Sorry. Another Rant.

Truthfully? WTH, Not Sorry At All.

Memory stirs this morning of Sunday mornings my years at the University of Florida, early of which Philip and I went to First Presbyterian Church with Bill and Scotty, late of which I went to First Baptist with Jerry and Tom. That was fifty-five to sixty years ago and I have no idea where those two churches are today, but at the time both churches were downtown, within a block or two of each other; and in both churches I found a congregation-wide dynamic about how long the sermon would be and whether we or they would get out first and be first in line for Sunday dinner at the Tower House Restaurant on the square. The Tower House had an incomparable tossed salad with blue cheese dressing, and for dessert the most scrumptious black and gold pie under heaven. Anyway, the sense was that church is a sixty-minute hour max. Fifty-nine minutes was grace, but church letting out at 12:01 meant the preacher had ruined the rest of the day.

This returns to mind this morning because of our Lectionary Readings for this coming Sunday, October 6. Depending on the seasonal “reading track” in use in each parish, the Old Testament reading appointed for Sunday is Lamentations, chapter 1, verses 1-6. Our parish is on RCL Track 1, so we’ll hear it, which is a good thing, in fact, a great thing. However, there are a couple of “bad things” about it, one being that the Morehouse Morons who put our lectionary sheet together set it up as prose, as though reading a newspaper article, when it’s exquisite poetry; the other being that we’ll read only the first six verses of a twenty-two verse golden masterpiece, a song of grieving lament wept while standing in the smouldering ruins of Jerusalem.

Instead of worshiping God by hearing and being blessed by the Word, we read a snippet. Why do we do this to ourselves and to our sacred Scripture? Why, because in sixty years nothing has changed: we’re too sorry and impatient to be bothered staying in church with God and each other for more than sixty minutes. We have things to do, places to go, people to see. Tradition to observe. Liturgical regimen to march and mark off.

In his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Trappist monk and writer extraordinaire Thomas Merton remembers years earlier living for awhile with relatives who were Episcopalians, attending church with them and concluding that there was nothing there but emptiness of spirit, playing church in good taste, checking it off and getting on with life. For that criticism alone, I dislike Merton and will not read him. My life’s experience is the opposite and he was wrong. Merton was right, but the only thing is, I’ve known Catholics and attended Mass where the sense was to attend Mass and get it over with. Merton can stay in Purgatory, it isn’t just St. Judas Episcopal, it’s Holy Commotion Catholic, Second Baptist and Third Presbyterian as well.

It’s also that at 78 I wandered off down Grouchy Boulevard. My intended itinerary was Lectionary Lane, to end up with our appointed responsive psalm, a lament that echoes the Lamentations reading. Echoes? No, it pounds the lament home. Psalm 137 begins with deepest sorrow, then builds until the poet is in a towering fury, banging on the podium and raging for vengeance. Psalm 137 is what more than once in my years in his history classes, I heard Bill Weeks call “a stomp down good ‘un.” He even said that to me once as, returning graded exam papers to us in class, he handed me mine. Coming from him, the moment was a high climax of my four years at Bay High. My final memory of Bill Weeks is closed eyes, nose and moustache, open casket, and my own deep sorrow. Bay High Class of 1953, I can look back sixty years and say and know that Bill Weeks was as great a man as any Merton or psalmist.

Psalm 137

1 By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, *

when we remembered you, O Zion.

2 As for our harps, we hung them up *

on the trees in the midst of that land.

3 For those who led us away captive asked us for a song,

and our oppressors called for mirth: *

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."

4 How shall we sing the LORD'S song *

upon an alien soil?

5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, *

let my right hand forget its skill.

6 Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth

if I do not remember you, *

if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

7 Remember the day of Jerusalem, O LORD,

against the people of Edom, *

who said, "Down with it! down with it!

even to the ground!"

8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, *

happy the one who pays you back

for what you have done to us!

9 Happy shall he be who takes your little ones, *

and dashes them against the rock!

TW+