Protest and Praise

April 28, 2024  Fifth Sunday of Easter
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Psalm 22:1-5, 12-31
“Protest and Praise”
Douglas T. King

Here in Saint Louis when we speak of red birds we are inevitably speaking of cardinals.  But Saint Louis also has its share of robins with red breasts.  The English author, Katherine May writes about the history of the robin’s connection to Christmas and our Christian faith.
 
“Robins first became associated with winter in Victorian times, as the stars of the new fashion for Christmas cards.  This might have been kind of a joke—the postmen who delivered them were known as ‘robins’ because of their red jackets. But the cards probably refer to an earlier association between the robin and the birth of Christ.  One traditional story is that the robin got his red breast in the manger, where he had come to watch the baby Jesus.  He noticed that the fire had blazed dangerously high and placed himself between the flames and the sleeping infant.  His breast was scorched to the deep red that he passed on to his descendants.” (May, p.215)

Lovely Christmas folklore is always a treat but I am not sure it has much to offer us in late April as we gather around the twenty-second psalm.  But here is what robins do have to offer us, “they sing through the darkest months.  Other birds call in the winter, too, but these are often defensive notes, aimed at warding off predators. Robins, however, engage in full, complex song during the coldest months when it’s far too early to consider breeding.  One ornithologist found that robins will sing as soon as the days begin to get longer…” (May, pp. 215-216)  It is as if they are, “in practice for happier times.” (May, p. 216)

Robins have a lot in common with our psalmist this morning.  Psalm twenty-two is a cry of protest in the darkness, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  These are the infamous words we hear Jesus exclaim from the cross.  And the psalmist continues, “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”  And then later in the psalm, “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are like wax; it is melted within my breast…”  But in the midst of these cries of protest we get these words of praise from another portion of the psalm, “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.  In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted and you delivered them…Yet it was you who took me from the womb; you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.  On you I was cast from my birth, and since my mother bore me you have been my God.”

This psalm pivots between protest and praise, with both being offered passionately and eloquently.  One scholar refers to this dynamic as “balanced extravagances.” (McCann Jr, p. 762) Upon first hearing it can be a little disorienting.  Praising God in the midst of protesting how God has failed you?  Can one do both of those things with full heart and voice?  Clearly the psalmist can.  And I believe we are called to do so as well.
 
Any honest and full relationship with the divine needs to not only allow but encourage us to share our deepest pains and frustrations.  Whenever I meet with someone and they express embarrassment and sometimes even shame that they are angry with God, I encourage them that those feelings can be appropriate and can be shared with God.  Our Biblical witness is filled with faithful people decrying their frustration with the divine.  
In the midst of expressing our pain and frustration to God, the challenge for us, is to not lose sight of our need to continue to praise God.  Just as we can be angry with someone who is important to us and still be able to express our love for them, so too, can we and should we do so with God.  No relationship can remain healthy if it is solely expressed in complaint and bitterness. Likewise, no relationship can remain healthy if it denies ever being frustrated.

One of my favorite poets is Rainer Marie Rilke.  Rilke grappled with this issue.  Rilke experienced a very painful childhood.  He was locked in the attic by his mother for long periods of time and was sent to a military school even though he had the sensitivity of a poet. Yet he learned something of praise from this journey with suffering.
 
He expressed this in a poem about his vocation.

Oh, tell us poet, what do you do?
I praise.
But the deadly and the violent days,
how do you undergo them, take them in?
I praise.
But the namelessness—how do you raise
that, invoke the unnameable? 
           I praise.
What right have you, through every phase,
in every mask, to remain true?
        I praise.
–and that both stillness and the wild affray
know you, like star and storm?
        Because I praise.*

*Translation by Denise Levertov in Denis Levertov, Light Up the Cave (NY: 1981), pp. 98f.

Rilke stands firm in his need to praise even in the midst of great trials and tribulations.  In another poem, the tenth of his duino elegies, he goes on to speak about his bouts of grief and anguish.  He speaks of gratitude for his tears of pain.

Some day,
in the emergence from this fierce insight,
let me sing jubilation and praise 
to assenting Angels.
Let not a single one of the cleanly-struck hammers of my heart
deny me, through a slack, or a doubtful, 
or a broken string. 
Let my streaming face make me more radiant: 
let my secret weeping bear flower. 
O, how dear you will be to me, then, Nights
of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, 
why did I not kneel more to greet you, 
lose myself more in your loosened hair? 
We, squanderers of painful hours.
How we gaze beyond them into duration’s sadness,
to see if they have an end. 
Though they are nothing but
our winter-suffering foliage, 
our dark evergreen,
one of the seasons of our inner year – 
not only season - : 
but place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling.

There is no way to be immune to grief and pain and complaint in our lives.  The question before us is how to face those times.  The psalmist and Rilke stand together on this.  They begin by passionately and eloquently expressing the reality of their suffering before God.  And in the midst of that passionate expression of their pain they also express their praise.  Their suffering and the honest expression of it, does not mute their gratitude.  We must praise in the midst of the protest of our suffering that our souls grow strong enough to bear the suffering.  Jack Levison writes, “Praise is more precious perhaps when it is peppered by pain.” (Levison, p.27)  

When I find myself in a place where all I can do is express frustration and pain; when that is the only reality I can see;  I find myself flashing back to when I was four years old and would have a tantrum over something.  When I find all of my reality clouded by frustration, I try to remind myself these moments are inner-four-year-old moments.  But we are called to a deeper and wider perspective on our existence.  

The suffering that can and will occur in our lives is very real and we should never minimize or dismiss that reality.  But all of that suffering occurs in the midst of a broader context.  In the midst of the psalmist’s cries of complaint and anguish he is still able to remember that it is God who delivers.  And as Christians we know there is no suffering that occurs when God is not suffering beside us.  There is no place of pain where God is not seeking to heal us.  There is nothing that will keep us from God’s loving and eternal embrace.  

Let us cry out and complain to God when we need to do so. Let us be honest about our every disappointment, frustration, and real place of pain.  And in the midst of those protests, let us worship the one, who creates, redeems, and sustains us on each new day.  Let us be like the robin, singing songs even in the darkness.  Let us be like the poet, responding to even the difficult days with the refrain, “I praise.”

Thanks be to God.  Thanks be to God, indeed.  Amen.

May, Katherine, Wintering, Riverhead Books, New York, 2020.
McCann Jr, Clinton J., The New Interpreter’s Bible: vol. IV, 
 Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1996.
Levison, Jack, Fresh Air, Paraclete Press, Massachusetts, 2012.