Half Truths, Part 4: God Said It, I Believe It, that Settles It

 Friends, we’re now in the fourth part of this five part sermon series I put together based on a book titled Half Truths by a United Methodist colleague named Adam Hamilton. In Half Truths, Hamilton presents five different Christian cliches, platitudes we spout off too often to one another, often when we’re going through a hard time, or we know someone else who is. Many of us even believe these cliches are scriptural, but they aren’t. We’re looking at the limitations of these phrases, and what we might replace them with.

The cliche we’re looking at this week is the only one in this book that I’ve actually never heard anyone say: “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” This is simply a cultural difference between me and Hamilton. This is the longer way to say a cliche I’ve heard many times, one I suspect you’ve heard, too: “the Bible says __ in black and white.”

But, before we get into the shortcomings of that phrase, first, many words about that Psalm I just asked our poor liturgist to read.

When I was in seminary, a few of my closest gal pals really liked watching what has now become the classic ‘90s sitcom, Friends. It first premiered when I was a kid, and I was too young for it, so I watched it with pretty fresh eyes in my early 20s. One of our favorite episodes was called “The One with Old Yeller.” The episode starts with most of the principle characters watching the movie Old Yeller together in Monica and Rachel’s apartment. Lisa Kudrow’s character, Phoebe, walks in, late in the movie, and is very confused why everyone is crying. When Monica explains that they’re crying because they’re watching the end of Old Yeller, we find out that Phoebe never actually saw the end of Old Yeller, even though she’d seen the beginning and middle of the movie many times. When she was a kid, her mom would always turn the TV off right after the scene where Old Yeller heroically saves his family from a rabid wolf and then yell “THE END!” So when Phoebe starts to see the real ending of Old Yeller, and especially the scene where the family tragically decided to put poor Old Yeller out of his misery because he was deathly ill with rabies, Phoebe yells at the TV “no, that’s it! The end! The end!”

I bring up that antidote because our church tradition has largely done with Psalm 137 what Phoebe’s mom did with Old Yeller. We have no problem with the beginning of it, the romantically melancholy words of a man who misses his home: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.” We love those words. We’ve turned them into stained glass window art, into paintings, into hymn lyrics, into poetry, and even into self help books. We’re eevn cool with the middle of the Psalm: “How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Oh boy do those words hit deep…without hitting too hard. “Hitting too hard” happens at the end, at the verse where Old Yeller gets shot: “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!”

For heaven’s sake, Pastor Natalie, turn off the TV already. The end! What lunatic would preach about this stuff when there’s a perfectly nice Lukan pericope about faith the size of a mustard seed? Well, I’ve made jaws drop with what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway: this is my favorite Psalm. The one that takes up a precious spot in my heart. And…no one ran away screaming. See? We can talk about this stuff. What kind of Addams Family pastor have y’all got, who would fall in love with Psalm 137 when so many of the other psalms are dripping with happiness? Well, it’s not the death and destruction of Psalm 137 that I fell in love with. It was the honesty. 

Now, on that note, let’s go back for a moment to “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” better known to some of us as “the Bible says __ in black and white.” I didn’t grow up like this, but many of us were raised in churches that taught that the Bible is rigid and fixed. The words are in there, the details are inerrant and infallible, the moral of each story is exact, known, and without nuance, and asking questions is how you wreck your faith. We touched on this a few weeks ago when we talked about faith and doubt and certainty. When you have a faith that can’t be questioned, that can’t be played with, that can’t be touched, it starts to break. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” leaves your soul no space to breathe with the Creator. And the Bible is not a brick, chiseled into an unchangeable shape for all of time. It’s the Living Word. When I read it, these stories come alive and the characters are in the room, talking to me. I have a personal relationship, not just with Jesus, like many Christians aspire to, but with John the Baptist, and Mary Magdalene, and King David, and Elijah, and Hannah, and Hagar, and Jeremiah. They aren’t frozen in the black ink on the page. Nothing about them is black and white. They’re stories are messy and sticky and shiny and glorious, like ours.

And then, the biggest reason why a “the Bible says __ in black and white” thinking doesn’t work for me: good gravy, if the Bible is an inflexible, literal, impersonal slab, then what on earth would we do with Psalm 137? This Psalm has its shock factor because it’s so personal. So raw. Even thousands of years after it first saw papyrus.

The man who wrote this Psalm was reflecting on the worst thing that ever happened to him–the Babylonian army sacking his home, killing many of his neighbors, even children, and then taking him and many of his friends as prisoners of war. Grief, as much as we casually describe its “five stages”, is far from a straight line. It’s a long, harrowing maze. In fact, the psychologist who first suggested the idea of the five stages of grief, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, stressed that true healing only happens when we embrace the mess. And if we do that, if we surrender trust both to the process and the Divine, and beat our chests and sit in sackcloth and ashes, we’re unlikely to look or sound good doing it. And if you can handle me saying that I love Psalm 137, then we can handle the heavy lifting of this man’s sadness of losing his home, his white hot anger at the people who killed his family, and even his bargaining with God, that killing another child might bring his back.

But, even though grief is painfully universal, it’s not what we want to talk about, or face within ourselves. This is where that spiritual inflexibility comes back, the same kind that makes us say things like “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Many folks, including my colleagues, will go to great lengths not to let this Psalm “in”, and they’ll spin theology to diminish it, like

“Oh well that’s the Old Testament, all that stuff was so angry”

“People were so rash and blunt back in the old days”

“Oh, the guy who wrote that Psalm didn’t mean it like it sounds, let me tell you the correct interpretation…”

“I read through the lens of Jesus. Would he sign off on that?”

Per that last point, raised up by a friend of mine: Jesus told us that faith no bigger than a mustard seed could move a mountain, as we heard just this morning. When we try to dismiss Psalm 137 as “not like me, not like us, not like Jesus, just a product of that angry Old Testament”...not only is that a terribly shallow and problematic read of the Old Testament, it’s us refusing to do the work of lifting that mustard seed. God will take care of the mountain, our Creator knows that Psalm 137 is Big Grief, and it’s too immense for us to lift on our own. We don’t have to. What we need to do is move on from inflexible thinking and Black and White interpretations of the Bible, and pick up a mirror.

Because I don’t expect any of us to say it out loud, but all of us, if we’ve lived long enough, have sat at our own Babylon River. The place where the grief was too heavy to carry, and the prospect of moving on looked unbearable. And I hope you trusted God at that river, like the Psalmist did. I hope you dropped the mask and came undone and let God see all of you, even the parts you’re not proud of. And if you haven’t been that honest with God in the past, then consider this your invitation for the future. Because if we do that, and lift that mustard seed, that’s where the mountain of healing begins. Because God isn’t afraid of our real feelings.

It’s also worth saying that when our church forefathers included Psalm 137 in our biblical canon, they were by no means inciting violence against anyone. The enemy of these words, the Babylonian Empire, met its own end in the year 538 BCE, at the hands of the Persian Empire. No one, in showing you these words, is suggesting revenge against a lond gone Empire. Us humans hardly know what justice is in this life. It’s a mountain kind of concept. When we spill our hearts to God, and do the mustard seed work of trusting God with those thoughts, and when we empower one another to lift up our own Psalm 137s to God, God takes care of the mountain work of true justice.

So, for these earth-side days, while we wait for a celestial, everlasting reality, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” certainly expresses trust in God, but not trust in everyone around you to carry on the conversation while we wait for this story to keep unfolding. In the mean time, a better alternative might be “This is my story. Will you listen, and believe? That will be enough.” 

Amen.