Things I?ve Learned About God: Everlasting Arms, August 9, 2009
The Book of Psalms is the ‘prayer book’ of the Bible. Throughout the 150 psalms you will find prayers of praise and triumph, prayers of comfort, questioning, and concern, pleas for help, and insistent demands for justice. There is something incredibly human about the psalms. They capture the human voice at its heights and depths - from great exuberance to the deepest pain. Even in the psalms that sound violent or vindictive, after we get over our indignation, when we’re honest, we can admit that even we have felt that way - wishing an enemy was dead or that God would get better at noticing our pain or punish an evil doer. There is indeed a timeless quality to the psalms. Psalm 27 is no exception. It is fundamentally a psalm about the intersection of fear and faith.
In one Peanuts comic strip, Charlie Brown is in the school nurse’s office. As he waits, he observes in Frame 1: So here I am about to see the school nurse. Then Frame 2: Charlie wonders - She'll probably take my temperature and look at my throat..." In Frame 3, he worries: Maybe she'll take a blood sample...I hope she doesn't take a blood sample. Maybe she'll just weigh me.
That is followed by Frame 4, where Charlie agonizes, If she mentions exploratory surgery, I'll scream!
God is my light, my strength, with me always therefore, of whom and of what would I ever need to be afraid? Oh . . . we can imagine a lot of things - some real, some just with ‘fear-potential!’ At the risk of seeming disrespectful, our psalmist is a bit like Charlie Brown - and like all of us. Despite our best efforts at confidence and faith, fear creeps in. The psalmist reflects on the things that could be fearsome - like facing enemies or being gossiped about or worse, being cut off from God. And then, he reiterates that one must simply wait for the Lord and take heart because God will be there. But fear has an amazing ability to rebound.
The story is told of a young preacher who was asked by a local funeral director to officiate at the grave side service for a young transient who had died alone and whom no one seemed to know. The service would be held at a rural cemetery and the fledgling pastor who was new to the area got lost on the way. He arrived late and saw the cemetery crew taking a break by a backhoe and a mound of dirt. The funeral director was no where to be seen. He parked the car, got out and looked in the hole where he saw what appeared to be the lid of the concrete vault, already in place. He didn’t realize he was that late but, still, did not want the young man to be buried without some acknowledgment. So he stood by the grave with his book of prayers and did a short but heartfelt service. The cemetery crew looked on and seemed to give some measure of respect. They even responded with an appropriate ‘amen’ from time to time.
As the pastor made his way back to his car, he overheard one of the workmen say, "I’ve never seen anything like that in all the years I’ve been putting in these septic tanks. There really does seem to be a blessing for everything!"
We laugh at stories like that but, at least in part, we tell them because they help us laugh at something we all find quite fearsome - death. Fear of death is a big one for us. So is fear of the unknown, of failure, of getting sick, of being alone - those are the very human, very real, fears of our lives. They persist, despite our best efforts to allay them. In Psalm 27, the psalmist states such fears and then reflects simply that, with God as our ‘light and stronghold’ we do not need to be afraid. But, really, what does that mean? What does it mean to say that faith is an antidote to fear? What does it mean to ‘have faith’ that - as the psalmist says - even if my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up? What does it mean to say we can lean on the everlasting arms? What does it mean to say that God will take care of you? How does that help in the long run?
Let me get quickly to my main point. To say that God is our light and that we have no need to fear is to make the claim that God is present and is faithful. It does not mean that nothing bad will ever happen. It also does not mean that we will always feel God’s presence. I believe some of the most misleading preaching in Christianity is found in sermons that proclaim that if you ‘give your life to Jesus’ everything will be just fine from then on. Some of the worst forms of that preaching are found in what is known as the ‘prosperity gospel.’ If you give your life to Christ, you can expect to get rich, live a cushy life and have good things happen. And if you don’t have those things, you just don’t have enough of the ‘magic potion’ - faith. The reason the psalms have lasted for thousands of years and the prosperity gospel has not is because the psalms got it right. God is faithful - but God’s faithfulness is about presence not protection. Like Charlie Brown, we all worry as we sit in the nurse’s office and wait and all we know for sure is that through it all, we are not alone. God is faithful. We do not need to fear because God is faithful. We do not let fear have its way because God is faithful. Still, fearful things will happen and life will have its share of challenges and if we get rich or prosperous it will probably be because of hard work or being in the right place at the right time or having some good connections or some good luck or a combination of all of that. It will not be because God loves us best! And, an ability to live without fear in the midst of an array of fear-producing events is not magic. It comes from cultivating an attitude rooted in the psalmist’s wisdom - that God is faithful and that we can rely on divine presence, not magical protection, to strengthen us as we face the ups and downs of daily living.
When I was a child, I remember loving a book called The Little Engine that Could. It’s been around a while, I know, and it has been rewritten and made into a short movie. You remember the story. A little railroad engine lived around a rail yard and did easy work that fit its size. One day a long line of freight cars was pulled into the station and needed an engine to take it up and over the hill. The big engine made for such things refused, afraid he couldn’t make it up the hill. So did another large engine. So did another - all with excuses about why they couldn’t do it. Finally the great train asked the little engine if he could do it. I think I can, replied the little engine. And as it went huffing and puffing up the hill with a load too heavy for it, it kept puffing the mantra (but the book doesn’t use the word ‘mantra’) I think I can I think I can I think I can. As it got closer to the top and was slowed considerably, it continued I–think–I–can – I–think–I–can. And then, once over the top, he began to puff with great relief I thought I could I thought I could I thought I could. Of course, when it was published it was a kind of moralistic story of the value of persistence and hard work. But, as I pondered this sermon, for some reason that childhood memory of a smiling train engine who thought he could - and did - came back to me. Holding to that sense that God is faithful no matter what we face is sometimes a bit like being that little smiling engine. It’s work! It was for the psalmist as he wrote . . . God will hide me, God will conceal me, God will set me high on a rock. Those are ‘engine puffin’ words! God is faithful - God is faithful - God is faithful.
The fact is that bad things, hard things, even unjust things, happen to good people. Our faith does not protect us. Belief in God is not a contract. (I believe in you, you protect me, fight my fights, keep me safe.) We know that, of course, but it is still amazing how often we catch ourselves saying things like how could God let that happen? Of all the people this or that could happen to - why her? Why him? Why me? We don’t usually say that about the blessings we are given. I’ve been born in the wealthiest country in the world and, even in a recession, I have more than most of the world’s population. Why me? We tend to think our blessings are our due or at least we take
them for granted. But, the hard stuff and the tragedies seem somehow an affront to what should be. There is an underlying sense that somehow our faith should protect us. But, the faithfulness of God is not about protection; it is about presence. I believe that no matter what, we are not alone - and we will never be alone - in either the blessings or the challenges we face. We will not be protected from life but we will be accompanied.
Rabbi David Wolpe writes:
When we ask why bad things happen to good people, we have to recognize the consequences envisaged by that question. Imagine good things always happened to good people and bad things always happened to bad people. Every time you robbed, you would be stricken with disease. True, you would never steal, but the choice not to steal would have no moral meaning. We would be like rats in a Skinner box, pushing the bar to receive a pellet of food. Morality in its highest form consists of being good regardless of what befalls us. To be good only to get something in return is not goodness but expedience. If the aim of life is to grow in soul, goodness cannot be merely prudence.
And our aim in life is to ‘grow in soul,’ isn’t it? (I love that term.) In the end, we cannot control what happens to us. We can control our response. We can choose to live with joy in the face of tragedy and difficulty, with goodness in the face of injustice and evil, with generosity in the midst of selfishness. We can do these things because we are not alone. We are held with - and in - those ‘everlasting arms’ that are a source of strength and that assure us of presence but not protection. A simplistic faith is one that expects God to reward us for good deeds and to protect from bad things. It is the faith of childhood. But, when we grow up, the challenge is to allow our faith to grow with us. Our faith must be transformed from ‘simplistic’ or ‘childish’ to ‘simple’ or ‘childlike.’ And a simple faith proclaims that God is faithful and that whatever I face, I do not do so alone. Simple - and strong. Childlike - and challenging.
The great preacher William Sloane Coffin lost his son to a tragic accident. It was a car accident and his son was driving too fast and alcohol was involved. Still, Alex was his son and he was devastated by the loss. In an interview, Bill Moyers asked him about his son’s death and commented on the poignant eulogy he wrote and delivered at Riverside Church where he was the pastor. Coffin replied
I think the most important thing I said was you can never say "God caused a death." Nobody knows enough to say that. And, why should I live and another person die? Why should I be healthy, and you have a serious illness? We don't know that thing. But, God is in the response to the death. My comfort is not that it was caused by God, but that God's heart was the first of all the hearts to break.
Coffin in those few words captures what I have come to believe about God: that God is with us. That God is faithful. That God weeps and rejoices and aches and laughs with us. We are not and will not be protected from the pain of life any more than we will get extra blessings because we are God’s beloved. It doesn’t work that way. Instead God will always give us what we need to respond with grace, to grow in love, to create meaning and beauty and goodness regardless of what happens. Because God is faithful now and forever. And that’s the God I’ve come to know! Thanks be to God! Amen.
