Hilton Head Island, SC – January 8, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 46:1-3,7-11; Psalm 11:1-7
A Sermon by John M. Miller
The Psalm Texts Series – Text – “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” – Psalm 11:3 (RSV)
WHEN THE FOUNDATIONS ARE DESTROYED
Psalm 11 is identified as a Psalm of David in its superscription. It sounds very Davidic, for it expresses both great anxiety and great hope. For whatever reason, David again seemed to be in a glum mood when he wrote this Psalm. But his opening verse describes how he shall deal with the darkness which he feels has enveloped him. “In the Lord I take refuge.” When things are hard, and the way ahead is very unclear, when uncertainties assail us and despair surrounds us, “In the Lord I take refuge.” That is David’s prescription for facing adversity.
But there is an unnamed someone who wants to test David in the midst of his anguish. David asks of this anonymous person, “How can you say to me, ‘Flee like a bird to the mountains; for lo, the wicked bend the bow, they have fitted their arrow to the string, to shoot in the dark at the heart of the upright; if the foundations are destroyed; what can the righteous do?’”
Alice Munro is an outstanding Canadian novelist and writer. Several weeks ago she had a very unusual short story in The New Yorker (Nov. 28, 2011). It was called “Leaving Maverley,” and it was set in the 1950s. It is the story of a young Orthodox Jewish girl in a small Ontario town who was hired to sell tickets at the town’s movie theater. Leah’s father was an authoritarian type who lived by the letter of what he perceived to be the religious law. He told her she must never watch the movies, but it was acceptable to sell tickets for them. And her over-protective, overbearing father agreed to walk Leah home after the theater closed every night except Friday. That was the Sabbath, and he believed the Torah forbade him to walk that far, although it was perfectly OK for his daughter to do so. However, she needed a male escort.
Therefore the theater owner arranged for the town’s night policeman to escort Leah home on Friday nights. Ray Elliot, the policeman, had grown up in Maverley. When he came back from World War II, he finished high school. One of his teachers was a pretty married woman named Isabel who was a few years older than Ray. They fell in love, Isabel divorced her husband, and despite the great scandal it caused in Maverley, they married and stayed there.
In the meantime, Leah took a second part-time job doing ironing for the wife of the pastor of the United Church of Canada congregation in the village. Not long afterward, Leah disappeared. She wrote a letter to the minister and his wife, saying that she had married their son. Needless to say, the citizens of Maverley, Ontario were all aghast when a girl from the town’s only Jewish family married the town’s only United Church minister’s son.
What should be done when the foundations are destroyed? Should we flee like a bird to the mountains? That seemed to have been the inclination of many of Maverley’s leading citizens.
However, Alice Munro did not end her circuitous tale there. Leah had two children by her husband, the minister’s son, who was a saxophone player in a band. The couple later split up, and Leah moved back into the home of her in-laws, the minister and his wife. He was now retired. (When the foundations are destroyed, sometimes they can really get demolished.) This story, as Lewis Carroll would say, gets curiouser and curioser.
When Leah spoke to the new minister at the church about what was necessary to put her children in the Sunday School, he took it upon himself to instruct Leah in the Christian faith, besides answering her simple question. One thing led to another, and the new minister left his wife and took up with Leah, although neither of them was officially divorced. Then Isabel, Ray’s wife, died at a large city hospital. And whom should Ray Elliot happen to meet there but Leah, who was now a recreation employee for cancer patients at the hospital. Her children had been taken away from her and given to their father, although they were living with their grandparents, the retired minister and his wife.
An hour after Isabel’s death, Ray went outside the hospital in the cold air. The author says of him, “What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.” Then he thought to himself, “The girl he’d been talking to, whom he’d once known – she had spoken of her children. The loss of her children. Getting used to that…. An expert at losing, she might be called – himself a novice by comparison.” He couldn’t remember Leah’s name. And then it came to him. And at the end we are left to wonder, with all that had happened in Leah’s and Ray’s lives, shall they become connected in the city, long after they have finally and forever left Maverley? Shall there be yet another unpredictable chapter in this unpredictable story?
In his searing poem The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats wrote, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned./ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
When the foundations are destroyed, who does the destroying? Are they perpetrators or the victims? Does it matter? Ethically, it matters a lot; but existentially, does it matter? Who can set things straight: that’s what matters! When things fall apart, who is responsible for putting them back together?
Mike Lopresti is an excellent sportswriter for USA Today. He often tells about sports figures we might not otherwise hear about. Last month he wrote about a Sudanese runner who is a student at Northern Arizona University. Here was Mr. Lopresti’s opening paragraph. “What can graduation mean to a college athlete? Let’s not ask the star who stops by briefly on the way to the NBA or the head-case who bad acts his way off campus or the occasional class attendee who drops out two hours after his final game. Let’s ask the distance runner from Northern Arizona University who had to flee for his life in Africa as a kid and eat meals in the street.”
Then he tells the story of Lopez Lomong. When he was six, Lopez was kidnapped from Mass one Sunday morning. His captors wanted to turn him into a child-soldier. He escaped by literally outrunning the men who had seized him. Then he spent 10 years in a refugee camp in Kenya, during which time his family assumed he was dead. Eventually he resettled in the USA with a foster family. Then he became an American citizen. Then he was on the 2008 Olympic team, carrying the American flag at the opening ceremony in Beijing. He finished college last month, carrying the flag for the graduates of the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management. He finished a semester early, cramming in 22 hours in his final semester, so that he can prepare for the London Olympics next year. He has set up a foundation to promote unity in South Sudan, and had brought two brothers to the US, enrolling them in schools in Virginia.
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do.? Trust in God. Work very hard. Run as fast as you can. David tells us, “The Lord is in his holy temple….The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked….The Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds; the upright shall behold his face.” If the foundations are destroyed, we can start over again. But we need to know that the process isn’t automatic. We must look to God to help us rebuild. Otherwise if we rely only on ourselves to do the building, we are far less likely to succeed.
Our opening hymn was “How firm a foundation.” Its opening stanza declares, “How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord./ Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!” If you want a strong foundation, build your faith on God’s Word. “Fear not, I am with thee, O be not dismayed;/ For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid.” If the foundations are destroyed, don’t be despair; God will help you. Trust in Him.
Our second hymn, whose text was composed by that singular hymnodist Isaac Watts, is based on Psalm 90: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.” “Our God, our Help in ages past, our hope for years to come.” If we live long enough, our foundations are bound to crumble. But when it happens, in the Lord we must take our refuge: “Before the hills in order stood,/ Or earth received her frame,/ From everlasting Thou art God,/ To endless years the same.” Fear not; God is with us! That which once was assembled only to fall into pieces can be re-assembled! The foundations can always be repaired! Trust God!
The final hymn is based on our responsive reading from Psalm 46. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” We know these words as “A mighty Fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” Martin Luther wrote both the text and the tune for his hymn in 1529. Eight years earlier, on April 17, 1521, Luther stood before the Holy Roman Emperor and his Reichstag in the German city of Worms. Charge after charge was hurled against the stubborn Augustinian priest. The emperor and members of the Reichstag insisted that Luther recant what he had so brazenly written and preached. Finally, in utter frustration but also exaltation, Luther declared his famous statement, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.” It took eight full years of danger and grave threats, and reflecting on where he had been and where he was going, for Luther to find the inspiration to set Psalm 46 to triumphant music.
If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? Martin Luther decided the only thing he could do was to take a stand, and to proclaim that he would not budge. Let the chips fall where they may. He concluded that the old foundations were faulty; new foundations would have to be laid. “A mighty fortress is our God,/ A bulwark never failing;/ Our Helper He amid the flood/ Of mortal ills prevailing./….Let goods and kindred go,/ This mortal life also;/ The body they may kill:/ God’s truth abideth still,/ His kingdom is forever.”
Did we in our own strength confide? If so, our striving would be losing. Fundamentally it is God who inspires the laying of the foundations, God who maintains the foundations, God who re-builds the foundations if they are destroyed. He uses us to do it, He never does it directly Himself, but He does it - - - if we remember to rely on Him; “In the Lord I take refuge.”
We have foundations. All of us have foundations. Some were built for us before we were born, some were constructed by our parents and relatives and others after we were born, some we set in place on our own behalf. Because they are human foundations, they are subject to inevitable buffeting and destruction and decay. The people in northeast Japan built foundations for their homes and buildings over many generations, and in a few minutes they were almost all gone when the earthquake and then tsunami struck them last year. The people in Joplin and Tuscaloosa built foundations, and with the sound of a 747 passing overhead at an altitude of fifty feet, it was all gone with the wind. In the Northeast, the remnant of Hurricane Irene dropped enormous amounts of rain on certain areas in just a few hours, and homes and other buildings in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Vermont were washed away as floods tore through the narrow valleys at the northeast end of the Appalachian Chain.
You and I have been carefully constructing foundations for ourselves over a lifetime, foundations for families and relationships and occupations and communities. When time or erosion ate away at the mortar between the stones, we did our best to repair the damage. Usually the foundations held, but sometimes they failed. If they did, what are the righteous to do?
It is when the foundations have crumbled that it is the hardest to trust in God, but that is when we most need to trust in Him. Either we did or we did not do everything we could to keep the under-structure intact, but if it gives way, more than ever we need to replace our trust, restore our faith, and renew our hope in God. It is disastrous to suppose we can fix everything by ourselves, but it is equally calamitous to imagine that God will instantaneously repair everything by Himself with no assistance from us.
Restoring foundations is a very difficult but also a very delicate task. It cannot be properly done without God’s help, but it cannot be done at all without our help. A mighty Fortress is our God, but a mighty construction crew He needs to keep the Fortress strong.
There is an old story that Oliver Cromwell, the English Puritan warrior, gave a fiery speech to his troops just before they were to cross a river to do battle against their religious foes. Holding his musket high above his head, he ended his oration with the memorable and stirring words, “Trust in God, but keep your powder dry.”
And so I say to you, trust in God, but keep your mortar moist.