Apr 12 2019 Psalm 22

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

One interesting thing about the Daily Office is that its schedule is based on the months and days of a three year cycle. Occasionally, the regular prescribed readings that get you through the Scripture during the year are interrupted by a particular reading for the specific celebrated day, but not always, and not for the general flow of the church year. 

This Sunday begins what we call Holy Week, the week celebrating Christ’s last week. It is packed with emotional and liturgical highs and lows – a crazy roller coaster which concludes on Easter Sunday. This Sunday, Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, where his vision of where he’s heading (death) is very different than the crowds', who think he’s their savior. Thursday, his last supper with his disciples and his imprisonment. Friday, his death. Saturday our waiting. And Saturday night or Sunday, his resurrection. Leaders at churches, big and small, have twice or three times the number of services to coordinate, sermons to prepare, music to arrange. It's a lot. 

This is my first year in 30 years where I don’t have a home parish, I’m not walking that Holy Week journey with my beloved choir from Kenmore, where I shared the journey with 16 of my favorite singers, with many extra rehearsals and long hours. I’m not at the parishes I served during my ordination process, learning many of the different ways of being church. I’m not with the parishes I served as an ordained deacon, learning the way to lead others through that, and developing my voice in preaching and writing. 

Maybe it’s because of that sense of nomadness, that I see today’s reading in the context of Holy Week. The beginning of this psalm, My God My God, why have you forsaken me, comes at a stark moment during this week, that takes my breath away. It is read during the scripted reading  of Jesus’ death. Different people in the church take different ‘roles’, and the arrest, torture, trial and execution are read from those different voices. Jesus says, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?, which the script parenthetically translates as My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?  After 50 years, I no longer stumble over the foreign language, but always stumble at the rawness of his cry.

Jesus is dying, after a horrible and unjust trial, his torture, and during an intentionally slow, painful, humiliating execution. Jesus, who’s laid down a new law, a new way of love, is being killed by the very humans he’d come to love. Jesus, like the rest of us mortals, cries out with a sense of anger, defeat, abandonment that I have felt. He turns to this line from Psalms, written about 1000 years before he was born. He turned to something well established, with staying power and deeply faith-filled for him. 

When I turn to these same psalms, this morning I’m struck how long they’ve been around and how many have used these words, written 3000 years before my uttering them. The Psalms are foundational to Judaism and Christianity throughout that time. Think of all of the people who’ve lived, and done amazing things, and died, all turning to the Psalms as an expression of their joy, adoration, gratitude, anger, despair, abandonment. 

Today’s reading adds Christ to that list of Psalm-users, at a pivotal moment in his life and death. And as a result, in a pivotal moment in my faith. Christ feels God’s distance and abandonment as he’s hanging, knowing death is soon. He senses this distance even though he’s been preaching an all-loving, all-powerful God. Even as he forgives the people who’ve done this to him. Even as he forgives the criminals dying with him. But God’s love doesn’t stop there with Christ. We know the rest of the story with Christ. We believe evil and death don’t have the last word. God does.

Today, I want to relish the depth and history of the psalms – all they’ve seen and all the people through time and space who’ve prayed the same words. I want to realize that wonderous people have prayed these words, even that guy hanging on the cross. And today, I want to end where Psalm 22 ends, My soul shall live for him.