Sackcloth: Gesture of the Sinner’s Contrition

(#2 in the series, “Try THIS on for Size!”)

 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast,

and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.

 (Jonah 3:5)

I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, and have laid my strength in the dust.

My face is red with weeping, and deep darkness is upon my eyelids . . .

My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me . . .

My days are past, my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart.

(Job 16:15-16; 17:1, 11)

 You have turned my mourning into dancing;

you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.

(Psalm 30:11)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 29, 2007

“As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep:  and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream.  I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back.  I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, ‘What shall I do?’”

With these words John Bunyan opens “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” completed in 1678, an allegory of the journey of his main character, Christian, “from this world to that which is to come.”  The book opens as Christian perceives that he lives in the City of Destruction, and concludes with his arrival at the Celestial City.  The “Den” which Bunyan describes in the first sentence is the jail of Bedford, England, where Bunyan was incarcerated for non-conformist preaching.  In that jail he “dreams a dream” of a man, Christian, setting out on a journey of faith. His clothing is important.  He is clothed in rags, which Bunyan sidenotes as a reference to Isaiah 64:6, “All our righteousness is like filthy rags.” 

Having last Sunday introduced the series, “Try THIS on for Size!” we now join Christian in trying on a most unsightly and uncomfortable biblical garment, Sackcloth.  Each person’s journey of faith begins with the recognition of need, of one’s dependency on divine mercy.  This recognition can lead to guilt, self-condemnation, and spiritual hopelessness.  The question, “What shall I do?” Bunyan informs us, is a reference to another jail, the jail in Philippi where Paul and Silas sang praises at midnight, and where the jailor cries out, “What shall I do to be saved?”

Bunyan’s rags are metaphors, of course, but in the Old Testament this expression of hopelessness is accompanied by a quite literal wardrobe change.  Sackcloth was a garment of rough texture, intentionally uncomfortable so as to remind the wearer of their anguish of spirit.  It was made of coarse goat’s hair and wrapped around the waist.  We don’t actually wear sackcloth today, as in Old Testament days.  But are not we yet human?  Are our spirits any less assaulted by spiritual and emotional distress?  Are there not moments when we, too, cry out, “What shall I do?” 

We’ve read this morning about the Ninevites who, convinced that Jonah’s message was true, tried Sackcloth on for size.  For the Ninevites, Sackcloth was the Gesture of the Sinner’s Contrition.  God regarded this repentant spirit, and showed grace.  As this sermon developed, however, I found I wanted to emphasize a different Sackcloth experience – not our initial spiritual movements seeking grace, but a different anguish of the soul – one better represented by Job.  Job’s Sackcloth, I think, is a Gesture of Oppression, feeling as if the weight of the world were crashing down upon his shoulders.  

The trigger for this sackcloth experience is usually unexpected loss.  Indeed, the first time sackcloth is mentioned in the bible, it is the patriarch Jacob who models it for us.  When Joseph’s deceptive brothers show their father the bloody coat of many colors (Genesis 37), evidence that beloved Joseph had met an untimely death in the wilderness, “Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins, and mourned for his son.”

Job, though, becomes the classic Old Testament figure modeling sackcloth.  “I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, and have laid my strength in the dust.  My face is red with weeping, and deep darkness is upon my eyelids . . . My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me . . . My days are past, my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart.”

Though Job’s emotional distress is caused by calamity – loss of family, wealth, and health -- depression is not always so triggered, but instead may be a gradual, not-so-sudden sense of hopelessness which creeps over the soul without any apparent cause. 

Linus says to Charlie Brown, “Here’s my philosophy, Charlie Brown. There is no problem so big, no problem so complicated, that it can’t be run away from.”  Alas, Linus, you are wrong.  Sometimes our problems trap us so that running away is not an option.  Sometimes life’s burdens weigh us down.  How quickly our circumstances can ambush us, leaving us with eyes reddened by weeping, plans which once caused a glimmer in our eyes now laid aside, the desires of our heart voided by hopelessness. 

Sackcloth times are primal moments.  In Old Testament narratives rough sackcloth is a reminder of how quickly life’s most feared terrors can seize upon us, leaving us to our basest instinct of raw emotion.  We fear these primal moments.  The human spirit of invention has always sought to make primal moments as uncommon as possible.  When you think about it, much of our human energy and genius is spent warding off these primal moments, making them as infrequent as we possibly can.  But alas, our human condition is such that we cannot escape a world in which we are vulnerable – whether to natural disasters aptly labeled “Acts of God,” which can take life on massive scales without warning, or man-made calamity such as terror, war, and massacres such as we saw at Virginia Tech two weeks ago, in the wake of which a large swath of people are now wearing sackcloth due to sudden and inexplicable loss. 

When, after such an event, you turn on the television news and see people in the wake of a bombing or a shooting with a microphone shoved into their face, asked to express how they feel, what you are seeing are primal moments of anguish.  In Old Testament days these would have been described as sackcloth moments.  And, especially in the post 9/11 world in which we live, we are aware of the potential primal moment awaiting our world.  We live knowing our vulnerability is real, knowing that there are enemies intent on reducing us in terror to another national sackcloth moment of emotional anguish.  These moments strip our lives down to the bare fundamentals, to the simplest truths of what it is to be human.  To experience our mortality in this way is to be adorned us with a veil of depression, a cloak of heavy-heartedness. 

I find it an interesting linguistic tidbit that our word sack is of Semitic origin, essentially unchanged in form and pronunciation through the millennia.  The Greeks, the Hebrews, even the Babylonians, all had the same word and it meant basically the same thing we mean when we say sack.  Seems to me that the word’s durability throughout history reflects the universality of depression in human experience. 

There seems in human nature a fundamental, inescapable sadness and melancholy.  The journey of life away from Eden implies loss at every stage.  It is truly said that life is suffering, as Job famously moans, “A mortal, born of a woman, is of few days and full of trouble, comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last” (Job 14:1-2).  This assessment of the human condition acknowledges our journey as one of constant loss.  And what is abundant life in Christ but the underlying faith that, in Christ, that which we have lost is regained?  Paradise Lost is recovered through grace. 

Still, Job’s closet had sackcloth hanging within easy reach.  And Job is hardly alone in his search for inner peace.  In the United States over 20 million adults annually seek treatment for depression, the common cold of the soul.  We use terms like clinical depression, bi-polar disorder, manic depressive.  In the Old Testament all these conditions would be described as the wearing of sackcloth.  None are exempt.  Depression knows no bounds.  Sporadic or chronic, severe or mild, depression impacts young and old, male and female, rich and poor, believer and unbeliever, clergy and lay.  Depression afflicts those suffering trauma and those who would seem to their friends to have nothing to fear. “They seem to have everything going for them.  How in the world can THEY be depressed?”   Ah, but who among us hasn’t sung in the sackcloth robed choir, “What shall I do?” 

Depression is a curtain of despair that leaves one feeling trapped, useless, and hopeless.  It’s estimated that depression costs the economy of the United States $44 billion annually in lost work time and reduced work efficiency, even as analysts admit that reliable numbers are impossible, likely understated because so much depression goes unreported and untreated, leaving depression free to interfere with normal functioning at home and work. 

Job’s description, while less analytic and more poetic, is equally true.  Job speaks of a face red with weeping, deep darkness upon their eyelids (sleep deprivation?), spirits broken and plans broken off, the grave looking more and more welcome (suicidal tendencies?).  “My days are past,” said Job, and so echoes the depressed person, feeling that all good days are now in the past, nothing ahead but pain. 

One may say, “I’ve not had tragedy strike my life.  Depression shouldn’t be a part of my experience, yet I feel that I, too, struggle with depression.”  Maxie Dunnam lists some of the ways people can feel trapped through depression arising from the normal rhythm of life.  “Trapped in a job that has become drudgery.  Trapped in a marriage where love has died and neither partner is willing to take the radical steps and expend the energy demanded to breathe life into a lifeless relationship.  Trapped at home with an ill and aged parent who demands constant care.  Trapped at a point in midlife when you feel suspended, lose grip on reality, and begin to respond irrationally to marriage and family and job.  We call this mid-life crisis.”  Crisis?  Yes, but a crisis of process, not of event.  Yet, a crisis no less able to manufacture depression severely detrimental to family, to work, and to self.  Kenneth Patchen captures this depression arising from life’s normal rhythm, in a poem:   

Isn’t all our dread a dread of being

Just here?  Of being only this?

Of having no other thing to become?

Of having nowhere to go really

But where we are?

 In Friday’s news was an fascinating story of the famous University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, now 65 and confined to a wheelchair for forty years with the effects of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease.  The headline?  Hawking floats wheelchair free on flight.  On Thursday Hawking went Zero Gravity in a modified jet which climbs to 32,000 feet, then takes a parabolic dive back to 24,000 feet, allowing passengers to experience 25 seconds of weightlessness.  They did it eight times, leaving Hawking to feel like a gold-medal gymnast, doing weightless flips.  It was a moment of sheer joy.

And how shall those who feel weighted down by life achieve this release from the circumstances and pressures of life?  Listen to Bunyan again:  “Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called Salvation.  Up this way therefore did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.  He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below, in the bottom, a sephulcre.  So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do, till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre where it fell in, and I saw it no more.” 

 At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,

and the burden of my heart rolled away. 

Sources and notes:

My discussion of calamity leaving us with “primal moments” was suggested to me by an article in the July 1998 issue of National Geographic, “Living with Natural Hazards,” by Michael Parfit.

Maxie Dunnam, The Workbook on Coping as Christians, The Upper Room, Nashville, 1988, pp. 85-86.

Mike Schneider (Associated Press), “Hawking Floats Wheelchair-free on Flight,” in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 27, 2007.