Scripture Readings: Psalms 22:1-15, Hebrews 4:12-16

When do you cry out to God? I see our poet of Psalms 22 writing at midnight by lamplight. This is a psalm of lamentation, a song for the depressed, the desperate, the lonely. He is clinically depressed, probably suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. So might our diagnosis go if he were to step into our therapy room, trigger happy as we are to slap a scientific sounding label on organic life. Diagnosis helps us feel in control, as if we have managed to package our problems, to cage our fears.

This poem is so honest and raw; it aches to be listened to without reservation. I have felt raw like this a few times in my life, and even the act of falling asleep hurts. Something is so clearly not right. Either you are mad at yourself because you are the way you are, and you seem unable to change, unable to summon the power you think you need, or you are mad at the world and God for not being more right for you. It is not fair. You should not have to change, the world should just be different.

I remember feeling this way when I was 18, just before I told my father that my girlfriend Mary was pregnant with my daughter Amy. I was angry that something that felt as good as sex could have such huge consequences. Why does the power of love and relationship and family and life have to be all tied up with it? I wanted things to be different, or I wanted me to be different. Why did I have to be this stupid, lustful, no talent to make a living 18 year old? "I am a worm and not a man, scorned by men and despised by the people."

Another time that I have spoken to God like our psalmist is after I met Douglas, a six year old Guatemalan boy who had been starving to death slowly for three years. Douglas in the infant hospital in Puerto Barrios, a seedy port town on the Carribean coast. What is this poverty that results in such a tragedy? I had to see. One of the other Peace Corps volunteers who had been working with the family to develop a chicken farm took me along for a visit. The house was about eight by ten feet, with three one-by-six foot planks for a bed. The floor was dirt. There was an open pit outside which was used as the toilet.

The father was working part time for Dole Fruit Company and was not home. The mother came out to greet us and brought us a stool to sit on. Ashamed of the accommodations she could offer, she brought out a gunny sack to place on the stool. I was ashamed for ever having cared where I sat. I was ashamed she thought I would care, as if she didn’t have other things to worry about. Besides Douglas who was dying in the infant hospital, there were three other children. The nine year old boy had quit school to help with chores and pick up work where he could. There was another infant boy and a three and a half year old girl. While we were there the girl attempted to get milk from her mother, who quickly pushed her away. It didn’t take very much thought to figure that due to lack of other food, the mother was breast feeding two children at once. This was the human face of poverty and injustice, of a horrible U.S. foreign policy and a culture of violence and corruption.

That night I flopped back and forth in the steamy dead air, unable to sleep. In my tiny little room, under the same tin roof as a couple of roosters who couldn’t figure out when morning was, I cried and yelled at God. "I am poured out like water, all my bones are out of joint, my heart has turned to wax within me." I felt powerless to change things, and why the hell whould I have to be so powerful anyway, isn’t that God’s job? Where is God? Where are you? Why? "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The psalm is so personal; grief is so personal. Certainly there is collective grief. And there may be bad things happening to other people. In fact I get the feeling our psalmist’s grief may be due in large part to the fact that the ones he loves have been hurt, or killed. The context sounds like a military occupation, which is certainly more intense than my own experience. But finally grief must become our own. We can distract ourselves with things or ideas or people, but sooner or later, if it must be at midnight, grief will find us. It demands that we selfishly own up to it, and if we do not it will haunt us forever.

Perhaps this is why perpetually shiny happy Christians make me nervous. This is why, while I am generally in favor of contemporary transformations of worship much contemporary Christian music makes me gag. Where is the tension of deep and powerful faith? But there is more than one way to hide grief. Sometimes we thinking Christians might do well to release our analysis of scripture and let it come alive and pierce our soul. I met To be sure, there is a time for analysis and diagnosis. There is also a time for letting go and being present.

This why this tragic psalm, this insistence on giving an ear to the truth of grief is not bad news. And as sad as my stories are, as unresolved, they do not hold the last word.

I know what you are thinking, because that is exactly what I was thinking at 10:30 PM last night when I got to this point in the sermon: "You are in pretty deep and there is a festival after worship. Max, people need to feel good so their enthusiasm for St. John’s will be contagious. If this is not the last word, then you had better come up with something good fast."

Here is my attempt, here is what we learn from this morning’s scripture: God can handle it! God can handle our prayers. God can handle us: we who are blind, we who doubt, we who are angry, we who are powerless, we who mourn, we who have sinned. God can handle us. God calls us still. Despite everything, God calls us forward to grow, forward, forward for justice. God calls us for love. Finally this psalm is a testimony of faith, not of doubt, of God’s presence, not of her absence. Indeed, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ these words become God’s words to God’s self. God prays them with us: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The belief that there is a God who is ever present, a God who creates us in joy, with a purpose and with a future which simply will not be overcome. "Yet you brought me out of the womb, you made me trust in you even at my mother’s breast. From birth I was cast upon you; from my mother’s womb you have been my God…I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters."

God knows of our grief even before we express it, yet God loves us still. The difficult in life is a reality, but it does not overcome the beautiful and lovely. It doesn’t overcome the tranformative power of God’s grace.

The greatest most joyous festival I have ever been to was in a graveyard. Guatemalans have reason to grieve, and they know how. They have reason to lose faith in a good and loving God. Yet in the midst of the troubles of life they know how to feel and express joy and faith in the most audacious way. I was so touched by God at this festival that the experience made it into a little story I wrote called the Gospel According to Max. The Christ figure, a Guatemalan woman named Emmanuela, has already been crucified.

The next morning some peasant men found her. They pulled the nails from her hands and feet, covered up her naked body and took her into town. A priest who had come to love her performed the funeral, and they buried her in the village graveyard.

Three days later the three disciples from North America were hanging out in a little eatery staring into their over-sugared coffee. They were jarred out of their daze by a conglomeration of children skipping and running, laughing and screaming by the door of the restaurant. Picking themselves up, they went out the door and down the street. "What’s happening?" they asked. "It’s the Day of the Dead. Go to the cemetery," an old man said. It was amazing. They could not help but look up and out.

The fields nearby were green, the corn ready to harvest, and massive thunder clouds created shadows that moved access the fertile, green valley. The three disciples followed the crowd into the graveyard and took a seat on one of the grave stones.

Small groups of women dressed in their most beautiful handwoven clothing, carried flowers on their heads and babies on their backs as they filtered into the cemetery. Children sold peanuts and gum, and ate them as well. Men sold small kites and lit firecrackers. Later, the young men scrambled over the fresh, flower lined graves pulling huge colorful kites---lifting the spirit of the dead into the heavens.

When most of the people had gone home and the sun was setting, a little boy ran up and pulled one of the disciples hands, dragging him toward where Emmanuela had been buried only three days before. Holding hands, the two stopped in front of Emmanuela’s grave. They couldn’t believe their eyes…