Psalm of Complaint

For the first week studying the Ketuvim, one of the Make projects was to write a Psalm of complaint. Since I'm so good at complaining, I decided this was my best bet. After all, Tori Rodriguez did say that negative emotions are the key to well-being. She writes, "Suppressing thoughts and feelings can even be harmful...Instead of backing away from negative emotions, accept them. Acknowledge how you are feeling without rushing to change your emotional state."

Well then, sounds like the Psalmists were working out all the feels. Here's my attempt addressing a complaint that rests on most of our hearts...

{I have included links to references for fun-- try to read it through without clicking on them first.}

A Psalm of Complaint.
For God. Of A Concerned Citizen. 

O God, my God,
do you not hear your people cry?
We call out to you and you do not come.
We ask for your hand, and where does it hide?

For so long we have seen the mogul exclaim.
His face becomes ruddy as he blows hot air.
God, he knows not what he says and yet the people
clamor for him.

For so long this mogul stomps on our rights
and oppresses the poor and the orphan.
He disrespects political correctness
and relishes in a mythical Dream.

God, who we have thought to be merciful,
where is the love? Where is the love?
If he is our head, to where will we turn?
A voice cries in the wilderness, "Retreat to the North."

Oh, God, we need you now.
Rain down your Truths onto your people
and help them see the path of righteousness.
For with him we cannot survive.

You have delivered us out of homogeneity
and inspired us with another from our country.
We trust that your divine love can infuse
your people again with fervor for Truth.

O God, we fear for our lives. Save us from despair.
Enter into our affairs and choose the best for us.
(Or wait, don't... that's a theocracy.)
Help us to appoint s/he who will do your will.

To you I will be ever thankful
if you but empower your people toward Truth.
We will gift you with a thousand cranes
and put our hope in you forever.

You are the rock on which we stand
and the guard at our closet door.
We will not fear but stand in awe
of your great and everlasting works.

O God, rescue us.

Breathing the Smoke of the Campfire

Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying. (From this article)

I remember the exact moment when this became my understanding of scripture. I was 17. I was sitting on a bench in Cincinnati, OH with two friends from youth group. We had the Bible in our laps. We were on a "mission trip" to help a church organize and clean in preparation for their VBS program.

Until this point, I thought I was conservative... politically and religiously. Part of this had to do with my upbringing, some with my developmentally appropriate teenage perspective, some because of who my best friend was at the time. I had been attending a UCC church for yeaaaars, but I just couldn't wrap my head around the progressive nature of its theology, much less any beliefs of my own... except the ones that were in question, of course. This meant scripture was especially troublesome.

So there we were, sitting on a bench reading Genesis. Poring over the creation stories... both of them. The three of us had so many questions. Who wrote these stories? Why are there two different creation stories? If these were the first created people, how can it be a first hand account? Why wouldn't someone write themselves into a story? How can these things be taken for Truth? What does it mean to believe these stories? What are we actually believing? What does it mean when our pastor says she takes the Bible "seriously but not literally"?

So we asked her. And she said six magical words: "These stories are like campfire stories."

And THAT was it for me. That was it. I finally got it. I finally understood that the scriptures, the stories we were reading in 2006, were the same stories people had been reading for centuries... millenia(!)... they're the stories of a people coming to understand who they are... as individuals, in community, in opposition to others, and in relation to G-d. I finally got it. It's "the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying."

And in the words of my pastor, it was as though I "had come up for a breath of fresh air."

She was right, but it felt more like I inhaled campfire smoke... at once relieving and alarming.

If we don't take it literally, there is so much more to learn.

What's an Ootle?

I've often used the phrase "oodles"... but this is a different kind of oodle... In fact, it's not an oodle, it's an Ootle! That's the Open Old Testament Learning Event.

It's a worldwide event (similar to a MOOC) meant to help people from all over the world learn more about a particular topic, in this case, the Old Testament. To be honest, I did not have a good learning experience in my seminary Old Testament class... neither of them, actually. I learned next to nothing in one of them and was force fed to memorization in the other one.

That is to say, I need this course.

I need this course because I feel like I missed out in seminary.

I need this course because I am a life-long learner.

I need this course  because I feel like I know very little about the Hebrew Bible.

I need this course to be a better pastor/minister/clergy person.

I need this course to be a better Christian.

I do a grave disservice to my faith and my actions when I am not critically studying the Scriptures in which my faith tradition is rooted. I have less of an understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures than the Christian Scriptures and that's problematic because both are integral to Christianity. Jesus' lineage is in the Hebrew Bible. The people, places, events that made Jesus who he was, and is to us today, are chronicled in those books. Albeit, with some missing pieces, overlap, and contradictions, but that is exactly what I hope to learn.

We are all called to wrestle with our scriptures, our traditions, and our rituals. We are called to be all of who G-d has called us to be in this world and without these wrestlings, we know not the depth and breadth of our faith community, of the Church writ large. The Christian tradition is rooted in the history of a people, of many peoples, struggling to find their place in the world and the place of G-d in it all.

And that is still our struggle today.

So I invite you to join me through Ootle 2016. You can find me here, blogging... probably sparsely because, work... and you can find me on twitter @emilymlab. Or, just go to twitter and search #ootle16 and our collective learnings will be posted.

Looking forward to learning with you!