This month, we have been exploring some popular summer hits alongside the songs of the psalms. The book of psalms was the songbook for ancient Israel, long before it was passed around in written form. It was sung from home to home and as they were traveling from place to place. The psalm songs taught the people about the character of God and articulated human experience with God. Summer songs often have the energy of the warm summer day with possibility. The first week, we looked at Dancing in the Streets with both Martha and the Vandellas and King David, and the worthiness of God to be praised! The next week, Jamie preached on the powerful song, I’ll stand by you, reminding us of God’s faithfulness in the midst of trial. Last week, we recalled God’s mercy in the midst of our wipeouts!
This week, we look at a different kind of summer song, Cruel Summer. This is not the beach day or the block party. This is not the energy of possibility. This is the rainy day, when you were planning to work out in the yard. This is the chilly summer day, when you wanted to bask in the sunlight. It comes from the place of disappointment of wanting the idealism of the season to be played out in each and every moment of the experience of the season. Parents know this as they struggle between wanting summer to be a perfect time to spend time with their children and pulling their hair out waiting for school to start. (Do you recognize the infamous staples commercial where the father sings, It’s the most wonderful time of the year?) Families know this as they struggle between loving the idea of the whole family gathering and the minefield of who speaks to whom. This is breaking up of a marriage you have thought would last forever. This is the death of a lifetime partner who carried you through the hard times. This is the horrible choices of your growing child who you thought you had taught better. This is the betrayal of a friend who chose the other side of the argument. This is loss of a pet who sat beside you day in and day out, when people seem to have forgotten. This is a Cruel Summer. (play video)
“Cruel Summer” was originally performed by Bananarama. They released the song in Britain in 1983. In the US, it became popular after its inclusion in the movie, the Karate Kid, in 1984. Singer Sara Dallin said the song “played on the darker side (of summer songs): it looked at the oppressive heat, the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by. We’ve all been there! ” It is the place of waning hope and fleeting faith. It is the place when possibility and connection seem as though they belong to someone else.
Both of our scripture lessons today offer us this familiar path. They offer us a place we might have been before. They offer us the space of life that might feel like a cruel summer. The psalmist offers us lament. Lament is a common language of the psalms. In the psalm, listeners are granted permission to wail out to God from our deepest places of grief, anger, fear, frustration. This was true to the ancient Israelites as they sang this psalm as one of the 15 psalms traveling to the Temple. Even in the midst of the excitement of traveling up to the Temple for one of the three festivals, there was pain. The whole of the community ritually sung this together. The Rev. Benno Pattison says, “There is a human truth embedded in the voice of the psalm, the aggrieved, the marginalized. It is the truth that there is a place in us that speaks in an ineffable tongue, a sighing and groaning, a language of travail that is at once transcendent and imminent, in that it shares the origins, speaks to the mystery of creation itself, of an earth caught in bondage, a creation groaning in travail as the apostle has said, waiting, looking, calling out for redemption, freedom, release.” This human truth is suffering. This God truth is presence and deliverance.
In second Samuel, the voice of David continues to praise God, even in the midst of disappointment. Out of the depths, I cry to you, David says, and God, heard my voice and delivered me. We, who have known depression, know the depths. To feel left on our own, to feel abandoned, to feel as though there is no reason to continue. The voice of lament is the courageous voice of calling out to God when the world seems to have abandoned you. As we have followed the story of David this summer, we have heard about adultery and murder, betrayal and being chosen, loss of children and dancing with unreserved joy and worship. We have heard David feel as though the God who sought him out over hill and dale has left him. Maybe, we have even known.
I can remember when a young man I babysat came to me and ask me to a part of the campus ministry he found. He had grown up in the church, in fact, is a Pastor’s Kid. However, he had known more than one season of cruel summer. He had known the feeling left out and abandoned. He had struggled to land in college. Out of the depths, he had cried to God and had felt left by God’s people. It was a campus ministry where he found hope. He found a place that it was safe to bring his big questions. It was welcoming to come as he was. It was open to him; however, he came. This campus ministry gave him a place to voice his lament and offer him hope.
Campus ministries are reaching a whole demographic that the average church is not touching. Campus ministries are thinking creatively about how do we offer the hope of Christ to a generation and a stage of life who laments the church and then is ready to move on. And a generation who has never walked through the doors of a church. The Pew Research Center, premier research think tank for religious life in America, released data in May about the picture of religious life today. “A high percentage of younger members of the Millennial generation – those who have entered adulthood in just the last several years – are religious “nones” (saying they are atheists or agnostics, or that their religion is “nothing in particular”). At the same time, an increasing share of older Millennials also identify as “nones,” with more members of that group rejecting religious labels in recent years. Overall, 35% of adult Millennials (Americans born between 1981 and 1996) are religiously unaffiliated. ”
Whenever I speak to people who consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, there is often a story in which they felt like their lament, their pain, their questions, their less than perfect life was not welcome in the church. It is often that they feel done with the church, while not necessarily feeling done with God. They feel like young man I babysat, so many years ago, it is hard to land on your feet in a place where you are “supposed to have it all figured out already.” This song, Cruel Summer, came in middle of the prosperity of the 1980s when the larger feeling was that everything was right with the world. It expressed the angst of a generation that was succeeding in business, but wondering about life. Whenever I hear these stories, I am never surprised to hear about beaches, mountains, gardens, nature, golf courses, and peace as places that God might be found. I often wondering if “nones” aren’t waiting for God there?
The variance from this week’s summer song is that our psalm ends differently. We are not left feeling completely abandoned. We find ourselves waiting for the God, who has been faithful, is faithful, and will be faithful. We are not looking around wondering to whom can we turn. We are leaning on the hope that we have in God. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The great hope in the Christian message is not that you will be rescued from the dark but if you are able to trust God all the way into the dark, you may be surprised. ” As Christians, we ought not be surprised by the challenges and disappointments of life, but rather delighted by the presence of God in midst of each and every one pointing us towards light and hope. This is the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, thanks be to God, Amen.
Old Testament Lesson: 2 Samuel 22:1-7
David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul. He said:
The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield and the horn of my salvation,
my stronghold and my refuge,
my savior; you save me from violence.
I call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised,
and I am saved from my enemies.
For the waves of death encompassed me,
the torrents of perdition assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me,
the snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the Lord;
to my God I called.
From his temple he heard my voice,
and my cry came to his ears.
Old Testament Lesson: Psalm 130
Waiting for Divine Redemption
A Song of Ascents.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplications!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
Lord, who could stand?
But there is forgiveness with you,
so that you may be revered.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is great power to redeem.
It is he who will redeem Israel
from all its iniquities.