Hilton Head Island, SC – July 23, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 62:1-8; Psalm 46:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text: The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. – Psalm 46:7&10 (RSV)
Broadcast or print news is never very good, but lately most of it seems to be unusually bad. Killings are an everyday occurrence, and mass killings seem to happen every other day. The temperatures in scores of locations are hotter this summer than they have ever been, and June was the hottest June there had ever been in all recorded world-weather data. Droughts bake many states, and rare summer floods engulf other states. Forest fires in Canada and the US once again are rendering the atmosphere to be unhealthy in cities all across North America. The war in Ukraine continues, with more military and civilian casualties and the dislocation of more refugees. New Covid variants keep cropping up. New drugs for Alzheimer’s disease may benefit the impaired memories of many people, but they also may have side effects which cast doubt on the wisdom of using them. The culture wars further divide the nation against itself, racial tensions rise, and the USA and China both appear to be on some sort of a collision course.
Some people deal with the nuisance of the news by avoiding it altogether. For them, out of sight is out of mind, and they feel much less stressed. It is an understandable response to an unappealing scenario. Better to watch old comedy shows or old movies than intentionally to immerse oneself in seemingly insoluble current events.
William Wordsworth wrote, “The world is too much with us; Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours.” Many people are tempted to withdraw from the world when it becomes too much for us.
In the seventeenth century there was a trend within European Christianity for certain groups to isolate themselves from everyone else. They came to be known generally as Anabaptists, and their primary manifestations were the Church of the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Amish. Many of them emigrated to America, especially to Pennsylvania and Ohio. It wasn’t that they had no dealings with other people; they just had very limited interaction with everyone else. They established their own communities and lived apart from others. Some of these communities still exist. They see themselves to be in the world but not of the world.
Most branches and denominations of Christianity never followed that pattern. Instead they intentionally identified themselves with the world. As life has become more complicated, however, and it is more difficult to maintain personal equilibrium, many individuals feel an impulse to withdraw into themselves as a means of coping.
Megachurches are a recent way of corporately withdrawing from the world. These congregations are so big and they have such a wide variety of activities that people can feel safe in an environment of like-minded people. They escape the larger world for a much smaller world where the megachurch becomes the center of one’s life. It isn’t Cheers, exactly, where everybody knows your name, because hardly anybody knows your name, least of all the pastor. Nonetheless it’s a place where everybody seems pleasant and nice and non-threatening. But there’s also another important feature to the growth of megachurches. This was pointed out years ago by Bill Moyers, the one-time political operative and later news commentator. Megachurches intentionally entertain people. Not all of the pastors are essentially entertainers, but many are. They also tell people what they want to hear, and that’s why many people go to most kinds of churches. (That, by the way, is a bad reason for anybody to go to any church. People need to get upset sometimes when they go to church; it’s good for the soul and for spiritual and mental growth.)
For as long as Christianity has existed though, there have been monks who established small religious communities in out-of-the-way places. In the fifth century, east of Antioch in the Syrian desert, there was a man known as Simeon Stylites. For thirty years he lived in a small cubicle on top of a tall pillar in a remote monastery. That was one way to rise above the troubles of the world, but few would choose it, and even fewer would recommend it. Besides, it sounds rather lonely, if you stop to think about it.
Still, the desire to get away from it all is an ancient inclination. Many passages in the Bible allude to it, especially in the Psalms. There God is frequently referred to as “a refuge,” who always welcomes people into His presence when the cares of the world become too much for them. Psalm 62, a Psalm of David, says, “On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is God. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (62:7-8).
Psalm 46 was written by “the Sons of Korah,” it says in its superscription. Whoever they were, they also wrote a few other Psalms. This psalm was the basis for Martin Luther’s composition of both the tune and the text which evolved into Luther’s great hymn, A mighty fortress is our God. Martin Luther was a brilliant, energetic, wise, and opinionated man, and a text-and-tune hymn-writer to boot. Psalm 46 says, “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea” (vs. 1&2). And when the mountains do shake in the heart of the sea, they cause earthquakes and tsunamis. For those closest to these geologic disturbances, it is the most terrifying, but even people thousands of miles away, reading about it or seeing the damage on television, are also shaken to the core. “The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he (God) utters his voice, the earth melts” (v. 6). It is powerful poetry. Luther’s text is not a direct translation; it is a paraphrase, with similarities to the original, but flourishes of other imagery by the masterful paraphraser.
That is not the end of the story though. “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge” (v. 7). And the Sons of Korah liked that line so much they repeated it as the final verse in the psalm; “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”
When the world is too much with us, we need a refuge, and God is always there to provide it for us, if we allow Him to do it. To those who believe that there is no God, they must look elsewhere, but for those who see themselves as children of God, even though they may quite old children, as most of us are, God is our refuge and strength.
All the calamities listed in this sermon up to this point are bad enough. But there are other potential calamities represented by certain autocrats in certain countries around the world: Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary: any of them or others like them can take actions that might provoke another world war, as Putin potentially has already done in Ukraine. Political instability in any nation might lead to political instability in every nation. The world order is usually strong, but it can be imperiled by the irrational decisions of erratic rulers anywhere on earth. Because that is true, many people withdraw into their own shells, blocking out the omnipresent threats that always hang over a precarious planet. They don’t want to think about anything unpleasant.
For me, however, the current danger of most concern, and the factor that beckons me to retreat into my own little self-created bastion against American unrest, is the presence of two men who are vying for the presidential nomination of one of the two major American political parties. Their names are Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. Each of them is campaigning primarily against the other in the upcoming primaries, which don’t even come up until early 2024. Nevertheless, as with a dozen other would-be presidents, they will be on the hustings for almost another year. And each of the two front-runners has concluded that what is needed in the United States of America is a strongman in the White House. Each is trying to portray himself as stronger than the other, and they are proposing enormous changes in the federal government. They want to eliminate a few huge federal agencies altogether. They suggest that with a stroke of a pen they will do that.
A week ago, Washington Post columnist George Will predicted that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis shall win the nomination for president. For more than forty years, I have hardly ever agreed with George Will on anything, but I hope against hope that he is correct in his prediction. In fact, because George Will is a very intelligent man, and has studied American politics far more closely than I have, since reading his editorial I am considerably less inclined to try to withdraw from the world than I was before I read it.
Here are a few quotes from Mr. Will. He calls Trump the “Great Orange Whale” and Ron DeSantis “Captain Ahab.” Splendid literary allusions! First rate similes! But there is more. “Trump, as stale as a month-old crust of sourdough, is running to win the 2020 election.” Bravo, George! He will never admit that he lost, and he has successfully convinced his acolytes of the same lie. Or there’s this: “DeSantis, after nearly two months of intensified exposure to non-Floridians, resembles a political Edsel.” Is that the unvarnished truth, or what? George Will knows his politics, even though I disagree with almost all of his politics, but if he’s right that neither Trump nor DeSantis will be the nominee for the GOP, I will have no inclination whatever to withdraw from the world – or move to Canada or Scotland or New Zealand, as I have fleetingly contemplated on many, many occasions in past election years.
However, I am still gravely concerned about these two men. Along with millions of other Americans, I am also concerned about the age of the man who currently resides in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I fear that he may be almost as narcissistic as the other two chaps, and that it is ego which is urging him to run for re-election, and not really the desire to continue in public service, which he has already done for one hundred and twenty-four years anyway. He deserves and needs to retire. Considering the severity of his opposition, he has done quite a good job for the past two and a half years, but will he be capable of doing the many important things which need to be done over the next five and a half years?
God is a refuge for everybody all the time, but it is up to us to do everything we can to make the world a place where it doesn’t need God as a refuge all the time. In fact, it is an example of human sin that voters place men into office who campaign in democracies to become autocrats and who do become autocrats. God wants us to be responsible residents of the world, not timid gripers who blame other people for mistakes we helped create. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now: Voting is the most important single activity in which people who live in democracies ever engage. And you can’t be an engaged voter if you don’t know what’s going on, and you can’t know what’s going on in the world if you don’t read, watch, or listen to the news.
In the old classical Greek and Roman dramas, they had a theatrical device which they called the deus ex machina, literally, the god from the machine. Things would get so mixed up in the plot of the play that none of the actors was capable of solving the insoluble. So they had an actor attached to a strong wire standing hidden above the stage. When disaster seemed inevitable, and everybody in the cast deserved to die because they were such a crowd of dunderheads, Zeus, Athena, Jupiter or Minerva would come swooping down onto the stage, proclaim a few divine edicts, wave an arm or two, and everything would be sorted out for a happy ending. The deus ex machina.
The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not that kind of a God. That kind of a god is a dramatic fraud, someone on stage who miraculously fixes things that earthlings mess up. God wants us to fix up everything that needs fixing. If we withdraw from the world, we will never accomplish that. So we have to stick to it when times get tough, as times are now. God wants to inspire us to be the repairers of a broken and befuddled world. It is not in his nature directly to do the fixing. Synagogues, churches, and mosques are some of the places where God does His inspiring, but so are the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of every government, and USAID and the NPOs, and Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and the United Way and thousands and thousands of other human-created non-profit and for-profit organizations.
If we truly need a refuge, God is always there. But most of the time He expects us to do His work in His world. And to say it for the last time, we can’t do that if we withdraw from the world.