March 11, 2007 Des Moines

Psalm 51:1-15

Forgive Our Foolish Ways…

Soma, we learned last week, was a potent and intoxicating drink brewed from milk and honey by ancient Hindu priests of India and consumed in order to produce a state of religious frenzy that they believed enhanced spiritual communion with God. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier reflected on that practice in his 17-stanza poem called The Brewing of the Soma and found in the brew something of a metaphor for everything that manipulates or substitutes for real spiritual devotion.

In sensuous transports, he wrote, wild as vain,

We brew in many a Christian fane

The heathen Soma still!

We could think of it as the artificial winding of one’s own rubber band that first snaps and then quivers and then, of course, lays lifeless on the floor. There was, after all, nothing real to it – only the energy self-generated and expended. “Foolishness,” the poet would observe.

I’m not really interested in maligning the ritual practices of another religious tradition, but Whittier’s larger point is well-taken. How much of our life is spent in such foolish stretching and snapping – mustering energy and then expending it toward no salutary end? The Old Testament Patriarch Abraham knew what it was like. An old man in the company of an old woman, Abraham and Sarah were childless despite their highest hopes. But one day, a message they understood to be from God promised a legacy – descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, more numerous than the sands along the ocean. Grateful, and anxious, they cleaned out the extra room, picked out nursery paint and a cute little “Noah’s Ark” border, bought a baby bed, and with everything readied, waited. And waited. But still the room – and the womb – remained silent, inhabited by nothing but their disappointment.

And so Abraham decided to try some Soma. At his wife’s suggestion, Abraham took Sarah’s Egyptian slave girl Hagar and brewed up, with her sexual assistance, a solution. Who needs God when you can answer your own prayers? Hagar conceived and bore a son. Mission Accomplished!

But it wasn’t to be that easy. What has since been demonstrated often enough for the observation to become an adage, “Today’s solution becomes tomorrow’s problem” – as Muslims, the children of that first son, Ishmael, and Jews with Christians, the children of the later son Isaac, can well-attest. Creator of all humankind, forgive our foolish ways…

One of the early verses in the book of Exodus offers an unobtrusive, but ominously foreshadowing observation: “Now a new king arose over Egypt who did not know Joseph.” Joseph, the Israelite slave who had worked his way up to the highest echelons of Egyptian influence; Joseph, whose spiritual depth and mental acuity had saved Egypt from starvation and ruin and been acclaimed as a hero by the king and all his court. But there eventually arose a king over Egypt who did not know Joseph or his contributions. And this new king became afraid of at least one of the legacies Joseph had left behind – the burgeoning population of Israelite descendants, and in an attempt to quarantine the threat he perceived them to be, he made them slaves.

Life became grueling and the work backbreaking, but eventually God heard their prayers for release and raised up Moses to secure their release. Leading them out of Egypt and across the Red Sea, Moses led them across the wilderness and into a new comprehension of themselves as a people – a nation in God’s own keeping. But when they encamped at the foot of the mountain, and after Moses, who had ascended the mountain, but had been gone now longer than they could bear, the people decided to take matters into their own hands. Pooling their resources – their necklaces and bracelets, trinkets and treasures – they fashioned a golden calf as a god they wouldn’t have to wait for, and bowed down and began to worship the thing. The thing.

Creator of all humankind, forgive our foolish ways.

David was in a position of power – he scarcely needed anyone’s assistance. He was King, after all, with honor and victories behind him and power at the snap of his finger. He had come a long way from that little shepherd boy who had been fetched from the fields to be anointed by Samuel; a long way from that little sling shot and a pocket full of stones with which he had slain the Philistine giant Goliath. He no longer had to prove himself; now he could simply enjoy himself, and all the amenities that accompanied his position.

And so it was, one certain spring, “the time,” according to the narrator, “when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab with his officers and all Israel with him.”

In other words, David stayed home and left the heavy lifting to others. He should have found something better to do. As it was, David took it easy, even indulging in a little afternoon nap one day, after which he took a stroll along the rooftop of the palace to survey his little geographic/political bank account. It was then that he spied one of his deposits, if you will – a woman, beautiful in David’s eyes, bathing. Well, she was, come to think of it, a loyal subject – or mightn’t it be an “object” within David’s kingdom, and through some hormonally charged logic, in a way “his.” And so he drank deeply of the intoxicating brew.

The tires on this story are already worn bald from the telling, and so I’ll simply say that David sinned – grievously, murderously so – and dragged the lovely neighbor woman into it with him, and there was hell to pay. David, manufacturing his own delirium and delight, falling into foolish ways!

And ultimately he was brought to know it. By the courage and the kindness of a faithful intercessor, David came to comprehend it, and repent of it. Rushing, we can imagine, into the wilderness outside the city, and falling to his knees, forehead pressed to the earth beneath him, David began to pray:

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
   and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
   and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
   and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Or, as we have come to sing it,

Creator of all humankind, forgive us…

So what is the foolishness that distracts and detours our own faithfulness? My bedtime reading in recent days has been a book titled, The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv. The author is hoping to reconcile the great divorce that has occurred between children and nature – indeed, we might add, most of us, regardless of age, and nature. More and more, he points out, we live in urbanized, organized, and increasingly sanitized environments, and have come to view nature as something to avoid, at worst, or tame at best. Free play in parks and vacant lots has given way to organized leagues and video games.

I’ve heard many recount the stories of the time when this congregation hosted the young people from New York City several years ago and taking them camping – and how terrified those citified kids were of the experience. And we are more and more like them. Nature is increasingly viewed as the great unwashed danger zone, and from that perspective we not only fall guilty to the old adage that “what we don’t value, we don’t protect,” we also deprive ourselves of the great healing value of interaction with nature. We prefer our nature as we have manufactured it: manicured and improved, behind glass, or potted within the climate controlled confines of our carpeted living rooms. “Forgive our foolish ways.”

Forgive us, as well, of our deep-seated cultural delusion that we can acquire our way into happiness or turn everything, from friendship to faithfulness, from wonder to worship into a commodity to be marketed and traded or sold. Forgive us for believing that “comfort” is the highest good, or forgive us for any of the zillion ways we function personally, politically, or internationally from what I think of as a “pre-Copernican” perspective, certain that everything else revolves around us.

And forgive us for stealing a sip, every now and then, from the cup of hopelessness that lures many of us from time to time – that dark conclusion that life and the humans who populate it are finally dismal and beyond repair; that contrary to the old liberal optimism that believed the world is getting better and better day by day, it is, instead, degenerating into worse and worse. Surely it is only the most optimistic among us who don’t lean dangerously close to despair when we watch airplanes fly into office buildings, or read of a mother swinging her 4-week-old baby like a baseball bat at her boyfriend with whom she was fighting. “Forgive,” we pray, “our foolish ways, which include both acting in ways abhorrent to our nature, and giving up on God’s creative power to redeem it.

“Creator of all humankind, forgive our foolish ways” that try to spin the gold of glory from the straw of our own flame and fizz. Which, of course, drives us to the core of the Good News that Jesus came to proclaim: that while our own efforts to manufacture grace are ultimately futile, God’s are not. Whatever our particular context of the story, the point of it is this: that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Neither our faithlessness, nor our foolishness.

If that doesn’t give us courage and incentive to get up in the morning, I can’t imagine what will. If, then, the prayer begins with the words, “forgive our foolish ways,” surely it ends with these:

O Lord, open my lips,
   and my mouth will declare your praise.