"All Too Human" A Sermon on Psalm 137 following the death of Osama bin Laden

All Too Human
Psalm 137

Dr. Robert Wm Lowry
First Presbyterian Church of Batesville, AR

15 May, 2011

Easter 4

Bleary eyed, I looked at the screen and saw that I had a text message. Normally messages later on a Sunday night do not contain good news At first my mind went to the church and dreaded images of smoke billowing from the steeple. After a moment I realized that the message came not from Batesville but from a friend in Little Rock and I sighed a big sigh of relief.

Turn on your TV, it said. Obama is going to announce that they killed Osama bin Laden.

I did just that. I turned the TV on just in time to watch the President deliver his nine minute speech telling the world that the man whose own brand of bile and hate had defined the last decade of our lives was no more.

I heard the news and I thought, “Good. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

As a Minister of Word and Sacrament, the first ordination vow we take, in fact the first vow that all church officers take, is “do you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ your Savior, acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church and through him believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit?” When asked that question at my ordination ten years ago next week, I answered, "yes, he is Lord of all." Sitting in bed watching this news unfold, I answered yes he is Lord of all except for that sorry son of a bitch.

In that moment, watching that news, I found myself feeling very human in a way not unfamiliar to the biblical witness. Psalm 137 is a very almost all too human Psalm. It is tough. We just heard it's harsh words. We did not hear them all though. The Psalm we read this morning has one more verse. After verse 8 and its declaration, “happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!” comes verse 9 which underscores the satisfaction in the defeat of an enemy. In fact, it goes one step further and celebrates vengeance against an enemy. Verse 9 reads, “Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash them against the rocks!”

That too is the word of the Lord.

Psalm 137 uncovers a very real, visceral, human feeling; the desire for vengeance against one who does nearly unspeakable wrong against us. This is not an eye for an eye; this is a head for an eye.

When the news came that Osama bin Laden was dead, some part of me turned to a feeling of Psalm 137. Somewhere in my soul a voice was saying, “Good.”

There is a school of thought that says I should not have shared any of that with you. I should have stuck to the lectionary text for today from First Peter and ignored this personal lapse. As a pastor, so the thinking goes, I have an added responsibility to model the moral and theological expectations I have for myself and for you. So I share that with you out of no sense of pride in myself for realizing the problem with my thinking or to suggest that this is in any way a faithful Christian response to the death of even such an abhorrent person as this. I share it because I am guessing that I am not alone. My guess is that there are a few of you sitting out there today who, when the news made its way to you, heard and may still hear that little voice from inside saying, “good. Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Enter Psalm 137.

A professor of mine referred to the Psalms as the poetry of human experience. He would dare a student to name a human emotion not contained in the psalms. Try it. They’re all there. Somehow these words from a civilization 2500 years ago hold up a mirror and show us a glimpse of whom and where we are now.

The psalms laugh and they cry. They shout with joy and moan with grief. They give praise to God and they ask God why.

And, yes, at times these holy words are very, very human.

When the ancient Israelite poet penned the words of this Psalm, he must have been feeling something akin to this kind of anger. And in his anger he prays for vengeance. But it is not vengeance born first of anger but of tears. His prayer is remarkable for the tender poignancy of the first six verses and the bitter imprecations of the last three. What begins as a tearful remembrance of days plagued by misery ends with the angry predictions of revenge.*

Like the poet, the wrath and vengeance many of us found answered in the death of one man began not in anger but in tears as we watched helplessly as airliners and buildings full of people came crashing to the ground. Anger may have come quickly on its heels, but i would wager to say that for most of us the first thing we felt was lament; sorrow; anguish.

The writers of the psalms were no strangers to the roller coaster of human emotion. They knew vengeance through tears. They cried out in pain and shouted out in joy. They knew, just as we know, that to be a child of God in a broken and sinful world is no easy task. In the face of such unspeakable evil, our human nature draws us so easily into a posture of anger and revenge.

In 1963, theologian Martin Neimoller preached from the pulpit in Duke Chapel. In his sermon he related part of the story of his time as a captive of the Nazis.

In the last year of my imprisonment in one of Hitler’s ill-famed concentration camps, at Dachau, a gallows was transplanted, transferred from the general camp in to the courtyard of the “bunker,” the prison inside the camp. And the upper part of this gallows looked into my solitary- confinement cell, through the window bars. How often has this gallows induced me to pray for my comrades who were hanged on it, and how often every day I had to control myself, when the idea arose: If these people will pull me out of my place here to that gallows, I shall shout at them, “You criminals, you murderers, wait and see- there is a god in heaven and he will show you!” And then the torturing question: What would have happened if Jesus, when they nailed him to his gallows, to the Cross, had spoken like this and had cursed his enemies? Nothing would have happened, only there would be no gospel, no Christian Church, for there would be no message of great joy; for then he would have prayed against his enemies, not for them, and would have died against them and not for them. Thank God! He prayed, he died a different way, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”**

“Happy are they who dash your babies against the rocks.”

“Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

They are both in there. Both find purchase in the rich soil of God’s holy book. And from time to time both find a home in us.

When I mentioned that I was thinking about preaching this sermon, a colleague replied to my email saying, “I keep seeing quotes from MLK Jr., and one or two from Jesus on loving your enemies. I'm coming to realize, yet again, that MLK Jr. and Jesus are better and bigger men than am I. That is why two things will not happen: (1) I will never die on a cross or be assassinated (2) I will never really be relevant. Now, question to myself--can I live with that?”

It’s a good question. Can I live with it? Can you? Are we content to reside solely in the lament and anger of psalm 137 or is there still journeying left to do? Do we honor and embrace the message of Christ if we willingly stop short of, "forgive them?"

The truth of our 24 hour news culture is that wherever we reside each of us has a view of the gallows through the window. None of us can escape the reality of evil and suffering and oppression throughout our world. It is enough to make you cry out in anger and anguish, “Happy are they who dash your babies against the rocks!” It is enough to bring your soul to the boiling point.

In the end though, the world has plenty of cries of anger and anguish. There are plenty of voices in the chorus demanding vengeance The lot that we who are disciples of Jesus Christ have drawn in this life is that we are charged with proclaiming not “happy are they” who seek revenge but “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Like my colleague, I often find myself feeling weak and ineffective because the witness I can muster in the world is not as bold or as confident or even as faithful as those of King and Bonheoffer and the other Christian martyrs who went to their deaths proclaiming, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” I find myself feeling my ministry irrelevant and my words futile.

Nonetheless, as Neimoller reminds us, even though we, from time to time, forget to forgive, Christ continues to call us to proclaim it. Though we lapse into the vengeance of Psalm 137, Christ continues to proclaim the salvation rather than the damnation of human kind. As the old hymn says, “I am weak but thou art strong.” Because Christ died a different way, we are freed to live a different way; to live beyond the gut reaction of vengeance to the faithful words of forgiveness.

Like many others who surrendered their lives to hate and anger, that man of evil and hostility knows now that he had it wrong the whole time. God is not hate. God is in fact love. And we who know God, know the love of God, and are called to shout it from the mountain tops.

In a world so full of hate and anger, may we who so recently stood outside the empty tomb and shouted “He is risen! He is risen indeed” be continuously resurrected in hope through the life and witness of Jesus Christ. And may our moments of anger and surrender to the desire for vengeance be quickly supplanted by the promise of hope in Jesus Christ. The hope that empowers us to live and even to die a different way.

Sola Deo Gloria! To God alone be the glory! Amen.


*  Although it is old (1970), Mitchell Dahood's volume on Psalms 101-150 in the Anchor Bible series is very insightful. 
** The full text of Niemoller's sermon and many others from Duke Chapel can be found in "Sermons from Duke Chapel: Voices from A Great Towering Church," ed. William Willimon, (Durham: Duke Press), 2005.