1 God takes his stand in the divine council;
he gives judgment among the gods:
2
“How long will you judge unjustly
by granting favor to the wicked? Selah
3
Give justice to the lowly and the orphan;
maintain the right of the poor and the destitute!
4
Rescue the lowly and the needy.
Deliver them from the power of the wicked!
5
They don’t know; they don’t understand;
they wander around in the dark.
All the earth’s foundations shake.
6
I hereby declare, “You are gods,
children of the Most High—all of you!
7
But you will die like mortals;
you will fall down like any prince.”
8
Rise up, God! Judge the earth
because you hold all nations in your possession! (Common English Bible)
A Summer in the Psalms: Summer 2019
Back when I was a solo pastor up in Longview, in order to set the tone in a good-natured, but still meaningful, way for our annual Ash Wednesday worship service, I would always begin the sermon by reading this short excerpt from the United Church of Christ pastor and author Lillian Daniel’s book This Odd and Wondrous Calling, as she recounts the experience of preaching her first-ever sermon as a seminary student performing the required field education internship that all Master of Divinity students must complete in order to earn their degree:
I remember sitting at the back of the sanctuary, reviewing my notes for my very first seminary-intern sermon. It was to be a mighty word from God that would correct all the hypocrisy, greed, and faithlessness of the local church that was, nonetheless, supporting my education as they had supported that of so many others. As I mustered my courage to sock it to them, I overheard one woman lean across her walker and whisper loudly to her pew mate, “Ah, our new intern is preaching. I see it’s time for our annual scolding.”
Later, I would pastor a church near that very divinity school, and hear for myself a few “annual scoldings.”
When I saw that I was preaching on Psalm 82, I talked with Pastor Josh and simply asked, “Is this a practical joke of some kind? Are you pranking the congregation by having me preach this one?” He of course said no, that this simply happened to be the Revised Common Lectionary’s psalm for this particular Sunday, and he had scheduled his study leave many moons ago, and so now y’all are stuck with me this morning for a stemwinder of a psalm.
Psalm 82 is one of those psalms that sets the entire table for a preacher looking to give an annual scolding, like a too-slow fastball over the widest part of home plate. It is tantalizing, tempting even, to turn this into an annual scolding.
I’m not going to do that today.
But do not necessarily breathe easy at that news. Because what I want to talk with y’all about today is no easier, and may in fact be even tougher.
I want to talk with y’all about the lament, the sheer, unadulterated feeling of powerlessness that Psalm 82 expresses, then and now. Pastor Josh laid out for you over the past couple of weeks a variety of subgenres of the psalms, and lament is one such subgenre. Psalm 42, which Pastor Bill preached on to kick off this sermon series, has a twinge of that lament, and Pastor Bill masterfully laid out how we in the church have shunned anger, when anger at God (who is a big enough adult to take whatever we can dish out) is a defining feature of psalmists and prophets alike.
But unlike Psalm 42, which contains this beautiful reassurance of God’s saving presence—Hope in God, for I will again praise him, my help and my God—Psalm 82 contains no such ode to the intimate spiritual connection between the psalmist and God. It could be that in that moment of composition, it did not feel like there was one. We do not know a lot about this particular psalmist, Asaph, but we do know from 1 Chronicles 15 that David appointed him (along with several others) to serve as worship musicians, and that this is not his only psalm—he has eleven others attributed to him, some of which do contain the sort of hope we often hear from other psalms.
Yet while there may be the absence of that particular sort of spiritual comfort food for us, there is in fact spiritual comfort food for others—and, perhaps, for you too on an individual level. If you have ever felt so powerless in the face of pain, potentially in the face of pain you were experiencing, that was inflicted upon you, and felt that you were powerless to fix it, or that only God could fix it, then you may well hear your voice echoed in the psalmist’s.
Because turning to God in times of injustice is often a sign not only of faith, but also of political, cultural, social, or economic powerlessness. Relying on God is an act of devotion, yes, but if you have been dispossessed and disenfranchised of earthly tools with which to change your station in life, then reliance on God may also simply be what you have left that is available to you.
This is a state of being many, perhaps most, of us as mainline American Christians don’t directly experience very much of. We are historically accustomed to being the ones centered, to having our hands on the levers of power and importance in the very center of the public square. All of our presidents, and most of our leaders in general—both in politics and in business—have been Christians. Ours are the holidays that get the most attention, it is our God that is named on the currency and in the pledge. We were, and still are, the establishment, the institution, the Man.
Here, our lament isn’t so much over being powerless in the face of gross injustice, as the psalmist is, but over having once been so powerful, so relevant, and so important that we basically got to define what was justice and injustice. But no more.
Ours is a lament of not being as powerful as we used to be, which is very different from powerlessness. But the powerless is whom the psalm is about, whom the psalm is for: the lowly, the orphan, the poor, destitute, and needy—these are the ones whom the psalmist calls by name. These are the ones on whose behalf the psalmist pleads for divine justice in the face of earthly injustice.
Because when there is no earthly justice to be had in the moment, all that is left is the promise of justice in the future—justice that God can bring, or that God can bring us to, if we are willing to be led. And individually, we may well feel such powerlessness. But collectively, we still have resources and status that so many others lack, for we live in a country and a society engineered to listen to us, to take us seriously, even when it does not do so for others.
Being willing to be led by God when we have those resources and status that others lack is a far deeper affair than sticking a “let go and let God” bumper sticker on our faith. Really, it amounts to letting go and letting an idealized version of ourselves whom we call God take the proverbial wheel.
No, letting go should be exactly that: letting go of power, letting go of control, surrendering to the powerlessness of relying only upon the promise of divine justice or future justice because you know in your bones that the structures and precepts of the present day were never made for you, will never go to bat for you, and will never favor you the way that they have favored others for centuries.
That is the reality so many people, including many peoples here in the United States, have had to live and continue to live—the reality of having only God to rely upon for justice because who you are has been made not to matter to anyone else. And I have to believe that this is a reality which angers God, for as Pastor Josh told us last week, a God who never gets angry is an apathetic God. But what we do in response to these realities—of peoples’ suffering and of God’s anger at it—is still up to us.
So, this is the choice we, as (mostly privileged) American Christians, have to make: will we choose to let go of our power and status as constructively as possible in order to pave the way for future justice, or is God going to have to level the playing field with us kicking and screaming all the while?
Because, as the psalmist opines in verse seven, that day is coming when we “will fall down like any prince.” When God administers justice throughout the Bible, it doesn’t just involve a lifting up of the humble; it also involves a very potent humbling of the once-powerful.
There is power in such a hope for justice—real, spiritual power. This sort of power corresponds to the psalmist Asaph’s role: he was not a king like that man who appointed him, but a musician and worship leader. He was certainly connected enough to gain the appointment, but it is not often that kings entrust decisions of national security or military readiness to their bards and troubadours. Asaph did not have the power of his patron David, and so while he may not have been able to change things directly himself for the needy and the lowly, he could at least powerfully witness on their behalf in song. And so in the psalms, these twin situations of power and powerlessness coexist.
We may have been in the position of David, accustomed to getting our way in public discourse, but we must permit ourselves to be in the position of Asaph, a musician, not a monarch, if we are to even begin to plumb the depths of Asaph’s dismay here. What Asaph witnesses, and the powerlessness with which he feels when it comes to remedying what he sees, is what fuels the power of this psalm. This psalm is the psalmist bearing witness—bearing witness as we ourselves do today.
We witness the powerlessness of others in our world all the time—in our news, on our sidewalks, around social media, everywhere. And we cannot, and will never, respond to their powerlessness in the way that we ought without choosing, in our power, to become a little more powerless ourselves.
Christ, as God-made-flesh, could have brought Himself down from the cross, or prevented it altogether, but as an act of powerlessness He fully experienced our own humanity, including death. If Christ can do that, then to be Christlike demands our own outpouring of our power and our status in the face of suffering at our nation’s borders, in our nation’s shelters, and etched across our nation’s collective soul. We must center ourselves less, and those hurting and in pain more, if we are going to live into what the psalms—and our holy scriptures writ large—are calling us towards.
Should we choose to do so, I cannot promise you that it will be easy. Quite the contrary. But what I can promise you is that just as the God who finds power in powerlessness and eternal life in death on the cross, we too can find power in understanding our own need for powerlessness, in elevating the power of others to whom such power has long been denied, and in opening ourselves up to God humbling an incarnation of the church that has not needed to be so humble for a long, long time.
No, that is not easy after all. But the sky will not fall, the kingdom will be ever closer, and we will be far the better for having chosen to walk this simultaneously powerful and powerless path together.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson, D.Min.
Vancouver, Washington
July 14, 2019