Sunday Morning Meds--Promises

“The LORD sustains the humble 

but casts the wicked to the ground.”

Psalm 147:6

It’s understandable how some have felt that religion, in all its forms, would someday simply fade away.  Harvey Cox’s best-seller, The Secular City, a book once thought a classic, now seems ludicrous, as does Time magazine’s much ballyhooed cover story, forty years ago, proclaiming the death of God. 

Silly, all of it. In my lifetime at least, faith—and its organized work force, religion—has never played so prominent, and fearful, a role in the world we live in.

Elton John, the Brit pop star, a decade ago said there would be no religion in his world.  "Organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate,” he told a magazine reporter. 

Sure. John Lennon once brayed about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus. He’s been dead and gone for thirty years.

There must be a hundred reasons or more for the permanence of faith in the human psyche, but one of them, certainly, is the undeniable political force so clearly manifest in this line from Psalm 147:  “The LORD sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground.” To the bloodied victims of oppression, that line promises to all dispossessed a glorious regime change.

           

In the last century, the percentage of Christians in Africa rose from just under ten percent to the neighborhood of half the population, from ten to 107 million.  Researchers predict that by 2025, half the Christians in the world will live in Africa and Latin America,17 percent more in Asia.  Pentecostalism, a relative newcomer to Christian traditions (just a century old), has grown astronomically to 400 million adherents, many of them south of the equator. It’s almost unimaginable, but experts predict that just 25 years there will be more Pentecostals, worldwide, than Buddhists.

It’s easy for good Christians to say that the Holy Spirit is alive and kicking throughout what we used to call “the Third World.” That simply must be true. 

But some very understandable reasons for this amazing phenomenon exist, and one of them is political.  Where there is poverty and injustice, the promise of Psalm 147:6 reads in a radically different way than it does here in my Alton, Iowa, basement. My evil enemies aren’t easy to locate or to name as they were to the psalmist; but if I were living in Somalia, I wouldn’t have to scratch my head to put a finger on “the wicked.”

And the pledge is sure: the bad guys will get theirs. They’ll go six-feet-under soon enough; but the humble—those God loves—will live forever.  The spiritual fortitude of that promise is undeniable, but its political dimension is an offer, it seems, to all believers, including feminists, communists, and gays. 

It’s a huge umbrella really, this pledge of happiness and the end of sorrow, bigger than I ever thought it was when I was younger, more idealistic—and more combative. People read this verse in a hundred different ways, and more.

I’ve never done the math, but it seems to me that no single promise is so oft repeated in the pages of holy scripture than this one—God loves the humble. He blesses those on their knees. He stoops to conquer. He will lift the lowly.

Bless his holy name—that’s the song the psalmist sings here in verse six. 

The echo is endless.