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Those Who Sow
in Tears
Psalm 126
March 25, 2007
5th Sunday in
Lent
Paul Simpson Duke
They
say that life is a journey, and I believe it’s true. Not everyone agrees. Some say a human life is such a blizzard of moments
that if you could write them all down, no story would be there – you impose a
story on your life to create a sense of meaning. Maybe so.
But I suspect our inclination to see a story in our lives is God’s gift
to us; it points to something real beneath the apparent randomness of
things. I believe that your life is a
journey, and so is mine. Experiences
behind us have consequence, meaning, lessons to be learned, memories to be
kept. And there’s a future in front of
us that we can move toward consciously, with imagination and a sense of
purpose. We are pilgrims on a journey,
with something behind us and something before us, and crucial steps to take out
of our past and toward our future this very day.
In
ancient Israel people journeyed together singing. On pilgrimage to Jerusalem they sang from
fifteen songs, which are embedded now in the big book of Psalms in our
Bible. They are called the “Songs of
Ascent,” songs for “going up” to Jerusalem.
They sing of where the pilgrims came from and of where they were headed,
and of what they felt in the meantime.
According
to one of these, the meantime wasn’t so good.
As these people walk, they sing of weeping. For now, on their journey through time, there
are tears in their eyes. You can tell
especially by the way they look over their shoulders at how things used to
be. There was once a better time. They had once been given a marvelous gift,
and they recall it now, sighing for those days: “When the Lord restored the
fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream; then our mouth was filled with
laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.”
You can recall such times? You were younger, had more innocence in your
life, maybe God seemed somehow more real, more present? Did you have days when your mouth was filled
with laughter, and you were like those who dream? The pilgrims to Jerusalem recalled such days,
and they sang their longing for the laughter again.
And
their sighing became their prayer.
“Lord, restore our fortunes.” In
their song was a perfect image for what they had become and what they wanted
now. It was the image of a desert with
dried-up streambeds, old watercourses parched and cracked. It happened every summer, the wadis going
dry. Not till winter would water come
rushing back, irrigating that desert into an oasis. That’s what we’re like, they sang. We’re shaped for streams to flow through us
and for life to spring up green and glad around us, but we are empty and dry,
and all around us is death. When will
our lives be refreshed again?
Never? “Restore our fortunes,
Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb.”
All
of a sudden, the song changes. It slows
down. It is softer. It has a haunting new melody. Here are the words that end the song: “Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts
of joy. Those who go out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their
sheaves.”
1
It’s
a strange picture, isn’t it – shedding tears while sowing seed, weeping as you
plant. Like a lot of poetry, it’s hard
to say what this means. If we were all
to ponder it, we might each arrive at a different idea. I’ve been sitting with it for a while, and
I’ve decided that for me it speaks of deep connections between grief and hope.
Planting
is an exercise in hope. Plant a bulb in
the fall or a tree in the spring or seeds in your vegetable garden, and as you
do, your mind is filled with pictures of the growing that will come, the lovely
things that the planting will yield.
Planting certainly isn’t grief work.
Some of you will plant your flowers soon. Will you cry?
Can you imagine a farmer on his tractor blubbering? Why this biblical picture of planting with
tears?
Maybe
it’s about the poor who live on whatever grain they can grow. For them, sowing seed has an element of
risk. Here is good grain in a sack, and
it’s food you have in hand. Now throw it
to the ground. You’ve lost it for your
use, you’ve cast it away. It may or may
not yield a harvest, depending on weather, disease, infestation. There is reason for having hope – hope is a
necessity if you’re to live next year; but there’s a risk in it, a death of
what you had in hand. People long ago
understood this. Ancient writings report
Canaanites and Egyptians weeping as they sowed seed. For them it was the burial of a god. Isn’t hope at least a little like that? Without letting something go, how can you
reach for a new thing?
And that’s not the only way that grief and
hope are linked. Look at the world, look
at this country, look at the church, look at your life. To look honestly is to grieve – all that’s
wrong, twisted, broken; all this death, failure, loss. Listen: no one whose heart hasn’t broken is
in any real position to hope for justice, for peace, for redemption, for
renewal of good faith. In 1959 Thomas
Merton, in a letter to Czeslaw Milozs, wrote: “[W]e should all be sick in some
way. We should all feel near to despair
in some way because semi-despair is the normal form taken by hope in a time
like ours . . . . Hope in spite of the
sickness that fills us.”2
This
is the difference between hope and optimism.
Optimism thinks that we’re
able to do anything and that everything will work out.
Hope
understands that we’re dying, that some of what’s broken is past fixing and
some of what’s lost can’t be gotten back.
Hope sees this and grieves it, then dares to pray, to love, to risk, to
trust, to act toward transformation. And
so tears are turned to seeds planted toward a future that belongs to God.
In
Montgomery, Alabama, outside the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a Civil Rights
Memorial. It was designed by Maya Lin,
who also designed the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. The Civil Rights Memorial is a huge circular
table of black granite. Into the stone
are carved dates, places, and events that define the civil rights struggle and
the names of many who were killed. On
the wall above the stone are the words from Amos often quoted by Martin Luther
King, Jr., with just the first word altered: “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness liked a
mighty stream.” Across the stone table a
sheet of water is constantly moving over these names and dates. You can touch the water as it slowly washes
over the names on the stone, and you hear it always flowing. On the day the monument opened, one of those
who came was the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago
brutally murdered in Mississippi. As she
touched her son’s name on the stone beneath the moving water, she began to
weep. Maya Lin was there and saw the grieving
mother’s tears falling, mingling with the stream that washed across the stone.
“Restore
our fortunes, Lord, like the watercourses of the Negeb.” And the tears of those who rightly grieve
will swell the streams of the new life we long for. Justice will roll down like waters and
righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
Our tears mingled with God’s tears can help to make it so. Such waters can reshape even the hard stone
of our history. And the deserts we have
made can blossom by the grace of God into the great surprise of new life.
Pilgrims
to Jerusalem sang this song of planted tears.
There came a day when Jesus of Nazareth made that pilgrimage. Along with his companions, he must have sung
this very song. Where he was headed he
would weep wretchedly, horribly. But the
tears that fell to the ground from his face were like seeds of hope for us
all. We have tasted the fruit of the
harvest he planted and we follow him now with gratitude. We follow him also with grief for all that is
so terribly broken in the world and in us.
But out of whatever grieving we must do can emerge new choices to pray
fervently, to love deeply, to act with courage and faith. So we will be planting hope. Hope for the world and for ourselves. Hope in the One who planted very well for the
harvest that leads, in the end, to shouts of joy.
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