May the Love of Christ Disturb You

by Dave Jones, Board of Deacons

Psalm 102

Today, March 28, as it happens, is the 43^rd anniversary of the funeral of my father, Richard B. Jones, struck dead in a car crash in the twilight of an early spring evening at the crest of a hilltop on a two-lane highway in central Indiana. (The drunk whose car crushed and shattered my father’s Pontiac in the head-on collision was able to walk away from the wreckage. In his coffin, before the funeral, my father’s remains looked surprisingly young, trim, lithe and “healthy” for a middle-aged businessman, husband, and father of three: to me, in that final glimpse, he looked like pictures I’d seen of him when he was about the age I was then, which was 18.) Almost everything I could ever know about the tortured spirit in which the “faint,” “afflicted” Psalmist “pours out his lament before the Lord” in Psalm 102 would come to me in reflection on the feeling of the terrible, aching void that opened up deep in my soul on those bleak, bitter March days, now so long ago.

At that time I could not think of “penitence” or God’s “righteous wrath” being visited on me – as the Davidic Psalmist does – all I could know in my bones was my own existential loss and pain. And, actually, on reflection, that is a way in which this Psalm hits me harder and resonates more deeply now than it did at the time of that death: Not believing, in my youth, that God could have anything to do with such dumb or tragic fate is, superficially, a much easier mind-set to live with than the certain, day-to-day knowledge that the Lord is involved in everything about us. Our failures, pains, debilities and sorrows, and ultimately our own inevitable deaths as well. To realize that, finally, in fully mature faith, is always a cause and a call to throw down in prayer:

“Hear my prayer, O, Lord;
let my cry for help come to you.
Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress.
Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly.
For my days vanish like smoke;
my bones burn like glowing embers.”

For, in the end, as the Psalmist surely knew in his soul, our repentance and our prayers are all we have that really matters. As our former pastor Dave Handley once quoted theologian Martin Marty in a sermon following the horrors of September 11, 2001: “ ‘In dark times like these, the bad news is that all we have to rely on is Jesus Christ. But the good news is that all we have to rely on is Jesus Christ.’”

(And that same good news is good today in Japan, Libya, Yemen – wherever and however the world may turn. Even in Chicago.)

At this time of year, in Lent, as Christians, how grateful we must be for the perfect living example of Jesus. Here we have a God who not only hears our prayers but comes to live among us, and in us, not only to empathize with our fears, griefs, and pains – and tears — but to experience them with us. In the dark realm of our sins, to experience and expiate them for us. And to show us the Love of the Father which will sustain and carry us with Him beyond the fate of the grave, throughout eternity. In the presciently luminous words of the Psalmist:

“…your years go on through all generations.
In the begininng you laid the foundations of the earth,
and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain…
...you remain the same, and your days will never end.
The children of your servants will live in your presence;
their descendants will be established before you.”

One cold autumn evening, half a lifetime ago, my own son and I were walking out of a coffee shop on Central Street in Evanston, just having finished a lengthy school homework session over lattes and hot cocoas, when we were approached by a somewhat raggedy-looking middle-aged man in a smudgy, thermal-quilted work jacket. Uh-oh, I thought – a panhandler, and began to guide my boy away from the approaching stranger on the sidewalk. Flushed with shared laughter and sweet drinks and the steamy warmth inside the coffee shop, stepping outdoors we must have looked like a Norman Rockwell picture of suburban easy money. But this man, this night, wasn’t talking to us about money. He wasn’t panhandling us. This strange, tobacco-smelling man, he walked up and asked us if we’d been thinking about Jesus lately, and when I rather too blithely said something to the effect that I was thinking about Jesus “all the time,” he reached out and put his long, strong arms around us both, and said, “I hope for your souls’ sake that is true.” Then he stepped back, looked me in the eyes, looked down at my beautiful little boy, and he smiled a quiet smile and said, “May the love of Christ disturb you.”

And, believe me, please, brothers and sisters, it has. He has. The love of Christ has disturbed me ever since. I wish I’d had more awareness of it with me when my father died. That terrible disturbance that could have awakened me to the great depths of the soul that Psalm 102 is calling us to, warning us away from, to turn only to the loving, forgiving atonement of the Lord.

As it is, as a Deacon, this Psalm is a clear lantern vision into the broken heart and fallen spirit of every needy fellow human we Deacons are called in our service to minister to. In our church basement Clothes Closet. In Christmas gifts for the children of prisoners, school supplies for children of the poor. Mother’s Day remembrances for mothers who must hide in women’s shelters. The Lord’s Communion feast served at home for those too old or infirm to travel to our sanctuary. Thank God for disturbing us with the sight of our own brokenness and ultimate need.

Thank God for showing us the path Jesus chose to walk – with us — every step of the way to the incalculable suffering of the Cross.

In verse eight, the Psalmist might have been describing a day on Golgotha, “All day long my enemies taunt me, those who rail against me use my name as a curse.”

Thank God for that Name, from the lineage of the oft-afflicted Psalmist, David, stump of Jesse.

Thank you, Jesus.

Amen.