Lent 2 - PSALM 22 - From Abandonment to Hope

Readings: Genesis 17:1-7, Romans 4:13-25, Mark 8:31-38, Psalm 22:23-31
Preached at First Presbyterian Church, Baldwin, NY on March 4th 2012

A printable PDF file can be found here

It happened in a Nigerian church. Just as the service was drawing to a close. Two hooded gunmen, members of a political Islamic extremist group burst in, automatic weapons let out a stream of bullets that took a number of lives, including that of the pastor and his two young children who stood at the communion table. They fled leaving behind incendiary devices that burnt the building to the ground.

It happened on a city street in Liverpool a few days before Christmas. Mum had just picked up her toddler from Nursery-School. She was waiting on the sidewalk preparing to cross the road. A lunchtime drunk driver lost his concentration and plowed into them both. They never stood a chance. The driver was to drunk to remember what happened when the case went to court.

A man sits in a foreign jail cell awaiting sentencing. His crime? Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite his protestations of innocence, there is enough false evidence to condemn him. The local militia have already decided that his death will send a message to the leaders of his country that shows they are a force to reckon with.

Why Lord? Why do these things happen? Why are people left abandoned, accused, at the mercy of powers they can not control? Why is life so unpredictable? Where is the sense of fairness, of justice, or meaning?

A man is nailed to a cross on a hillside outside Jerusalem. His friends have deserted Him. His accusers mock Him. He is taunted by those who look upon Him whilst soldiers gamble for His clothes in an effort to pass the time. From His mouth falls these words, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The words are a quotation from Psalm 22. In the original Psalm they are the complaint of a man who is in great suffering because life has turned against him. For the first twenty one verses of the Psalm, the man’s thoughts veer from accusing God of abandoning him to descriptions of the treachery and cruelty of the punishments he is enduring. “I am nothing” he declares, “An earthworm, something to step on, to squash”.

As we travel towards Easter, I will continue to focus on the Psalms that the Lectionary gives for the Sundays of Lent. Today’s readings deal with the dilemma that suffering, particularly suffering which seems unnecessary and undeserved, raises for those of us who want to live our lives by faith.

Jesus tells would be followers in Mark’s gospel that to follow Him meant accepting a cross. The symbols of bread and wine that we share from the communion table remind us that an act of ‘undeserved suffering’ lies at the very heart of our faith.

One startling thing about the Psalmists cry of abandonment... his honest questioning “Why?” is that he never receives an answer. Instead there slowly comes a conviction that his abandonment is not without a purpose. That somehow, this terrible experience his life was going through would serve as a witness to the Presence and reality of God... even though in reality he had never felt further away from God or God’s promises.

It should not surprise us that this was the Psalm that Jesus chose to recite as He hung upon the cross. Despite the abandonment He felt, somewhere mixed into the picture there was a hope that His suffering was not without purpose, but would for ever be a sign of God’s redeeming love to the world.

Indeed the section of the Psalm that we read this morning bristles with promises of God that go way beyond the narrow confines of life on earth, but put the whole question of suffering in a different framework. What starts out as a Psalm of abandoned hopelessness becomes a song of triumphant hope; that at the last, God’s glory will far surpass the depths of any suffering.

There is a dramatic transition from hopelessness to hope, from despair to rejoicing, from defeat to victory. The closing verses are full of images of God’s love breaking out throughout the whole world, of all peoples of all nations coming to know the salvation of God.

This, as we’ve observed, was the Psalm that Jesus turned to in the hour of his bitterest anguish. The depths of suffering He went through on the cross, we can not even come near to estimating. Yet in the midst of that suffering, before He would cry, “It is finished’, came the hope that through His death would come the consummation of the Kingdom that He had given everything for, the hope that God would take the horror and naked brutality of the cross and transform it into the beauty and mystery of the empty tomb.

The New Interpreters Bible says of this passage “The Psalms final images are not of abandonment but of satisfaction, remembrance, deliverance, worship and dominion. Images of salvation, not just for the privileged few, but for the poor, for the humble, for all who seek God to the ends of the earth, in all nations. God’s redemption is promised to those who have died, to those who are alive now, and to those as yet unborn.

And the whole focus of the promise is the action of the Lord, “He has done it!” The glory and praise are to be given to God. We are to offer that praise through living our daily lives for God, as the Psalmist declares, “I shall live for him”.

“I shall live for Him”! This is the perspective that Jesus embodied. He lived in humble dependence on God. He did not welcome suffering, yet was ultimately prepared to embrace it on behalf of others. He faced an undeserved, untimely, unjust, death with the conviction that God’s power is greater than death’s power, that God’s justice is greater than life’s injustice, that love is a stronger force than hate.

Jesus was, like the Psalmist, one of the afflicted, but lived in the knowledge that God loves the afflicted and desires to share in their suffering. Jesus gathered to himself a community of the suffering, the poor, and the outcast. He sat at table with them. He healed them. He told stories of love to them. He still invites to His table those who profess the desire to live in humble dependence upon God.

All of this is a far cry from answering the question as to the “Why?” of suffering, or explaining the presence of evil in the world or the terrible tragedies that take place. What it does is invite us to cry out to God in our pain, to be brutally honest about those times where we sense the darkness of abandonment and feel that God doesn’t even care.

Somehow, the Psalmist implies, such brutal honesty will draw us nearer to God. We will discover that God is not standing far off, but desiring to walk through our trials with us. This is the assurance that comes in the Psalm that follows Psalm 22, namely Psalm 23; “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me!”

The Cross that we use as a motif for our faith is a symbol of the valley of the shadow. The sign of the Cross us remember that Jesus died, feeling deserted and abandoned at Calvary. Symbols such as bread and wine speak of a broken body and poured out blood and we are even bid to “Remember” Jesus in such a way.

Senseless tragedies, like those I mentioned at the start of the sermon, like that of the crucifixion of Jesus, will always be a feature of life on earth. We do not welcome them. We do not understand them. They sap our faith and leave us cold. Yet... still... God calls us to put our faith in Him. Still..... God promises that, although for a while we may feel utterly abandoned by His love and far from His presence, the experience of abandonment will not be the final word.

The same Psalmist who framed the words Christ uttered on the Cross, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” also declares “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him.” His final words are words of hope.

I pray that as we travel through this Lenten season that we may know that wherever our life may lead us, God stands with us. We may feel abandoned. We may feel distant. But maybe as the realization comes that God knows the deepest feelings of our soul, we will also find in God a peace that surpasses all human understanding.

May God’s Spirit be upon us and within us today as we share in bread and wine and in prayer and fellowship. To God’s name be all glory. Amen.

Rev Adrian J Pratt