Psalm 22:1-15
Proper 23 (28) - Year B
Listen to The Message, verses 9-11:
And to think you were midwife at my birth,
setting me at my mother's breasts!
When I left the womb you cradled me;
since the moment of birth you've been my God.
Then you moved far away
and trouble moved in next-door.
I need a neighbor.
Quite an image, our midwife and nurturing G*D move away. At least that is the way it seems to us. No void goes unfilled. If nothing else fills it or we are not up to traveling into new realms, trouble settles in.
How do we deal with this setting. First we recognize our need - a neighbor. In a neighbor we find ourselves. It is one of the key issues in growing up, who are your friends. In a neighbor we find G*D.
Believe it or not we can find ourselves and G*D even when our neighbor is trouble.
This passage sounds like an adolescent who needs a perfect neighbor, a loving neighbor, before they are willing to be whole and loving themself. Let's give ourselves a couple of years and then we will be better able to deal with brother suffering and sister hostility. Looking back from a resurrection or two we can see how we can love even the seemingly unlovable.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/october2003.html
Psalm 22:1-15 or Psalm 90:12-17
Job 23:1-9, 16-17 or Amos 5:6-7, 10-15
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31
Job: "Today my complaint is bitter."
Everyman: "What must I do to inherit eternal life."
Both cases call for boldness - a boldness to complain about impoverishment and a boldness to give all our resources to the poor.
While this boldness is spoken of in terms of its result in mercy and grace, the clearer reality is that it is only mercy and grace that allow boldness to flourish and be enacted. To have it be otherwise, in any fashion, would be to give into entitled rights of goodness or rewards for righteous works.
Where we are left is exercising our right to choose, right up to the end, our response to the exigencies of life.
- - -
how hard it is to enter
a realm of experience
requiring only nakedness
our bodies and riches
become our definition
we cannot put down
without them we are nothing
we are definitely last
with no first in sight
our windup clockwork
does not go into any good night
gently or easily
we complain and grasp
and gasp to the end
shoving grace aside
until all that is left
is unrequited forsakenness
and we sputter out
may our difficult days
and persistent riches
recede before a wise heart
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html
How many different ways can you say, "I'm not feeling well, my expectations have been dashed." If you only have the F- or MF- or S-word available to you, you are not able to communicate the depth of your despair. Psalm 22 can add to your lexicon of descriptors of your woe. Just being able to bring so many different metaphors and similes to bear helps.
This is a case where expanding the expression of experience actually deepens the experience.
One of the interesting phenomena involved here is that using a multitude of images begins to build in such a way that by the time the Psalm ends (you'll have to look it up) we shift gears and can see our situation from a different perspective - one that will help us move on rather than be stuck. This ability to use so many different allusions begins to cut through our initial illusion of being trapped in a particular circumstance. I can't think of a better reason for expanding an imaginative use of experience descriptors than this - it is clarifying and healing. Building so many wonderfully concrete pictures begins to put a new picture in place. Literacy is liberating.
Here are two montages to illustrate the many descriptors giving new meaning to a one-dimensional picture:
Bush and Soldiers Killed in Iraq, Jesus and a Congregation.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html
Who can be saved? Surely not me from this Laurel and Hardy mess.
I have giggled, and now I weep.
I’ve come through so much. We have come through so much. Is it only to find ourselves on the scrap-heap of history and hope?
There is never enough wealth. Never enough power. Never enough prestige. Put simply, there is never enough.
A wrong question keeps being asked: “As I push you out of the way, I wonder how G*D will help you?”
Better questions are: “Why do I find so much pleasure in pushing you down?” or “Am I my neighbor’s?” or “What is my relationship to you?”
Having lost a neighborhood where we can walk and talk in the cool of the evening, how do we reestablish neighborliness, a neighborhood, and neighbors?
Some old understandings of behaving well — no stealing, no lying, etc. — serve well, but with a periodic psychopath/sociopath rising up with with followers excusing their bad behavior in light of their supposed cause, more than behavior control is needed. Unfortunately the something more that is needed is difficult to attain and maintain — perspective beyond one’s own experience and speculations.
Without a glimpse of a larger community with significant interactions, we keep falling back into easy answers — wealth trickles down rather than building up, so I’ll keep mine for me. Wealth proves G*D provides for those who persevere in hard work, so keep yanking on your bootstraps. Wealth is evidence of wisdom, so listen to your betters. Et cetera, et cetera, and etc.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/10/psalm-221-15_10.html