Paul Walker, “Adorning the Poor with Victory”
My text this morning is from our psalm – the penultimate psalm in our Psalter. I’m going to focus on the first half of the psalm, which is filled with joy and dancing and rejoicing and singing. The second half plunges into Game of Thrones vengeance on enemies – double edged swords and binding in chains and wreaking punishment. That’s just far too violent for a Labor Day weekend.
“Hallelujah! Sing to the Lord a new song…. Let Israel rejoice in his Maker, let the children of Zion be joyful in their King.” That was written 4000 years ago. The psalmist urges - almost admonishes -the people to rejoice and be glad. Reminds me of a man who recently died. He began everyday – right up to his death as his health failed in small room in a nursing home - by saying, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
That is a lovely way to begin each day. And I believe this dear man did rejoice each day. And there is one, all encompassing, life-altering, mind-blowing reason to rejoice. We will get to that reason in a minute. So let us rejoice, for sure. But, at least for me, reality always seems to come crashing in. We all know that someone telling you to “cheer up” does not lead to actual cheering up. I was once in a post holy week staff meeting with a peevish rector who was angrily pounding on the wall yelling, “WE NEED MORE JOY!” Yikes.
Back in the 1980’s many earnest Christians were captivated by a book called “The Celebration of Discipline.” It was a guided tour through the so called “spiritual disciplines” of Christian life: fasting, meditating, prayer, etc. The last chapter of the dreadful book, “The Celebration of Discipline” was called “The Discipline of Celebration.” The discipline of celebration? If that isn’t a buzzkill, I don’t know what is. Celebration – true rejoicing – can never be strong-armed. Instead, it comes to us as a gift – we are just swept up in it.
The book is well-meaning, perhaps, but is also a short easy stroll to the heresy of Pelagianism – aka – thinking that your nature is improvable and even perfectible by your efforts, spiritual or otherwise.
There is a brilliant short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne called The Birthmark. A brilliant scientist marries a stunningly beautiful woman named Georgiana. Everything about her is a model of perfection, except for a small, crimson, hand-shaped birthmark on her cheek. Most people see Georgiana’s birthmark as part of her charm, but her husband grows obsessed by it. It soon repulses him. He comes to believe that the birthmark is the symbol of all that is wrong with humanity – our sin, our weakness, our evil inclinations, and ultimately our mortality.
Finally, the scientist convinces his beautiful wife to let him remove the birthmark. He mixes up an elixir and gives it to his beautiful wife. Lo and behold! The birthmark vanishes. But the potion proves fatal, and Georgiana dies just as the last trace of her “imperfection” fades away. A character in a Muriel Spark novel sums up hard-hitting truth of The Birthmark by talking about a novel she’d written with lots of flaws. She concluded that if she edited out the flaws, she would destroy the novel’s essence. So too with human beings – our flaws, even our original sin – this infection in our core nature – are part of our essence. We cannot discipline ourselves into perfection, and rarely into lasting improvement. You are stuck with yourself and your birthmark.
As Warren Zevon sings, in a song that Linda Ronstadt made famous, “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me – Lord, have mercy on me.” By the way, if you don’t see yourself in this category, then you are in worse shape than you can possibly know. Your birthmark may not be on the outside, but it is wreaking its own havoc on the inside.
Well, lo and behold, the psalmist gives us answer to that prayer and the legit cause of our rejoicing. Verse 4 of our psalm says, “The Lord takes pleasure in His people, and adorns the poor with victory.” Poor, poor pitiful me is adorned with victory! What does mean? The word “adorn” here means that we are given “headdress or a head wrap,”. That head wrap is worn by the upper-class women, by the elite priests, and by royal bridegroom. Removal of birthmark not required. The reason we are adorned has nothing to do with us. It is simply because God takes pleasure in His people.
The existential, intergalactic mechanics of the psalmist’s declaration happen 5 centuries later, when Jesus Christ is crucified. He alone was born without a birthmark. He knew no sin. And yet He became sin for our sake. That means that He became the bearer of our birthmark of sin. The elixir that sets us free from that sin is His blood, “resolving the enigma of our fever chart,” as T.S. Eliot says. As a result, the bible says that we are not just clothed with a headdress, but that we are clothed in Christ. You are already accounted as perfect in Him.
What else is there to do but rejoice! Maybe one thing is not to take yourself and your flaws so dang seriously. You might be easier to be around, and you might even begin to have compassion on all the flawed people around you who are not getting any better, much like yourself. Dolly Parton knew the deep joy of her adornment in Christ, which is one of the reasons why she didn’t take herself so seriously, and therefore was so likeable. In an interview with the Larry King, Dolly was asked if she was offended when people assume she’s a “dumb blonde.” She replied, “I say no because I know I’m not dumb and I know I’m not blonde.”
The other thing we can do is give thanks to God for being loved and saved despite ourselves. It might even mean that we ending praying and really meaning the collect of the day – “Grant us, O Lord, to trust in you with all our hearts; for, as you always resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.