Jeremiah 8:18-9:1, Romans 8:26-27, 31-39
Language. One of the images of the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. which will stick with me came scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen two weeks ago Tuesday. The United States government was asking anyone who knew how to speak or read the languages of Arabic or Farsi to contact, presumably, the CIA or FBI at the given 1-800 number. Never mind that the message of the terrorists' actions was so incomprehensible, we couldn't even understand the language of their tongues. People we don't understand attacked us. Our government was literally scrambling to learn how to speak their language.
That is, in a nutshell, where we all stand. We are scrambling to learn a language to describe our changed world. There are no words big enough to contain all the different emotions our nation is feeling. There are no words to explain how it felt to see the towers come crashing down, the idea that someone had attacked the fortress that is the Pentagon. This is new territory for us. We have neither the experience nor the words to express the pain, the outrage, the fear, and the hope. We don't have the language. We are scrambling to learn how to communicate and to understand. In military terms, we are beefing up our intelligence. Our nation will communicate by the soldiers and the weapons of war; that is certain. But as a nation of people who value both faith and intelligence, we know we need more. We are people of relative comfort, accustomed to being able to say what we want and, for the most part, getting what we say. When that comfort is injured, we need help.
Our scripture today is a language lesson. These are old words, but they can help. They are part of the language of God and they can help us express ourselves. They can help us express our sadness. They can help us in the deep holes where there are no words. And they can help us speak the confidence and hope that no matter what, God is with us.
The language of lament.
My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
My heart is sick.
Hark, the cry of my poor people
From far and wide in the land:
"Is the Lord not in Zion?
Is her King not in her?"
"The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved."
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me.
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of my poor people
Not been restored?
O that my head were a spring of water,
And my eyes a fountain of tears,
So that I might weep day and night
For the slain of my poor people!
You know, this was the Lectionary passage for today, which means every three years it comes up to be read on the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time. Someone saw the heading on the bulletin last week and asked me what was meant by that term, "Ordinary Time." I explained that it's the name the church gives the Sundays in between the major seasons, like Advent, Lent, and Easter. Ironically, these are no ordinary times. And around the world today, ministers, priests, even rabbis are reading these same words from the prophet Jeremiah and they are being heard with extraordinarily new ears. While these are old words, they are foreign to us. And I confess that ordinarily I would read them and think, "Oh that's something that applied to ancient Israel, another time, another place, another world." All that has changed now.
I read not just a sad song, but God's lament for his people. I read of the tears of God, streaming like a fountain for the slain of his poor people. I think of the photos tacked on every street pole in New York, photos of loved ones still missing, unidentified. I think of the CEO who was late to work on the eleventh, because he took his son to his first day of kindergarten, and who lost every single one of his 700 employees, and how he wept before the television cameras because he can't send their salary checks to their families because he has no company left to do the work.
My joy is gone, grief is upon me,
My heart is sick.
It has been a long time since the language of lament has been spoken in this country. Yes, we have had disasters, but we have also had ways to resolve the agony. Yes, we will try to "bring the terrorists to justice or bring justice to them." Yes, we will rebuild buildings. But we will also mourn the loss of life, and we will mourn the loss of lifestyle, which we silently took for, granted. We will join with Jeremiah and we will share the tears of God, who weeps for the innocent here and abroad, now and forever more. These words have spoken for men and women down through the generations. And now we join ourselves to them through the words of God. We join ourselves to God by sharing the language of lament.
"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God."
The language of silence.
One of the rescue workers at the World Trade Center described what happened when they thought they heard a sign of life. Ordinarily, there was the steady hum of machinery and men talking to each other, carefully coordinating the removal of debris. But then, someone would think they heard something, maybe some tapping from under the rubble - and everything would stop. Man, machine, even the rescue dogs, would stand still - waiting, hoping against all odds. Was there life in the darkness beneath? Or not.
I can't imagine how filled the air around that silence must have been with prayer. I can only imagine the sighs too deep for words when the signal came to resume their work. Did you know that even the rescue dogs become depressed when they can't find what they're looking for? (Chaplain Gibbs Hammond of the Fire Department told us that at the Men's Breakfast last year.) Life cries out to its Creator, and the Spirit of the living God cries out when there are no words beneath the rubble of our existence. The Apostle Paul tells the Romans and tells us of a Spirit that goes beyond our ability to express. For even as we search for answers, even as we look for perpetrators, even as we search for victims, we are merely human beings - and we don't know how to pray as we ought. We try. But in our hearts we know our words fall short of our intention because we're just not smart enough to do it perfectly. One commentator said last week, "That's why we call it human nature and not human art." Our sinfulness gets in the way of even our best. Our limitations keep us from perfectly sharing the mind of God. In the silence between our words, in the quiet emptiness of our search for life, the Spirit speaks to us, and speaks for us. By the grace of a loving Lord, we aren't called to get it right. We are only called to get it. And "it" is the confidence that God cares for us even in our moments of weakness. Not just in our strength and our success - of which this nation has had its share, but also in those times when we have banged our heads against the wall for so long that we can't hear anything at all -- in that futility, are the whispers of a merciful God. God speaks the language of silence. In the silence, God speaks for us. God teaches us to listen for life.
"What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?"
"Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
As it is written,
for your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Scripture teaches us the language of confidence. Right now, people are filled with questions. Our questions run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. In one moment we ask how a merciful God could allow such violence, and in the next we ask how we're supposed to get through the airport without the benefit of curbside check-in. People on TV tell us "everything has changed." Well, how? Tell me what's changed and how it's going to effect me and my family, my child. We all sense that we have been witness to a turning point in history, but not one of us knows how it's going to turn out. We people who pride ourselves on our knowledge, we people who idolize the experts in every field, have come to the cruel realization that what we don't know is a whole lot more than what we do. Understandably, we're a little shaky, right now. But we also know that we aren't the first people to feel this way.
Scripture teaches shaky people to speak the language of certainty. The Apostle Paul offered the Romans, and offers us, no pie-in-the-sky, smiley-face cheeriness that we'll wake up tomorrow and everything will once again be "nice." Instead, scripture teaches us that despite the hardship, despite the distress, despite the peril, despite the sword, despite the life, and despite the death - we are something more than simply conquerors. We are people who are loved. And nothing, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And so we face trouble speaking the language of confidence - that more than the triumphs and tragedies of our lives, God is with us. God is with us. God is with us, God loves us, and God cannot be separated from us. Nothing - no terrorist, no military, no grief - has the power to take God's love away. And so even in times when we're thinking of what we have lost, scripture teaches us the words of what we will always have.
Language lessons. They say that the best time to teach a person a foreign language is when he or she is very young, just a few years old, so the language is imprinted on the brain. Our Lord calls us to come to him not as wise adults, but as little children. Maybe that's why. Our Lord calls us all to be as little children that we might learn a new language of faith, so that it might be imprinted within us. So that we might know and speak our lament, our sighs, our confidence in his name.
To God be the glory forever and ever. Amen.
James McTyre
Lake Hills Presbyterian Church
Knoxville, TN