Psalm 102
“God Holds the Keys”
April 7, 2019
I have a friend whose mother now lives in South Florida, where a lot of cruise lines stop. They offer lower rates to last-minute passengers to fill empty rooms and locals like Mrs. Robbins have discovered that if you have a passport and a sense of adventure, you and a friend can just pack a bag, show up at the dock in the morning, and find yourself on the high seas that afternoon.
So that’s what happened last year. Her kids knew she was on a cruise ship and figured everything was fine. So did Mrs. Robbins. In fact, when she called her daughter a week later from somewhere off the coast of East Africa, she told her how solicitous the captain was for the passengers’ health. Every night he came on the speaker and announced “Quiet Time”, when they had to cover their windows and turn down the lights and make no noise. Mrs. Robbins and her fellow cruisers were sleeping so well! Of course, her family didn’t sleep well after that, since it was clear to them (if not to her) that the ship was evading pirates.
An article in The Economist last year noted that things aren’t as bad as they were.
“Ten years ago Somalia’s coast was the centre of the maritime-hijacking world. The country lacked a coastguard or functioning state machinery, which allowed heavily armed pirates to sail up to huge cargo vessels in speedboats before boarding and taking crew and ship hostage. But 2017 was not a good year for buccaneers. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), which monitors crime at sea, global piracy and robbery at sea dipped to their lowest points in over two decades. … According to the IMB, just nine vessels were hijacked off the Somali coast last year. This is in part because regional security has improved dramatically. The Gulf of Aden leads to the Suez canal, through which roughly 10% of global trade flows. After scores of kidnaps and hijackings, the world launched a huge naval anti-piracy effort in 2008. … Along with the introduction of armed guards, barbed wire and evasive-manoeuvre training on merchant ships, this campaign has slashed the number of successful boarding incidents off Somalia...”
What a relief!
Yet what happens in places without any significant oversight at all? Climate change has been driving people who live on the edges of the Sahara north and west as the desert is expanding. The Europeans don’t know what to do with the influx of people riding flimsy boats across the Mediterranean, and so they’ve tightened up on them, and formed blockades. “But with the sea route shut,” says a report from the Woodrow Wilson Center,
“an estimated 400,000 – 1,000,000 migrants were trapped in Libya, where they remain vulnerable to forced labor, torture, and trafficking. …More than nine million people in Africa are estimated to be in modern slavery – the highest prevalence in the world, and the value of forced labor on the continent is estimated at $14 billion.”
Then there are the women that ISIS enslaved, or those who come to this country from Eastern Europe or Asia thinking that they have found honest work, but whose papers are stolen from them by their supposed employers and find themselves in pretty much the same situation they were in, but not knowing the language and with no place to flee.
Over and over and over again this has been part of human history. Israel itself, God’s own people, knew what it was when famine and drought drove Jacob’s family to seek food in Egypt, where Joseph had been sold into slavery years before, only to rise to a prominent position that allowed him to offer help to the very brothers who had sold him off. And when, over time, the Egyptians enslaved their descendants, God raised up Moses, saying,
“I have also heard the groaning of the Israelites whom the Egyptians are holding as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant. Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with mighty acts of judgment.’” [Exodus 6:5-6]
And he did.
Centuries later, they again were enslaved after the Babylonians captured Jerusalem, and they gave up hope. God sent the prophet Isaiah to put courage back into them.
“But Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.’
Can a woman forget her nursing child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
See, I have inscribed you on my hands.” [Isaiah 49:14-16]
And free them he did. How could he do any less for his other children, those alive today? How is it happening? I’m not altogether sure, but I know it happens.
I look at not only this large-scale and blatant enslavement but also at the small-scale and disguised forms. I look at the way that drug dealers knowingly tie people into addiction and dependence. I hear about companies that enticed doctors into over-prescribing. I wonder about how things like state lotteries encourage gambling addictions and consider what might happen if recreational use of pot is legalized. In all of those cases, I know and have seen (and you probably have also seen) that God does give people help in getting away from such things. All of those practices and more have come under scrutiny and I find hope in that. When I see in the news that a human trafficking ring has been shut down, that is something worth a prayer of thanks. When a woman from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait is able to claim asylum in a free country rather than be married off at fourteen, that is a miracle in its own way.
On the larger scale, anything that undercuts the conditions that allow one person to seize another or to steal their freedom is a step in the right direction. If climate change underlies the desperation that drives migrants into the hands of criminals, then it has to be addressed. If ethnic hatred leads people to treat others as less than human, then let’s get working on that. It all connects somewhere.
Psalm 102 begins as the prayer of one, suffering person.
“Hear my prayer, O Lord;
let my cry come to you
Do not hide your face from me
in the day of my distress.
Incline your ear to me;
answer me speedily in the day when I call.
For my days pass away like smoke,
and my bones burn like a furnace
My heart is stricken and withered like grass;
I am too wasted to eat my bread.” [Psalm 102:1-4]
Yet in the help that God offers that one person is the sign that God’s care and help and deliverance is there for all.
“For the Lord will build up Zion;
he will appear in his glory.
He will regard the prayer of the destitute,
and will not despise their prayer.
Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
so that a people yet unborn may praise the Lord:
that he looked down from his holy height,
from heaven the Lord looked at the earth,
to hear the groans of the prisoners,
to set free those who were doomed to die;
so that the name of the Lord may be declared in Zion,
and his praise in Jerusalem,
when peoples gather together,
and kingdoms, to worship the Lord.” [Psalm 102:16-22]
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