Psalm 69:1-3, 13-16
Meditation following Superstorm Sandy
My soon to be fourteen
year old daughter, Anna, desperately wants her own cell phone. I have been informed a few times over that
she is nearly the last one of her peers to get one. I actually don’t think that’s much of an
exaggeration. For some reason, she just doesn’t seem to want
a state of the art walkie-talkie or C.B. radio like I had when I was her
age. Ok, I haven’t really offered
those. And, yes, I fully understand and
respect her plea … especially after these past two weeks when easy internet
access has disappeared. As she waits
for the gloriously happy day to come when she’ll have her very own number (oh
how well I remember becoming KABG3738 in C.B. radio land!), Anna rather much
enjoys making little modifications to my phone. When I’m away from it, she’ll pick it up and
change the color scheme or the font.
Just for fun. Most often,
though, she changes the little word banner that appears on my main screen. This is usually to leave a sweet or humorous
tiny message. For example, I looked
down one day and saw the words “Book Not Kindle.” This came after I confessed to her that
while I was recently reading a real book -- a paper book, not a digital one on
my Kindle tablet computer – I had pressed my finger down on a word and waited
for the definition to pop up. Well,
that very helpful tool works on the Kindle, but, um, completely fails for inked
books. She got quite a kick out of that
and so wanted to remind me not to do it again.
Sometime late Thursday
night, after we had returned to utterly absorb ourselves into our own warm, lit
home space, she changed the word banner again.
This time it simply and happily declared, “Power Back!!!!” I smiled at what was true for our family,
but then let the smile go since this was unfortunately still not the case for so
many of our neighbors, near and far, still in great need and grief. And then, as
my mind tends to do, I read something deeper into it those two words. The declaration morphed into a profound question. It
asked me, “Did God’s power ever go away?”
This set me to deeper,
further reflection on the power and presence of God – and more specifically, of
Christ -- during calamitous circumstances.
Just the day before I had been
reading on this topic from a book that jumped into my hand from my office
bookshelf while I was there last Wednesday.
The book is a collection of sermons written by a widely-known Old
Testament scholar named Walter Brueggeman.
The book title invites the reader to spend lots of time pacing through
the book’s pages – “The Threat of Life: Sermons on Pain, Power and
Weakness.” There’s nothing quite like a
little “light” reading while struggling in the dark, right?
Specifically, I had been reading the sermon
“Deep Waters” based on Psalm 69. In
this time of coping with power outage, of lost homes and lost lives, of both
small and grand scale devastations and disruptions, as well as this time of
people truly pulling together to work toward restorations and to offer
compassionate care for neighbors, I find the insights from this sermon a
powerful reminder of the Bible’s witness to God’s ever-abiding, good and
powerful presence. So too our vital participation in it.
It’s significant that
it is a Good Friday sermon. And truly,
Superstorm Sandy has caused a great many people to visit this frightening
pre-Easter period. Brueggeman calls
this the time when “We wait in the quiet and the dark to see if chaos will
recede,” a time “open for stocktaking and for noticing in honesty that the
powers of chaos and death are indeed untamed.”[i]
We’ve all been doing
this, haven’t we? As we hear about and
read about and talk about and experience the
tremendous impact of the greatest natural disaster in our state’s history, as
well as its farther reach, we indeed take honest inventory of desolations. Both literally and metaphorically, great
multitudes of people have been in the deep
waters, the sinking mire, the swallowing deep voiced by Psalm 69. It’s been a time of threat, when, to Brueggeman
again, “all our fragile arrangements and our little safe spots of earth” have
been pounded by fierce and relentless chaos.
The Psalmist’s deeply,
desperately honest plea helps us voice our own storm-damaged laments and urgent
petitions to God for rescue and restoration.
During such a time when our
normally secure footholds have quite literally been swept away or have been
blacked out by anxiety and despair, it helps us to passionately pray for
ourselves and others to be delivered from all that is deep, dark, and overwhelming. And the most blessed truth of Psalm 69 is that
it “refuses to host the idea that chaos is limitless.” Brueggeman puts it this way, saying that the
Psalm is a prayerful “affirmation that watery chaos has limits, boundaries, and
edges, because the waters butt up against the power of God.” It reminds us that the voice of faith needs
to acknowledge chaos, but then submit to the larger power of God. Ours is therefore faithful “counter-speech” to
the roar of chaos, speech that steadfastly refuses to be silent in the midst of
threat. This echoes the voice of Jesus
on the Cross, the One who suffered with us and for us, and whose voice is, as
Brueggeman nicely states it, is the voice of “all our common humanity, sore
pressed, but not yet talked out of faith.”
This most definitely
does not mean we just sit around doing nothing more than speaking piously. We don’t just state our lament, make our desperate
appeal to God, and then sit back as if God’s response doesn’t involve us. For the Psalmist, for all of ancient Israel
So Anna’s tiny banner more
accurately proclaims that power back means we power back! By God’s
abiding grace and through our collective faithful trust in the power and light
of Christ, we shout back and push back at the impact of desolating storms. Evidence of this is everywhere. I read counter-speech, counter-action updates
on Facebook, I hear it in countless conversations and honestly uttered prayers,
and it is energized through extensions of hospitality and through initiatives
such as our donation partnership with Jersey City University
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