Fourth Easter, Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Psalm 23
Lord, may we hear your voice in the words spoken in your name.  Amen.

My daughter Melissa has always had a strong connection to home – wherever home was.  So the summer she’d just turned two was particularly difficult for her.  Our little family had just left London after spending a sabbatical year there – and as we came home to the States we bought our first house in Guilford, Connecticut.  But we couldn’t get into the house right away — and had to stay that summer with Walt’s family, who also lived in Guilford.  To Walt, to me and even to Seth, our five–year–old, these were familiar people and familiar places.  But for two–year–old Melissa, it was all new, all strange – and she was not a happy camper.  So every couple of days we would drive over to Chaffinch Island Road – just to look at our new house and reassure Melissa that one day soon, we would all be there together.  And she believed us.  The house stood on a wooded hill at a bend in the road, and every time we would round that bend Melissa would sing out happily, “There we house.”  It was proof of our promise to her that one day soon — we would all be there together – safely and securely at home.
I think we all want to know where we belong.  We all want a shelter for hope and joy and all things good.  And I think that is why everyone loves the Twenty–third Psalm, for this is the psalm that tells us that we all belong to God.  He is our shepherd; we are his sheep; and he cares for us as a good shepherd would – leading us to green pastures where we can graze and to quiet waters where we can satisfy our thirst.  When we stray, he comes after us and carries us back to the flock.  And if some predator appears, he is ready and able to defend us.  So he is not a place so much as he is a Presence with us – always watching over us even as we travel with him.
But for all that he loves each one of us individually, he also sees us in the context of the flock, the family where he has placed us — for he never meant for us to be alone.  Just as Walt and I and Seth were key to Melissa’s concept of security and safety – so the Lord our Shepherd surrounds us with people who know him, people who can love us as He loves us.  That’s what belonging to the flock is all about.  As God is with us, so we are with each other.
A pastor in North Carolina tells the story of a parishioner he visited in the hospital who was recovering from a severe stroke.  This man told his pastor about all the people from church who were also coming to visit him, bringing their hymnals and singing with him, stopping by on their lunch breaks.  One man even brought his fiddle and played Appalachian tunes for his friend.  “All those church people,” the man mumbled to his pastor, “make it easier to believe in God.  When they are with me, I know God is with me.” ¹
So when the Psalmist says, “I fear no evil for you are with me” – that you can be understood as a plural you.  It’s a prayer for companionship, a prayer for us to be drawn together, a prayer for our presence together to be a sign of God’s presence to others. ²  When the Body of Christ was brand new in this world, Imperial Rome had a hard time describing this curious new religious sect that had rapidly attracted so many new members.  The Roman officials simply couldn’t figure it out.  The one thing they could see, though — was the love.  “Oh, how they love one another!” one official wrote to his superior officer.  And that was as close as he could come to describing this strange new sect.
Of course, you have, for God is with us in joy and in suffering, in life and in death, in hope and in fear.  And he blesses us when we reach out to others in those same situations.  But it’s not automatic — that we will feel the presence of God at all times, wherever we are, in whatever situation.  For God is always on the move, and it takes some effort, some discipline to keep up with him.  Like the discipline of staying close to him from early in the morning to late at night through prayer.  Like the discipline of coming together regularly to worship him, to learn more about him from teachers and preachers.  Like the practice of breaking bread together and sharing our resources with people in need who are just outside our own close circle.  As we stay close to the Shepherd in these and other ways, he stays close to us — even as we travel through dark valleys, even in the presence of our enemies.
Now all that makes the life of the believer sound ideal – especially the way the Psalmist describes the end of that faithful person’s life.  He is brought into a banquet room where his head is anointed with oil and his cup filled so full it runs over.  And – who knows — when we all get to heaven, this might well be our reward.  But here on earth you and I know that even faithful believers don’t always have such an honored end.  I think of Ukrainian soldiers still fighting off Russian forces in the steel plant in Mariupol.  I think of the millions of people who have died alone in hospitals in the past few years – because Covid restrictions wouldn’t allow their families to be with them in their final days and hours.  So what do we say about them?  Where was their honored end?
Susan Andrews is a Presbyterian minister who tells an unforgettable story about one such person.
Twenty–five years ago, she says, St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. was a federal facility with more than 4,000 psychiatric patients, most of them poor and black.  As a chaplain intern, she says, I was assigned to the cancer ward, where certain death added an extra layer to the human despair.  One day I entered an isolation unit to find a wretched shell of a human being – legs and arms chewed up by gangrene, sweat pouring out of a shaking, stinking body.  “Dear God,” I thought, “what can I possibly say to this man?” The answer came intuitively.  The words of the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty–third Psalm suddenly welled up within me.  As the familiar cadence filled that room, the creature before me changed.  He stopped shaking.  He looked into my eyes and began to speak the words with me.  In that moment he traveled back home, back into the rooms of a long–lost faith.  When this child of [faith] died an hour later, he had been welcomed by a loving God who had never left him.³
In life and in death, we belong to God.  In life and in death, we are at home in God.  But the reverse is also true.  God needs and wants to be at home in us, and if we will let him, he will be.
Amen.
 
¹ Isaac Villegas  “Living by the Word”,  The Christian Century, April 14, 2015.

² Ibid.

³ Susan Andrews  “At Home in God: Psalm 23”  “Living by the Word,” The Christian Century, April 14, 1999.
 
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