Speaker 1: Here, Jesus seems to be offering a vision of a world made right where God's favor and affection could be made a reality without needing divine judgment and violence to make it happen.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 1: Hey, everyone. Welcome to church today. My name is Scott, and I serve on the team here at Commons. And I'm so excited about our plans for in person gatherings again soon. As a team, we really have missed you all, and for me, our parish connections in Inglewood.
Though it has been so great to see our community stay connected and engaged online this spring, and there is lots to look forward to together. That said, I'm also delighted to be jumping into this inspired series that we are in, where over the past few weeks, we've been talking about the Bible, which for some might seem a little redundant. Not unlike a professor or a teacher saying something like, in this class, we are going to be looking at the textbook. Fair enough. Except what we've been trying to do is take this collection of texts that are our scriptures, this library of narrative, art, and theology, and we've been talking about how we want to read it as a community, which first and foremost for us means putting Jesus at the center.
And, yeah, that might sound a little oversimplified, so let's rephrase it because what we mean is that we want to use Jesus as a way of interpreting the whole story of the Bible. Last week, Jeremy walked us through how we can do this, looking at some sections in the Hebrew Bible that talk about and seem to condone violence, where genocide and blood sacrifice feature prominently, and these can be really difficult sections for us to deal with. And we talked about how, ultimately, the image of God and Jesus makes an end to our systems of retribution, systems in which sin and death and violence require more death and violence to make things right. See, as Christians, we hold that Jesus doesn't live and then die so that God can forgive us finally. Rather, Jesus lives and dies to show us what forgiveness and mercy actually look like, inviting us to picture God in a new light and our lives and relationships too.
And in that new light, we turn from the idea that God is angry, wrathful, and heavy handed, and we embrace a God that takes our sin and our wrath and our violence and forgives. Setting our imaginations free to turn from all that is violent, forgive and to live again. Which brings us to today where we need to talk about poetry and the Psalms and how Jesus helps us make sense of it all. But before we jump into that, let's quiet ourselves for a moment. Join me now as we pray.
Loving God, we are present to you now wherever we happen to be, and we are grateful for the gift of community, for this sacrament of belonging that is with us wherever we are in our journey. And today, as we come again to the text, the ancient story in all of its complexity, we ask that you would be our guide, that you would open our eyes and ears to hear and sense you in new ways, and ultimately that you would help us to see your world as you do. We ask this in the name of Christ. Amen. Alright.
So as I mentioned, today we're thinking about how to read these poetic texts that are in the middle of our bible. And to do that, we're gonna talk a little bit about voices that we hear, the paradox of justice and mercy, and divine solidarity. And as with this entire series, our goal is to come to a place where we see how Jesus helps us read well. And I wanna start today by thinking about our relationship with poetry because I imagine that there's more than a few of you listening who, when you hear that word, you flashback to some junior high assignment or that one English lit class that you took to fulfill your arts requirement in college where poetry reading and writing and interpretation function as a bit of a nightmare in your memory. And listen, bad English teachers or Shakespearean soliloquies aside, I totally get this.
Poetry is a bit of a labyrinth to find your way through. And I'm sure those of you who love and read and carry poetry would agree, and there's a reason for this. Because poetry is essentially a use of language that requires close attention and engaged participation. And it isn't all just rhyme and nauseating metaphors. And it isn't meant to fit neatly into a tweet or to be followed by hashtag love life references either.
Poetry is language that arrests. It takes its time. It waits for us to give it the attention it deserves. And why is this? Well, because life itself inspires meaningful words.
Our lives pull at all the best adjectives and verbs and punctuation, weaving stories out of our pain, our loss, and joy alike, which is why we shouldn't be surprised to find poetry at the very heart of our sacred texts. Words woven together to make meaning, this collection of writings that we call the Psalms. As a community, we've actually spent some time with these in the past. Most recently just last summer, if you wanna check out our YouTube archive for more content. This group of songs and prayers, laments, protests, and scholars believe that they were in production for hundreds of years, composed by different authors and communities taken up as worship and prayer by disparate times and traditions.
And they range from the pithy, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. That's Psalm 90. And then they can swing all the way to the bossy. Defend the weak and the fatherless. Uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.
Rescue the weak and the needy. Deliver them from the hand of the wicked. That's God speaking in Psalm 82. But then you have the horrifying and vengeful Psalm one thirty seven written to Israel's enemies. Daughter, Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. Followed by, starkly, the contradictory Psalm one forty five, which reads, the Lord is gracious and compassionate. Slow to anger, rich in love, the Lord is good to all, and he has compassion on all that God has made. And we're gonna talk about those last two more in a second, but first, I need to make an argument for how I think we should read the poetry of these ancient texts. And here's the basic gist.
Much of scripture, but especially its poetry, demands a form of active listening from us. So often, what seems unintelligible in poetic language and our Bibles is actually sometimes, I think, a symptom of us reading too quickly and too carelessly. And this is why it doesn't matter who I'm reading, some ancient psalmist or a recent TS Eliot prize winner. I have started to read aloud. And, yeah, this has inspired some questions in our home like, hey, dad, are you talking to yourself?
And certainly, it is weird if you're sitting in a cafe because social distancing doesn't make spontaneous poetry reading any less awkward. The the reason I do this though is because if I don't, I find that the words rush past me. They just stay in my head, and they fail to make it out into the world where they belong sometimes. And in my own reading of scripture, especially the Psalms, this practice has made a huge difference. And why?
Well, here's my theory. Poetry requires this kind of attention because its wisdom or its critique or its beauty are found when we start to hear three voices. First, the of the divine in all creation, and we're gonna have to talk about that one another time. Second, we start to hear our own inner voice. And I can only speak for myself here, but I know that I would not believe or trust the story of Jesus today if I had not learned to hear the cry of my heart in places like Psalm 40, which quietly prays, as for me, I am poor and needy.
May the Lord think of me. Or when I heard the echo of my own mental health in Psalm 94, which says, unless the Lord had given me help, I would have soon dwelt in the silence of death. And when I said, my foot is slipping, your unfailing love, Lord, supported me. And when anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought me joy. And the point here is just that poetry can help us hear the words we felt but not ever spoken.
But third, it also amplifies the voices of the drowned out ones. And this third one is the core of my argument today, which is just this. You want to know how to read the poetry of the Psalms faithfully? Do you wanna get a sense of how the story of Jesus helps us look back at these ancient texts with all of their emotional contradictions, all the beauty and rage, the violence and the worship? You have to read the poetry of your own time carefully and slowly and aloud so that the drowned out ones are heard.
And let me give you just a couple of personal examples of how this has worked for me because this past month has been excruciating for so many of us. And in the middle of watching protests and reaching out to my friends whose experiences are so different than mine and grappling with how privilege distances me from both chaos and change, I found myself saying more than a few prayers of anger and calls for justice and mercy. In the middle of all that, I've been leaning into poetry, where recently Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong arrested me with these words taken from his piece, Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong. He writes, don't be afraid. The gunfire is only the sound of people trying to live a little longer.
Ocean, ocean, get up. The most beautiful part of your body is where it's headed. And remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world. Or my return to a sonnet I'd heard many years ago, won't you celebrate with me, it's called, and poet Lucille Clifton in it describes her experience as an African American woman. Won't you celebrate with me what I have shaped into a kind of life?
I had no model. Born in Babylon, both non white and woman, what did I see to be except myself? I made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. And I wonder as I read those voices, can you hear them?
The voices of those long kept silent? I I know I do, and I know too that these cries tune me to a frequency of pain, anguish, and truth telling that mirrors the angst and provocation of the Psalms. See, I really do believe that as a community that is aspiring to be intellectually honest and spiritually passionate and centered on Jesus, we may find that our capacity to read scripture well or our ability to grapple with the tension of ancient texts, the tools for this work might actually be found in attending to the poets of our time, who call us to stop, to say their words, and to fall silent in their face, and then to carry those words out into the world. So if you've had trouble with the Psalms, maybe start by reading them aloud. And if you still aren't sure how to deal with their harshness and their platitudes, how they wrench you into a world that seems to make no sense, I invite you to read the poets of our moment and listen to the artists that have long been crying out and pay attention to words that come to you and get you to stop and think and grapple with chaos.
Maybe in books, in news, in conversation alike, because you might just find that what you hear is the voice of the divine, poetic and profound for where you are, which brings us back to this paradox in the Psalms that I noted earlier. Remember how in one poem, the Hebrew author wishes for the death of their enemy's infant children, and then in another, there's this talk of God's even temperament and grace for all? And for the record, this kind of paradox is not an isolated incident or occurrence. In fact, its attention at the center of the entire collection of the Psalms maybe because it's naming something in human experience. For example, Psalm one ten describes how kings will be crushed when God finally comes to bring justice.
How God will judge, quote, heaping up the dead, end quote. And and then in the very next lines in Psalm one eleven, we hear how God is gracious and compassionate. To which we have to ask, well, which is it? And part of how scholars explain these paradoxical depictions of the divine is to remind us as readers that these poems and songs were composed over hundreds of years, paralleling and mirroring the development of Jewish theology in some cases. And paying attention to these historical context does help us somewhat in instances like one thirty seven that I read to you earlier.
Because this particular poem is set against the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in May, a traumatic event in Hebrew history that we actually referenced in our last series, where you might remember the capital of the Jews was besieged, and then it was pulled apart. And the temple is destroyed, and the people of the city are murdered, enslaved, and deported. It's this really dark moment, which is why then Psalm one thirty seven begins with the Jewish author saying that beside a stream in a foreign country displaced, dejected, and now refugees, the Jews wept as they remembered Jerusalem. And the author writes that their captors mocked them saying, sing us one of your worship songs. To which the poet says, I'll never forget you, Jerusalem.
May I be cursed if I do. And any attentive reader of this particular psalm might comprehend why the ancient author would be calling for divine justice here in their longing for things to be made right. I mean, war and displacement and political maneuvering have been making victims for a long time. And if we are honest, we might understand why the poet lashes out at their enemies and hopes that their children perish. Remember, their possessions had been looted and their bodies taken and their lives undone, and then they are asked to sing the songs of their defeated God.
And scholar Robert Alter invites us to imagine them singing these horrible lines of retribution in a language their captors cannot understand. Raising a violent song of the powerless raised to God, but without any moral justification for the horror that it takes, which even if we're disturbed by how this poetry is scripture, we have to admit that it's human. And we have to acknowledge that its cry for justice stands as implicitly right even if it's misguided in its violent application. Though this is not or this doesn't really remove the tension between this psalm and other psalms that repeat the refrain that God is merciful, that divine anger is slow in coming. It certainly doesn't mesh with the soaring claims of Psalm one forty five, where God's benevolent rule is said to be good to and for all, not just Israel.
That Psalm declares how divine love is universal by definition in verses eight and nine if you wanna go and see. And this contradiction can be difficult to engage for us, especially because we live in a world where justice is handed out with violence each and every day. And there are many groups that claim divine favor and affection as exclusively belonging to them, which is why it's so important and helpful to look at Jesus here. And specifically, this intriguing story from Luke's gospel where chapter four tells us that Jesus goes to Galilee at one point, and people start noticing him, and they're following him. And just a quick note here about Galilee as a region.
It was surrounded by non Jewish nations and peoples, and one ancient historian describes the Jews and citizens living there as being quick in temper and given to quarreling. Sound awesome. Right? And this was a place where political dissent and fervor for the Jews to be rid of Roman rule was rampant, which is the background for Jesus going to his hometown in this story. And on the Sabbath, he gets up to read in the synagogue, and he famously reads from the prophet Isaiah saying, the spirit of the Lord is on me because he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
He's sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. And we can assume that devout Jews sitting in the audience would have been tracking with Jesus here. This is a famous messianic passage after all, where the ancient poet is foretelling how the anointed one was gonna come and bring justice for God's people, and how the needs of the poor were going to be addressed. And you can almost see them all nodding their heads in agreement. Jesus is feeding into their confirmation bias as he reads because they know how Isaiah ends this particular passage.
See, Jesus is reading from a text with a strong interpretive tradition, and he's taking its message as his own. I am going to bring good news and freedom, and I am going to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, God's long awaited reordering of the world. To which the crowd would have been saying, yeah, we're tracking with you, Jesus. They would have been thinking this because the ancient text says that God's favor is gonna come, and then it reads, and the day of the vengeance of our God will come. That's right, the crowd would have thought.
All is going to be put right. Oppressors will be confronted. The Romans will be removed. Their children will be dashed on rocks by divine vengeance. Except Luke doesn't include that vengeance line from Isaiah because Jesus didn't say it.
The point of the story is that Jesus doesn't seem to be playing into the expectations of his fiery Galilean audience at all. Within just a few verses, they've taken him outside the city to kill him because he seems to be confronting their assumptions about how justice would come to the world. Justice for them against their Roman enemies with force and fury, which isn't to say that Jesus was claiming that righteousness wasn't needed. It isn't to say that Jesus was downplaying the cries for change that were echoing all around him. No.
But it is to say that as Jesus came to announce that God was at work in the world and when it came time to say that God was gonna finally stomp on God's enemies, Jesus fell silent. And he went off script, and he started to write a new future for us all. See here, Jesus seems to be offering a vision of a world made right where God's favor and affection could be made a reality without needing divine judgment and violence to make it happen. Which is an imagination of what it means to be paradoxical in the scriptures, where the need for justice and the truth of God's mercy, how these things come together in the body and the life and the message of Jesus, which feels like a message our world needs right now. Because it's a message that's carried in the hearts and the work of people like you that place Jesus' embodiment of justice and nonviolence at the center.
But let me just say that this is not the only place where I think Jesus helps us know how to read the Psalms. See, there's this other familiar story, and in it, Jesus draws on the ancient Hebrew poets. And it's right at the end of his life, during his execution actually, where the gospels record that Jesus was nailed to a cross between two thieves, and they had been hanging there for a few hours. And we read the sky begins to darken, and there's this eerie stillness around those who were there. And in the middle of the afternoon, Jesus cries out.
And Mark records in his gospel that these are the only words that Jesus has in his final moments where he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Which some of you may know is a direct quote or reciting of Psalm 22, which goes on to ask the divine, why are you so far from saving me? Why are you far from the words that I roar, the Hebrew literally says. Because this is no quiet complaint. The ancient poet is screaming at God.
I cry out day by day and you do not answer, and night by night and I cannot rest. And guess what? I think we have a tendency to read this story and hear Jesus' language with a thick theological overlay, which dulls us to a couple things, unfortunately. First, there's the potency of the whole poem that Jesus is using with his dying breath. And second, how profoundly truthful Jesus is here.
This is no pious incantation. This is not a moment between divine parent and child. This is a human being like so many others, roaring in the face of imperial violence and relational isolation, and in my opinion, existential crisis because he'd been unjustly accused and abandoned by loved ones and ignored by bystanders, all while carrying the image of the merciful divine so faithfully. And in this moment, Jesus shows us how to read the most problematic pieces of our Bibles, how to read the most challenging parts of our own stories. Yes, because he draws on poetry to say what must be said, but also because he tells us something profound about the divine.
That when faced with the prospect of separation from God's self, God chose solidarity with us. Unlike other tales of ancient gods and heroes that were aloof and removed from the earth in showing us God's self awareness in being lost and forgotten and forsaken, these verses reveal that no place of brokenness in us or our world, no violence brought to bear on helpless bodies, no crushing of souls and hearts can ever take us to a place that God has not been. Because when we tell the story of God and Christ, we tell a different kind of divine story, one far more poetic than we could comprehend, where justice for the poor and the oppressed becomes our language, in advocacy, in mutuality, and in efforts you make each and every day, where all cries for mercy find their echo and are justified in Jesus helplessly taking on all our brokenness, where Jesus' use of poetry gives us the words we need for what we cannot change. Words that say, bring me your chaos, your contradiction, and your paradox. Bring me your tired heart and hands that fight for justice.
Bring me all that life has shattered and left behind. I know that place, and I'll meet you there, and I'll make all things new. So my prayer is that you would be found by poetic words this week, that you would hear the voice of longing deep inside you and the voices of truth and wonder that are all around. May you find that the justice you seek and the mercy you long for are found in Jesus' peaceful and humble way, born out in the simple actions you take to help and confront and hold and comfort. And may you discover how in Jesus, the divine stands in solidarity with whatever confusion and chaos you might be facing, giving you words and holding you close right now and in the days to come.
Let's pray. Gracious God, We are present now in the mystery of how wide and how broad this story you've laid out for us is. We're also present to the mystery of how that story comes to us and how it picks us up and it carries us. But we also do confess that the story being with us and near us does not take away all the chaos and the contradiction. In fact, these words that we have, they seem to sometimes stir up that paradox.
And in one way, we are thankful for this because we see in this story a telling that is honest and true where we are each found, where all the ins and outs, the valleys, and the mountains of our experience, they are seen and known, and they are held. And we also acknowledge that in this story, we see in Jesus your solidarity with us. And for this, we give you thanks. Give us courage and grace to do the work of truth telling. Give us mercy for ourselves and those we meet.
For the sake of a world made new, we pray. In the name of Christ, our hope. Amen.