Hilton Head Island, SC – May 5, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 91:1-16; Matthew 6:25-33
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. – Psalm 91:9-10 (RSV)
Psalm 91 is one of the best known of all the Psalms. It has been a source of comfort and assurance to Jews and Christians for many centuries. Whenever I read it, I am reminded of the monks at Mepkin Abbey. They have seven services a day, most of which have a few Psalms sung as part of each service. The abbey is cruciform in shape, and the monks sit in two rows of seats on each side of the “long part” of the cross, facing one another. One half of the community sings one verse, and then the other half sing the following verse, and so it goes all the way through the Psalm. The words are not exactly the same as what we find in the Bible, but they are a paraphrase of that, which makes the metric feet of the poetry work out better. If you don’t know what I mean, don’t worry, and if you do know, don’t feel smug. But in my mind I can hear the Marvelous Men of Mepkin singing Psalm 91, and it puts chills down my spine.
The 91st Psalm has two sections. Verses 1 through 13 are addressed to anyone and everyone, and they clearly and forcefully declare that God takes care of all of us in every situation we must face. Do you have a crisis? God will take care of it. Have you ever gotten sick? Not to worry; God will take care of it. Has life seized you in its icy grip? It will be all right; God will straighten things out.
“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, who abides in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust’” (1-2). God is a shelter in times of stress, a stronghold. Martin Luther could have used Psalm 91 as the theme for A mighty fortress is our God, but he used Psalm 46 instead. Many of the Lutherans and most of the rest of us sing A mighty fortress is our God, but some of the Lutherans sing A safe stronghold our God is still. Either way, God is the one who protects us when the going gets tough, and Psalm 91 proclaims it in no uncertain terms.
When I was a student in seminary, I worked for a summer at a church camp just outside Oregon, Illinois. It was only a few miles from where I was born in Dixon, Illinois, and it was handy location for us to see my parents, who had moved back to Dixon from Madison, Wisconsin, when I was a junior in college. The camp was called Stronghold. A very large castle-like house had been constructed there many years before by the Strong family, who owned the Chicago American, one of the four major dailies in Chicago. (Now there are only two newspapers, and the bigger of the two, The Chicago Tribune, is in bankruptcy. So much for the newspaper business these days.) The Strongs named Stronghold with an obviously apt double-entendre title, and the Presbyterians wisely decided to attach the name to their camp. In those innocent bygone days, it seemed like God gave all of us a safe stronghold, and there was nothing we needed to fear.
“For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler, and from the deadly pestilence; he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge” (3-4). A pinion is the end of a bird’s wing. We might say it is from the bird’s elbow down, if the bird had an elbow, which it doesn’t, exactly. But the pinion is the part where the longest and strongest and hardest feathers are, the ones which were used for quill pens two or three centuries ago. The poetic imagery here reminds us of a hen placing her chicks under her wings if danger is near. Furthermore, if a goose or turkey whacks you with its pinions, you know you have been properly whacked. That’s what God does to protect us when life gets dicey, says Psalm 91 in its theological poetry.
“Because you have made the Lord your refuge, the Most High your habitation, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent” (9-10). First of all, I deduce from that imagery that Psalm 91 was written by someone during the 40-year Wilderness Wandering, because it refers to a tent as a dwelling. The Israelites no longer lived in tents once they conquered Canaan. But secondly, these two verses, which are our sermon text for today, declare unmistakably that God takes care of His own, whatever obstacles may cross their paths.
Really? Truly? Honestly? If people trust in God, no evil shall befall them, no scourge come near them? Is life always triumphant for those who believe in God, and always abysmal for those who don’t? Or is it at least triumphant for believers, and all others are on their own?
Frederick Douglass was born as a slave in 1818 on a farm outside Easton, Maryland. When he was 8, his master’s wife taught him to read, which was illegal. When he was 20, he borrowed papers from a free black sailor, and escaped from slavery, fleeing first to New York City, then to New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was there where he met William Lloyd Garrison, and through that connection he became active in the abolitionist movement up to and following the Civil War. To keep from being captured again, Frederick Douglass went to England, Scotland, and Ireland. Newly acquired British friends were so impressed with him that they paid the $711 to his owner back in Maryland to guarantee his freedom.
The abolition of slavery was a very difficult and dangerous effort. Evil could easily have assailed Mr. Douglass, and scourges of all kinds came close to his tent. But he prevailed. Toward the end of his life, He wrote of his life’s work, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning….This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both…but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Is Psalm 91 excessive optimism? Is the Sermon on the Mount unrealistic unbridled trust? What do you suppose Frederick Douglass would say? “But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?” (Mt. 6:30) Does God always protect us? Or does He always uphold us, even if He might not exactly protect us? Always?
What about little children who are afflicted with terminal cancer at age three? What about faithful Christians, Jews, Muslims, or others who lose their jobs in a bad economy and can’t find a decent job for decent pay anywhere? What about conscientious soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who literally have their legs blown off under them? What about stalwarts of dedication to God who lose their homes in fires or floods or hurricanes or tornados? Where is God for people who dwell in the shelter of the Most High, and things like that happen?
There was a very interesting story recently in The New York Times Magazine about a Danish man named Thorkil Sonne. When his son Lars was three years old, he and his wife discovered that Lars was autistic. Lars had the withdrawn, almost antisocial behavior of many autistic children. However, the Sonnes also discovered as the years went on that Lars had remarkable abilities as well. For example, they could give him a date, any date, May 5, 2002, for example, and within seconds he could tell them what day of the week on which that date fell. He knew all the train schedules for all the trains in Denmark. One time the family went on a long road trip. Lars sat in the back seat of the car, gazing at an atlas. Some time later, Lars drew some rough sketches of European national boundaries, and wrote numbers beside them. Thorkil Sonne went to the bookshelf and pulled out the atlas. Sure enough, their son has duplicated every set of pages, and they were all in the correct order with the proper page numbers.
Lars Sonne is a kind of Danish Rain Man. The Rain Man was the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie of the same name. He was what scientists call an idiot savant, someone who has astonishing abilities with numbers and statistics, but nearly a total inability to adapt to ordinary life. My father knew a man somewhat like that who could watch a passing freight train and tell the serial numbers of every railroad car in sequence. It isn’t a skill for which there is a massive market, but this man had it nonetheless.
Thorkil Sonne has founded a company which employs autistic people to utilize their unique assets. They require close supervision, but they are able to earn good money both for themselves and for the corporation. It is a win/win for everyone. The workers have limitations, to be sure, but they also can do things ordinary people cannot do.
Is autism “evil”? No. Is it is a scourge near someone’s tent? Not exactly. But it isn’t a condition anyone would choose, if they had the ability to make the choice, which they don’t.
Remember how I said there are two sections to Psalm 91? The first section, verses 1 through 13, seem to declare that bad things don’t happen to good people, but of course we all know that is not true. Bad things happen to nearly everyone. And if we live long enough, we are certain to encounter bad things.
The second section of this Psalm is not the Psalmist observing how believers live charmed lives. Instead, it is the voice of God speaking to all of us. And God says of the believer, “Because he cleaves to me in love, I will deliver him; I will protect him, because he knows my name. When he calls to me, I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will rescue him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him, and show him my salvation” (14-16).
At face value, those words are simply untrue. As a minister, I have known several thousand believers to varying degrees, and almost all of them had troubles of one sort or another. Some lives were less stressful than others, but everyone faced --- as everyone faces --- problems, hardships, and heartaches. It cannot be otherwise. However, that’s not the whole story.
Last Monday evening I went to see Park Your Car in the Harvard Yard at the South Carolina Repertory Theatre. It is one of the best plays I have ever seen. If you like your theater to be without any naughty words or negative emotions expressed, don’t go. But if you want to see two characters, portrayed by two outstanding actors, you need to park your car in the Harvard Yard. Bill Gorman has appeared frequently in various regional productions as well as in off-Broadway plays in New York City. Jan Haskell-Mohr is the daughter of the Repertory Theatre’s founders and primary inspirers, Pat and Hank Haskell, who have been lovingly and carefully nurturing the SCRT for the past 21 years.
At first the plot seems to be straightforward. A recent widow is employed by an elderly retired schoolteacher to keep up his home and take care of him, to the degree he will allow himself to be taken care of. It turns out that Kathleen Hogan and Jacob Brackish have much more in common than certainly he imagined when he hired her, or she imagined when she agreed to be hired. The play is humorous, touching, tense, sad, joyful, wistful, and sardonically wonderful.
Jacob Brackish never married, and poured his whole life into his teaching. But he was, by his own admission and that of everyone else in Gloucester, Massachusetts, very strict and exacting. Easy grades did not emit from the irascible old coot. Kathleen Hogan and her late husband had difficult lives and very little income, with no children, no expanded horizons, limited education, and no prospects of escaping the lower middle class, if they even rose that high. I won’t tell you how the play ends, but it does not end in unblemished bliss.
How does any of us deal with the fierce curveballs which life hurls at us? That is the theme of Psalm 91 and parts of The Sermon on the Mount. I don’t know what Frederick Douglass or Thorkil Sonne or Israel Horovitz, the Harvard Yard playwright, would say to these things, but I know what I want to say. Despite the unconditional positive spins these passages place on life’s inevitable challenges, they must be understood in their context. Regardless of the pitfalls which assault all of us from time to time, our faith nevertheless convinces us that God does both protect and uphold us. We don’t hear those claims and therefore we believe them; we believe the claims, and therefore we conclude that they are true. Faith is quaint lunacy to those who don’t have it, but to those who do possess faith, or rather who are possessed by faith, we discover that we do have a mighty refuge and fortress in God.
Here is the essence of this sermon. If we believe God will protect and uphold us, that is what will happen - - - even if it doesn’t happen. Capisce? Verstehen Sie? Comprende? Do you understand? Good. If not, not so good. In fact, if not, you will think God has abandoned you every time something bad happens. So think about this. It matters.