(in the series Psalms in the Key of Easter)
Texts for Sunday, May 8, 2005
Psalm 68 1-10, 32-35; Luke 8: 19-25
We bring to a close today our Eastertide meditations on the Psalms. For the most part, the words we have attended to fed the soul as her fears and her hopes are transformed within God’s refuge. That you are blessed so that you may bless others–this too we have heard, as clear as the shepherd’s voice. But the Psalms hold still much more. Israel and the Church have sought to live with the Psalms not by favorites, here and there, but all together. And the Psalms speak to all together–to a whole world. Today, we hear an ancient song to God, merciful and mighty. It opens, “Let God rise up. Let God’s enemies be scattered. Let those who hate him flee before him.”
So forceful, this image! A warrior God, dividing the wicked and the righteous. Many in our generation have grown leery of such power and such texts. God is not male, we object. The God we want to love cannot love war, or destroy the work of his hands. What people are utterly wicked? Who are so righteous sin does not touch them? Hadn’t we best file such a psalm on the shelf with ancient history, when primitive people imagined their gods making weather and war for the price of burned bulls?
Read some history with me. In antiquity, the gods usually had particular jobs. In Canaan, the god called Yahweh was a war god; he gave strength to armies, or withheld the victory. The god of fertility was called Baal. Baal made wombs full. Baal showered the land with rains to feed the flocks and the people–or held back the clouds in anger. Against this pattern, there came into Canaan’s land long ago, in the mystery of the fullness of time, a tribe of wanderers who began to experience their God in an ungodly way. They felt deep deep down that the many gods hardly existed, but were mere shadows beside one God only; one and the same God, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob: Yahweh.
In Psalm 68, you can hear the sound of this new wisdom still dawning. “Sing to God. Lift up a song to him who rides upon the clouds–his name is Yahweh!–be exultant before him.” God who rides the clouds down, making rain in abundance–his name is not Baal, his name is Yahweh. Not in the hands of two gods, but in God alone is all creation held. Listeners, open your imagination ear to sense the wonder of this discovery.
For a person who imagines the world controlled by many gods, the world is split into shards, like a government bureaucracy where every division claims a little authority and sheds a lot of responsibility. Having many gods, an unhappy believer has always some other god to go to; always the possibility of a new ruling by a more powerful office, a bigger god; and always someone else to blame. If I can’t get happiness from my mate, then I’ll get it at work. If not at work, then with the boys. If not with them, then make much much money. If that fails, then lets go to the game. If we lose, let’s go to war. Having many gods–it’s not so ancient. It just means laying bets for happiness on many different numbers all at the same time while the wheel of time is spinning. Having many gods is the normal pattern of human thought. Being told as a child to make bedtime prayers to “G-O-D” does not inoculate the ego against polytheism, for conventional believers in God may have a hard time seeing how their hopes and fears are scattered all over the rocks of life.
For such a one, may our psalm sing like a lullaby. “Sing to God, sing praises to God’s name; lift a song to the one riding on the clouds–whose name is Yahweh.” There is no such thing as a happiness not given by your God. There is no appeal to a different office. It is not true that of the two or three or four different doors through which you might walk your life, only one is right and you must guess right or suffer. Not so! For I am your God, and I am with you always, even to the end of the age. The world is not split. What is, is. To meet what is, and to accept it or change it: these are your choices in the power of one God. Let God arise! From our sleep in the beds of many gods, let us arise and see our God.
Shema Yisrael: Yahweh elohenu, Yahweh echad. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God; Yahweh: One. (Deuteronomy 6.5) This is the great call to the people of Israel, inscribed on a little parchment and set in the doorpost of every Jewish home.
The consequence of having one God dawns upon us slowly: God is equally God for each of God’s creatures. If we are split from the least of them, we are split from you, O God; and we have shattered your creation. O father of orphans, you are father and mother for all who are ruined off their land by power and wealth–in India; in El Salvador; in Mexico, fleeing north for a job and food for their children; in America’s migrant labor fields. You are their God. If my happiness and comfort depend on my cheap coffee and sweet orange, dropped from their sweat and blood into my careless shopping cart, then my prayer was to a lesser god, a god of smooth wages, a god of green groceries–but these were not the blessing of God for a whole world.
O protector of widows, cut our heart and sharpen our wit for witness to all the widows we have made in Iraq, and all the orphans. They are thousands. They are yours, who live in you only, O Allah-named. Make them ours also, we–who in arrogance and ignorance bombed their living room and tossed their nation into chaos when we made you into a war god. But you are one, and we have not confessed it. “Create in us a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within us.”
O houser of the homeless, how shall the desolated come home if we do not build them their home by your help and ask to dwell with them? How shall I come home to you, Yahweh Echad, God of one and all, if my happiness leans on the pretty walls and villages I wall myself behind to keep away from all whom you love, O love? Make me over new. Bring me forth: a child of one God, over all.
O bringer of the bound from their fetters, even prisoners cry to you out of the depths. I was happy hating them, and hating my own secret sins, too, dungeoned away in memory. Yet now, O cherished of the chained, one God of many names, I see that I have hammered out the shackles, I shut the iron doors that cut me off from them, and from myself, and from you, O freer from fear. You are One. Everything is one. Only those who turn from you for peace apart are parched, O rain in abundance sent abroad on the just and on the unjust.
Sing to God, all kingdoms of the earth. Let God arise! Our enmity was in our mind, not yours. O rider in the heavens, the ancient heavens, you were never other than this. At your call, we have changed, we have at last listened. But you are the same, and your years without end. Now listen! For God is sending out his voice anew. This is how God gives power and strength to God’s people. Listen!
You have listened. Ancient as this psalm no doubt is, steeped as it is in the world-view of early civilization, whose every conjuring of the powers of gods invoked violence, still there pours out of this psalm, even deeper than its awe of power, a heart of compassion and mercies–God of the womb, mother God. (The Hebrew word racham means “womb” but is often translated “compassion.”) It seems hardly surprising that when the full sense for one God dawned on the ancient mind, the first union of divine attributes borne into their mind was the union of male and female principles, of justice and mercy made one. But even then, though they brought many names for God, they did not bring “mother.” Even they who knew Light and Dark were gifts from one hand would not say “God called the light Day, and she called the darkness Night.” This was for a later day. In the 1300’s, it came to the mystic Julian of Norwich:
We know that all our mothers bear us for pain and for death. And what is that but our true Mother, Jesus; he alone bears us for joy and for endless life . . . He carries us within him in love and travail . . . This fair, lovely word ‘mother’ is so sweet and so kind in itself that it cannot truly be said of anyone or to anyone except of Jesus and to Jesus, who is the true Mother of life and of all things. For though it may be so that our bodily bringing to birth is only little, humble, and simple in comparison with our spiritual bringing to birth, still it is Jesus who does it in the creatures by whom it is done. (pp. 298-299)
In the 1970’s and 1980’s, God’s name as “mother” began to dawn in many, many minds. Roberta Bondi, professor of church history at the Candler School of Theology, was overwhelmed by this Word as her rigorous academic work among men took wing in strong rationality. Still some grief shadowed her success until a vision came to her of a “tall, dignified woman dressed all in brown . . . surrounded by all the animals of the earth.” A voice came to her inwardly: “This, too, is the image of God.”
Now I understood the reason for my grief. To know myself as a woman in the image of God, to know God as Mother, and to know my own mother as a window into God: these three are inseparable. If one is implausible to the heart, the other two are as well . . . [I came to] know my mother to be the image of God [for even in poverty] my mother recognized broken pieces of furniture for what they were and she paid for their re-creation by going hungry. In the same way, God our mother recognizes the beauty within all the broken and discarded parts of ourselves; and, if we can believe scripture, for our repair and re-creation, God pays everything God has. (pp.107-109)
As long as we had thought God “he” we were worshiping many gods, split, rigid in justice, ineffective in love. Among the loud bleating of angry, unhappy Christians in our land, many worship separate gods in ignorance that becomes arrogance, separating justice and mercy. Do they not see that no one passes this way but by God’s womb and her compassion? If we have cut the womb out of our God, maybe the Baby is cut out too. What is justice without love but the excitement of power? What is love without justice but keeping children children? Now that you have know the voice of God the mother and God the father of orphans, protector of widows, dwelling for the desolate, home at last for the prisoner–now what will you do?
Soon after Jesus with a breath blew open the doors of his family to admit any, saying “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it,” he got into a boat, the story says, and asked to cross over to the other side of the lake. So they put out, and Jesus fell into sleep. When God’s Word must break upon a new shore, on the other side of what you already know, God’s Word leaves the literal to-and-fro of wakeful thought and rests deep, deep. Then come storm and strife to the busy mind; doubting and fighting and fear amid bitter partisans. Our unspiritual nature, which goes after many gods, cries out, “Master, Master, we are perishing.” And the Word wakes and rebukes the sea. And then rebukes us: “Where is your faith?” Let God arise! Let God arise within you. Whoever hears the Word of God and does it, he is my mother, she is my brother. He bears me forth to quiet the harsh winds. She orders the seas of injustice to settle. Where is your faith in this troubled and violent world? Let God arise!
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, May 2005
Recent Comments