Growing Present
September 1, 2024 - Psalm 23
I stopped my car at Fitchie Creek Forest Preserve on a whim once. I noticed the sign for it on my drive out of town, and on the way back I scanned the horizon until I found the turn. It must have been about this time maybe later in the season, because I remember I parked my car and marched out onto the paved trail through the dried-up prairie grasses. Thinking about how annoyingly slow it seems to me to walk sometimes. I thought about how much faster I would go on a bike--let alone in a car. Just then I heard a familiar bird call, and I stopped in my tracks, searching the trees but finding nothing. The physical stopping though gave me a moment for my mind to stop too. My attention stopped racing ahead at that moment. Instead, it came to rest on the milkweed pods in front of me, on the sound of a helicopter whirring far over head, and on the feeling of the cold pavement soaking through the soles of my boots and the too-thin socks inside. I decided to turn back and drive home for a warm dinner. But when I turned back to my car I walked slower and I traveled lighter, as though that pause had been enough for now to salve and smoothe over the rough, worried, and hurried parts of my soul.
This Psalm 23 has been a salve for millions. It’s one of the most well-known scriptures there is. Those who have memorized it have been known to carry it with them and recite it to themselves in times of trouble.
When Jesus likened himself to a Good Shepherd, he surely had this psalm in mind. With its words of comfort, rest, and assurance, Psalm 23 has often been leaned on by those of us who are making the transition to the life beyond this one or who are saying goodbye to our loved ones for the last time.
There is a salve many of us find in the whole of this psalm and perhaps especially in promises like: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” I keep using the word salve because it has expanded my understanding of salvation.
My grandmother used to use a rosebud salve for every cut or complaint we had. Whether it was the actual product ingredients or the care of our grandmother’s wrinkled hands, my sister and I believed it did indeed carry special healing powers. Once, as adults, long after my grandmother had passed, one of us came across a supply and bought a small tin for everyone in the family. It wasn’t quite the same.
Maybe that’s why though I like to think of salvation as an application of holy salve to our aching hearts, bodies, minds, countries, and planet. As Justo Gonzalez explains in his Essential Theological Terms, “In the Greco-Roman world in which Christianity was born, there were many religions offering salvation.” Most of these understood salvation mainly or exclusively as life after death... Given that context, it is not surprising that quite often Christians lost the fuller notion of salvation that appeared in their Scriptures, and came to think of salvation merely as admission into heaven…”
Gonzalez writes and I agree that “Salvation in its fuller sense, certainly includes eternal life in the presence of God,” AND it includes what I would simply call a healing, a wholeness-bringing, and an evil overcoming in the here and now. Slipping into that holy healing doesn’t mean our lives will be easy.
It means no matter what trouble comes, we can rely on the unending resources of God’s strength and peace. I am limited though, and it takes prayerful pauses to put me back in touch with that promised healing and wholeness --that promise that “I will dwell in God’s healing company my whole life long.”
From this pulpit, retired Second Baptist Pastor Edmond once emphasized the word choice in that the King James translation of Psalm 23 verse 2: “He maketh me lie down in green pastures.” Pastor E underlined the maketh -especially. Pausing is not optional. Pausing is ordained by God, he argued.
How many of us have found that pausing is not optional. I know I have come up against my physical limits in ways that have put a full stop on anything I wanted to get done. We can choose to work ourselves to that limit, and there are times when maybe we need to. But maybe those times aren’t as often as so many of us think. We do have other options. Most of us probably can figure out a way to practice pausing. Many of us already have even if we don’t always give ourselves credit.
Some of us are talking to God on our long commutes. Some of us are very mindfully brushing our teeth as we review all the beauty and wonder of the day that has just passed. Some of us have instituted a Sunday afternoon nap or an evening movie time. Some of us are reading devotionals. Some of us have a chair where we sit, read the newspaper, pray, and sip tea. Some of us allow ourselves to be mesmerized by the fabulous flow of 2% milk as it floods a child’s cereal bowl and morning chaos abounds around us.
However it works for you, I invite you to pay attention to your pauses. I find God is there in the pausing. I find I can build up my connection to that safe, sound, sense of security when I can take those pauses in some regular way. I find I can build up my capacity for connecting with other people from those pauses, as though somehow remembering my connection to the Good Shepherd reminds me of my connection to all the other sheep. So many people seem to be writing about “self-care” in the past few years. If you’re in a professional church circle you may have had enough of that language to spit when you hear it. And if so, I’m sort of right there with you. I don’t think it’s that it’s wrong to take care of ourselves. I do think we can’t really do it well without support.
More than thinking about how to care for myself though, what has been most helpful for me is to think about pausing long enough to be really honest with myself. How is it with my soul? What is it I really need? What does it cost to be so busy? Sometimes the honesty that comes in those pauses is disturbing. Sometimes in those pauses we can be painfully reminded of how limited we really are in resources, energy, or time. The good news is God meets us there. Indeed, God leads us there to those honest places beside the still waters and the green pastures.
“Even when the way goes through Death Valley [we don’t have to be] afraid because [God] walk[s] at [our] side. God sets a six-course meal for all of us who find ourselves at odds to sit down at a table together. Even in the midst of our suffering, shortcoming, and limitation “our cups brim with blessing” because we are connected to the source of all blessing, love, and life. In pausing, we can connect with the saving, healing, grace of God right now in ways that give us a taste of eternity.
In the words of Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” As The Message puts it “Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life.”
As the poet Mary Oliver puts it: When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”
No matter what valley you travel through, may you find a pause that lets all that holy, saving beauty and love chasing after you all the days of your life catch up to you and bring you home.
May it be so. Amen.
