Psalm 13

Long enough, God--
you've ignored me long enough.
I've looked at the back of your head
long enough. Long enough
I've carried this ton of trouble,
lived with a stomach full of pain.
Long enough my arrogant enemies
have looked down their noses at me.

Take a good look at me, God, my God:
I want to look life in the eye
so no enemy can get the best of me
or laugh when I fall on my face.
(from Psalm 13, The Message)

One summer I worked in the Grand Canyon National Park as a Server and volunteered with Christian Ministries in the National Parks. There was suppose to be a Seminary student assigned to lead our team, but he never showed. The team was very disorganized. One day I was assigned to give “the message” at one of the campgrounds and neither the liturgist or the musician showed up. In a moment of panic, I opened the Bible and because I am terrible at improvisation I found a totally random Psalm and began reading. It was Psalm 13. I was embarrassed. It was a little intense for a campground kumbaya service. 

When I was in Seminary, I was in a seminar with Stanley Hauerwas and someone made the statement: “Christian are not suppose to have enemies.” I readily agreed. It made sense to me as a budding Mennonite, but Hauerwas disagreed adamantly--you need to have enemies in order to love them. A few weeks ago, I wrote on how disarming it felt for the book of Lamentations to feel so relevant. It is even more unsettling when we are able to pray imprecatory Psalms without too much squirming. 

From the cross Jesus prayed “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Last year, I noted in a sermon on the last words of Christ that I found it interesting that Jesus didn’t say: “I forgive you because you do not know what you do.” I pondered whether this isn’t a recognition that forgiveness is a complicated process and not something that we can coerce into existence by our own force of will. It is a grace that God gives and requires the creation of new reality/world between people. Jesus prayed for his enemies. He didn’t pretend he didn’t have them. Jesus asked for mercy for his enemies. He didn’t pretend that what they were doing was excused simply by virtue of the fact that they “didn’t know what they were doing.” 

Intentional sinning is a drop in the ocean of the sinning that we do, and yet we are all responsible for the suppleness of our own hearts and our own receptivity to hearing the truth. So, I will end with what I find most disturbing about these Psalms. As denizens of the richest nations on the Earth, 90% of the world’s population could rightly pray these words about and against us.