Homily preached at Morning Prayer in St Luke’s Chapel
Berkeley Divinity School, New Haven, Connecticut
November 10, 2017 / Friday after Pentecost XXII
Let them be wiped out of the book of the living, and not be written among the righteous.
If, whether out of curiosity or pure devotion, you were studying the lectionary in your spare time this morning, you will have noticed that this verse and its neighbors were put in parentheses by the compilers of the Prayer Book. These imprecatory verses – that is, verses containing a spoken curse – and those that come up elsewhere in the Psalter are usually made optional, and I think we can understand why. They are unpleasant, they seem ungodly and of questionable appropriateness for reading in church, and the minds behind the lectionary evidently felt it might be better just to leave them out. They are not alone: centuries of reformers of various stripes also have tried to do away with them.
Well, my friends, I think we in this room have sufficient theological and constitutional fortitude to hear these verses out, to sing them together and face down the issue of what to make of such spiritual ugliness.
Lay to their charge guilt upon guilt, and let them not receive your vindication.
Part of the virtue of reading these verses is that they are anthropologically correct, even if they feel theologically troubling. The human desire for the settling of accounts, moral and otherwise, has deep roots. Consider the number of terms we have for it: is it not usually satisfying when someone gets his comeuppance; or his just deserts; or what’s coming to him? If that weren’t enough, the Germans have given us the word schadenfreude, which describes the instinctive pleasure we feel when someone does get what’s coming to him. When we are down and out, like the Psalmist is this morning, what could be better than a reversal for the person who put us there? Serves him right, we might say.
Pour out your indignation upon them, and let the fierceness of your anger overtake them.
James Cone writes, however, that “Our intention is not to make the oppressors the slaves, but to transform humanity.”[1] This is a good thought, but it is far from intuitive; no wonder Cone spends 225 pages – plus footnotes – trying to convince his readers of it. How many of us would have the good grace to say, in extremis, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do”? I’m not sure I would. How many of us, reading the news in yesterday’s Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senator from Alabama, is a serial sexual abuser of women and girls as young as 14[2]… how many of us read that and said, “Father, forgive”? I’m sure I said something more like, “I hope he gets what’s coming to him.” And we know that he may not.
I have grown weary with my crying; my throat is inflamed; my eyes have failed from looking for my God.
Sometimes our only recourse seems to be to shake our fists in the air and curse our enemies. It is a very human response to human fallenness, and not only that, but also to the sense that God is absent, that the wicked are running amok with impunity, that Sin and Death are having their day at the expense of the good and the innocent. And so we get Psalm 69, its litany of woes, curses and all, and we are right to read it in its fullness. It might even feel good to do so. At the same time, we are forced to recognize the ultimate inadequacy of its imprecations. Wishing destruction on our enemies, as C.S. Lewis has written, is almost “naïve,” as if “such a simple remedy for human ills had not occurred to the Almighty.”[3]
In fact we know that God has thought of something better, which is the “the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, … the means of grace, and … the hope of glory.” The rectification of human pain, human injustice, and human suffering is accomplished not through the piling up of curses, but through the righteousness of God. We struggle mightily against every form of oppression, and yet we know that the sign of all things being made new is not schadenfreude; the sign is an empty tomb, and a question that makes a such a mockery of curses as the lectionary’s parentheses could scarcely dream: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?” The Psalmist knows this. Even in the midst of his troubles, the curses do not get the final say; they make way at the last for a hymn to the power of God to set right every wrong, rooted in the sure confidence that in the final day, God’s justice will prevail over every sadness.
The afflicted shall see and be glad; you who seek God, your heart shall live. For the LORD listens to the needy, and his prisoners he does not despise.
AMEN.
[1] James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997), 199.
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/woman-says-roy-moore-initiated-sexual-encounter-when-she-was-14-he-was-32/2017/11/09/1f495878-c293-11e7-afe9-4f60b5a6c4a0_story.html
[3] C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2017), 24.
That Holy Fellowship 