OUR DWELLING PLACE: ANOTHER ANSWER TO THE GREAT ?

LENT 4 - Psalm 23

Rev. Tiare L. Mathison, Pastor & Soul-Tender

A PANDEMIC VOCABULARY

Unnerving, crazy, wild, scary, disconcerting, disturbing, dislocated, frightened, jumbled, chaotic, distrustful,

I’ve got about 5 threads to sew into some kind of whole cloth this morning. Bear with me. Some of this discombobulation is simply being alive every day this week. We wake up each morning to new, more disturbing news of illness levels and death in our state and around the world. New restrictions of movement, new practices - shelter in place, self-isolate, family members now quarantined - two of my family’s 7 households in Seattle have been directly exposed. Can’t get a test without a fever; are these Coronavirus symptoms or simply my spring allergies? Work from home with kids home from school. Right.

What about the Internet? Will our home WiFi hold with the added pressures of two or more computers working at full steam?

Hear Psalm 23 again, this time my interpretation:

Ps. 23 Interpreted

You are my guardian

I have all I need

Verdant pastures

Cool streams of living water

Sabbath time of rest,

I am restored, the right way unfolds.

Death Valley is present

but I have no fear - You are with me!

The meal, oh the meal!

In front of my enemies even;

Oil, warm oil on my forehead,

My cup is full.

Goodness, only goodness, follows me every step

Forever, and ever, I will dwell in You.

A FAITHFUL VOCABULARY

Provision, abundance, restoration, comfort, courage, verdant, present, gratitude, grace, mercy, trusting,

We teeter between the two. Pandemic and faith. Life and death. Broken relations with no hope of restoration. Healing and hope, again.

Psalm 23. Read and spoken at countless funerals over the years. I always invite folk to say it with me, if they know it by heart. A beautiful chorus of older voices blend together, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...”. Most everyone of a certain age has memorized the King James Version.

Psalm 23 offers a wide-angle view of the possibilities of life.

Shepherd means King, sovereign, Lord--the one who directs my life, claims my loyalty, is my authority, has power over me. I am answerable to him, and him only!. I trust and serve this Shepherd. The Poet says, YAHWEH! Writ large. And no other.

Pre-Israel was a herding economy, nomadic; it was God's gift of sustenance that gave understanding to the term, shepherd. Then the monarchy got started and shepherd was applied to the leader/King. As the permanent agricultural economy developed, shepherds were classified in Jesus' day with tax collectors, Gentiles, Sinners, outsiders. Like our migrant farm workers today. Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd and says, 'my sheep know my voice' in John's gospel. It makes some people very angry.

They know what he means. It is a political statement against Caesar. It is a submission of the will - this one I serve and no other. While kings fail, God does not.

Psalm 23: Take note: God is Shepherd, all the way through the darkness and then becomes Host. The enemies disobey the fundamental value of hospitality in ancient Mediterranean culture. Yet, the table is set with the most beautiful cloth, the finest china, the best food and the most marvelous wine, by Yahweh, this Gracious Host who feeds, provides and protects.

OUR DWELLING PLACE

Psalm 23. Throws up an interesting theological challenge: It is a powerful critique of our democratic capitalism in this country. While we are so productive and there is good in all this, yet what goes missing is any sense of gratitude or humility or connection to where resources come from. We are bombarded by ads to buy more, get more, have more, hoard more. With what results? Excessive individualism and a level of greed that is nothing less than shameful. It is what gives rise to the statement, “I should not have to see these homeless people on my street.” It warps our thinking about wants and needs at a very deep level. Not having enough, we are dissatisfied all the time. Which leads us to a state I call, ‘dis-empathy’ that is, our capacity for generosity is thwarted by the constant drumbeat of, ‘I want, I need, I want, I need’. These twin evils, individualism and greed, must be thoroughly cleansed from our thinking and our daily practices. I admit, envy is still a besetting sin. Nonetheless, I submit my will to the Good Shepherd who gives me everything I need. Our Dwelling Place.

Psalm 23. I want to offer another possibility to understand this amazing poem. Let me set it up for you. Because of the excessive individualism I mentioned above, we only hear this psalm as between God and me, the I-Thou relationship, singular. It’s defined as God protecting me, feeding me, loving me, as if we are each a silo unto the Lord.

But what if we learned to think ‘we’ rather than ‘me’? If you look to the communities on the continent of Africa, they already know this. Just ask Melody or Allen. And what if, every relationship you have, WPC, family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, everyone, is God’s provision for you? We have all we need, with each other. There is no want in community. There is always plenty, abundance, generosity, reciprocity, giving.

So, it goes like this:

The Lord is OUR Shepherd, we shall not want

He makes us lie down in green pastures, He leads us beside still waters,

He restores our souls.

He leads us in paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake.

Even though we walk through the valley of death, we fear no evil.

For You are with us; Your rod and Your staff they comfort us.

You prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies,

You anoint our heads with oil, our cups overflow.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives

And we will dwell in the House of the Lord our whole lives long.

In this pandemic time, God has provided everything we could ever need through Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are called into community with one another. We stay together, no matter what. We offer support and help to each other and to all the hurting neighbors, friends and strangers we can see. We hear the cry of the lonely and isolated and desperate. We are strong. We got this.

Our Dwelling Place: Another Answer to the Great ?

Amen

Liberating King: Another Answer to The Great ?

(Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Us every day)

Rev. Tiare L. Mathison, Pastor & Soul-Tender

Who do you say that I Am? Our Lenten discipline is to answer this ? Out of the context of our own lives. A corollary question is raised in our Romans passage today: Who do you say that I am in your season of suffering?

Thursday on my sermon walk, I remembered my worst suffering, the deep hurt and betrayal of adultery in my 25 year marriage. The gut ripped pain sent me over the edge, the smoke of sorrow so thick I could barely breathe. I remember reading this very passage in the midst of it and not believing one word of endurance, character, hope. I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. Everything was gone, the whole of my life shattered.

I had 2 things that needed my attention, though: parenting Isaac and pastoring the church in Iowa. I begged God for endurance as hope was out of the question. I listened to my mom’s anguished cry, “don’t let yourself get bitter” and prayed my anger would subside as the healing began. If there was to be healing. In the very moment, I was unsure. I clung to the promise found later in Romans 8: We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose. I trusted I was loved by God, a gossamer thread. What good could come out of this terrible tragedy was a mystery, at least to me and certainly to 13 year old Isaac.

I sat at the foot of the cross for a long time until some dear family and friends gathered round with a promise of holding hope for me while I did the deep work of excavation of my soul. I had to discover two things: first, how deeply God held on to me even when I could not see, hear, touch or know this truth. Second, I had to see my own part in the demise of the marriage, recognizing, once again, my own sinfulness. It took the better part of 5 years.

This pilgrimage of pain is common in our lives, you have your stories too. It is not a formula for survival, ‘just follow this 4 step plan and you will be well’. Rather it is the reflection of one who has come out the other side, long enough out of pain to behold the presence of God when you thought He had turned away. And we do know folk who have walked away from faith because the hurt overwhelmed any resources they had, believing in love and hope and grace just a mean joke played by religion.

Let me suggest something to you, a practice. Read this passage at least 3 times out loud in one day, BUT change the plurals ‘we, our’ to I, me, my’. I did this a number of times this week and I’ve got to tell you it transformed how I understand the whole thing, including suffering! It goes something like this:

Justified, given peace with God, love poured out, so that WHEN

Suffering, endurance, character, hope, 4 of a kind comes, we are embraced.

We are given standing before God through the work of Christ on the cross. The echoed question of Genesis 3: why did you leave your place of repose? Now you are with the snake! Is the fundamental recognition of our sinfulness, our bondage entwined with the fallenness of all of humanity. This is not about individual moral failures that modern Christians label sin, but it is recognition of what depravity actually looks like.

What we so often forget, or sublimate, is our deep capacity for self-centeredness, that crafty ability to rationalize our desires, without restraint or discipline. Our bondage blinds us to this fundamental need of salvation. But that doesn’t stop God from acting! At the right time, Christ died for us, to give us status before God.

As Karl Barth, a mid-20th century theologian, suggests: “there is a wonderful paradox of justification: by justification we are what we are not.”

Therefore, since I am justified by faith, I have peace with God through Christ.

Christ’s grace gives me standing. I boast of hope, hope in sharing the Shekinah, God’s glory. Endurance in suffering produces character and character produces hope, a formula registered in the heart of God. God proves Her love for me, for while I was still a sinner, Christ died for me. I am justified. The Holy Spirit becomes my tutor of spiritual discipline, this deep lesson - to wait, a kind of self-mastery in the midst of such pain and turmoil, the ‘thousand natural shocks’ of life, as its been said. It means the angle in which I gaze upon life, my perspective as it were, is radically changed by this radical grace. I am not alone, I am not alone, a mantra repeated in the soul of my body.

From this well-spring of grace, comes the motivation for all relationships to be lived in the light of this sacrificial love. Our first lesson? We cannot earn God’s love. Our second? We cannot earn another’s love either. The psychology of attraction is complex but the commitment to love another, with all their defects and foibles present and accounted for, is always a gift. We have to continuously set aside our judgments of one another, the list of failures and short-comings burned in the fireplace of endurance and forgiveness. It is from one sinner to another, this free love. Remember? While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. All of us. So we set our will to love, our intimate partners, our congregation members, our neighbors, family, friends, enemies, the world. We are called to mimic Christ, even with our own shortcomings that hinder our best expressions sometimes.

But it is this rich vein of personal identity, IN CHRIST we are forgiven, that grounds HIs Presence in our bloody, breathing humanity. Openness to others, empathy, compassion, generosity, infuses our minds and hearts for we are filled up with what we call grace. This is what brings us to life, again and again, like the dawning of Spring, the buds of the magnolia whisper love as we walk by. God’s love is poured into us and we need it! We need lots of it! It is the water of our lives, this well-spring that never runs dry. No matter what.

And we know this. This is not a do-it-yourself project for Pinterest or Instagram, rather it is a do it together project of grace. We build the scaffolding of community through our prayers, worship, laughter, tears, music, even softball.

This is the good news of the gospel, In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.

The Liberating King has set us free from our bondage to the snake and all his shame, and sets our feet on solid ground. Amen

Our Dwelling Place: Another Answer to the Great ? Lent 4 - Psalm 23

Liberating King: Another Answer to The Great Question Ex. 12.1-7; John 4.5-42; Romans 5.1-11