SunJan222012
Scripture: PSALM 62:5-12
When I was in college, I acted in several plays. Morgan Freeman I was not! These were bit parts. In one tiny role, I was a townsperson in Inherit the Wind, the superb Lawrence and Lee play about evolution. I was a witness in a courtroom scene, and I remember being asked, as I sat on the stand, whether I had any children, and my line was, “Not’s I know of.” Who knows why that’s the line I remembered!
What most stands out in my memory of my stage career, though, was an odd, contemporary play we put on in what was called the “Ex,” the college experimental theater. I remember nothing of the performances themselves. What remains vivid in my mind, however, is a rehearsal we had leading up to the performances. In the play, the main character was someone reviled by everyone else in the play. So as a way of getting into character, our director told us that, for one rehearsal, we were to treat the lead actor with contempt—to curse at him and treat him like dirt. Like a method acting class, it was all designed to get us into our parts.
This was not a surprise to the lead actor, Peter Kozik, as I recall. He was in on the plans, and knew why we were doing it. What was startling though, was that, after some twenty or thirty minutes of being treated like scum, he suddenly burst into tears and collapsed in a heap on the stage. Even knowing why we were being so cruel to him, the abuse was more than he could stand.
At the time I was totally shocked that this apparently strong and self-confident man could be so undone by make-believe disgust. Didn’t he know we were just pretending? As the years have passed, though, I have a much stronger sense of how that could have happened. Inside almost all of us, I think, there lies this tender core that wonders whether we measure up. Hard as our exteriors may appear, there is, in most of us, a vulnerable center that needs affirmation and appreciation, a heart that yearns to be valued. And when we’re bashed the way Peter Kozik was bashed, even in make-believe, it can break us and undo us.
The psalmist knew this in real life. In the earlier verses of today’s psalm, that we didn’t read aloud, she asks, “How long will you gang up on me? . . . You talk a good line, but every ‘blessing’ breathes a curse” (62:3-4, The Message). She’s clearly been through the ringer, misused and abused and treated terribly. Who knows what it is specifically. Gossip, slander, taunting, teasing? Fired inappropriately, ridiculed, ganged up on, raped? Have job expectations been absurdly high; has a parent or partner been scornful; have the neighbors been mocking and derisive? We don’t really know—we have no specifics. What we know is that the psalmist has been severely maligned and it’s extremely painful.
My college classmate Peter Kozik knew what that was like, and at some level or other most of us do, too. My roommate during my first year of college used to call me “Twinkie,” and it cut deeply. A church member, hugely disappointed at a stand I took in a previous church, came to a Deacons’ meeting one evening, pointed his finger at me accusingly, and said with barely contained fury, “I thought I could outlast you here.” Another church member called me one day and raked me over the coals, berating me for seven egregious pastoral faults she saw that infuriated her. All of these still loom large in my memory because they cut me to the quick.
Some of you have endured withering criticisms at work. Maybe an initiative you planned has been greeted with eye-rolling and smirks. Or a tender and sympathetic tear has been scorned as “baby-like.” You may have been ignored or dismissed or teased or despised. And if you’re like most of us, your reaction may have run the gamut from mildly unnerved to deeply scarred.
And the question always is: how do we deal with it—with the cruelty and spite that can rain down on any of us, at any time? If you had to write a “how-to” for enduring life’s testing, what would you advise?
The long-ago writer who penned today’s psalm has an answer for that question. On first glance, it may not seem like an especially user-friendly answer. It’s not particularly practical or specific, not a simple ABC for dealing with life’s challenges. But as H. L. Mencken once said, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple—and wrong.”
So we’re left without the “clear, simple” advice we crave, left only to make sense of what the psalmist does write. And what this wise one says is this: when life’s trials and tribulations assail you, the way to deal with it is to trust in God. For God is your rock, your refuge, your fortress, the only true ground on which to stand.
And of course that’s simple advice. But it’s not easy to figure out exactly what standing on that rock entails. What does that sort of trust look like? When Mary and I were in Maine last summer, we visited Schoodic Point, a promontory “Down East,” as they say in Maine. Having little geological knowledge, I have no idea what sort of rock we were standing on that day as we gazed out at the sea. But what I remember so vividly is how unbelievably firm those rocks seemed beneath my feet. They were enormous and you could walk on them for 100 yards down to the sea as the tide rolled in, jumping from rock to rock and sensing their astonishing solidity. As we watched our sons and our niece and nephew bounce along, I was acutely aware of the profound support undergirding me.
This, I imagine, is some of what the psalmist was picturing in declaring that God is the rock on which we stand. Immovable, supportive, confidence-inspiring. Other images in the psalm accent this: fortress, refuge. God is the sheltering one, the one who will not let the ground on which we stand move. God is the one who envelops and protects and makes safe. This we can grasp.
The question is: how do we get into that fortress when the missiles are flying all around us? How do we enter that refuge when the “slings and arrows” assault us? Where’s the door or the gate? What’s the password? How do we gain admittance?
Maybe the truest thing we can say about it is that it’s all a matter of where we get our bearings. What is it we look to to convey our worth and give us peace? What is it that forms our true north? Do we look first to our difficulties? Do we let them determine our state of mind? Or do we look elsewhere? Do we look instead to the only true rock that undergirds and reassures us?
Any teacher who’s ever received course evaluations knows how tempting it is to let the single criticism drown all the glowing praise. You get sucked in to the negative, and your sense of your self is shaped by those criticisms. What if we were instead to be teachers who took our cues from the enfolding, supportive words, and let those be our guide?
It’s all a matter of where we take our cues. The psalmist talks about the importance of the rock sustaining us. But any number of images can convey the true refuge that keeps us safe. We can supplement the image of God as Rock with an almost opposite image for the One from whom we get our bearings. In 1937, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the last century’s great philosophers, wrote this in a private notebook: “Redemption . . . can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be ‘no wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A [person] who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within that person is nevertheless quite different, so that [a suspended person] can act quite differently than can a standing [person])” (quoted in The Christian Century, March 18-25, 1998, p. 300).
Make sense? If you’re walking down the street and know yourself only as weighed down by heaviness and burden, it’s very different from walking down the street and knowing yourself as suspended from heaven. It’s the same walk. It’s the same burdens. The difference is where we take our sense of what’s most real. When we’re suspended from heaven, we know that what matters most, what gives us our fortress and our refuge, is the God from whom we are always suspended, not the ungodly challenges that may seem most pressing and most real.
So it may be the image of being suspended from heaven. Or it may be the feeling of standing on the sturdiest of rocks—“On Christ the solid rock I stand.” The point is simply this: that there is something more real, more compelling, more true than any trouble that stalks us. And the job of faith is to fix our gaze there.
This is why the psalmist urges us not to put our trust in our riches (62:10), for example. It’s not our things—our fancy watches and Armani suits and burgeoning retirement accounts—that save us.
Jesus, too, knew how tempting it is to put our trust in the wrong place. I think it’s what he meant, for example, when he said those words that are among the most grating in the Bible, that “I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Mt. 10:35-36). On one level it’s a repulsive idea, this whole notion of hating one’s family. But as Jesus says in the very next verse, “whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Mt. 10:37). Do you put all your stock in the daughter or son, the mother or father who, no matter how wonderful they may seem at the moment, may still turn on you, or let you down, or abandon you emotionally, or die? In seeking a refuge and fortress, in other words, do you trust in your family who, spectacular though they may be, can never be everything to you? Do you trust in your riches, which cannot possibly save you? Do you trust in athletic accomplishments or health or employment success, whose benefits are only partial and temporary? Or do you, instead, “rest in the Lord” (Ps. 37:7)?
“When the storms of life are raging, stand by me,” goes the old hymn. Because it’s only the One who gave us life, and who endured the suffering of the cross, who is able to sustain us when life hits its most abject lows. It’s only the One who was and is and always will be who can be the rock and refuge on which to stand.
I have long taken comfort in the story of Ruby Bridges. You may remember that, in 1960, she was one of four little girls chosen to integrate the public schools in New Orleans. She was six at the time. Every day when she would walk to school, she had to be accompanied by federal marshals because a riotous crowd would shower her arrival with venom and abuse. And when she arrived in Miss Hurley’s classroom, she would be the only student there because the white families wouldn’t allow their children to attend school with her. What must that have been like for her?
One morning, as Miss Hurley waited for the class day to begin, she happened to look out the window as Ruby walked toward the school’s door. As always, the mob greeted her arrival with a deep hatred. But this day, Miss Hurley noticed that Ruby stopped walking and appeared to be talking to the crowd. And then Ruby resumed her walk and came to her classroom. So Miss Hurley asked her what she was saying to the crowd as she was walking in. And Ruby said she wasn’t talking to the crowd. “I was praying,” she said. “I was praying for them.” Every morning, on her way to school, Ruby stopped a few blocks from school to pray for her persecutors. That morning she had forgotten, so when she got into their midst, she stopped to do it. And this is what she said: “Please, God, try to forgive these people. Because even if they say those bad things, they don’t know what they’re doing. So you could forgive them, just like you did those folks a long time ago when they said terrible things about you” (The Story of Ruby Bridges, by Robert Coles).
Now that’s a girl who walked suspended from heaven. That’s a girl who knew that no abuse or taunting was as strong as the solid rock on which she stood. May we, too, trust in the Lord and stand on that rock that holds us always.