“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I”
Psalm 61:2
A couple of weeks ago I preached on this text from Psalm 61. Whenever I read this prayer I am always cowed by its wisdom. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” In other words: Lord, elevate me to a place where I have something more than merely my own power and perspective. Lift me to the place where I can take in a bigger picture. Help me to see what I cannot see from the narrow and cramped cell where I have only myself and people like me as a point of reference. Let me experience the liberty that I can know only when I understand myself to be a part of something bigger than myself and the world that I have created.
In this era when the fruits born of our various political, racial, gender, and economic disparities are on full display, it seems to me that this prayer is one that all sides can and ought to pray. In fact, I might even assert that it is the prayer that is actually the foundation of all our prayers. Like a stem cell, it is the prayer that gives birth to every other prayer we pray. For to be lifted to the rock that is higher than ourselves requires us to not only acknowledge a power greater than ourselves who does the lifting, but also the relinquishment of our own power to don and assign the various labels that keep us in those cells of polarity and disparity.
Assigning labels seems like an appropriate thing to us when we do it. It helps us to order life. It suggests a framework of understanding and an organization of society. We have categories for friend and foe, right and wrong, safe and unsafe. Labels help us embrace those who will return our embrace and keep away from those who seek our harm. Labels help us to identify goals and provide a framework for defining priorities. We land on a worldview, a way of knowing, and a framework for understanding that gives shape to our lives and so creates a space that seems safe. As a good diagnosis defines the course of treatment for a disease, labels help us to know how we are going to engage life and make decisions.
But here’s the thing, those labels we don for ourselves or assign to others can never tell the whole story. The full story is always bigger. Always more complex. Always defying the limits of the label. While labels have a short term asset of helping us to root out and excoriate the sinners and create and elevate the saints, they ultimately wear thin as we realize that the line between these two groups is not as dark and definitive as we might have thought. Better societal definitions of the oppressor and the victim, sinners and saints, heroes and villains are not the primary catalyst for real change. Those labels indeed tell the truth, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Why do we think that defining polarities and waging wars based on these polarities can lead us to that higher place where all will be well? I suppose, history testifies to the wisdom of Hegel’s dialectic. It’s not hard to make the argument that a succession of battles between various theses and antitheses will gradually produce the synthesis of a new order. There is some truth in the theory that we will evolve as the factions who have donned conflicting labels battle it out and go through those pendulum swings of gaining or losing power. But history also shows that an endless succession of winners and losers produces an endless succession of attempts by either the defeated to reclaim what they’ve lost or hegemonistic despots to ruthlessly hold onto what they’ve gained.
It’s only the truth that is bigger than the label that can set us free. That’s why Jesus’ words about attending to the matter of the log in our own eye before we attempt to remove the speck in our neighbor’s eye gets us a step closer to that rock that is higher than ourselves. Giving attention to that log requires us to use our power to address a thing that we have the power to change. God has pledged to come alongside us in this work. The winds of the Spirit can elevate us to the rock that is higher than ourselves. And what liberty there is when we take in the view of that broad and open space of a life where we belong to One who has delivered all of us out of the tiny world of self.
David Rohrer
06/26/2020