The Remedy... (Thoughts on the 23rd Psalm)
A Homily on Psalm 23
by Griff Martin
For the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (and the Thirtieth of Covid Worship)
For the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
October 11, 2020
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
Let’s pray… Incarnate God, we ask that you once again take the Word and transform it into a living and breathing reality we can all together experience. Be present here in this space and in these words God, for if you are present here then nothing else will matter, but if you are not present here then nothing else will matter. In the name of the Creator, the Christ and the Comforter.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures;
And leads me beside still waters;
The Lord restores my soul.
And leads me in right paths
for the sake of the Lord’s name.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.
I know things are rough when I forgo novels for poetry collections, when my mind is so overworked by what is my immediate context that even a cheap murder mystery thriller is too much for me at that moment, when the new Steinbeck biography or Marilynne Robinson novel is sitting beside my bed in a deep stack of unopened novels but my well worn copy of Mary Oliver, Andrea Gibson, or Billy Collins is once again on top of the pile.
These are poetry days, when I can’t handle another narrative but just need a glimpse of something else, something truer.
One of my favorite things in 2020, and that list is going to be unbelievably short, but one of my favorite things is a new podcast from On Being studios titled Poetry Unbound. In this podcast the poet and theologian Padraig O’Tauma takes a poem and reads it, offers a brief meditation on it, a new way to hear it, and then reads it again. It’s everything I need right now.
In introducing the episodes, he explains why poetry speaks… “Poetry is not interested in telling the whole story, instead poetry stops in small moments and tells the story of that moment, which is helpful when you are stuck in a story and can’t see the outcome, stuck in a story of pain and not sure how it will work out… poetry gives you fortitude and helps you through.”
Poetry helps us see a moment, knowing the paradox that the universal is most often loudest in the particular.
And all this explains why we as a people are so drawn to the 23rd Psalm. Why it is such a foundational piece of art for us, a creed of sorts, a poem we read at all sorts of occasions,. We read it at weddings, funerals and we read it when the news is bad or when the presidential debate ends or when the next email from AISD comes announcing another change in virtual school or when the doctor calls with the test results or when we finish another fruitless conversation about politics and an issue that matters deeply to us with someone who feels opposite us and started the conversation that we should have walked away from.
All to say: It is an anchor in our existence and a foundation in our theology. It is a prayer for all seasons but it seems particularly right for the pandemic season right now.
Now I have to tell you and begin with this confession: I don’t know much about the 23rd Psalm. I don’t know who wrote it, I don’t know why they wrote it, I don’t know when it was written… and no one does, the Psalms are pretty much a hermeneutical nightmare. It’s Israels’ prayer book, hymn book and poetry collection, it’s large and it’s vast and it tells us a lot about Israel, but context of individual Psalms are a mystery.
But the collection itself offers us some very important clues, how the book is put together, what comes next to what, and after what, and before what. There is a flow to it, there is art in its design. And the 23rd Psalm comes right after the 22nd Psalm, which, if that does not give you enough context, hear the first lines: “My God, my God why has thou forsaken me?” It’s the Psalm that Jesus cries out from the cross, a lament when nothing is going right, when everything is falling apart and it looks like the center will no longer hold, another prayer in our prayer book that seems particularly right for the pandemic season right now.
And what I love about the Psalms is that this Psalms of questioning God and lamenting God’s absence exists in the first place, we don’t tend to ask people who pray those prayers to offer the pastoral prayer all too often even though that might be the exact way we all feel in our heart. Thank God Psalm 22 was written and that Israel was bold enough to keep lament as part of our prayer book, they knew that religion is not only for the good times and that life with God is not happily ever after.
But I also love this, whomever put the Psalms together knew that we needed to follow that Psalm up, that cry of lament, with something of a remedy. And for the remedy, they chose Psalm 23.
And Psalm 23 is the perfect remedy.
And although I know nothing about who wrote it or when they wrote it, I know why they wrote it… because there is a brilliant shift in this Psalm that tells us everything we need to know about this Psalm.
Think of it like a ballad sung in a musical and there is the key modulation, everything shifts and you perk up a little bit because a key modulation tells us that something is being sung that we need to hear.
Listen and see if you catch it with that hint:
The Lord restores my soul.
And leads me in right paths
for the sake of the Lord’s name.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
Did you catch it? The poem moves from "the Lord is…" to "You are…"
And it happens right after walking through the darkest valley.
So even though I know nothing about the context of this Psalm, I know the story. Life was falling apart, the center was not holding, everything was up for grabs, the fear was real, the anxiety was present and it felt like everything was coming undone all at once, the gig was up and it was all so real… And then, faith became real as well.
The Lord went from being a theoretical to reality. Because that is what happens when life happens… Our theology is tested, it’s put in the furnace and we will see if what we hold is real or not, if what we have stored up is enough, if we have put our faith in something or someone which will last.
Maybe it happens with a test result, with another day where the news felt like an assault on goodness and justice, maybe it was when their partner was questioning if marriage was still a thing they wanted, when an election does not go our way, when our kids don’t behave like the kids on social media, a day when we wanted to open the bottle for all the numbing reasons because the grief was too much… Life loves to throw us these furnace moments, see Job or Hagar or Ruth, saints who walked through the furnace.
It’s Richard Rohr who says time and time again that the two greatest teachers of life are love and suffering, and he often ponders those might be two sides of one coin.
And in this Psalm, everything the poet has described about God in descriptive terms takes a shift after the darkest valley and those descriptive terms become personal salvation. Those are days where junk food faith won’t last, we need sustaining faith… anticipatory faith no longer works, one must have participatory faith. Days like today.
The Psalmist starts the poem by beautifully describing God as leading, restoring, comforting, providing. And after the darkest valley those descriptions are now a testimony… "The Lord is" moves to a prayer, "You are."
Right now is a time of testing, these are dark days, like just a few weeks ago my therapist said to me, “Griff every day when we wake up we are waking up in a battle zone…” I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but it’s not ridiculous, it’s true. It’s so dang true.
With Covid and months and months spent in this odd state of living and isolation and the news that the virus is now on the rise again and it’s going to impact more school and more church and now we have to face it will impact the holidays… with the rise of our awakening to the racial crisis at our doorstep as a country… with politics that are so divided and seem intent to keep ripping us apart… With environmental catastrophes, hurricanes and wildfires… With death so ever present around us every week… With a world that feels utterly hopeless.
Even though we walk in the darkest valley.
With a rise of depression, a recent study suggests that 1/4 of us are dealing with depression which is three times more than before the pandemic hit… with the rise of prescription of anti-anxiety medications… with more and more substance abuse… with the highest level of loneliness we have ever seen…
When so much that matters to us has been taken from us, when so much that gives us life is not accessible to us right now, when we can’t see our friends, we can’t sit in church together, we can’t sing together, we can’t escape to pools and movies and restaurants, when we feel utterly stuck and we hear that the stuckness of it all is going to be here for a while longer.
Even though we walk in the darkest valley.
We are being given a real life opportunity to live this text in front of us this very day.
Will the God we have worshipped for so long actually hold us when everything falls apart? Will that God still be there in the end of all this? Will we move from language that talks about "God is," to prayers of "God you are?"
In a few weeks we will celebrate All Saints' Day and here is what I know about saints: saints are those who were tested, and by that I mean they lived, they lived the same life that you and I live. The highs and the lows. They dealt with all the same junk we deal with: death, depression, divorce, divide, disease, disaster (and that is just the Ds of this horrid Alphabet Soup of Bad Things). They lived that and still at the end, God was for them. God was provider, leader, restorer, comforter. God was all.
One of the questions I get most right now is about the future of the church, what happens to the church when we can come back together after months of being apart? Am I worried that folks will walk away in all this? Am I worried that there are people who were in the pews last February and won’t be there when we reopen?
I am not because that is a reality. There are going to be people who at the end of this journey say, God did not hold for me -- my faith did not stand up. And to that I say, amen… amen, because if it did not stand up, then it was not God or faith and I celebrate that they can now work to find God and faith truer. It’s time to start over, to find the God and faith that will hold up because everyone deserves that.
And I am not worried because I know this, those who will be there with me when things re-open, well, they are the second half of 23rd Psalm folks, those who don’t talk about God in the abstract, those of us who lived through this nightmare and our faith held… and with these people, we can rebuild and reimagine the church and this time we can offer all the world something that will hold. We will help those who lost God in the pandemic to find God once again.
Hear it again this morning:
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
The Lord makes me lie down in green pastures;
And leads me beside still waters;
The Lord restores my soul.
And leads me in right paths
for the sake of the Lord’s name.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.
Don’t let these days go by without fully entering them so you can walk through the darkest valley and move from "God is" statements to God "you are" prayers…
The world needs those type of Jesus followers. Amen and Amen.
*artwork: The Good Shepherd by JESUS MAFA
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