Tough Faith

We can’t excuse the psalmist for getting angry on the grounds that he was not yet a Christian, for he had Leviticus to read: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart . . . . You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:17-18 RSV). And he had Exodus: “If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall help him to lift it up” (Ex 23:4-5 RSV). And he had Proverbs: “Don’t laugh when your enemy falls; don’t crow over his collapse” (Prov 24:17). When Jesus said “Love your enemies,” he added nothing to what this psalmist already had before him.

So we will not make excuses for the psalmist’s vindictiveness. What we will do is admire its energy. For it is apathetic, sluggish neutrality that is death to perseverance, acts like a virus in the bloodstream and enervates the muscles of discipleship. The person who makes excuses for hypocrites and rationalizes the excesses of the wicked, who loses a sense of opposition to sin, who obscures the difference between faith and denial, grace and selfishness—that is the person to be wary of. For if there is not all that much difference between the way of faith and the ways of the world, there is not much use in making any effort to stick to it.

We drift on the tides of convenience. We float on fashions. It is regarding the things we care about that we are capable of expressing anger. A parent sees a child dart out into a roadway and narrowly miss being hit by a car, and angrily yells at the child, at the driver—at both. The anger may not be the most appropriate expression of concern, but it is evidence of concern. Indifference would be inhuman.

And so here. The psalms are not sung by perfect pilgrims. The pilgrims of old made their mistakes, just as we make ours. Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us. We get caught yelling at our wives, at our husbands, at our friends, at our employers, at our employees, at our children. Our yelling (though not all of it!) means we care about something: we care about God; we care about the ways of the kingdom; we care about morality, about justice, about righteousness. The way of faith centers and absorbs our lives, and when someone makes the way difficult, throws stumbling blocks in the path of the innocent, creates difficulties for those young in faith and unpracticed in obedience, there is anger: “Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation!”

For perseverance is not resignation, putting up with things the way they are, staying in the same old rut year after year after year, or being a doormat for people to wipe their feet on. Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength. There is nothing fatigued or humdrum in Isaiah, nothing flatfooted in Jesus, nothing jejune in Paul. Perseverance is triumphant and alive.

The psalmist lived among prophets and priests who dealt with his vindictive spirit and nurtured him toward a better way of treating the wicked than calling down curses on them, learning what Charles Williams once described as the “passion of patience.” We are in a similar apprenticeship. But we will not learn it by swallowing our sense of outrage on the one hand or, on the other, excusing all wickedness as a neurosis. We will do it by offering up our anger to God, who trains us in creative love.

The cornerstone sentence of Psalm 129 is “GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.” When the Bible says that God sticks with us, the emphasis is on his dependable personal relationship, that he is always there for us. The phrase does not mean that he corresponds to some abstract ideal of what is right; it speaks of a personal right relationship between Creator and creation. “Righteous” is a common translation for the Hebrew term. “Righteous is out and out a term denoting relationship, and . . . it does this in the sense of referring to a real relationship between two parties . . . and not to the relationship of an object under consideration to an idea.”1

That “he sticks with us” is the reason Christians can look back over a long life crisscrossed with cruelties, unannounced tragedies, unexpected setbacks, sufferings, disappointments, depressions—look back across all that and see it as a road of blessing, and make a song out of what we see. “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.” God sticks to his relationship. He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it. The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness. We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous, because God sticks with us. Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.

This is what the writer of the New Testament letter to the Hebrew Christians did. He sang a litany of people who lived by faith, that is, people who centered their lives on the righteous God who stuck by them through thick and thin so that they were able to persevere. They lived with uncommon steadiness of purpose and with a most admirable integrity. None of them lived without sin. They all made their share of mistakes and engaged in episodes of disobedience and rebellion. But God stuck with them so consistently and surely that they learned how to stick with God. Out of that litany comes this call:

Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: cross, shame, whatever. And now he’s there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. (Heb 12:1-2)

Some of those early Christians this writer was addressing had been complaining, apparently, that life was too rough for them. They couldn’t hold out any longer (complaints that are, from time to time, heard in every congregation). They didn’t see the use in believing in a God they never saw, serving a God who didn’t give them what they want, trusting a God who let babies die and good people suffer. There is a no-nonsense slap of reality in the words their pastor addressed to them: “In this all-out match against sin, others have suffered far worse than you, to say nothing of what Jesus went through—all that bloodshed!” (Heb 12:3). Quit your complaining. Take a look at the pilgrim road and see where you have come from and where you are going. Take up the refrains of the great song. “ ‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young’—this is how Israel tells it—‘They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down.’”

The reason my childhood was one enthusiasm after another was that I hadn’t yet found an organizing center for my life and a goal that would demand my all and my best. The Christian faith is the discovery of that center in the God who sticks with us, the righteous God. Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in his ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for. There are endless challenges in it to keep us on the growing edge of faith; there is always the God who sticks with us to make it possible for us to persevere.

In Charles Williams’s delightful, brief drama Grab and Grace, there is a dialogue between Grace and a man who is dabbling in religion, trying out different experiences, “into yoga one week, buddhism the next, spiritualism the next.” Grace mentions the Holy Spirit. Grab says, “The Holy Spirit? Good. We will ask him to come while I am in the mood, which passes so quickly and then all is so dull.”

And Grace answers: “Sir, purposes last.”