Sermon: The Broken and Contrite Heart
“God, have mercy on us.”
This lament, this cry from the heart is for every one of us who cannot find words for the recent tragic, terrible and despair-inducing events that occurred in Syria on the 21st of August, when chemical weapons were used to kill many hundreds of innocent people. For many of us, this tragedy is not just the news we would hear and watch through the radio or TV, then turn off our concerns when we are done watching and listening. It is the suffering we would hear and see and embrace as if it is as our own through our ‘broken and contrite heart’(Psalm 51).
We are not witnessing the immeasurable suffering in Syria as just the suffering of an other nation. I hope we can see that is our tribulation in which we as a whole human community struggle, suffer and lament together. The fact that chemical weapons are being made even now and were deliberately used against unarmed, unprotected civilians shocks us. The fact that deadly violence and massacres are still being committed in our global community and are threatening the most vulnerable among us makes us feel deeply sorry. The fact that we will have to expect the killings of innocent civilians whenever and wherever any war occurs, including the military intervention which the US and other Western nations are considering in order to intervene in Syria makes us deeply concerned.
It is ironic that the American president was pressured to decide whether to proceed with military intervention in Syria, with its attendant risk of sparking a major war in the Middle East, on the same day when he was heading for the Lincoln Memorial to make a speech about the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. – including non-violence. We do not only grieve for the hundreds of adults and children who were murdered by by chemical weapon. We also grieve for our human nature. Maybe we can rightly re-phrase ‘human nature’ to ‘the ubiquity of sins’ which provoke us to harm each other in order to achieve greater power and self-glory. I hope seeing these tragedies in our recent past and happening even now – the massive chemical killings in Syria, unceasing wars fueled by ideology and profit margins, unjustifiable interventions by the US and others which have brought confusion, turmoil and death instead of a promised peace – may help us to see and address the primary sin within the ubiquity of sins endemic in humankind: we human beings can and do harm one another for own self-interest.
We may wonder whether that capacity for harm is an undeniable part of the nature of human existence, part of our psyche, built into the structure of society and the world. Certainly, the tragedy in Syria is not about damage we have personally done. But we grieve with our ‘broken and contrite heart’ for the sins human beings inflict upon others. And I see in this sorrow the hopefulness about our human nature as well – our capacity and call to compassion and sympathy. (The phrase ‘broken and contrite heart’ appears in Psalm 51 when King David confesses to God his regret for taking Uriah’s wife by force.) What Jesus warns people about in today’s Gospel is nothing but greed. He sees it in us and asks us to turn away from our greedy inclination towards power and self-importance, our willingness to risk the life and well-being of others for our own gain.
“God, have mercy upon us” was also the first phrase a minister from Japan (Name) used to begin his sermon when he visited a Korean church two weeks ago. The great tribulation for Japan, in which 18,550 people died or went missing during the earthquake and tsunami in March, 2011 didn’t stop with the natural disasters. The next day, the explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant started, as reactor after reactor overheated, expelling clouds of radioactive hydrogen gas into the clear blue sky. Day after day, the Japanese people had to watch on their TV screens pictures which reminded them of doomsday; smoke coming out ceaselessly from the ruins of the power plant, a site so radioactive that no fire truck could get near enough to pump cooling water on exposed fuel rods. 11 times more nuclear radioactive emissions poured out of Fukushima than at Chernobyl in 1986, and it’s still pouring out; Fukushima shows signs of meltdown even now.The immeasurable amount of water needed to cool the crippled reactors, polluted by an intensive level of radioactive material, is leaking through the groundwater and flowing into the sea every day. The land is poisoned by radioactive fallout, steam from still-hot power rods floats up into the air. It is unstoppable and irrevocable; an electric power facility has become a poison factory. Already 12 children among those who were 0 to 18 years old at that time of the nuclear power plant accident 2 years ago have been recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer, 100 times more than the national average rate. The Japanese preacher’s voice caught when he said it is just the prelude to the expected rapidly-escalating rate of cancer in the near future as the consequence of radiation exposure.
After sharing this, the Japanese preacher asked the church and the world to pray for Japan and all the people who will be afflicted by this tragic natural and human disaster. He said he believes that what God is asking us at this time is a true offering from our heart – the ‘broken and contrite heart’ as sung in Psalm 51. He declared with his own broken and contrite heart that his people need to repent and confess their greed for nuclear energy, the greed they have employed to promote economic revival by exporting nuclear energy, only to put so many people in pain. And he continued, saying the Japanese people need to ‘tear out and trample’ their ambitions for nuclear weapons which they secretly concealed in their promotion of nuclear energy. And he urged his people and all of us to repent our aggressive civilization which hurts and harms not only our humanity but every living being in creation in our obsessive chase for more power and more glory.
We might want to ask what greed our own nation may have been holding and promoting to achieve prosperity and what the true cost of that greed may be.
May we look at the cross of Jesus and confess our own self-interest and greed and pray that God will have mercy on us. Let us pray that no one may be ever hurt or harmed by anyone’s desire for greater power and influence. Will that day surely come? Our answer is our prayer as Christians that God’s reign of justice, peace and life come upon our earth and upon us – we, the broken community. May God’s spirit lead us all to offer ourselves and our broken and contrite hearts as true offerings at the foot of the empty cross of Jesus who promises a new morning with each tomorrow. Let us rise and sing as our prayerful response, “God, What a Morning.” Amen.
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