Sermon: February 7, 2021

The Rev. Charlie Bauer

Chaplain, The Episcopal Church at William & Mary

February 7, 2021

Psalm 34; Hebrews 12:1-6; John 7:37-46

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb today by suggesting that we’re not exactly in the place we’d all like to be in life. Now, this isn’t going to be yet another Covid-inspired sermon, but on a fundamental level, yes, living in the midst of a global pandemic, with the restrictions and loss and general fear of illness and death, does not exactly lead one to say, yes, this is my idea of paradise.

But putting that all aside, we could all spend a moment and identify things in our life that aren’t exactly what we’d hope. Yes, there’s the aspirational – I hope to achieve these things in my life, the five-year or ten-year plan of where you’d like to be and what you hope to accomplish. I don’t necessarily mean any of that. Instead, we all have those aspects of our lives that we wish were different right now. Aspects of our personalities – I wish I had more motivation and didn’t procrastinate so much, I wish I had signed up for a different class, I wish I had the courage to speak out in the face of injustice, I wish certain relationships were improved. Or aspects of the world we live in – global pandemic aside, too many people in this world, all lovingly made in God’s image, live in real fear of war, oppression, famine. The list is too long to mention; too many of us live a life that does not even approach what we might think God desires for us in this world.

So yes, we can easily focus on the negatives– or, perhaps more accurately, focus on those things we wish would improve. We can easily live in lament: focused on those things we have lost, or never had, or could be better.

I would be mistaken if I were to suggest we should just take all of those things and brush them off. Burying those things we experience as loss, or ignoring those things we wish were better, is one way of prolonging pain. But that does not mean we cannot also explore an alternate view on our lives, and I’m grateful today for our psalmist for suggesting just such a lens. The Psalms are my favorite collection of scripture, for their acknowledgement and affirmation of the whole range of human emotion. I am comforted to know that, among the divinely inspired Word that is our Biblical texts, God recognizes the multitude of human feelings, from joy to pain to fear to anger. The rawness of this emotion can even challenge us – Psalm 137 comes to mind as an example of scripture that might even frighten us in its unfiltered view of what might be best called hopeless agony.

But Psalm 34, which we just heard, is hardly a psalm from pain, though it’s not unrelated. “I will bless the Lord at all times, … I will glory in the Lord. … I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me out of all my terror” (Psalm 34:1a, 2a, 4). This is a psalm of resurrection, not exactly in the way of Jesus’ resurrection, but of a life that has found renewed hope in and through God. Walter Brueggemann categorizes this as a psalm both of personal thanksgiving, and of new orientation: that is, life was once one way, then something unsettling happened, and now there is life anew – not necessarily the way life was, but there is hope where once there was none (Walter Brueggeman, Spirituality of the Psalms [Fortress Press, 2002], p46-50).

This is a major theme within the Hebrew scriptures; not a surprise, given people who were exiled and returned to a homeland only to find life different; a people who saw their primary expression of God’s presence in the temple destroyed not once but twice; and yes, for us Christians, the promised Messiah coming here to walk among us as not a king but a craftsman of humble birth, who died a public, humiliating death on a cross.

From all of these events, came that sense of new orientation: we would not necessarily predict how the future would look, but once we survived the disorienting event – exile to Egypt or Babylon, the ruin of Jerusalem, the death of the Son of God – we see a new way of living through faith in God, a God who plays an active role in the way we respond to these disorienting times in our lives. “I called in my affliction,” the psalmist writes, “and the Lord heard me and saved me from all my troubles" (Psalm 34:6).

I do not know how we will find new life, life newly oriented, after this pandemic is finally in the past, whenever it may be. And likewise, I do not know how your life will look whenever you make it through those things that challenge you, that you wish were different, or better – those things that disorient us. But God is actively at work in our lives to move us into new orientation, into rebirth and renewal and hope, even if that new life does not look quite like our old one. “I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me out of all my terror … taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are they who trust in him!” (Psalm 34:4, 8).