{"id":532,"date":"2010-11-30T18:01:39","date_gmt":"2010-12-01T00:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=532"},"modified":"2010-11-30T18:01:39","modified_gmt":"2010-12-01T00:01:39","slug":"on-divine-abandonment-the-psalms-in-our-worship-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/on-divine-abandonment-the-psalms-in-our-worship-14\/","title":{"rendered":"On Divine Abandonment: The Psalms in our Worship 14"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, I sat in a piano recital in which my son and seven other college piano majors played some of the most gorgeous pieces ever written (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and some others).\u00a0 They were intense as they brought together months of work and passion into a single distillation of beauty and pathos for us to hear.\u00a0 At such times, my mind tends to settle down from its almost constant restlnessness and frenzy (a state born of the need to perform and achieve at all times).\u00a0 I become calm and peaceful and attentive to the sights and sounds and smells around me.\u00a0 For a few moments, I do not feel alone, but rather part of a much larger whole that loves me and wants me to be whole.\u00a0 Music pulls me to God.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But why I do need to be drawn to God, if God is always present and available?\u00a0 This question bothers me.\u00a0 The answer must surely be because God is not always present or available, but often seems terribly absent.\u00a0 The composer of Psalm 22, on which I wish to reflect a moment, knew this.\u00a0 This poignant lament became famous to Christians because Jesus fittingly prayed it on the cross, thereby joining the great parade of sufferers that have made up the human race since its tragedy-filled beginnings.\u00a0 A fitting psalm for a moment of agony — “my God, my God why have you abandoned me?”<\/p>\n

Like other laments, this one follows a fairly recognizable structure:<\/p>\n

1. A cry to God (v. 1-2 [Hebrew 2-3])<\/p>\n

2. A statement of the problem (vv. 3-18 [Hebrew 4-19])<\/p>\n

3. A petition for help (vv. 19-21 [Hebrew 20-22])<\/p>\n

4. A commitment to praise God (vv. 22-31 [Hebrew 23-32])<\/p>\n

Parts 2 and 4 are especially interesting to me.\u00a0 What does the psalmist lament?\u00a0 It is not merely the physical pain or social dislocation he or she experiences.\u00a0 Rather, it is the loss of God, the sense that God has disappeared, contrary to all expectation or human longing.\u00a0 The psalmist describes a time of cognitive dissonance, in which the old religious verities (“our ancestors trusted in you” or “they cried out to you”) have crumbled to dust, leaving not brave new worlds of liberated humankind but a sense of lostness and pointlessness.\u00a0 God’s disappearance, far from allowing humanity to come to maturity as some modern thinkers have hoped for, leads the psalmist to face the utter hopelessness of human existence, its irreducible meaninglessness without God.<\/p>\n

This dislocation from oneself can be experienced in different ways, but for the psalmist the key idea is social dislocation: “those who see me mock me,” “I am a worm” (which does not mean that he is worthless or sinful, as the language has come to mean in our guilt-ridden form of Christianity influenced by American evangelicalism, but that he or she has lost human identity in the eyes of other people, who regard him as a parasitic, distasteful, horrifying creature), and so on.\u00a0 Without God, we are no longer quite human beings, and vice versa.\u00a0 The chain of being has been snapped.<\/p>\n

The fourth part marks a reversal of all the tragedy.\u00a0 The psalmist, as one must do in a proper lament, turns to praise for God’s reversal of fortunes.\u00a0 By reentering the community and singing again its holiest and most gorgeous songs, the psalmist has found God again.\u00a0 Or maybe the causal chain is the other way round, but in any case, there is a connection between God and the songs of the community about God.\u00a0 No longer is the psalmist ashamed, because the poor, of which the psalmist is one, are not put to shame (v. 24).\u00a0 The normal social hierarchies in which some humiliate others in order to exalt themselves, come under divine judgment and so are destroyed.\u00a0 And, in fact, the only concrete thing that is different when God intervenes, other than the attitudes of the people, is the fact that “the poor eat and are satisfied” (v. 26), surely a reality we in our great wealth would find almost trivial.\u00a0 And all of this reversal occurs because Yahweh owns kingship (v. 28) over all the world and thus orders it according to the principles of righteousness.\u00a0 By the end of the psalm, the cognitive dissonance has resolved itself in a harmonious way (my music metaphor again!).<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is useful that this exquisite lament is so famous.\u00a0 In praying with the most famous pray-er of Psalm 22, we may enter into the suffering of the world and find in our discordant singing the resources for a more glorious hymn that will evoke a new world in which we “come and tell of Yahweh’s righteousness to the people to be born, because he has acted” (v. 31).\u00a0 Because God has acted.\u00a0 Because God has acted.\u00a0 Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, I sat in a piano recital in which my son and seven other college piano majors played some of the most gorgeous pieces ever written (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and some others).\u00a0 They were intense as they brought together months of work and passion into a single distillation of beauty and pathos for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Divine Abandonment: The Psalms in our Worship 14 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/on-divine-abandonment-the-psalms-in-our-worship-14\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Divine Abandonment: The Psalms in our Worship 14 - 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