WHAT BECOMES OF THE BROKEN HEARTED?

(This sermon was preached at Epworth Chapel, Baltimore on 12/4/16)

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?  Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?   My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest. Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them.   To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame. Psalm 22:1-5

             If I can be transparent for a few moments, there have been only a few times in my life when I have been truly broken hearted.  One was when our Son, Marcus William Hunt died from an accidental drowning on August 7, 2005.  Another was on September 11, 2001, with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon in Virginia.  Yet another was the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968.  And a fourth was at the presidential election on this November 8-9, 2016.

If you’ve ever been broken hearted, you know what it feels like, and you can feel the same pain that I’m still experiencing in the aftermath of the election.  To be clear this is not, at its core, a political concern – it is more an existential concern – getting to the very core of who I am, and who we are as the people of God. 

Indeed, many of us right now are living with broken spirits - broken hopes and dreams - indeed broken hearts.  

And it would not be an overstatement to declare that the experience of broken heartedness is often accompanied by a sense that one has been punched in the gut so hard, and knocked down to the point that one finds it difficult to get back up.  The broken heartedness that I’m talking about today carries with it profound disappointment, dis-heartedness, a confusion, and pain – and indeed fear – fear for the future of God’s creation.   And this brokenness often leads to bitter tears of despair – which may seem to drip with no end in sight.

And at its core, this broken heartedness is connected with a wonder about where God is in all of what has occurred.  Is God present?  And if so, how and why would God allow that which threatens good for God’s people in any way to occur?

This is what the psalmist in Psalm 22 was trying to address.  As we make our way to this song, we find ourselves parked at a blues song.  The psalmist – who most scholars believe is David – is singing the blues – and he asks his God a question, “Why Lord, have you forsaken me?  These are the very same words that Jesus uttered on Calvary’s cross as recorded in Matthew 27 and Mark 15.

David is singing the blues.  If we talked to David this morning, he’d tell us that something terrible had gone on in his life that served to break his heart.  Maybe it was the death of a loved one.  It could have been a relationship that he thought would never end that did.  It could have been something, anything that he never expected to happen that did happen.  Why God?

Whatever the “it” was for David, it served to break his heart, and led him into a deep theological and spiritual and existential conundrum.  “Why, God would you allow this - whatever this was - to happen to me a person of faith?  You are the very same God who my parents put their trust in, and you blessed them, saved them - but now I am going through this.

Indeed, the theological and spiritual conundrum that we find ourselves in as a nation and as the church today is a concern of theodicy - and the question of the very Justice and Fairness of God.  The fundamental question to God right now is "Why, Lord?!" (Psalm 22)

"God, why?"  Why, if you are a good and loving God, would you - could you allow bad things to happen to your people (any of your people)?"

            "Why God, do you allow evil - racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, militarism, and misogyny, homophobia, anti- Semitism, Islamophobia - to exist and persist among us?"

God Why?  And even for good people – faithful people, this question of “Why?” is real.  At the prolonged illness of his own son, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book a few years ago, “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”   

It is a perennial question.

God Why?  Somehow, for some reason - on the existential, theological and moral spectrum, God allows evil to exist in our world.  God is all-powerful and all-present, and yet evil exists.  God is all-caring and all-knowing, and yet we get sick… yet loved ones die... persons remain hungry… homeless… hurting… and in need of help.

Jimmy Ruffin posed this concern about the broken hearted in another song – a soul song - in 1966 –

(refrain) Now what becomes of the brokenhearted
Who has love that's now departed
I know I've got to find
Some kind of peace of mind -

What becomes of the broken hearted?   To answer this question, the only thing that we who walk by faith can put our trust and confidence and hope in now is the fact that just as God did not foreclose on David and the Israelites - God does not, will not foreclose on you and me.

In these day, we must put our faith and trust and hope even more in Almighty God – and believe even more than ever before that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it (always) bends toward justice.  We must believe now more than ever before that if we do our part – if we pray without ceasing… if we love unconditionally….if we work while it’s day – God will do what God has always done, and save God’s people.

What becomes of the broken hearted?   I’m glad to tell you that David lived to sing something other than the blues - and so will we.  David sang at other places -

“I’ve been young, and I’ve been old, but I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken – or his seed begging for bread.” 

“Weeping may endure for a night – but joy will come in the morning!”