Hilton Head Island, SC – April 28, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 91:9-16; 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. 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, was very close to bankruptcy several years ago. 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). 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 during 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 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?
Thorkil Sonne is a Danish businessman. 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.
The Point of It All is the last book Charles Krauthammer ever wrote, and he wrote a goodly number. It is a collection of his Washington Post columns, a few of his longer essays, and a few speeches he delivered over the years.
Mr. Krauthammer was a psychiatrist for three years. But, he wrote, “I left psychiatry to start writing…because I felt history was happening outside the examining room door. That history was being shaped by a war of ideas, and I wanted to be in the arena.” He was a potent gladiator in a wheelchair, armed with a massive brain full of ideas. He was a more formidable foe than a heavily armed Navy SEAL.
Charles Krauthammer was injured in a diving accident when he was twenty. For the rest of his life he was physically immobilized, but his mind kept operating at the speed of light. For the last year of his life he wrote nothing. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and the treatments
sapped every ounce of energy he possessed.
In the last piece he ever wrote, which was published in the Washington Post on June 8, 2018, the incomparable Charles said this: “I have been uncharacteristically silent for the last ten months. I had thought that silence would soon be coming to an end, but I’m afraid I must tell you now that fate has decided on a different course for me.”
Here are his very last written words: “I leave this life with no regrets. It was a wonderful life, full and complete with the great loves and the great endeavors that make life worth living. I am sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life I intended.”
Charles Krauthammer was a Jew. He was not a practicing Jew, but in his own way he was a religious Jew, although in a non-religious manner. He was admirably strong in his integrity, his opinions, his intellect, and his personal commitments.
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 Charles Krauthammer would say to these things, but I know what I want to say. Despite the unconditional positive spins these biblical 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 us 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 semi-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.
Yesterday yet another shooter came into yet another house of worship. This time it was in Poway, California, a suburb of San Diego. But instead of over two hundred being killed by Islamist extremists in the churches in Sri Lanka last Sunday, on Easter, or eleven being killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue six months ago by a self-styled “Christianist” fanatic (although he would not understand that term), this time only one was killed on the last day of the Passover celebration, and only three were wounded.
The woman shot to death was a fifty-year-old, who stood between the shooter and the rabbi, sheltering him by giving up her life. Next door to that synagogue is an Eastern Orthodox church. This morning that congregation will be celebrating the Eastern Orthodox Easter. What a different Easter it will be for them from any other they have ever known. And shall they be safe from some other twisted Jewish or Muslim or Hindu fanatic with a gun?
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. Your faith in God will convince you of that, one way or another, Your trust in His parental concern for your wellbeing will see you past every obstacle you must face.
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.