January 4thPsalm #60
What's Going On?
In 1971, Motown Records was known for its smooth sound with artists like the Supremes and Marvin Gaye leading the way with hit after hit. But Gaye was disillusioned with the formula. He was inspired by social injustices in the U.S. including the Watts riots that left 34 dead and over $40 million in property damage.
He was also influenced by emotional conversations shared between him and his brother Frankie who had returned from three years of service in Vietnam.
Gaye asked himself: ‘With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?’
The result was the song, ‘What’s Going On?’ which sold over 200,000 copies in it’s first week of release. [https://youtu.be/H-kA3UtBj4M]
Our psalmist might ask the same question: ‘What’s going on - God?’
1 O God, you have rejected us, broken our defences;
you have been angry; now restore us!
2 You have caused the land to quake; you have torn it open;
repair the cracks in it, for it is tottering.
3 You have made your people suffer hard things….
5 Give victory with your right hand, and answer us,
so that those whom you love may be rescued.
Our psalmist challenges God to act in accordance with God’s promises. He acknowledges that the people are helpless without God. The psalmist believes that the mere fact that God has not fulfilled His promise today does not stop us from believing that God might fulfill it tomorrow.
10 Have you not rejected us, O God?
You do not go out, O God, with our armies.
11 O grant us help against the foe,
for human help is worthless.
This text does not seem very edifying to a 21st century reader. It seems to reinforce in a dangerous way the all too pervasive temptation to equate national policy with God’s will and claim God as our ally in every cause. However our psalm is not pleading for some sort of military triumphalism (‘my country right or wrong!), but rather sees salvation as God’s salvation which undercuts any temptation pride or trust in the military machine. We must also take seriously the truth that Psalm 60 is the prayer of a suffering and oppressed people, not the prayer of an empire and its chaplains who wish God to maintain the status quo. Rather, their prayer is the desperate plea of those who turn to God as the only possible hope in an apparently hopeless situation. It is a stark reminder of the limits of human power and that salvation is God’s work.
When I was a young student at Bible College in the 1970s, I was introduced to the book, A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Guiterrez. Gutiérrez forced Christians to hear the voice of God among the world's suffering and to ask whether the church's talk of salvation meant anything for their liberation.
In 1968, Roman Catholic bishops and theologians gathered for a meeting in Medellin, Colombia, to assess the state of the church in the continent. The bishops wrote that “a deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of persons, asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else.”
It isn’t often that theology makes headlines. But for the past 50 years, a way of thinking about God and poverty has been doing just that through the voices of Guiterrez and other liberation theologians.
Liberation theology’s approach to living out Christian faith has been both globally influential and bitterly controversial. It has been investigated by the CIA on suspicion of promoting social unrest and criticized by a former pope who accused it of getting too close to Marxist thought. Critics have dismissed it as naive – but also called it a threat to free market capitalism.
Here are some of the key points that liberation theology teaches us:
- Poverty, Gutiérrez and other theologians have argued, is an evil – something they believe God does not want – for it can bring suffering and early death. In this view, poverty is not a natural condition; it is a violence that some communities inflict upon others.
- The key principle of liberation theology is “the preferential option for the poor.” This is a commitment to prioritize the material needs of the poor, as well as their knowledge, experience and spirituality. This principle is grounded in the conviction that God is not neutral, but is always on the side of those who most struggle to live.
- If there is one thing we have learned in the last few years, it is that the great problems that we face, such as racism, poverty and the climate crisis, are structural in nature. They have long histories and are embedded socially in ways that are often masked in day-to-day life. A Theology of Liberation takes that structural insight to engage with and deepen Christian theology.
- Liberation theology would be easy to dismiss if it simply abandoned the Christian tradition. But it isn't a question of Jesus as a Liberator vs. Jesus as the God-human. The challenge of liberation theology is to understand Jesus as God-made-flesh and then to ask how the church can be more like Jesus and incarnate itself in the world. No, not in the centers of power and wealth but in the peripheries that long to hear good news.
- Though Gutiérrez could draw upon several images of the church coming out of Vatican II, such as "people of God," he develops the image of the church as the "sacrament of salvation." Key to this image is the way that a sacrament not only points to something deeper, it makes it present.
Jesus preached and made present the reign of God. The church must then, in solidarity, faith, hope and love, do the same. As the sacrament of salvation, the church strives to make present a communion with God and with others. It is not a gatekeeper. It does not seek to exclude. Rather, it should strive to overcome barriers and be a vehicle for inclusion and communion among all people.
Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador in the late 1970s, is often admired as an example of a Catholic leader living out liberation theology. “All those who draw close to suffering flesh have God close at hand,” he said in a sermon.
In the lead-up to El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, Romero fought for agrarian reform for landless rural farmers. He mediated between labor unions, popular guerrilla organizations and the military to try to prevent armed conflict. He established the country’s foremost human rights and legal aid organization and urged U.S. President Jimmy Carter to cease U.S. financial support for El Salvador’s military.
In one of his last homilies, Romero asked soldiers to stop the killing – just one day before being assassinated by military agents in March 1980.
Romero was canonized in 2018 by Pope Francis, who said that prioritizing the poor is “the key criterion of Christian authenticity.”
Pope Francis has also said, “Do not settle for a desktop theology,” but focus on real people and real life.
Our psalmist would have understood.
For an insightful essay on Liberation theology, upon which I have drawn, go to the following link.