Real life has a way of being able to reach the heart that fiction cannot. I thought of that this last week as I watched little Marcus Cirillo go in the back door of the funeral car, hugging his bear and holding the Maple Leaf in his hand, after tributes and farewells had been given to his father. Somehow the pathos of that moment surpassed Greek tragedy, and there was nothing you could write from the imagination that could conjure up such profound feelings of sadness and disappointment. I thought of the young lad’s father, and I thought that over the last week his name has been on the lips of so many, and yet how easily and how quickly such names recede into the vault of time and are soon forgotten. Maybe for one, possibly two or three generations, the name that we remember now will hardly be thought of at all.
And so it goes for the tributes to so many, for indeed throughout the ages many have given their lives in various forms of service, or have been victims of violence, and are remembered for a while, to be forgotten in the mists of time. Sara Teasdale, the great poet, suggested the very same thing happens with war, and that the song of creation continues even when the names of those who have been on this earth have passed and forgotten. She wrote these sad but wonderful words:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools, singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara captures the raw emotion people feel when it appears that they will be forgotten.
No one had descended into that more than the psalmist in our Psalm this morning. The psalmist says, “O God, my God, why have you deserted me? Why have you rejected me?” For the psalmist, it was as if in this universe he was alone, even alone before the presence of Almighty God. This Psalm has reverberated throughout the ages, for who has not read, as the psalmist read and thought as the psalmist thought, and at some point in their life said, “God, O my God, why have you abandoned me? Why have you rejected me? Why am I alone on this earth?”
For the young person who goes on the computer in desperate search of a job on Workopolis, and wonders whether there is any future for him, he might not put it so poetically as the psalmist, but deep down in his soul, he is asking, “Why, why have you abandoned me?” For the lover who has been jilted to the spouse that has been abused, they might not declare it with quite the same passion, but they nevertheless feel it in their heart, “Why have you abandoned me, O God?” For the parents of Justin Bourque, who murdered those Mounties in Moncton and left widows and orphans, can you imagine his parents, seeing what they had produced do, and in their hearts I am sure they are saying, “O God, O God, why have you rejected me?” For those who suffer from chronic pain, who get up every day knowing there will be no release from the pain: “O God, why have you rejected me?” The psalmist speaks for us all!
This Psalm, that was probably one of a pair of Psalms that were written as one, Psalm 42 and Psalm 43, goes to the very heart of our humanity. As Walter Brueggemann, the great scholar who at the Lester Randall series this week said, if you look and see how many times “me” and “my” and “I” are used, you can see the passion and the pain of the psalmist: “My God, why have you abandoned me?” It appears to be a plea from the heart. We don’t know what has happened. Maybe it was a Levitical priest who thought he could no longer go to the Temple and worship his God, and felt abandoned. Maybe it was somebody who felt that his leader had let them down, and that Israel was lost, and that there was no hope. We do not know the exact reason why the psalmist wrote; we just know what the psalmist wrote; and what the psalmist wrote was from the heart!
It wasn’t an empty cry. It was a cry that was the beginning of a conversation, a conversation with someone who the psalmist knew was listening – with God. It is no coincidence that St. Augustine at the beginning of his Confessions used Psalm 43 as the very heart of his own heart, when he declared “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” He knew that Psalm 43 was not then just a Psalm of despair but a Psalm of hope. It was a conversation with God. It was a personal statement of what was going on in the psalmist’s life. It was passionate and real. It was still, “O God, my God, why have you rejected me?”
The universe is not a void. It is not crying just from the depths. The psalmist is crying to God and that is why when I look at this Psalm I am struck more perhaps by the verbs than anything else. Three times the psalmist implores God to do something about the state of his being. He says, “Vindicate me, O God!” Vindicate me, show fact, be my magistrate, judge on my behalf. Why? It is because I cry out to you and I think you have rejected me. My enemies are all around me and everything seems to be falling apart, but I nevertheless still believe that you are just. I cry out to you and ask you to vindicate me precisely because your judgements are true and I cast myself on your judgement and place myself before your throne. I acknowledge that you are just. Rather than being a cry of despair, it is a cry of hope and trust. It understands that in this universe that the psalmist felt rejected him, there is still the just one, there is still the truth of God’s vindication.
I cannot think of any level of despair in the whole of human existence that would be greater than believing that there is no vindicator, to live as if there is no justice, that there is no final arbiter, that there is no one who can come to our aid, that everything is capricious and pernicious. For me, that would be the ultimate despair. But the ultimate hope is knowing that there is a vindicator, that there is one who is just, and one in whom we can place our trust. For the psalmist, he might have reached the bottom of his agony, but he hadn’t lost his faith. “Send, send me your truth and your grace and your light” writes the psalmist: “Not only are you the judge, not only are you the vindicator, you are the one who sends something to us.”
The psalmist was not alone. The psalmist knew that guidance of light and truth were there in a world that is so often self-absorbed and self-directed, in a world that so often believes that everything depends on us and that we are the final arbiters of what is and what is not. In the words of the psalmist, the comfort and in the correction, God sends God’s truth and God’s light. We are not alone even when we feel it. We are not alone even when it appears that we have been abandoned and rejected, and we have not in fact been left comfortless. As Jesus said to his disciples, “There is a Comforter who comes. There is One who is greater. There is the light and there is the truth and we will not be abandoned. We are not alone.”
There is a wonderful Hassidic parable. It goes like this. There was a man who went into the woods and got lost and was all alone. Suddenly, he sees in the distance another person coming towards him. He thinks to himself, “I will ask that other person how I can get out of here and be saved.” So, he goes up to the stranger in the forest, and he asks him, “Can you show me the way out?”
The stranger says, “I was hoping you would show me the way out. I have no idea how to get out of here.”
The two of them looked at each other and realized that it was as if they were abandoned. Then, the one said to the other, “But, this we do know, that the way that we have come is not the way to return, so we must find another path together.”
The psalmist sounds like he was lost in the woods. He felt, “My God, my God, you have rejected me. You have let me down. But he was not alone. They could not go back on the path that they had taken. They could not return to a place that they had been before. But, with God’s guidance and God’s light and God’s truth, they were not alone.
The psalmist pleads at the end, “Bring me.” Not only send your Spirit, not only vindicate me: “Bring me to the Holy mountain, bring me back to the Holy Temple where I can praise you. Return me to the place where the broken hearted go, where I can play on the harp and I can sing of your praises. Let me come to the place where I remember you, and where I know you will be worshipped and adored. Let me go to the place and being in that place, feel you and know you and be assured by you.” You see, the psalmist might have cried a third time, “O God, O God, why have you abandoned me?” But then, he says, “No, I have hope. I have hope that I will return to the place, the place where the broken hearted go.”
Many years ago, I saw something as pathetic as that boy getting in that funeral car this past week. It started out hundreds of years ago with the beginning of the nineteenth century. It began with an African, a Xhosa called Makana. He was a boy who had grown up under the tutelage of Christians, and had become a very devout follower of Jesus Christ. But he also realized that his own people were being oppressed by the British. Their land had been taken from them and so with others, they felt they should resist, but in resisting, they were mercilessly slaughtered.
Makana was arrested. He was shipped from the Eastern Cape in South Africa to Robben Island, which was even a prison in 1819. There, on Christmas Day, feeling led by God, he and a number of those that had been in prison, decided to swim to the shores for safety. He drowned. This great leader of his people, this man who had been shackled on an island, this man who had committed his life to Christ, had died. But for fifty years, at home in the Eastern Cape, people believed that Makana was going to come back. There is no way they believed that Makana could abandon them. But, he died. He had drowned.
A hundred and forty years later, Nelson Mandela said that Robben Island should be called Makana Island. The inmates in Robben Island prison created a soccer team called Makana FC, and under his name they played the game of soccer. Makana was hardly remembered. There were no monuments to him. He had slipped away in the vault of time.
Yet I realized ministering as I was as a young minister in a little town called Makana’s kop, Makana’s town, that there would be people who would disappear from worship, and after church they would walk into the hills. Realizing that quite a few of them would do this from time-to-time at key moments in the church year, I decided one day to follow them. I followed them to a hill in the distant north shores of the Indian Ocean, and there was a little monument, a little shrine made of stone with a few flowers. Inscribed on it was the name “Makana”. Hundreds of years later, they hadn’t forgotten him. Hundreds of years later, in the midst of the hatred of apartheid, they had not forgotten him. They were going to remember him no matter what.
I think that passion, that sense of remembrance was at the heart of the psalmist when he said, “Bring me back to the Temple, bring me back to the place where I can worship you” but not to a Makana like memorial who was dead, but to a God who was alive. Maybe in our pain we cry, “O God, my God, why have you rejected me?” We know God hasn’t. God still vindicates those who struggle for justice. God sends light and truth to those who ask for guidance. God brings us to his Temple, to his holy place that we might praise him.
This day, if you are one that cries out like the psalmist, then this place should be your Temple. If you know someone who is broken hearted, you should bring them to God’s Temple. For those who you know who suffer from injustice, you pray that they will find God in their Temple, for we know that the psalmist might have cried, but the psalmist hoped because God was there. God was there! Amen.