The Power of the Broken
Texts: Lamentations 1.1-6, 3.1-33; Psalm 137; Luke
17.5-10
In 586 BCE the armies of Babylon the Great swept down from the north
and sacked the city of Jerusalem, capital of the monarchy of
Judah. The great wall which surrounded the city was breached and
pulled to the ground. Both soldiers and civilians were put to the
sword. Women were raped, children were beaten to death. The
city’s religious and political elite - priests and courtiers - were
shackled together and carted away into exile. And the two great symbols
of Judah’s proud heritage - the twin towers of temple and palace - were
desecrated entirely, and torn to the ground.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a prosperous citizen of this great
city. You have become accustomed to thinking of yourself and your
fellow-citizens as the chosen ones of God, the nation rescued by God
from slavery in order to become the light of the world. You believe
that the temple and its priests are hallowed and holy, the sacred
conduits by which God addresses and blesses the people. You
believe that the king is heir to a messianic promise: that he is the
anointed of God, who will always be there to protect the city from her
enemies. Consider, then, the horror you feel as the Babylonian
armies gather in the valley below. Imagine your shock and
disbelief as the walls are breached and your countrymen put to the
sword, as the priests, the king, and the noble families are carried off
in chains. Imagine, if you will, the howl of despair that begins
in your gut as the chosen people of God, with their noble law and their
liturgy, are returned to the slavery from which they came.
Imagine being that citizen who is left behind in the rubble, amidst the
ruin of a disgraced city, the citizen who speaks in these opening words
from Lamentations:
How lonely sits the city that once was
full of people!
How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal . . .
The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to the festivals;
all her gates are desolate, her priests groan;
her young girls grieve and her lot is bitter.
Consider your bitterness and the overwhelming swell of your vengeance
as one of those taken to Babylon, as one asked to sing a song of Hebrew
worship for the entertainment of your captors. Today's psalm
reflects on exactly that circumstance:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat
down and wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung our harps . . .
How could we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? . . .
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the
rock!
Consider the swirling blackness of your desolation. The
shock. The loss. The utter destruction of the dream which
was Judah. The words of Lamentations are devastating:
I am one who has seen affliction under
the rod of God's wrath;
he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light . . .
he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation;
he has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago.
What does one do when such a thing has happened: when the
illusion of safety and prosperity has been shown to be just that - an
illusion; when that sense of election to a sacred mission and destiny
has been shattered, and the God who promised to protect seem suddenly
to have become the enemy?
Well, one wonders if these are the kinds of questions which the
Americans are asking themselves at the moment. And not only the
Americans, but anyone who before Sept 11, 2001, saw themselves immune
to the terrors of the 6 o’clock news; or who saw the Western project of
civilisation as somehow ordained and supported by God. Isn’t it
curious how God is always on one’s own side, rather than on the side of
those ‘others’, those people of different language, culture and
belief. Isn’t it curious how the God of universal justice
becomes, in the imagination of a threatened people, a warrior god (with
a small ‘g’) who takes our side in battle of our tribe against theirs?
. . . But I am getting ahead of myself. The question I
really wanted to ask today was this: When the world has fallen
apart and the foundations of safety and certainty have been shaken, how
should the person of faith respond? Hear that again: how should
the person of faith respond?
Well, there are a number of options, really. And we have seen all
of them in the last few years. But they are also there in the
Scriptures, as the people of faith in an ancient culture reflected on a
similar question to ours.
The first kind of response one can make when the world has fallen
apart, is to go looking for someone to punish. Here one feels
that someone else is responsible for what has happened, and justice
demands that they be punished in proportion to the damage they have
inflicted. You know, ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a
tooth’. Now, let us not underestimate the incredible power of
this response, the emotional and, yes, spiritual energy which underlies
its pervasiveness in human experience. You see, the desire for
revenge actually finds its genesis in a genuinely religious impulse -
the instinct for justice. ‘If God is just’, the argument goes,
‘then what has happened to me must be paid for. The guilty must,
themselves, receive the wounds they have inflicted upon the
innocent. Only then will justice be satisfied’. The impulse
for justice stands behind many of the vengeful outbursts we find in our
Scriptures, including those lines of terror found in Psalm 137:
O daughter Babylon, you devastator,
happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the
rock!
Why would an Islamic man hijack an airplane and crash it into a
building full of people? Why would he blow himself up in a Bali
nightclub? Because he is driven by the religious impulse for
justice which is deeply embedded in all the Abrahamic religions,
including Christianity. ‘The Christians have killed and oppressed
my people for decades’, he says to himself, ‘and so I will make myself
the instrument of God’s justice. I will kill and terrorise the
Christians’. Now, before I move on, I simply want to acknowledge
the sheer power of this logic for every human being. When, as a
child, someone hits or teases you in the playground, you feel hurt, you
feel wronged. And it is our instinct for justice— the eye for the
eye— that motivates us to respond in kind. Who of us can really
say that if our own children were maimed or abused, we would not feel
the same as the Psalmist? There is truth in these lines, even if
it is an uncomfortable truth for civilised, urbane, people to
countenance.
A second response that one might make when the world has been shattered
is that of a fall into sheer despair. The kind of despair which,
again, we find in the words of the Lamentations:
My soul is bereft of
peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;
So I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the
Lord’.
The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall!
My soul cannot escape these thoughts and is bowed down within me.
Anyone who suffers from depression, or anyone who has experienced a
significant bereavement, will know this feeling all too well. It
is what the Desert Fathers called acidie or ‘the noonday demon’.
A sense that creeps up upon you, even in the noonday of one’s powers,
at the apex of one’s ‘success’ in life, with a troubling
question: ‘What is all this worth, anyway. So, you’ve
achieved things, you’ve done a good turn for another, you’ve penetrated
some of the mysteries of life. SO WHAT! What does it really
matter? Everything passes away, like sands through your grasping
hand. And there IS NO GOD who holds and values all this in his
own hand and heart. It’s just an empty universe. In the
end, there is nothing! So why bother?’.
When the foundations are destroyed— whether by terrorists, or by
governments (as in the case of Aboriginal people in this country) or by
the simple bereavements of everyday life—it is sometimes very, very
difficult to see what the value of building them was all about in the
first place. And so one loses the will for anything. And
slips into despair. Now. Again I want to acknowledge the
sheer humanity of his response. The noonday demon is visited on
every human being, without care for religion, social standing or
race. No-one is immune, not even those who wrote the sacred words
of Scripture. The noon-day demon is part of our experience.
And the Scriptures acknowledge that with a startling realism.
But there is a third option for people of faith when their worlds have
been shattered. And that is the option which is hidden in that
very designation: the option we call ‘faith’. Now faith,
according to the gospel of Luke, is a fundamental belief and trust in
that which is impossible. It is to believe that a tree can uproot
itself from the ground, take a walk, and replant itself
elsewhere. It is to believe that the apparently ‘normal’ way of
things, the logic of the everyday, work-a-day world can be
fundamentally interrupted by a power which regards such things as far
from necessary. It is the power that we call “God”, or
“Grace”. Faith believes that the impossible is possible, that the
unthinkable is thinkable, that the power of love is stronger than the
power of death.
Now, listen to me, because this is important. Faith does not
accomplish this belief by simply denying those other two desires we
spoke of earlier, the desire for justice and the fall into
despair. No. Faith has never been about taking us out of
either the world or the bodies which we inhabit as human beings.
It has never been about our escaping, about fantasising ourselves
beyond the troubles we encounter in the midst of life. Anyone who
takes that particular path is kidding themselves. Faith, rather,
acknowledges the power of those two experiences but takes them in a
different direction. Faith identifies in both vengefulness and
despair a kind of holiness, a seed of the good and the hopeful, and
taking that seed into its care, waters and nurtures the seed until it
is grown to a joyful maturity.
Let me explain what I mean. Faith recognises within the desire
for vengefulness the holy seed which is a longing for justice.
But faith finds another way for justice to be fulfilled. Rather
than gathering all its power for a retaliatory strike, faith gives its
power into the hands of another power. The power of God.
Faith recognises that there is no-one who is righteous, not even
one; so that when someone attacks me, my desire for just
retaliation will inevitably be clouded my own sin, my own impurity of
heart, by the limits of my own vision. So that were I to respond
in kind, another kind of injustice would be accomplished. Evil
would be added to evil, and the kind of justice I long for would
certainly not be accomplished. In the words of Matthew Arnold,
there is no justice when all the combatants are soiled by evil.
Faith, therefore, longs for something which is impossible, and
recognises that the only one who may fulfil that longing is God.
A God of love and clear vision who may be trusted to interrupt the
logic of revenge and bring peace. Faith believes that the way to
tackle terror is to resist it with another kind of logic
altogether. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute
you”, said Jesus. Why? Because only God knows how to
accomplish the justice we long for.
Similarly with the experience of despair. Faith recognises that
there is a holy seed even in this experience. When we come to the
end of our powers, when our achievements have been destroyed or seem
useless in the grand scheme of things, faith gently reminds us that the
life of joy and peace for all is built not by ourselves, but by
God. Even death and despair are the angels of God. They
come to teach us that unless the Lord builds the house, the building
will not stand. That unless we empty ourselves of all ambition
and desire, the desires and ambitions of God will never find the
necessary space in our hearts to take root and grow. In one of
the most pervasive religious narratives of our time, the Star Wars
films, the Force is unable to do its work unless the Jedi knight
disciplines his own anxieties and desires. The Force will not
flow unless the Jedi lets go of both his fears and his desires.
All that is self and ego must be surrendered so that the will of the
Force may be done. Now, this is more that just
science-fiction. The makers of Star Wars nicked this insight from
the great religious traditions of the world, Christianity
included. The mystics, the writer of Luke included, teach us that
we are servants of a power which is not our own. That we must do
what is proper to servants, the will of our master, no more and no
less. And that means letting go and letting God. For, in
the end, it is only the soul which acts in concert with God who will
survive and prosper.
The good news of the gospel is this. When the world falls apart
and the foundations are shaken, God cares. God recognises the
pain, the despair, and the anger which goes with that experience.
And God does not leave us on our own. God reaches down into our
confusion and gifts us with faith—a belief that the inevitable is not
inevitable, and that the impossible is indeed possible. That when
our own powers are at and end, and when we are not competent even to do
justice, that God’s power of love will yet prevail, that God will
accomplish the justice and the peace we long for. If only we will
surrender. If only we will have faith.
In the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—as in the beginning, so
now, and forever. Amen.
Garry
Deverell
18th Sunday After Pentecost, 2004
back to homily index