Getting Along

Sermon

You may remember the race riots in Los Angeles in March of 1991, an eruption following the four police officers brutally beating Rodney King, who was pulled over for driving while intoxicated. The beating was captured on video, and it ignited a simmering rage in the Black community in Los Angeles. You may also remember King’s plea for the riots to stop. “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?…It’s just not right. It’s not right.”

In response to police brutality, or riots, or assassination attempts, or bombings in Gaza or Ukraine, we might share the sentiment, or shout it in despair, or pray it when we find ourselves awake at 3 a.m. It is the eternal human question, can’t we get along. The source of just about every ill in the world and throughout history is because we can’t get along, or maybe more importantly, because we don’t choose to.

It’s tricky, though, when you think about it. “Getting along” might imply sweeping things under the rug so that we don’t disagree, or pretending something is okay when it really, really isn’t. But in the best sense, maybe “getting along” is about treating each other with respect and dignity. So hold on to all of that while we delve into the text a wee bit.

In some ways, psalm 85 is universal and timeless, but it was a particular poem written in a specific point in time, namely when the people of Israel at long last return to their homeland after decades of exile only to find that the homeland they return to is not what they remember it to be.

God was involved with all of that, of course: we could say that the people of Israel didn’t get along with each other or with God. We could say that the people of Israel had sinned, and despite so many prophets’ warnings, they kept on sinning until the threat of punishment became reality: Babylon conquered the tiny nation-state. The elites—the wealthy, the powerful—went into exile in Babylon. The poor stayed put, amid the rubble and ruins of what had once been.

During the exile, some of those elite living in Babylon accommodated; they left behind their old customs, even their old religion, and became Babylonian. Others resisted those temptations and ached to return home. Eventually they or their descendants did return home. But things were not as they remembered. They returned not to a prosperous nation, but to a place in tatters.

They think they have served their term for sinning, that God is done punishing them. But when they get back home and things aren’t right, they wonder if God still cares about them, if God is even there. And then the question arises, as one commentator put it, “…what do you do when you return to the place you dreamed of, the place you hungered and yearned for, to find that it is now alien?” (Todd M. Donatelli, Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 3, p. 225)

Do you know what that’s like to come through an ordeal during which you hoped and prayed and longed for it to be over, for things to be like they were, only to come through the ordeal and things aren’t they way you dreamed they would be? It reminds me a little of The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits return to their beloved Shire after fighting in horrific battles only to discover that their precious home has also fallen to the ravages of evil.

Or when Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter Pevensie return to Narnia, having left there as royalty, only to discover their castle has fallen into ruin and no one remembers them. Maybe Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again. Or if you do, it no longer feels like home.

Maybe that’s what exile feels like: not being home. There are some who don’t feel at home in the U.S. anymore, with recent Supreme Court decisions and deep questions about the presidential candidates. Many wonder what happened to the “good ol’ days” which I think means when men worked forty hours a week and women stayed home and raised the children, all of whom were perfect; those “good ol’ days” when people lived in the closet for fear of harm, and Black people faced everyday prejudice and hatred and violence, when women could not have their own credit cards. For whatever reason, we might feel exiled from our true home.

Perhaps you feel exiled from God, which is a loaded sentence that I’ll try to unpack. Many folks have experienced the spiritual high, that event in the soul when you have amazing clarity about being loved by the divine force. It’s an experience you couldn’t manufacture, an experience you didn’t expect, but you have it, maybe once in a lifetime. Or you have small everyday revelations about God’s love, or Christ’s commands, or the Spirit’s work, and those are the confirmations you need to hold on to your faith.

But what happens when you don’t get those touchstones, when God is an interesting intellectual idea but has no sort of tie to reality? Maybe that is what exile from God feels like.

Or maybe you feel exiled from your true self, from that part of you that was created in the divine image. You miss who you used to be and want to be that person again. I turned sixty last week, and part of my recognizing that milestone was rereading my high school diary. That was painful. I want to give that young woman a big hug and tell her she was created in love and in the divine image. Perhaps adolescence is one big exile.

And if we have had a sense of some sort of exile, what happens when we’re able to get back home and things aren’t right or comforting, when there still is no peace in the land? What then?

That was the text described in the psalm, when the people returned and faced more work, more despair, and more questions about God. Then the psalmist gives us a path forward, or at least the paving stones for a path. They are found in the beautiful images of verse 10. “Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.” That is the hope and the way to turn hope into reality.

“Steadfast love” is a translation of the magnificent Hebrew word chesed, which is also translated as “loving-kindness” or even “covenant loyalty.” It implies a choice—we choose kindness over other responses. We remember where we are from, who our people are, and that informs how we behave. We are from God and we are God’s people; we remain loyal to God when we treat others with loving-kindness.

Faithfulness is sort of about having faith, believing God exists and believing in God, and it’s also sort of about fidelity, being true to living as God calls us to live. Righteousness is not about being right and winning the argument, the debate, the war; righteousness is about being right with God and each other. And peace is another great Hebrew word: shalom. It means more than an absence of conflict or the end of war. Shalom is about the whole life and about the well-being of all. It’s about everyone living without fear of being killed and also with access to food and water and shelter and help and friends and community.

Did those ancient Israelites realize their hope? Did it become a reality? Every now and then a generation might have known that. And other generations did not.

And for us? Is there hope for us when we return home after exile and find that all is not right? Maybe those four paving stones will create a path for us as well.

What might it look like for us if steadfast love and faithfulness meet, and righteousness and peace kiss each other? In some ways, it looks like a mirage to me, an impossible dream. But that’s on my bad days.

On my good days, on my hopeful days, steadfast love and faithfulness and righteousness and peace having a square dance of joy looks like a lot of things.

It looks like people slowing down and taking time with each other, taking time to listen and learn. It looks like not just saying you’re Christian but acting like you follow this guy named Jesus who taught about divine love and living out the identity of being created in the divine image. It’s about being as committed to peace as nations are to war, knowing that sometimes peace looks like free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren who would otherwise go hungry. It looks like praying for your enemies. It means not letting the sun set on our anger but talking with our brothers and sisters and siblings with whom we are in conflict so that some sort of reconciliation might begin.

And those things might seem like mirages, impossible dreams, too. So if it all feels like too much, don’t look big; look for the little things that point to God being with us. Maybe it’s as simple as asking ourselves, “How can I get along with this person?” given who they fully are and who we fully are. Songwriter Carrie Newcomer offers another way. She says,

“It is important we name what is bright and beautiful and remind one another that love is still the greatest power and that love is still here and that it is not the realm of one political group or another. It is also important to lovingly but courageously name what is unkind, demeaning, hateful or ugly—call it by its name, so in the light of that naming we can correct course and turn toward something kinder and truer.

“And then after the naming, engage in these timely and important questions —

• What shall I do and how shall I live into my deepest values?
• How do I find and honor those threads of goodness and connection that exist even across differences?
• What are the things I can personally do each day, that hold the realities of what is hard as stone, and yet foster hope and movement forward?
• How do I name what needs to be named with courage and love?
• How do I make my hopes and values clear by doing as the Quakers say, by ‘letting my life speak’?”

How do we live so that someday we will get along, so that someday steadfast love and righteousness will meet, so that the exiles come home and everyone lives in peace? How? With God. And each other.

Amen.