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Sermon - April 29th, 2007
Beside Still Waters
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Psalm 23
Happy Easter! I proclaimed this today to remind you that we are still in the season of Easter, according to the church calendar. Easter is such a profound experience that, in its wisdom, the church gave us 50 days to let it sink in. So, Happy 4th Sunday in Easter! May the resurrection continue to touch the dead spots in your hearts and bring them back to life, so that you can be part of the good news that flows forth from this place and time. May you be springs of living water in all the dry places on this sweet, parched earth. May the fresh life that God has given you spill over to freshen all the lives that touch yours--in your homes, your work, your neighborhoods. May you be Easter people, this day and forever more.
One of the classes Barbara Brown Taylor teaches is Religion 101. Sounds like a class many of us need to take, judging from a recent article I noticed in the Oregonian about how most of us are flunking religion. Anyway, the students in her class say that they love studying other religions because "they have so much in them about how to live." They tell Barbara, "This is different from my religion, Christianity, which is about going to heaven when you die." (Barbara Brown Taylor's Newsletter)
When Harvey Cox taught a class called, "Jesus and the Moral Life" at Harvard, his students wanted to know why he left out the resurrection story. He would end with the crucifixion. He told them it was because the resurrection stood on the border between the historical and mystical. It was a very popular class, so much so, that he had to move it to a theatre usually reserved for rock concerts. But the students challenged him as to why he had left out the resurrection, both Christian and non-Christian students. After all, they said, that was the climax of the story and it made Jesus different from Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. So Harvey Cox did some research.
He was surprised to discover that stories of raising the dead in the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, had nothing to do with everlasting life or immortality. The stories were about God's justice. Harvey Cox wrote: "They did not spring up from a yearning for life after death, but from the conviction that ultimately a truly just God simply has to vindicate the victims of the callous and the powerful." The resurrection was about striking a blow at the system that executed Jesus (When Jesus Came to Harvard, pg. 274).
Harvey Cox is right about the Hebrew Bible, the scriptures that Jesus grew up with. Jesus grew up with the story of the Exodus, the story of liberation of the oppressed, the story of the formation of community in the wilderness. It makes sense that resurrection was about liberation. The empty tomb was a signal that God's justice was on the move, right here on the earth.
But I'm supposed to be preaching about the 23rd Psalm, the most beloved Psalm of all time. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar writes that "it is almost pretentious to comment on this psalm." It is a psalm of confidence with rich metaphors. The "I" statements are filled with gratitude, yielding, and trust. Life with God is "a life of well-being and satisfaction." In God, every need is taken care of. With God, nothing is to be feared. It is one of those scriptures that I recite at almost every funeral--the King James Version--because the poetry is so soothing and comforting. It touches us in a deep and profound way (The Message of the Psalms , p. 154).
We, Christians tend to read the Psalm, thinking of Jesus as the Lord, our Shepherd. After all, in the Gospel of John, one of the seven "I am" statements Jesus made is "I am the good shepherd." (John 10:11) But where is our Good Shepherd today who leads us to green pastures and beside the still waters? The waters are murky, the path is rocky. The ways of the world seem to be bending toward destruction. Where is the voice of the Shepherd who calms us and tells us everything will be okay? Who will look after our every need until our cup overflows? Where is the goodness and mercy that is suppose to be following us?
The last thing we need to be doing is rushing to this psalm believing that everything is okay. This Psalm is from and for a people who have struggled with God all through history. They struggled for a home that they were always trying to get into, hold onto or get back to. They struggled for peace, for food, and for a future. And ultimately they struggled for their faith in God.
The last thing we need to be doing is rushing to the resurrection, the Easter story believing that everything is okay. Everything is not okay. That is not what the Psalm or the resurrection is about. It is about yea, thou we walk through valleys of the shadow of violence and war. Yea, thou we walk through surgery, cancer, and chronic pain. Yea, thou we walk through the ups and downs of life --God is with us. The Psalm and the resurrection are about our liberation from the bondage of fear. They are about trusting God. They reflect an extraordinary, miraculous, mysterious confidence in life....not life after we die...but life right now. They represent an extraordinary hope in peace...not after we die...but right now. And believe me hope and peace and living life to the fullest is a lot harder than death.
So, how do we do we live with confidence and hope? How do we live without fear in a world such as ours?
I think the 23rd Psalm can help us just as the risen Christ can help us. It's about the relationship between Jesus, the Shepherd, who lays down his life for us, the flock. Now, we have to get beyond the idea of thinking of ourselves as sheep. Or, I do. There's a lot of other animals I like much better than sheep. So, I ask you to think about the relationship of being bound to something beyond ourselves and identifying with it so much that it becomes a part of us. We all deserve to have someone in our lives who loves us with the kind of love the good shepherd practices and the kind he teaches--the kind of love that leads us to green pastures and beside still waters.
Not the kind of love that controls or fixes or rescues us. That kind of love prevents us from learning the consequences of our actions That kind of love keeps us from finding confidence and trust. That kind of love chips away at our ability to take care of ourselves in a healthy way . It’s the kind of love that walks with us. It is the kind of love that we all yearn for.
Our good shepherd has walked through the valley of the shadow of death. Our good shepherd walks with us when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
There is a story about a naturalist named Loren Eiseley who spent some time in a seaside town called Costabel. All his life, he was plagued by insomnia. While in this town, when he couldn't sleep, he would spend the early morning hours walking the beach. Each day at sunrise, he was joined by some townspeople who were there to comb the beach for starfish which had washed ashore during the night. They collected the starfish, killed them, and sold them. For Eiseley, this was one of the many signs of the way the world said no to life.
Then one morning, Eiseley got up unusually early, and discovered a solitary figure on the beach. This man, too, was gathering starfish, but each time he found one alive he would pick it up and throw it as far as he could out beyond the breaking surf, back to the nurturing ocean from which it came. As days went by, Eiseley found this man embarked on his mission of mercy each morning, seven days a week, no matter what the weather was.
Eiseley named this man "the star thrower," and in a moving meditation he wrote of how this man and his predawn work contradicted everything that Eiseley had been taught about evolution and the survival of the fittest. Here on the beach in Costabel, the strong reached down to save, not crush, the weak. And Eiseley wondered in the meditation: Is there a star thrower at work in the universe, a God who contradicts death, a God whose nature (in the words of Thomas Merton) is "mercy within mercy." ( Weavings, Mar/Apr. 1991, p.17).
According to Psalm 23, there is--it is the Lord who is our shepherd. According to the Gospels, there is, it is Jesus, the good shepherd. And we, the church, are "star throwers" every time we put together an Easter basket, every time we visit the migrant camps, every time we give food to the food bank, or an offering to the United Methodist Committee on Relief, every time we put together a Christmas basket.
Carolyn Myss would say that the "star thrower" is doing an invisible act of power. She has a to-do list, a list of invisible acts of power that meant the most to people she heard from. The list is very simple, yet very profound:
1) Hold a door open.
2) Smile.
3) Offer a kind word and encouragement.
4) Give a compliment.
5) Listen without interruption.
6) Make a call when your intuition tells you to.
7) Offer a prayer for a homeless person.
8) Pray--period.
9) Forgive others and yourself.
10) Prepare a meal for a friend.
11) Refrain from judging another person harshly.
12) Remember that life is full of miracles and have faith that every difficult situation can change in the blink of an eye.
13) Remember the truth that there is no such thing as a small or insignificant act of service.
14) Keep your power and attention in present time.
15) Begin and end the day in appreciation of either doing or accepting an invisible act of power.
May the God of our Jewish ancestors give us the grace and courage and power to be a star thrower in what ever way we can, restoring the world to health, one blessed word, one blessed act at a time, until the whole world can join us in saying, “Amen.”
Amen.