Sermon: Fountain of Tears

Texts: Jeremiah 8:18-9:1; 1 Timothy 2:1-7

Date: September 23, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Susan Griffin wrote this poem about the Divine that I want you to hear:

“Teeth”

She who usually feeds us

is in a bad mood.

Are you trying to eat me up?

she shouts.

She bares her teeth

and makes a low noise.

With a disgusted gesture

she tells us

Go study your manners.

And wipe your feet,

she adds.

I don’t know if the poet had God in mind, or Mother Earth, or what, but I find some resonance between her lines and much of what the Israelite prophets write: “She who usually feeds us is in a bad mood.”  The voice of God is rather growly in the reading for today, as God responds to the complaint of the people with, “Why have they provoked me to anger with their images, with their foreign idols?” 

            I’ve been spending some time this week mulling over whether God has feelings that can be provoked—feelings of anger, grief, exhilaration, joy.  What do you think?  Does God have feelings? 

            There are a couple of arguments against God having feelings.  Some would say, as Aristotle taught, that God’s perfection requires that God be impassible, implacable.  You know, above it all, the Unmoved Mover. 

            Another argument against God having feelings is that to imagine God has feelings may seem a little too much like humans creating God in our own image.  We have feelings; so in our theologizing, we imagine God with really big God-sized feelings.   We have to watch out for a tendency to “anthropomorphize” God, to cut God down to human size.  Maybe saying that God has feelings makes God too small. 

            I don’t know.  I guess I’m a little skittish about imagining God’s feelings after listening to a book on tape this summer, a true story of  some whacked-out members of a fundamentalist sect who carried out what they thought was God’s vengeance by killing some innocent people.  They mistook their anger for God’s, with horrifying consequences.   Too often when true believers think God is in a bad mood, they take it out on their fellow humans.

            On the other hand, to say God is above feelings doesn’t seem right.  It doesn’t feel right.  The Bible is chock-full of the passion of God; we’d have to ignore an awful lot of our own tradition to say that God is too perfect for emotion.  There are other spiritual traditions, as well, that portray God with Divine Passions, with an emphasis both on the intensity of God’s love and the depth of God’s grief.  The God who suffers with us and suffers because of us is a key part of many spiritual traditions.  I’ll read you an example from a Chinese Buddhist Sutra that encompasses God suffering with and us and because of us:

Because He saw them living in an evil time, subjected to tyrannous kings and suffering many ills, yet heedlessly following after pleasure, for this He was moved to pity.

Because He saw them living in a time of wars, killing and wounding one another; and knew that for the riotous hatred that had flourished in their hearts they were doomed to pay an endless retribution, for this He was moved to pity.

Because many born at the time of His incarnation had heard Him preach the Holy Law, yet could not receive it, for this He was moved to pity.

Because some had great riches that they could not bear to give away, for this He was moved to pity.

Because He saw the men of the world ploughing their fields, sowing the seed, trafficking, huckstering, buying, and selling; and at the end winning nothing but bitterness, for this He was moved to pity.[1]

              “Moved to pity” doesn’t sound as passionate as it might; we might choose more colorful terminology.  Something like “Oh, that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people!”  This lament is the prophet Jeremiah’s; but in most of the prophecy of Jeremiah the line between God and the prophet is exceedingly thin or non-existent.  Jeremiah expresses the pathos of God like no other— God’s love, God’s anger, God’s grief, God’s suffering with and because of the covenant people.  Several commentaries I read pointed to the roots of God’s anger in God’s even deeper grief.  If God does indeed love us with the kind of love a parent has for a child, anger rises out of the grief the parent feels when children are hurting themselves and each other with their actions. 

            What good does it do to imagine God’s grief and suffering?  Perhaps imagining the grief of God would motivate us to more serious self-examination.  Somehow for me imagining God’s suffering is more stirring than imagining God’s anger.  I think back to when we were kids, that the worst thing we could do was make Mom cry.  One might inspire her to yell, and that was kind of bad, but yelling didn’t get the kind of heart-felt response out of us that causing her to cry did, which we managed on fairly rare occasions.  If you actually made Mom cry, boy, that was cause for some serious repentance—know what I mean?   I don’t think she cried alone very many times; if Mom was crying, at least one of us kids was going to be crying along with her.  Which was followed, at least in my hazy memory, with some vigorous attempt to make amends.

            Could it be that God-lovers should be reflecting God’s grief the same way we try (imperfectly) to reflect God’s love and compassion?  I was struck by a phrase in the verses preceding today’s text from Jeremiah in which the prophet was assessing the various sins of the people that were leading them into the jaws of judgment.  The phrase was this: “They did not know how to blush.”  In context, “They acted shamefully, they committed abomination; yet they were not at all ashamed, they did not know how to blush.” [Jeremiah 8:12] 

              That’s a very evocative way to talk about a serious soul-sickness, not knowing how to blush.  Bill Moyers touched on this theme in his excellent keynote address to our UCC General Synod meeting in June.  He was talking about the growing gap between the rich and the poor in our country, which might go more or less unnoticed until there is a disaster like a killer heat wave in Chicago a couple of years ago, or the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina, when the desperation of the poor becomes apparent.  He noted with frustration that there was little reaction from leaders in these situations. “Nothing,” he said, “seems to embarrass them.”  Leaders of corporations and political parties alike apparently no longer know how to blush.  There is a remarkable lack of public confession, apology, or shame.

            If this is so, the nation is suffering from a life-threatening illness.  I found Bruce Epperly’s comments on the Process and Faith essay on the lectionary illuminating.  He cites Robert Jay Lifton, who once spoke of the danger of “psychic numbing,” that is, the loss of vital emotional experience when the reality of change and threat outpace our ability to experience personal and global meaning. Unable to face the stark realities of social, political, and planetary upheaval, or what Lifton called “psycho-historical dislocation,” we simply shut down emotionally, and go through the day as if nothing has changed, even though our whole way of life and vision of the future is under siege. Living in denial may provide a buffer from the pain of the world and our sense of hopelessness, but denial is bought at the price of emotional numbing, loss of moral and spiritual stature, and personal and political apathy.

“Is there no balm in Gilead?” Perhaps, Epperly writes, “before we are comforted, we need to be afflicted. We need to become disillusioned with ourselves and our nation as the first step to recovery. Remember that to be disillusioned is to see stark reality as it and to let go of the illusions that prevent us from responding creatively to our current personal or national situation.” [2]

Those of you who were here last Sunday will remember Mary Piette’s poignant reading of the UCC Collegium’s Pastoral Letter on the War in Iraq.  The letter is, in my opinion, an example of putting stark reality on the table in the form of a corporate call to confession and protest.  Mary choked up while she spoke of our shared grief over the many lives that have been lost and damaged in Iraq.  It was, for me, a holy moment.  While she probably would rather not have cried in front of all of us, I believe she incarnated for us, for just a moment, the depth of God’s own grief over lives lost in violence.  She cried with our Mother; she wept with our Father. 

I had a dream recently that I want to share with you because I think it is apropos.  I think I had left the television on when I went to sleep; it was around the time General Petraeus was making his report to Congress so it was much in the news.  In my dream, the faceless authorities were reporting that we would be at war for years to come because we did not know how to extricate ourselves or know even whether we should withdraw.   As I took this in, in the dream I found myself suddenly sobbing, wailing, shedding noisy, slimy public tears.  In waking life, I cry relatively often—but usually just a few dignified tears which I quickly try to squelch.  This was very different.

As I woke up I had to kind of check to see if I was really crying.  I wasn’t; but the dream has stuck with me.  This is why: the crying felt like a holy obligation, like a calling, almost.  I had to ask myself, why haven’t I shed tears like that for the slain in this or any war?  The dream tears were terrible, but at the same time they were good; I could feel them cracking open a heart hardened by cynical despair.    

Such tears are wasted if they fall useless, a momentary catharsis.  But they may also water spiritual growth and bring action into fruition.  John Adams wrote, “Grief drives men into habits of serious reflection, sharpens the understanding, and softens the heart.”  We are in need of all these things, serious reflection, sharpened understanding, and softened hearts.  If the way to attain them is to endure the experience of God’s grief and ours for the ways we have gone astray, so be it.  May our eyes become fountains of tears, that we may weep day and night for the slain of our poor people; and may our tears refresh and renew our resolve to put things right.

[1] Buddhism. Upasaka Sila Sutra, cited in an article on God’s Grief linked at textweek.com for Sept. 23, 2007

[2]  Epperly, Robert http://www.processandfaith.org/lectionary/YearC/2006-2007/2007-09-23.shtml