This is one of busiest congregations I've ever seen. We're a small church.
But everybody's doing something - delivering meals on wheels, creating
prayer shawls, making quilts, serving the hungry through the Neighborhood
Table, working with Habitat for Humanity, assisting the members of our church
in all sorts of ways, and you do this in addition to work and school and family
time. I am proud of how much you get done, but we are all so busy. And the
world is so full of noise. And we are pulled this way and that and barraged
with bad news and the journey is so long and there is still so much to be done.
How will we find the strength to keep going?
I'm not going to tell you anything this morning you don't already know. In
fact, I seldom do. I am like the Hindu guru who said, "All I do is sit by
the river all day selling river water." Here we are at the
We take God for granted. And we work, work, work, we even do God's work, and we
get weary to the bone with it, continually on the verge of burnout. But we
forget that God says we need a Sabbath. We forget that God says, "Be still,
and know that I am God." We forget that Jesus says, "Come to me all
of you who are weary and loaded down, and I will give you rest."
As much as we need productive labor and meaningful service, we need a quiet
place and restoring silence. I would hope our worship service might be such a
quiet place. I know like the noise of praise and prayer and I hope we
don’t mind the preaching, but I worry about the lack of silence in our
services. Silence is just as important
as the rest. We have shared so many holy moments together in this place. Maybe
you have the luxury of a place out in the country or just a private back porch
where you can be still and let the hours speak to the ages. Maybe the shower is
the only place you can ever find a moment of peace in your home, but I hope you
have some place where you can be still.
Of course, it doesn't matter whether you go to a cottage on a remote
mountain top or a magnificent cathedral, if you never go there. It doesn't
matter whether you have a private chapel or an out of the way bench in a
beautiful garden, it won't be a quiet place if you haven't found that quiet
place within where you meet God.
Deep rest, the peace that passes understanding, comes from that place inside
where you can let all your anxieties about the future, all your sorrows about
the past, all your bitterness towards others, all your shame about yourself go,
and just be. It is that place of grace, where you know you are accepted and you
are beloved of God and God is with you. The Quakers called it
"centering," and they would sit noiselessly together for hours
seeking that place where Divine words can be heard out of humble human silence.
We need to stay centered in God's abiding presence and peace. Our activity, our
service, our relationships, even our speech must remain connected to that
spiritual center or we lose our integrity and fragment our lives into so many
disconnected puzzle pieces. I have no use for people who turn spirituality into
one more self help gimmick, who only want to pray and praise but do nothing
useful to help anybody else. But I also weary quickly with those frenetic
activists who only want to do for God and do not know how to be with God. The
inward and the outward should be balanced and connected. We cannot be "too
heavenly minded to be of any earthly good," but neither can we sustain
social ministry without a spiritual center.
You know this. I know this, but even I, the preacher, forget to go back to the
center often enough and meet God in the deepest place of my being. The twenty
third psalm has always been one way God leads me back to that quiet place. The
generation before us knew it by heart. I don't just mean they memorized it.
They were wired into it. I have been with stroke patients who could hardly put
a sentence together without getting confused, but when I started reciting the
twenty third psalm, they joined right in and didn't miss a word. They memorized
it in the old King James version: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not
want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the
still waters. He restoreth my soul; he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.”
God is called the Shepherd of Israel several places in the Hebrew Bible, and in
the New Testament Jesus says "I am the Good Shepherd." It was
something of a shocking image in those days because shepherds were the lowest
rung of the social ladder, a rough and smelly lot. It would be like saying
"God is my garbage collector" today, but that's the point. To compare
God to a shepherd - or a garbage collector - is to honor all those who serve
society in any capacity and to remember they also bear the image of God. And
when the Bible compares us to sheep, it's not really a compliment. "All we
like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his - or her - own
way," Isaiah said. Sheep are notoriously stupid, self willed, driven by
their appetites.
Still, the twenty third psalm almost immediately transcends the shock and
insult of shepherd/sheep with its images of peace and provision. We don't think
long of shepherd and sheep. We imagine green pastures, still waters, good
directions, God making us lie down, God leading us, God caring for us with
tender mercies. And then there is the "valley of the shadow of death."
What a sentence. The valley, because we feel low and diminished. The shadow,
because the fear of death kills us before the reality of death arrives. Death,
because it is our inescapable destiny. And there, at the deepest place of our
anxiety and helplessness, the psalmist shifts from speaking about God to
speaking to God. "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me." As another psalmist
suggests, there is no place we can flee from God's presence. That is bad news
for some people who might prefer not to have God hanging around to spoil their
fun, but as Romans suggests, it also means "nothing can separate us from
the love of God." We are never abandoned. We are never alone.
And then the psalmist shifts the image from shepherd to host. This is more of a
maternal image, isn't it? Mom puts Sunday dinner in front of us, and we all
enjoy the roast beef and gravy. Now, now, I know… Men can cook, too, and
Mom shouldn't have to do all the work around the house. But for most of the
history of humanity, Mom's have had to carry the load around the house, and in
this sense I'm glad to find maternal imagery used of God in the scripture. As
Teresa of Avila said, "As surely as God is our Father, God is our Mother."
"Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou
anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over." In ancient
Finally, the psalm which connects us with the quiet place and the strong
presence within ends with a profession of faith: "Surely goodness and
mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of
the Lord for ever." Is that a faith you can claim? Is that a hope you can
profess? Is that a love you can connect to at the center of your being?
Fred Kane tells the story about a dinner party attended by the famed British
actor, Charles Laughton. After the dinner they gathered in another room to
share favorite poems and stories. The host asked Mr. Laughton to recite the
twenty third psalm, which he did in his richest style, with trained voice and
impeccable timing. Others recited their favorites, and then they came to an
elderly woman sitting in the corner of the room, the host's aging aunt. They
invited her to share something. But she was almost deaf and had not heard much
of what had gone before. She rose and began to recite the twenty third psalm.
People were embarrassed for her at first, that she should try what the famed actor
had already performed so beautifully. But soon, everyone was caught up in her
recitation. Some even began to weep. It was stunning. Later someone asked Mr.
Laughton why her recitation had been so moving when she lacked the skills he
had as an actor. He replied, "I know the psalm, but she knows the
Shepherd."
Do you know the Shepherd? Today I invite you to your quiet place, to your place
at the table prepared for you. And I urge you to find that place deep in your
own being where God waits to meet you and remind you that you are accepted and
beloved just as you are. And for thosee few moments, rest there. Let God
restore your soul.
Let us pray.
In the stillness of this moment, in the provision of this table, in the
silence of our innermost being, we wait upon you, O God. As we receive your
gifts help us remember who and whose we are that we might live and love and act
not out of our own resources, but from the center of your abiding presence in
our hearts. Amen. .
Mary Anne Biggs, Pastor
Nekoosa United
Nekoosa