Scriptures: Psalms
I had meant, in my last sermon, two weeks ago, to say something about enemies. I had started out with the thought of focusing on the verse from Psalm 23 about preparing a table “in the presence of my enemies”, I meant to say something about that then, but ran out of time and energy. So I want to come back to that today. It’s just as well I didn’t get around to that topic before, because as I’ve continued to reflect on it, there’s a lot to think about and a lot to say—more than I would have been able to get to in a part of that last sermon, more than I will get to today.
Enemies are everywhere in the Psalms. You can’t really take a preaching tour through the Psalms, as I decided to do this summer, without bumping into enemies everywhere you go. You know how they say that Eskimos have 100 different words for ice. A student of the Psalms I was reading claimed that he had found 94 different ways to say enemy in the Psalms. Clearly this is a “theme” in the Psalms, maybe an obsession. They seem to be a “theme” and maybe an obsession, in real life these days too. It’s hard to avoid talking about enemies if you’re dealing with the Psalms. It’s hard to avoid if you’re alive in the world today.
Many of us I would guess have a sense that what the Psalms have to say about enemies is not particularly inspirational. And there are some parts of the Psalms that will definitely give that impression. Two weeks ago we read from Psalm 139, and I stopped the reading at a certain point because I wanted to avoid reading the rest of that Psalm, which includes these wonderful words: “O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me…Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?…I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies.” As I say, not very inspirational.
In fact, given the world we live in, not very inspirational is hardly the right phrase. Chilling might be more like it. To be so willing to designate people as enemies, to wish their destruction, to hate them with a perfect hatred, no less, to identify my enemies with God’s enemies—all of this is not just troublesome. It sounds very much like a recipe for disaster, for violence, for ever-escalating violence, even for apocalypse.
Or what about the reading from Psalm 94? “O Lord, you God of vengeance. You God of vengeance, shine forth…Rise up, O judge of the earth, and give the proud what they deserve…God will repay them for their evil and wipe them out for their wickedness; the Lord our God will wipe them out.” That’s the way the Psalm ends—not exactly on a high note. Statements like these are not just not a good source of moral guidance. Scripture or no scripture, they deserve to be denounced and rejected as having no place in our faith.
But having said that, I have to make one comment before we go any farther. Words like this are not representative of the whole of the Hebrew scriptures. It is inappropriate, it’s just not right, to read these words and then say, “Oh I’ve never liked the Old Testament.” This is not the Old Testament. There is a lot of material in the Old Testament. We shouldn’t paint the whole Old Testament with the attitudes that are expressed in a few places.
Still I have to admit that there are some things in the Old Testament that will make you shake your head and sometimes make your heart sink, and some of them are in the Psalms. “O Babylon, you devastator!” says Psalm 137, “Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us. Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” Now that is said only once in the Psalms, but once is enough. Once is too much. And a few passages like that can make it seem like such statements characterize the whole collection of Psalms. It gives the impression that this is pretty much what the Psalms have to say about enemies. And what they have to say at this level leads to nothing good.
So let’s admit the obvious—that there are some troublesome parts of the psalms, and some parts that will send shivers down your spine if you think about them. But since we already know that much, simply to complain about that would also not be very helpful, so I want to do more than complain. C.S. Lewis points out that we are after all blood relations to the people who wrote the Psalms. Maybe at the least they deserve not to be dismissed. Maybe they deserve to be given the benefit of the doubt as far as having something to say that is worth thinking about. Maybe there’s a little something more here than hatred and revenge.
One thing that immersing myself in all these writings about enemies has meant to me is that it has made me much more conscious and questioning of my own world-view in this matter. And while I remain deeply offended by the rhetoric of the Psalms, I am not so sure that my experience of life is so very different from theirs.
I mean, we do have enemies, don’t we. I do have enemies, don’t I? (I ask myself.) It’s not that that I object to in the Psalms, is it? The very idea of having enemies? Or is it? On the one hand, it’s a little bit like the story of someone who was asked if she believed in infant baptism and she said: Believe in it! I’ve seen it with my own eyes. We don’t have to “believe in” enemies or think they’re a good thing, but we have seen them, experienced them. On the other hand…
There is a part of me that wants to say that there are no enemies, not really. That if human beings could penetrate beyond those things that put them at odds with each other, if we could somehow talk to each other about the things that hurt and the things that we wish for, if we could somehow discover that piece of common humanity we share or that something of God that is within us, that we would realize that we are not enemies, any of us, that there can be no such thing as enemies. That’s part of me, and I don’t want to give up that part of me, but it’s only part of me.
The other part of me says that there really are enemies, as the Psalms say over and over. It’s not just that what we find in the Psalms is some real but unattractive parts of human nature, and therefore of ourselves. It’s not just that those feelings are real, but that there really are enemies. You know the saying: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t really out to get you.
So the Psalms have led me to think about this question of even having enemies. Clearly the hope that we can overcome enmity by getting to know each other is not inconsistent with acknowledging that in the real world there is such a thing, but sometimes our desire for pleasantness and our desire to avoid conflict get in the way of even thinking about the reality of enemies.
One thought I’ve had is that even though we may have no desire to be enemies with other people, in fact may have every desire not to be, that even so other people may choose to be enemies to us. This might seem to be a rather simple thought, but it is one that people in the United States often have seemed to have a problem with, especially so in the wake of September 11. Why do they hate us? Given the fact that we are by and large such good and caring people, and that this is such a good place to live, why is there such anti-American feeling in so many other places? Why would anyone just out of the blue attack us? And on a personal level it may also be that no matter how likeable I am, that even though I am cooperative, easy going, good-hearted, and bathe on a regular basis, that there may be people who do not like me and who for some reason seem to wish me harm or want me to fail.
This puzzling fact—that people seem to want to be enemies with me even though I don’t want to be enemies with them—might be because of the fact that I am not quite as innocent as I would like to think of myself as being. We all would like to think that we are undeserving of the wrath of people who make themselves our enemies, and that our enemy relationship is entirely because of them. It may be that I am not quite as good-hearted as I thought. Or it may be because we have had the courage to say or do something that will make us some enemies. It may be that having no enemies is a sign not of our goodness but of our cowardice. Not having enemies is not necessarily a good thing.
In any case, this is all not about nice. A friend of mine in Chicago used to refer to herself as “the queen of nice” by which she meant nothing good. She used that phrase in a very self-critical way, which I didn’t happen to agree with, but by which she meant that she got through life by being nice, not getting anyone too upset, avoiding conflict wherever she could, and being generally good at getting people to like her. If there is one thing the Psalms are clear about, it’s that nice isn’t where it’s at in this whole business. We neither preserve ourselves from enemies we feel we shouldn’t have nor have the courage to make the enemies we probably should have by being nice. Not that there’s not a place for niceness in our world, and not that there’s some point in being intentionally not nice. We don’t see “nice” in the Psalms very much. And it does remind me that nice is how we avoid issues in this context, not how we work them through. Pretending to have no enemies, seeking to have no enemies will not get us very far. But we won’t work through our attitudes toward terrorism or massive retaliation by pretending to have no enemies We will not work through any personal relationship problem we may have merely by being nice. So I do have to say that for all their out of control anger and bitterness, the writings about enemies do lead me in the direction of some needed soul searching about why I do have enemies, why I should in some cases, have enemies.
But who are they, these enemies? It is frankly often not clear to me in the Psalms who is being talked about as the enemy. Of course we’re talking 2,500 years ago, but even if I understood the context, I’m not sure I would have a clear sense of exactly who the enemy was. Maybe the psalm writers weren’t clear themselves. I know I am not always clear about that in my own life. What I do know, and this is where my own life experience comes closest to what I feel from the Psalms, what I do know is that the world does not feel like a very safe place these days. Life does not feel very much like a safe place, not just these days but every day that I am willing to face my own fears.
I say that knowing that objectively I am much more secure and have less reason to feel unsafe than most people in the world. I do not worry that a suicide bomber will blow himself up while I’m having ice cream on the mall, or that bombs will fall from the sky on my neighborhood. There are no tanks rolling through Woodbrook. So far, my next door neighbors have not been taken away in the night. I am not threatened by poverty. I have a place to live and more than enough to eat, and…well, you get the idea.
I have come to realize, in living with some of these psalms, that it’s easy to have a kind of patronizing or holier-than-thou attitude if a person is reading them from a position of privilege, where relatively speaking the world seems pretty safe. It’s easy, or easier, to look down your nose at someone who is sort of panicky and frantic about their enemies, if you are able to imagine that you don’t have any really serious enemies or if you are so well protected that your enemies don’t threaten you in any serious way. If they do threaten in serious ways it is not so easy to be calm, and there are some enemies that do threaten everyone that we would all gladly wipe out—diseases for instance.
The Psalms speak to me in my relative place of privilege, not so much with the words calling for revenge, but with the words that say: “Look. Listen. There are enemies all around me. I’m besieged. I’m under attack. My life is not safe, and I need someone to make it safer.” And I can respond by saying, “Oh no, please don’t talk about your enemies like that. Please be a nicer person.” Or I can say that it’s my job too to try to make life safer, for everyone, to try to see that justice is done. I can be led to confess my own feelings of unsafety as well, recognizing that I cannot be aloof from what the Psalms are dealing with.
There are enemies all around. My God, there are. Some of them seem to be people—like terrorists on the loose, or maybe corporate executives wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Some of the enemies only seem to be people, and we can see that, because there may be people we know and love who have been grasped by some spirit from outside themselves that is destructive to them and to people around them. Sometimes enemies are clearly not people, diseases for instance, or are spirits that again may take root in people but are not people, are larger than people—greed, bigotry, violence, deceit.
When the enemies that beset us seem to be not people but something outside of people, independent of people, something more powerful than people, there are those who refer to such enemies as evil spirits, or demons, or even Satan. Scriptures often use that language. We are not so likely to, I would guess. I know I am not so likely to use that language. But the experience is there, isn’t it? That we are surrounded by enemies, and that not all of those enemies are individual people.
And sometimes—we need to say this out loud in church—the enemy will seem to be God. I don’t have time to deal with all the questions that might raise, but let us at least acknowledge the reality and the legitimacy of such feelings. To talk nicely—as we church people tend to do—about loving God and God loving us does not do justice to the fullness of our human experience. Maybe it doesn’t do justice to God either.
The Psalms tell us, remind us, that the world is not a safe place, that we are surrounded by enemies, undefined people, powers, spirits, that threaten our lives, at the very least threaten the wholeness and the holiness of our lives. The quote that appears at the top of our bulletin echoes this: “A safe place to begin. A safe place to begin again.” Implying in a few words that there are a lot of places that are not safe, and that we see it as a calling here to be a safe place for everyone.
How do we do that? How do we make Sojourners a safe place, or anywhere a safe place? How do we find a safe place to be, when all around us are enemies? How we do that, and how well we do that, probably depends a lot on how we deal not only with the enemies without, but also how we deal with the enemies within. Some of those enemies, we all know, are deeply personal. Each of us has some inner demons we need to contend with. But there may be some enemies within that we share and that we can talk about. And I am going to choose to end this morning not with some kind of wrap-up paragraph, or some theological affirmation, but simply with a request for you to join me in thinking about what I will be thinking about this week. Our enemies within. I invite you to come next week prepared to share some thoughts about our enemies within. I’m not sure just how we’ll do that, but in some way we will. In the meantime, may God keep your going out and coming in today and all days. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 21, 2002