A Clerk In The Complaints Department Of Humanity

A Clerk in the Complaints Department of Humanity

The first lines of the psalm twice describe God as “for us.” The last line is “GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth.” God is for us. God is our help.

For some people, statements like that are red flags. They provoke challenges. I, confident and assured in the pulpit, can announce, “The Lord is for us . . . . God’s strong name is our help.” But no sooner am I out of the pulpit than someone is saying to me, “Look, I wish you would be a little more careful about your pronouns. How do you get this our? The Lord might be for you, he might be your help. But he is not mine. Listen to this . . .” Through the week I get case histories of family tragedy and career disappointment, along with pessimistic recountings of world events. The concluding line is a variation on the theme: “How do you explain that, you who are so sure that God is for me?”

I am put on the spot of being God’s defender. I am expected to explain God to his disappointed clients. I am thrust into the role of a clerk in the complaints department of humanity, asked to trace down bad service, listen sympathetically to aggrieved patrons, try to put right any mistakes I can and apologize for the rudeness of the management.

But if I accept any of these assignments I misunderstand my proper work, for God doesn’t need me to defend him. He doesn’t need me for a press secretary, explaining to the world that he didn’t really say what everyone thought they heard in that interview with Job, or that the quotation of his word by St. Paul was taken out of context and needs to be understood against the background paper that Isaiah wrote.

The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm 124 is an excellent model. It does not argue God’s help; it does not explain God’s help; it is a testimony of God’s help in the form of a song. The song is so vigorous, so confident, so bursting with what can only be called reality that it fundamentally changes our approach and our questions. No longer does it seem of the highest priority to ask, “Why did this happen to me? Why do I feel left in the lurch?” Instead we ask, “How does it happen that there are people who sing with such confidence, ‘God’s strong name is our help’?” The psalm is data that must be accounted for, and the data are so solid, so vital, have so much more substance and are so much more interesting than the other things we hear through the day that it must be dealt with before we can go back to the whimpering complaints.

The witness is vivid and contagious. One person announces the theme, everyone joins in. God’s help is not a private experience; it is a corporate reality—not an exception that occurs among isolated strangers, but the norm among the people of God.

God’s help is described by means of two illustrations. The people were in danger of being swallowed up alive; and they were in danger of being drowned by a flood. The first picture is of an enormous dragon or sea monster. Nobody has ever seen a dragon, but everybody (especially children) knows they exist. Dragons are projections of our fears, horrible constructions of all that might hurt us. A dragon is total evil. A peasant confronted by a magnificent dragon is completely outclassed. There is no escape: the dragon’s thick skin, fiery mouth, lashing serpentine tail, and insatiable greed and lust sign an immediate doom.

The second picture, the flood, speaks of sudden disaster. In the Middle East, watercourses that have eroded the countryside are all interconnected by an intricate gravitational system. A sudden storm fills these little gullies with water, they feed into one another, and in a very few minutes a torrential flash flood is produced. During the rainy season, such unannounced catastrophes pose great danger for persons who live in these desert areas. There is no escaping. One minute you are well and happy and making plans for the future; the next minute the entire world is disarranged by a catastrophe.

The psalmist is not a person talking about the good life, how God has kept him out of all difficulty. This person has gone through the worst—the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent—and finds himself intact. He was not abandoned but helped. The final strength is not in the dragon or in the flood but in God who “didn’t go off and leave us.”

We can, of course, avoid dealing with this by employing a cheap back-of-the-hand cynicism. It is inevitable, in one sense, that we should respond to enthusiasm with some cynicism. Advertisers are routinely so dishonest with us that we train ourselves to keep our distance from any who speak with passion and excitement for fear they will manipulate us. We see Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Martha Stewart speaking on behalf of a product and inwardly discount the witness; we know the words were written by a highly paid copywriter and that the testimonial was done for a handsome fee. In the midst of that kind of world we come on the lines “If God hadn’t been for us when everyone went against us, / We would have been swallowed alive,” and we say, “Vigorous poetry! Well done! But who was your copywriter, and how much did they pay you to say it?”

The only cure for that kind of cynicism is to bring it out in the open and deal with it. If it is left to work behind the scenes in our hearts, it is a parasite on faith, enervates hope and leaves us anemic in love. Don’t hesitate to put the psalm (or any other Scripture passage) under the searchlight of your disbelief! The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.

Subjected to our most relentless and searching criticism, Psalm 124 will, I think, finally convince us of its honesty. There is no literature in all the world that is more true to life and more honest than Psalms, for here we have warts-and-all religion. Every skeptical thought, every disappointing venture, every pain, every despair that we can face is lived through and integrated into a personal, saving relationship with God—a relationship that also has in it acts of praise, blessing, peace, security, trust and love.

Good poetry survives not when it is pretty or beautiful or nice but when it is true: accurate and honest. The psalms are great poetry and have lasted not because they appeal to our fantasies and our wishes but because they are confirmed in the intensities of honest and hazardous living. Psalm 124 is not a selected witness, inserted like a commercial into our lives to testify that life goes better with God; it is not part of a media blitz to convince us that God is superior to all the other gods on the market. It is not a press release. It is honest prayer.

The people who know this psalm best and who have tested it out and used it often (that is, the people of God who are travelers on the way of faith, singing it in all kinds of weather) tell us that it is credible, that it fits into what we know of life lived in faith.

Hazardous Work

Christian discipleship is hazardous work. I hope the Red Cross nurse did not think that I was referring to my pastoral work as hazardous. My work, as such, is no more difficult than anyone else’s. Any work done faithfully and well is difficult. It is no harder for me to do my job well than for any other person, and no less. There are no easy tasks in the Christian way; there are only tasks that can be done faithfully or erratically, with joy or with resentment. And there is no room for any of us, pastors or grocers, accountants or engineers, word processors or gardeners, physicians or teamsters, to speak in tones of self-pity of the terrible burdens of our work.

What is hazardous in my life is my work as a Christian. Every day I put faith on the line. I have never seen God. In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control, I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe. That’s a risk.

Every day I put hope on the line. I don’t know one thing about the future. I don’t know what the next hour will hold. There may be sickness, accident, personal or world catastrophe. Before this day is over I may have to deal with death, pain, loss, rejection. I don’t know what the future holds for me, for those I love, for my nation, for this world. Still, despite my ignorance and surrounded by tinny optimists and cowardly pessimists, I say that God will accomplish his will, and I cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing will separate me from Christ’s love.

Every day I put love on the line. There is nothing I am less good at than love. I am far better in competition than in love. I am far better at responding to my instincts and ambitions to get ahead and make my mark than I am at figuring out how to love another. I am schooled and trained in acquisitive skills, in getting my own way. And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily—open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.

All that is hazardous work; I live on the edge of defeat all the time. I have never done any one of those things to my (or anyone else’s) satisfaction. I live in the dragon’s maw and at the flood’s edge. “How very hard it is to be / A Christian. Hard for you and me.”1

The psalm, though, is not about hazards but about help. The hazardous work of discipleship is not the subject of the psalm but only its setting. The subject is help: “Oh, blessed be GOD! . . . He didn’t abandon us defenseless, helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs. We’ve flown free from their fangs, free of their traps, . . . we’re free as a bird in flight. GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth.” Hazards or no hazards, the fundamental reality we live with is God who is “for us . . . GOD’s strong name is our help.”

When we are first in danger, our consciousness of hazard is total: like a bird trapped in a snare. All the facts add up to doom. There is no way out. And then, unaccountably, there is a way out. The snare breaks and the bird escapes. Deliverance is a surprise. Rescue is a miracle. “Oh, blessed be GOD! . . . He didn’t abandon us defenseless.”

How God wants us to sing like this! Christians are not fussy moralists who cluck their tongues over a world going to hell; Christians are people who praise the God who is on our side. Christians are not pious pretenders in the midst of a decadent culture; Christians are robust witnesses to the God who is our help. Christians are not fatigued outcasts who carry righteousness as a burden in a world where the wicked flourish; Christians are people who sing “Oh, blessed be GOD! . . . He didn’t abandon us defenseless.”

Enlarged Photographs of Ordinary Objects

The final sentence, “GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth,” links the God who created heaven and earth to the God who helps us personally. It takes the majesty of the One who pulled a universe into order and beauty, and finds this same God involved in the local troubles of a quite ordinary person.

A friend showed me a series of pictures he had taken. The subject matter consisted exclusively of household items found in an ordinary kitchen: a matchstick, a pin, the edge of a knife. Household utensils are not ordinarily thought of as possessing much beauty, but all these photographs of very ordinary objects were quite astonishingly beautiful. The beauty was suddenly visible because the photographs had all been made through a magnifying lens. Small, ugly, insignificant items were blown up to great size, and we could see what we had overlooked in our everyday routine. And it turned out that what we had overlooked was careful, planned details that produced exquisite beauty.

I particularly remember the photograph of a highly magnified Brillo pad. Nothing in the kitchen seems quite as ordinary or quite as lacking in aesthetic appeal. When possible we keep Brillo pads hidden under the sink. No one would think of hanging one on a nail or hook for people to admire. Yet under magnification the Brillo pad is one of the most beautiful of kitchen items. The swirl of fine wire is pleasing to the eye. The colors of blue fade in and out of the soap film. What we assume is not worth looking at twice, and best kept in an obscure place, is, on examination, a beautiful construction.

Psalm 124 is a magnification of the items of life that are thought to be unpleasant, best kept under cover, best surrounded with silence lest they clutter our lives with unpleasantness: the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent, the snare’s entrapment; suffering, catastrophe, disaster. They are a very real part of life, and they constitute a dominating, fearful background for many. We look for relief among experts in medicine and psychology; we go to museums to get a look at beauty. Psalm 124 is an instance of a person who digs deeply into the trouble and finds there the presence of the God who is on our side. In the details of the conflict, in the minuteness of a personal history, the majestic greatness of God becomes revealed. Faith develops out of the most difficult aspects of our existence, not the easiest.

The person of faith is not a person who has been born, luckily, with a good digestion and sunny disposition. The assumption by outsiders that Christians are naive or protected is the opposite of the truth: Christians know more about the deep struggles of life than others, more about the ugliness of sin.

A look to the heavens can bring a breathtaking sense of wonder and majesty and, if a person is a believer, a feeling of praise to the God who made heaven and earth. This psalm looks the other direction. It looks into the troubles of history, the anxiety of personal conflict and emotional trauma. And it sees there the God who is on our side, God our help. The close look, the microscopic insight into the dragon’s terrors, the flood’s waters and the imprisoning trap, sees the action of God in deliverance.

We speak our words of praise in a world that is hellish; we sing our songs of victory in a world where things get messy; we live our joy among people who neither understand nor encourage us. But the content of our lives is God, not humanity. We are not scavenging in the dark alleys of the world, poking in its garbage cans for a bare subsistence. We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shapes our days.