A Sermon Delivered by the Rev. Scott Dalgarno on Nov. 15, 2020 Based on Psalm 123 I Want to O

“When We’ve Had Our Fill” a sermon delivered by the Rev. Scott Dalgarno on Nov. 15, 2020 based on Psalm 123

I want to open this sermon with a diatribe. It’s one some of you know a bit of by heart. It’s the angry speech fictional news anchor, Howard Beale gives in the 1975 film, Network. Howard was played by Peter Finch in the movie version. Bryan Cranston played him in the original stage version.

HOWARD: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air’s unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit and watch our tee-vees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It’s like every thing’s going crazy. So we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we live in gets smaller, and all we ask is please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my tee-vee and my hair-dryer and my steel-belted radials …. just leave us alone. Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to write your congressmen. Because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.

I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is first you got to get mad … So I want you to get up now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

You get the idea. I’m quoting it because the tone and the message are an important part of the Psalm appointed for today, and I am going to focus on the psalm, not the parable. Partly because I’ve preached the parable plenty of times, and partly because the psalm seems to me to be so timely. I’m thinking of the final verse. Here is the whole thing in a contemporary version ….

1-4 I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. Like servants, alert to their master’s commands, like a maiden attending her lady, We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! We’ve been kicked around long enough, Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes. (Psalm 123, The Message’’’)

Again, that’s the whole psalm … every bit of it. Let me ask … what does it evoke in you? Today.

As with most laments in the Psalter, the oppressors of the psalm singers are not named -- they are simply identified as "the complacent rich" and "the arrogant." The psalmist, like Howard Beale in Network, feels overwhelmed with contempt. The writer of Psalm 73 describes such oppressors in detail:

Their necklace is pride; and violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes bulge out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies.

We all know how polarized we are in this country. And the result of last week’s election has not made that any less profound. I mean, this country is divided right down the middle. And what I find interesting about the psalm (and the words from the movie I quoted, too) is that so many of us are mad as hell these days – and we all can name the complacent rich men and the arrogant people who make us crazy – and they would be entirely different people, depending on which side of our national divide we find ourselves.

On one side are those who identify the arrogant as FOX News anchors like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Rupert Murdock and Donald Trump and all those who support and bankroll him.

On the other side, the arrogant would be identified as Silicon Valley billionaires, liberal elitists like George Soros, and liberal pundits like Rachel Maddow. The psalm works as well to finger one side as well as the other.

And, to repeat myself, our election did nothing to lessen the animosity. The journalist, David Brooks put it this way …

The voters reminded us yet again that the other side is not going away. We have to dispense with the fantasy that after the next miracle election our side will suddenly get everything it wants. We have to live with one another. (NYTimes Nov. 5, 2020).

Okay, hold that last thought, but allow me to remind us all that things weren’t always like this. I was raised in what we used to call, post-war America. I was raised in the years after World War II which was a time when this nation was very much one nation. You have to be one nation when you fight a world war. In those days we all agreed on some things. There was the G.I. Bill that said that anyone who has the ambition for college should be able to go, especially those who risked their lives in the war. We also agreed that having very little money should not keep you from the American Dream of home ownership. We had classes, of course, but somehow we respected one another.

I remember how Jack Kennedy, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, said that being an Ensign in the U.S. Navy in World War II taught him that rich and powerful men who commanded other men in war could be stupid heartless brutes and that enlisted men could be wise and also the salt of the earth.

Of course, there were still great inequities, but the G.I bill, and federally underwritten home loans were big gains when it came to leveling the playing field. With that as agreed upon, 70 years ago we also agreed that culture and the arts, that is, the humanities, were good things.

Not everybody was going to read and study what we called, The Great Books, but there were Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Not everyone wanted to pay for symphony subscriptions but Light Classical music was very popular and every kid in America was exposed to Leonard Berstein’s famous Young People’s Concerts. We agreed that visual art was wonderful and cheap copies of the “great masters” were in nearly every home, and people did something called Paint by Number.

Today a lot of people look down their noses at the humanities. Funding for arts education has evaporated. An art educator from our church had to move to Colorado just to get one of the few coveted elementary school jobs available in that field because her position was eliminated here.

To like fine art and classical music and great literature is considered elitist by many on one side of the national divide, while loving Nascar, and Country Music, and Bull Riding are looked down upon by folks on the other side. Of course, this is way too simple. There is a ton of cross-over when it comes to taste. A young man from my last church was a Top 40 Bull-Rider and I totally loved watching him ride and I was in complete awe of his courage.

Ned Cross was his name and Ned broke nearly every bone in his body doing it, but he was amazing to watch and I got what people saw in that sport.

Well, I’m not going to get people to watch bull riding any more than I can get them to buy symphony tickets, but, as David Brooks advises, we are still going to have to find a way to live together. “The key,” he says, “is loosening the grip the culture war has had on our politics and governance. Let’s fight our moral difference with books, sermons, movies and marches, not with political coercion.”

I’m not sure a sermon is a good place to fight a culture war if that’s what he has in mind, but looking at today’s psalm it does seem to me to be calling us all to quit looking scornfully at one another and to begin looking together at what might unite us.

I’m thinking of two things – that which we can see as a common enemy, and also something else that is larger than we are.

The thing we can fight together, of course, is this virus that is threatening to kill a million or more of us; way more than anyone predicted 8 months ago. Until now the leaders of our country have told us it was just going to go away. We don’t need to shout and blame folks about that. It would do little good, but maybe we can at least agree that wishful thinking has done us no good at all.

If we can agree that steps we take as individuals to keep ourselves safe will, as medical experts agree, help keep us all safe, well, that’s a beginning. All it takes to be civic minded these days, all it takes to be the least bit compassionate is to wear a mask. Enough said.

Then, to consider the advice of the psalm, we need to quit looking with scorn across our cultural divide, and instead begin looking up at the one who created us; the one who may be working in our current history to help us find our way out of this great plague before death, the greatest equalizer of all, kills many more of us.

Heaven knows we need mercy in these dark days. Just a week ago we reached 100,000 new cases in a day and in less than a week it went up to 150,000. And Utah is becoming an epicenter. I don’t know a better word for what we need than God’s mercy.

Psalm 123 is just one in a series of Psalms of ascent. A-S-C-E-N-T. Going up. These psalms may have been sung by pilgrims going up to the city of Jerusalem during festival days. Jerusalem, you may know, is set on a very high place. Psalm 120, 121, and 122 are also psalms of ascent In Psalm 120 the psalmist writes, “In my distress, I cried to Yahweh.” (Psalm 120:1)

To cry out when you’re hurting comes with being human. Brand new babies know to cry when they’re hungry or afraid or uncomfortable and need attention. It’s only natural to call for help when you’re in trouble and things aren’t going your way. You look for somebody – anybody – to come to your rescue. On Friday morning, the Tribune published a story on Ken Gardner, a Ute basketball star 50 years ago. He played a little professional basketball after but he’s had incredible medical expenses of late and after being three days late he was evicted from his apartment in Draper. So he’s suddenly homeless. Three days late. He is just one of tens of thousands like him – and we live during a time of pandemic. Does the word mercy mean anything today?

“In my distress, I cried to Yahweh.” If people won’t listen where else can you turn?

Once you look up, it’s only natural to look for tangible signs of God’s power and might. That leads us to another psalm of ascent: Psalm 121. It begins,

“I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1-2).

In addition to the majesty of nature’s lofty places there’s the wonder of sacred places. That leads us to Psalm 122. It begins,

“I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let’s go up to Yahweh’s house!'”(Psalm 122:1)

Biblical accounts tell is that the temple in Jerusalem in Solomon’s day was a sight to behold. The stones were whitewashed, the roofs plated with gold. Looking up to Jerusalem on a sunny was nothing short of dazzling.

Even after the temple was destroyed and rebuilt on a smaller scale, it still represented the holy of holies. Devout Jews made every effort to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem at least once a year to offer sacrifices, sing praise and fall prostrate before the one called the Almighty.

The idea of looking up and humility is not a popular one now. As I said early in this sermon, I grew up in a different world – the past World War II world where we were more inclined to look up to things – to speak with respect for our institutions – institurions that have been under attack in recent years.

A couple of Mondays ago Dr. Tim Chambliss, a very popular retired professor from the U joined a few of us on Zoom to talk to us in a great Wasatch adult class. Tim is a superb story teller and here is my favorite story from that evening.

Tim spoke of a normal classroom day years ago when he was teaching at our U where he asked the students in attendance, “Does anyone here think he or she can recite the names of the presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt in order?”

One hand went up, in the back by the door, from someone Tim didn’t recognize. He asked who the young man was. It was a young Chinese national who was visiting Utah. The fellow had been wandering the hall and came in because the conversation inside sounded interesting to him.

Tim asked him to come forward and the man indeed repeated the names of all the presidents from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt complete with the dates. Being a Chinese national, he pronounced them badly, Tim said, but everyone was in awe because he knew them at all.

Tim asked him why he memorized the names of those presidents. The young man said, “I thought it was important.”

“I thought it was … important.”

1-4 I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! (Psalm 123)

Amen