May the sayings of my mouth be acceptable to you, and the murmur of my mind before you, Yahweh, my crag and my restorer.” That is from The First Testament a new translation of the Old Testament I’ve read through this summer. In more familiar terms, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and redeemer.”

What if the reboot moments in our lives at Point this year brought us to next May where our every word and every thought honored God?

                                                Best of any song

                                                is bird song

                                                in the quiet, but first

                                                you must have the quiet.

                                                                Wendell Berry

Give Me Jesus

“Our parents refused to accept this gift as a gift and instead used their separateness as a club, hoping to force all peoples to speak their tribe’s language. Thus, at Babel war was born, as the fear of the other became the overriding passion that motivated each group to force others into their story or to face annihilation. The killing begun in Cain was now magnified as humankind’s cooperative ability unleashed a destructiveness that is as terrible as it is irrational. Humans became committed to a strategy of destroying the other even if it means their own death. Better to die than to let the other exist. To this day we thus find ourselves condemned to live in tribes, each bent on the destruction of the other tribes so that we might deny our tribal limits. Our histories become the history of war as we count our days by the battles of the past.” (Hauerwas, Stanley. The Hauerwas Reader. Page 145)

In a great Pentecost Sunday sermon, Stanley Hauerwas suggests that at some level, the purpose of Pentecost was to undo what happened at Babel. He creatively links the “confusion of tongues” at Babel with everyone hearing the good news at Pentecost in their own language. What happened at Babel, undone at Pentecost.

But what draws me to the quote above from that sermon is that if we changed but a word or two, it could appear on the editorial page an any American newspaper today. “The killing begun with Cain” . . . happens all too often in our country - in “mass contexts.”

Every time we experience tragic moments like what just happened in El Paso and Dayton, we hear the clamoring of voices with quick solutions. No doubt some of those solutions would be helpful. No doubt some would make little or no difference. I don’t think I’m smart enough to make the call but am smart enough to know that God’s long-term plan for humankind was not as Hauerwas aptly describes Babel. Yet it seems like so much of the world, not just our own country, seems “condemned to live in tribes, each bent on the destruction of the other tribes.”

What is disturbing to me, in addition to the awful evilness of these acts, is how small a voice the church has in our national conversation. I know many believers are speaking about gun control, the kind of tribalism that generates hatred of one another, and similar ideas. But you can say all of that and then some with little or no authentic Christian voice.

At least part of the uniqueness an authentic voice can bring to the table is the worth of every human being. Others don’t have to share my skin color, my language, my worldview, my gender, my geography, or even my values to be people of worth. The Genesis way of talking about that would be to simply say “we are all created in the image of God!”

But it isn’t just mass shootings. I live in metro-Atlanta. Most mornings I listen to the local news while getting read for work. We have lots of “killings” in our city that are the result of people just driving through neighborhoods and shooting up houses, apartments, and the like. People are too often killed in robberies where the amount taken is a pitiful exchange for a human life.  Georgia prisons,, like is true for many of these United States prison systems, are over-crowded warehouses that are poorly cared for – both the facilities and the prisoners. We seem to operate on an “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” mentality that denies the humanity of those who are there. Then we are perplexed at the recidivism rate in our prison systems. 

Would it make a difference if we followers of Jesus were more known for declaring “we no longer need to live in Babel” instead of a voice that often sounds as though some lives either have no value or aren’t as valuable as others?

Would it make a difference if we were more known for the kind of behavior Jesus models which seems to suggest value for every human life, even people like adulteresses, foreign women, crooked tax collectors, occupying army leaders, and more, instead of being know for how tightly we can draw the circle to include our tribe, but not some others?

It seems to me that if the gospel doesn’t transform our Babel-like world into the joy and hope of Pentecost, maybe we aren’t preaching it as we should. After all, Paul declared that “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation!” (Romans 1:16)

There’s a Christian singer by the name of Jeremy Camp who recorded a version of Give Me Jesus. When I rise, when I eat, when I go to bed, when I die – give me Jesus.

What if . . . instead of offering condemnation, distain, judgment, and condescension, we decided “to give the world Jesus”?

Would that make a difference?

The church desperately needs to present its prophetic, unique voice in the conversation of our culture. That voice needs to offer the saving grace which only Jesus can provide.