Lm 1:1-6 & Lk 17:5-10

7 October 2001

World Communion Sunday

 

"To Laugh Again"

 

You may not have ever noticed, but I usually try to inject a little dose of humor whenever I speak in front of people.  (And I know, you're probably thinking, "'A little dose of humor,' he says.  Yeah, right.  How about a microscopic dose?")  Public speaking gurus tell us that humor helps establish rapport with one's listeners—and I'm sure that that's true.  Though for me, it's more a matter of simply who I am.  But as I've said recently, not everyone agrees on what's funny.

Still, there's another issue to consider.  Obviously, there are times when humor is not appropriate.  A week ago last night, I was watching "Saturday Night Live" when they began the show with members of the New York City Fire and Police Departments.  It was part of their tribute to the acts of heroism involved in the rescue effort.  New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was on hand to introduce various officials.  In a show of decorum, the program's producer, Lorne Michaels, walked out on stage and asked Giuliani, "Can we be funny?"  Apparently ignoring the fact that he himself has hosted "Saturday Night Live," Rudy responded, "Why start now?"

I can understand the awkwardness the cast must have felt as they tried to return to a sense of "normalcy," as it's been called.  For comedians, that means being funny.  Even if I were so inclined, I'd be unable to find anything amusing about today's Old Testament reading in Lamentations.  We have a picture here of raw agony.  That's something that many New Yorkers—many Americans—have tasted in recent weeks.  For a lot of people, it will be a long time before they're able to laugh again.

I also want to look at our gospel reading in Luke.  It's one that strikes me as just¼bizarre.  As with the parable of the dishonest manager in September, I wonder if Jesus isn't expressing his own sense of humor.  If the parable last month was tinged with sarcasm, the reading for today appears to be dripping with it.  For years, I’ve thought about, and been haunted by, the words of verse 10.  But I’ll say more about that later!

Today is World Communion Sunday, and its theme is peacemaking.  The Presbyterian Church (USA) is especially focusing on God’s promise in Isaiah 32:18 that “[m]y people will abide in a peaceful habitation.”  As I mention in the newsletter, it’s both ironic and appropriate that Lamentations be the Old Testament reading for this World Communion Sunday.

With the terrorist attacks of September 11, America has been forced to enter into a type of communion that it’s rarely, if ever, known.  It’s not an enviable communion—for it’s the communion of nations who’ve suffered from the plague of terrorism, many of them for decades.  It’s a communion of anger, fear, and pain.

Again, as I mention in the newsletter, Lamentations takes us back 26 centuries to the time just after the Babylonian Empire has invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the temple.  In his commentary on Lamentations, Delbert Hillers says that the book “is a recital of the horrors and atrocities of the long siege and its aftermath, and, beyond the tale of physical sufferings, an account of the spiritual significance of the fall of the city.”  He adds that “Lamentations was meant to serve the survivors of the catastrophe simply as an expression of the horror and grief they felt.  People live on best after calamity, not by utterly repressing their grief and shock, but by facing it, and by measuring its dimensions.”^[1]  So the poems of Lamentations have a therapeutic value.

This divinely-inspired art gives voice to the terror and misery of the Jewish nation.  And it is art; it is poetry—and not only that, but poetry of a quite structured nature.  The first four chapters have been done in what's called an acrostic style.  That means that each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  To illustrate, I've listed the first line of each verse of our scripture text on the back of the bulletin.

No one's really sure why the poems have been written this way.  Maybe it's to help in memorizing them.  Maybe it's a symbolic way of telling the whole story, of summing up everything from A to Z—or in Hebrew, from aleph to taw.

No one really knows who the poet or poets were, either.  Jeremiah's been a popular candidate, based on 2 Ch 35:25, which says that "Jeremiah¼uttered a lament for Josiah," after that king had died.  The only king in Lamentations is Zedekiah, who repeatedly ignored Jeremiah's words from the Lord.

Besides that, it's very unlikely that Jeremiah would have said much of the stuff in Lamentations.  For example, the poet mourns the absence of true prophets (2:9), has trusted in foreign nations (4:17), and has praised King Zedekiah as "[t]he Lord's anointed, the breath of our life" (4:20).  Finally, the book ends on a very bleak note:  "Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old—unless you have utterly rejected us, and are angry with us beyond measure" (5:21-22).

Unless he had gone insane, there's no way Jeremiah would have said that!  Remember, by this time, he had already gone from preaching bad news to preaching good news.  He knew that God would restore the nation, that God would make a new covenant with the people.

No, the words of Lamentations come from someone who is shocked at what has happened—someone who didn't see, or didn't believe, that it was coming.  The poet or poets are "closely identified with the common hopes and fears of the people."[2]  The details may differ, but the sense of trauma is universal.  The event of the Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem is unique, but the aftermath of terrorism unfortunately is not.  Over and over, the painful experience of Lamentations has been felt throughout the world.

Part of our pain, part of our agony, is the question¼why?  Why do they hate us?  We're tempted to seek a one-dimensional answer.  Some focus on the attacks as works of evil, works of the devil; others point to the people involved, to uneducated young men brainwashed by corrupt leaders; still others mention legitimate grievances which have been carried way too far.  No doubt, all of these and more are involved.

I won't pretend to truly understand the mind of a terrorist, and I won't pretend to have the final word on why so much of the human race has a love/hate relationship with America.  I'm sure if we Americans made more of an effort to understand the world around us, we'd have better answers.  Certainly an international body like the church of Jesus Christ should have a better understanding of our world.

I think another part of our distress, if not our pain, lies in wondering how to respond to September 11.  Do we treat terrorists as criminals to be apprehended?  Are they targets for military strikes?  How do we distinguish between the guilty and innocent?  Does Christian faith help our perspective?  Does it make any difference?

Returning to our gospel reading in Luke, what is it that prompts the apostles’ request to Jesus in verse 5, “Increase our faith!”?  Is it what he tells them in verse 4, when he says that “if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive”?

Some say that Luke has pieced together sayings from different occasions, so we don’t know why the apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith.  Maybe that’s true; but even if it is, Luke still arranges the sayings this way.  Is it because he knows how hard it can be to forgive, whether the other person repents or not?  And by the way, Jesus doesn’t always require that the other person seek forgiveness, as he does here (Mt 6:14, Lk 6:37).  That would seem to make forgiving even more difficult.

Of course, we’re so used to watering down the teachings of Jesus that we often find it impossible to believe what he says.  And I don’t exclude myself from this—I’m not putting myself in a different category.  Maybe that’s why I’ve always had such trouble with verse 10:  “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”  Part of me agrees with the idea that that comes from another occasion, when Jesus is talking, not to his disciples, but to slaveholders!  Or that he is in fact being sarcastic!

The amazing thing is that, according to Jesus, the apostles have it all wrong.  They’re looking to have their faith boosted, but Jesus says they just need a tiny bit of faith—just a little dose (kind of like the amount of humor I’m able to conjure up!)  “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed¼” (v. 6).  “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much” (16:10).

In saying these things, I don’t want to treat the horror that so many people have been through in a glib fashion.  I’m especially thinking of those directly affected by the attacks.  In a recent address at a Manhattan synagogue, Mayor Giuliani spoke of dark days ahead.  “He told the congregation he was terrified of the anguish coming when the dust literally clears and New Yorkers realize the true magnitude of the devastation.  The words he did not speak, which have been on the lips of therapists and news anchors for weeks, are ‘post-traumatic stress disorder.’”^[3]

There are already signs that the shell-shocked sense of civility and unity is beginning to wear off, as people struggle with the nightmare of what has happened in their midst.  “She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks.”  This phrase, from verse 2 in our reading from Lamentations, was written with Jerusalem in mind.  But in our new world of terror, New York can now more easily empathize with places like Sarajevo and Rwanda.