2 Lent

 

March 13, 2022

 Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Luke 13.31-35

 + I read a fascinating article just recently in Christianity Today.

 Some of you might have read it as well.

 It is an article about Putin and the invasion of Ukraine.

 And it was timely not only for the events that were taking place, but also because, in the days after the invasion, I heard from many of you and others came to me and ask about what to do with their anger and frustration over these events.

 One person—one of our proxy members—asked bluntly and honestly: “Is it wrong for me to pray for Putin’s death?”

 It’s an important question.

 And it’s one that makes my pacifist blood turn cold.

 Within a few hours of that query from this person and before I could answer, I happened to see this Christianity Today article floating around Facebook.

 The article is entitled:

 Go Ahead. Pray for Putin’s Demise.

The imprecatory psalms give us permission to push boldly against evil.

TISH HARRISON WARREN|

 Warren writes from a sense of helplessness many of us are experiencing right now.

 We are dealing with a sense of real helplessness in the face of this oppression and blatant violence.

 We are watching with wringing hands as an invading army is killing innocent people.

 And we simply don’t know what to do.

 Well, Warren says, she actually did do something.

 She began praying

 “Each morning,” she wrote, “I’m praying Psalm 7:14–16 with Vladimir Putin in mind: “Behold, the wicked man conceives evil and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends” (ESV).”

 Psalm 7 is one of the so-called imprecatory psalms

 She writes, “An imprecation is a curse. The imprecatory psalms are those that call down destruction, calamity, and God’s judgment on enemies … I am often uncomfortable with the violence and self-assured righteousness found in these kinds of psalms.”

 “These psalms express our outrage about injustice unleashed on others, and they call on God to do something about it.

“I strongly tend toward Christian nonviolence and pacifism. But I recognize that in the past, there have been times when calls to peace have been based in a naïve understanding of human evil.”

Which is where many of us are as well in these dark, violent days.

 “The imprecatory psalms name evil. They remind us that those who have great power are able to destroy the lives of the weak with seeming impunity. This is the world we live in. We cannot simply hold hands, sing “Kumbaya,” and hope for the best. Our hearts call out for judgment against…wickedness… We need words to express our indignation at this evil.

“Those of us who long for lasting peace cannot base that hope on an idea that people are inherently good and therefore unworthy of true judgment. Instead, we find our hope in the belief that God is at work in the world, and [God] is as real—more real—than evil.

 “We hope that God will enact true and ultimate judgment… Very often in the imprecatory psalms, we are asking that people’s evil actions would ricochet back on themselves. We are not praying that violence begets more violence or that evil starts a cycle of vengeance or retaliation. But we are praying that people would be destroyed by their own schemes …

 Or, in my own understanding of all of this, I who truly believe that the chickens always come home to roost, simply pray that God will simply bring those chickens home to roost sooner than later.

 And that in some real way, it will truly matter.

 Warren ends her article in this way:

 “If you’re like me and you gravitate to the seemingly more compassionate, less violent parts of Scripture, these kinds of prayers can be jarring. But we who are privileged, who live far from war and violence, risk failing to take evil and brutality seriously enough.

“I still pray, daily and earnestly, for Putin’s repentance. I pray that Russian soldiers would

lay down their arms and defy their leaders. But this is the moment to take up imprecatory prayers as well. This is a moment when I’m trusting in God’s mercy but also in [God]’s righteous, loving, and protective rage.”

We have to recognize the fact that there is violence in this world.

 Some of us here have been victims of actual violence in our own lives.

 And to be on the receiving end of violence is a horrible thing.

 Violence can be expressed in multiple ways, not just in physical ways but also through intimidation, bullying and downright terror.

 There’s no getting around violence in our lives.

 We see it in the news.

 And we are most certainly seeing it in Ukraine right now.

 Some of us grew up with violence in our lives.

 Many of you have heard the stories I tell on a regular basis of those teenagers my siblings who grew up with in West Fargo in the late 1970s were brutally and horrifically murdered.

 Also a story I don’t share very often is the story from around that same time of a dearly beloved friend of my family who was murdered by her husband in New Mexico in 1978.

 As a young child, those events scarred me.

 They affected me.

 And I have grown up, even here in this seemingly protected part of the country, knowing full-well that violence happens, and it happens more often than not to people who never deserved that violence.

 Even today, in our scriptures readings, we get some violent images.

 First, let’s take a look at the reading from Genesis.

 In it, we find God making a covenant with Abram (soon to be called Abraham).

 God commands Abram to sacrifice these different animals, to cut them in half and to separate them.

 Violent and strange, yes.

 But the really strange part of the reading is the smoking fire pot and the flaming torch passing between the pieces.

 If we don’t know the back story—if we don’t understand the meaning of the cut up animals—then the story makes little sense.

 It’s just another gruesome, violent story from the Hebrew scriptures.

 But if we examine what covenant is all about, then the story starts taking on a new meaning.

 Covenant of course is not a word we hear used often anymore.

 In fact, none of us use it except when talking about religious things.

 But a covenant is very important in the scriptures.

 A covenant is a binding agreement.

 And when one enters into a covenant with God, essentially that bound agreement is truly bound.

 In the days of Abram, when one made a covenant with someone, it was common practice for that person entering the agreement to cut up an animals and then to stand in the middle of the cut-up pieces.

 Essentially what they were saying by doing so was: “let this happen to me if I break our covenant.”

 Let this violence come upon me if I break what we have sworn.

 What we find happening in our reading this morning is that it is not Abram standing in the midst of those cut-up animals.

 Rather it is God.

 God is saying to Abram: “my word is good. If this relationship between the two of us I breaks down it is not I who breaks the covenant.”

 Then, we come to our Gospel reading.

 Here too, we find a sense of impending violence.

 The Pharisees ominously come to tell Jesus that he is in danger from Herod.

 This is real danger.

 Life-threatening danger.

 And how does Jesus respond to this danger and impending violence?

 He is not concerned at all over Herod or even the danger that he himself is in.

 His concern is for Jerusalem—for the city which, no doubt, was in sight as he was speaking.

 A city that in a couple of decades will be destroyed and its inhabitants killed.

 His concern is for the city he is about to enter and in which he knows he will meet his death.

 His violent death. 

 As he does so, Jesus does something at this moment that really is amazing.

 He laments.

 He uses words similar to those found in the imprecatory psalms.

 He uses poetry.

 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

 It is beautiful.

 And it is powerful.

 It’s incredible poetry.

 Psalms like this are important.

 It is important to be honest with our selves before God about our feelings of anger, of justice, or fear.

 And these psalms often give voice in a way we, polite nice Christian people that we are, often can’t.

 It’s sometimes all right to complain.

 It’s sometimes all right to wish bad things on bad people.

 Lamenting is one of those things we don’t like to think about as Christians.

 After all, it is a form of complaining.

 And we don’t like to complain.

 In this part of the country, we find people who might face bitter winters and harsh summers, might make their way through floods and droughts and pandemics and rising gas prices, but who don’t ever complain much.

 We, for the most part, shrug our shoulders and soldier on.

 And when it comes to our relationship with God, we certainly never think about complaining to God.

 But the fact is, although we find it hard to admit at times, we do actually despair occasionally.

 Even if we might not actually say it, we sometimes secretly do find ourselves crying out in despair, saying, if to no one else than ourselves, the words from our psalm today:

 “Deliver me not into the hands of my adversaries.”

 Let me tell you—that has often been my prayer.

 I have people who don’t like me. I have enemies.

 “Deliver me not in the hands of those who hate me.”

 It’s good, honest language and it’s good to be honest about those negatives feelings we feel occasionally.

 It’s a strange moment when, as we examine our scriptures readings for today, and we ask ourselves: who do I relate to the most from our scriptures, that we find ourselves relating more to the cut-up animals than anyone else.

 Let me tell you, those people in Ukraine today can relate to those cut-up animals.

 It’s hard to be in such a place.

 It’s hard to realize: people out there hate me, or don’t like me, or want to do me real violence.

 So, what do we do in those moments?

 Well, most of us just simply close up.

 We put up a wall and we swallow that fear and maybe that anger and we let it fester inside us.

 For the most part, we tend to deny it.

 But what about those feelings in relationship to God?

 Well, again, we probably don’t recognize our fear or our anger or our pain before God nor do we bring them before God.

 And that is where Jesus, in today’s Gospels, and those imprecatory Psalms come in.

 It is in those moments when we don’t bring our fear, our anger and our frustration before God, that we need those verses like the one Tish Warren writes about.

 When we look at what Jesus is saying in today’s Gospel and what the psalmist is saying today’s Psalm, we realize that, for them, it was natural to bring everything before God.

 It didn’t matter what it was.

 Certainly, Jesus, in his honesty before God, wished bad things for Herod.

 And I think this is the best lesson we can learn from our Gospel reading today.

 Jesus is letting us see his fear and his sadness.

 Jesus is letting us see the fear he has in knowing that he, in a sense, has become the sacrifice that must be cut in two as part of the covenant God has made with us.

 He is letting us see him for what he is about to be, a victim of violence.

 In fact, Jesus lays it all out before God and us.

 He wails and complains and lays himself bare before God. 

 He is blatantly honest in his lamenting.

 The fact is: sometimes we do fear and despair.

 Sometimes we do want to pray to God,

 “Hide not your face from me…”

 Sometimes we do want to pray for the death of a dictator or a despot.

 It is in those sometimes awful moments, that it is completely all right to complain to God.

 It is all right to vent and open ourselves completely to God.

 Because, the important thing here is not how we are praying or even what we are praying for.

 It is important that, even in our fear, in our pain, in our despair, in our horror at the gruesomeness and violence we find in this world, that we come to God.

 We come before God as an imperfect person, full of insecurities, exposed and vulnerable.

 Take what it is hurting you and bothering you and release it.

 Let it out before God. Be honest with God.

 Because God knows.

 God stood in the midst of those cut-up animals.

 God has stood in the midst of that violence.

 Because, as I say again and again, just because you pray for it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. 

God is not Santa Claus.

 In this case, it’s not the outcome that’s important.

 It’s the actual praying that’s important.

 And what we might sometimes find in those moments of complaining and ranting is that the words coming out of our mouths are not ugly, bitter words at all.

 But sometimes the words coming out of our mouths in those moments of despair are beautiful poetry.

 Sometimes, even in those moments, God takes our fear-filled words and turns them into diamonds in our mouths.

 See what we find in this morning’s Psalm.

 After all that complaining, we find the Psalmist able to sing,

 “O tarry and await the LORD’s pleasure;

be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; wait patiently for the Lord.”

 See. Diamonds. 

 So, when we pray these psalms together and when we come across those scriptures full of violence that might take us by alarm, or when we may want bad things to happen to Vladimir Putin, recognize in them what they truly are—honest prayers before God.

 Let us follow the example of Jesus, who even in the face of violence and death, was still able to open his heart and his soul in song and poetry.

 More importantly, let us, as Jesus himself did over and over again in his life,  pray those psalms when we are afraid or angry or frustrated.

 Let the Psalms help us to release our own anger to the God who loves us and knows us more completely than anyone else.

 In the shattered, cut-open pieces of our lives, God, as a bright light, passes back and forth.

 I can tell you from first-hand experience that even in that “deep and terrifying darkness” God appears to us as a light.

 All we have to do is recognize God in that midst of that darkness.

 And in doing so, all we can sometimes do is open our mouths and let the poems within us sing out to our God.