Scripture readings: Psalm
13:1-6; Mark 9:14-29
When I ask someone, “How are things going?” there are
some people who will always answer this way: “Can’t complain!” The classic long
answer of this type is: “Can’t complain. It wouldn’t do me any good if I did.”
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| Butterfly in the Oregano |
So, in the battle of wits (in which I am often caught
unarmed), when someone gives me the short answer, “Can’t complain,” I ask them,
“Do you mean; it wouldn’t do you any good if you did?” But I know someone who
outwits me every time, and he always says, “No I just can’t complain.”
That’s a good answer. But it’s not true, I think, for
most of us. And so the Lord has something to say to us about our complaints.
This psalm (Psalm Thirteen) forms part of the Lord’s answer.
For all the complaining we do (whether do it out loud
or in a suffering silence) something in our very nature warns us about it. At
least we know this when we hear other people complain. We don’t like it.
Parents hate to hear their kids complain. Parents
usually make a deliberate effort to teach their children not to complain,
although some parents don’t use the best teaching methods. They don’t teach by their
own example.
It’s like the five-year-old who was riding in the car
while his mom was driving on errands in the city. The traffic was bad, and his
mother was quietly doing her best to get through it. The little boy noticed
this and he asked his mother, “Mom, why do the idiots only come out when Dad drives?”
The Bible gives us a lot of warnings against
complaining. Sometimes the Scriptures call complaining “murmuring” and tells us
that it is very dangerous. (1 Corinthians 10:10)
There is a beautiful warning that comes from Paul in
his letter to the Philippians. (Philippians 2:14-16a) I love this warning
because it is so loving and positive, and it tells us why it is so much better
not to complain. “Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may
be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a
crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world,
holding fast the word of life….” (Oh Paul writes such long, complicated
sentences!)
How can complainers ever look like children of God? How can they shine as lights in the world? How
can complainers ever hold out to others the word of life?
On the other hand, Psalm Thirteen is a complaint.
Technically, scholars call it a “psalm of lamentation”. It’s a fancy word but it
adds up to the same thing. Nearly a third of the all psalms are psalms of
lamentation; psalms of complaint.
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| Looking down the gravel road above Washtucna Cemetery |
Four times David in a row pounds away at God with the
same phrase, over and over again. “How long O Lord! How long? How long? How
long?”
This isn’t a complaint, it’s a rant! Eugene Peterson
paraphrases the opening line like this: “Long enough God – you’ve ignored me
long enough.”
One third of the psalms are psalms of complaint. It
is as if God wanted to teach us how to complain.
The truth is that this psalm is a complaint of faith.
This complaint believes in the faithfulness of God: “But I trust in your
unfailing love.” (Psalm 13:5) “Unfailing love” here is a translation of that
single, special word in Hebrew for the covenant love (the promise love) of God.
It is steadfast love; absolutely steady love: unceasing, unchanging.
In this psalm everything seems wrong. The writer,
David, feels forgotten. “How long will you hide your face from me?” Peterson
puts it this way: “I’ve looked at the back of your head long enough!” Has
someone ever turned their back on you when you tried to talk to them, or
refused to shake your hand when you held it out to them? I have; it makes you
feel terrible. That is how David felt.
“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and, every
day, have sorrow in my heart?” This sorrow, this struggle closes in on people
suffering from depression.
And then it made me think of another kind of
depression. During the Great Depression, my grandparents, on both sides of my
family, had a hard time. They worked hard when they could. When they weren’t
working, they worked hard to find work. Sometimes they traveled across the
country in search of work. My grandpa Evans took his family from New York to Washington
in search of a job on the Grand Coulee Dam project, but the waiting line for
jobs was too long; so they went back to New
York
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| Washtucna Pioneer Memorial Cemeter |
This went on for years; from 1929 until the 1940’s.
They knew that they were better off than many other people, but they also knew
they were living on the edge. They were thankful for what they had, but they
always had the question of survival on their minds. To have thought about
prosperity would have seemed like a luxury.
My grandparents had their lives to live and their
families to feed, and they never knew if, tomorrow, or next week, or next
month, or next year, their jobs would disappear. The whole country was like
this. The whole world was like this.
There were good reasons to fear and worry. It was a
problem that had no end in sight. They must have often asked the question, “How
long?” And they yet got through it.
They had families to provide for. They had children
to raise, feed, and clothe. If they ever complained wasn’t because they were
complainers. It was because they didn’t want to fail.
There were needs hanging upon their shoulders that
required caring, and caring can be hard work. There were needs that begged for
their unfailing love. Sometimes our complaining can be a form of that caring
and unfailing love. Sometimes complaining can be holy.
So it is not surprising that the Lord, himself,
complains. Jesus grew up singing that song that cried “how long”. Jesus used the
words of that song in his own life.
Only he addressed those words to us. He cried, “O
unbelieving generation, how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up
with you?” (Mark 9:19) It was the complaint of caring; the complaint of the
unfailing love of the Lord.
Jesus had taken part in what was literally a
“mountain-top-experience”. Jesus had taken his favorite disciples, Peter,
James, and John, up to the top of whatever they considered to be a mountain,
and he was changed before their eyes so that they had a glimpse of his true
glory.
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| Washtucna School: Football field, with the Church peeking over the school roof |
When this experience of glory passed Jesus insisted
on getting through to them that this glory included his death on the cross and
his rising from the dead. These favorite disciples didn’t complain, but they
were confused and full of questions. They didn’t like what they heard.
Then they came down from the mountain top, and they
found confusion among the other disciples. They found a crowd waiting for Jesus.
They found a big argument going on, and a big complaint. The disciples had
failed to heal a demon-possessed boy.
When Jesus asked the crowd, “What are you arguing
about?” he was opening the door to the complaint of the boy’s father. Jesus
asked for the complaint of someone who cared with an unfailing love.
When he heard the complaint, Jesus uncovered the
father’s need for faith, and gave him that faith. When his own disciples
complained of their embarrassing failure, Jesus uncovered their prayerless
prayers, and answered their prayer.
When it seemed (though the failure of his own people)
that he had failed, Jesus proved his unfailing love. The real answer of Jesus to
the complaints was that he overlooked the weakness of peoples’ faith. He worked
in spite of the prayerlessness of his own disciples. He kept on his road to the
cross, where all the unfailing love of God’s works its power.
If Jesus can complain; so can we. The psalms teach us
how to complain. Our problem is that our complaints are not holy. They are not
pretty. They don’t come from faith and love. We can’t complain and shine. We
can’t complain and hold out the word of life as people who have clearly been
made alive by that word.
I am tempted to say that we are not good enough to
complain; at least not good enough to complain well. Jesus’ complaints are the
complaints of God in all his caring and unfailing love. His complaints are
holy. Often, our complaints are not.
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| High School Football Practice in Washtucna |
One third of the psalms are psalms of complaint. God
has taken them up into his word. They are his word to us. Partly they are
cautionary, it’s true. But they also teach us how to live in an honest
relationship with God. They help us to journey from where we really are, to the
place where God has called us and created us to live. The complaints of the
psalm are like the prayer of the boy’s father in the gospel, “I believe; help
my unbelief.” This is what all holy complaints are looking for.
In fact (you will have to trust me on this) the good
that the Lord does for David, at the end of the psalm, tells us something about
this. David prays: “I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.”
(Psalm 13:6) This is a very odd thing to say, when he has been ranting at God:
“How long O Lord; how long; how long; how long?”
But the good that God has given David is not the
ordinary Hebrew word for good. It is good in the form of an answer (see the NEB
What the Lord gives is like a process of goodness; a
journey of goodness. It is like the ripening of fruit. It is like the weaning
of a child from its mother’s milk to solid food. (“Analytical Hebrew and
Chaldean Lexicon”, p. 138) It is a goodness that has taken David from a bad
place to a better place; from a complaining faith to a trusting and loving
faith. This is a goodness that is possible because David has been honest.
Christians often believe that God requires them to be
dishonest and to live a lie; or at least to live up to a lie, or to live up to
a pious fiction. The truth is that God knows us through and through and
pretending to be happy does no good. God does not reward play-acting among his
children. Play-acting only makes them likely to fool themselves, and to teach
others to do the same.
Psalm Thirteen has complaint and faith going hand in
hand. This is honest. Martin Luther was able to put these together. Luther
said: “Hope itself despairs, and despair yet hopes; and only that unspeakable
groaning is heard with which the Holy Sprit, who moves over the waters covered
with darkness, intercedes for us [prays for us].”
It seems schizophrenic. Christians do have split
personalities. We have our old self; the self we are without Christ, without
God. We have our new self; where we are in Christ and Christ is in us, full of
the hope of glory. That sounds both honest and crazy, but there it is. This is
what it means to say, “I believe; help my unbelief.”
Jesus told his disciples that they could not heal the
boy because such a healing requires prayer. I see this as a joke. I mean that
Jesus was joking with his disciples. Of course they prayed, especially when the
boy was not instantly healed before their eyes. They had done this before, and it had always
worked. This is the kind of faith they had, to pray for the thing that had
never gone wrong before.
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| Geranium |
I am sure they remembered to pray; but some prayers
may not deserve to be called prayers. And, yet, what did Jesus do about this? He
answered their prayerless prayers. He healed the boy.
This psalm rants its complaints; but it knows, in its
heart, that none of its complaints are true. We are not forgotten. God has not
turned his face away. We are full of worry but we know we are only being
foolish because we also know that God will take care of us. It doesn’t matter
if our enemies see us shaken and stumbling all over ourselves. It doesn’t
matter who laughs at us, or how often.
There is another healing, in the fifth chapter of the
Gospel of John. (John 5:1-15) There was a man who needed a miracle and so he
had gone to live in a place where there were periodic miracles. It was at a
place called Bethesda
It was like some places in the world, today, where
people go on pilgrimage because they have a reputation as healing places. But
the man lived in that healing place for thirty eight years without being able
to get to the water at the healing time. He must have often prayed, “How long?”
And then he must have stopped praying at all.
Jesus came to that place. He saw the man, and learned
how long he had waited. Then Jesus walked up to him and asked him a strange and
revealing question. “Do you want to be healed?”
The man did not ask for healing. All he could do was
to tell Jesus his long, long, sad story. It was as if he were a broken
recording repeating his unending complaint. Jesus healed him anyway, without
his asking to be healed.
Afterwards, the man was pressured by the authorities
to tell them who gave him this healing, and he didn’t know. He would have heard
of Jesus; but Jesus had must have come to him anonymously, suddenly appearing
before him out of the crowd. He didn’t know that his healer was Jesus.
So the man couldn’t report Jesus to the authorities. He
went his way and the authorities let him go.
Then Jesus met him again, suddenly appearing to him
out of the crowd, and gave him a mysterious warning. It was a warning not to
sin unless he wanted something worse to happen.
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| Cross above Kahlotus WA |
Now the man knew who had healed him, and so we can
see what Jesus had warned him against. He responded to Jesus by becoming a
tattle tale.
The authorities were expert complainers about the
faults of others. They had many complaints about Jesus, and the man (knowing
their power) played into their culture of complaint. He joined their club. He
rejoined his place in the complainer’s club.
There is this danger; that even the apparent grace of
God may not cure us from being complainers. There is a complaining nature that
stops being honest.
Complaining becomes an addiction. It stops caring
about answers. It stops caring about believing. It stops seeking, and finding,
and sharing the unfailing love of God. It only wants to hear itself. That is
the danger and curse of complaining, when it stops being honest and becomes
unholy.
God save us from that! Psalm Thirteen teaches us to
rant and then to stop and give it up; to trust and to love. Then we will sing
to the Lord, because we know he has been good to us.
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