Today, on the Third Sunday of Lent, I am at Southwick Community Episcopal Church. I am continuing to preach the psalms during Lent - today's sermon text is Psalm 63:1.

Wherever I go during this Lenten season, I’m preaching on the appointed psalm for the day. Why, you might ask? Aren’t Episcopal clergy “required” to focus on the gospel reading? No! And for decades, the psalms have shaped my prayer life. They cover every possible emotion in relating to God: not just gratitude and trust and love and awe, but also the harder ones like feeling lost or abandoned or angry or confused. Yet over three decades of ordained ministry, I have rarely preached on them. I’ve taught them in Bible studies, and I’ve prayed them myself, but I’ve only very rarely preached on them. So this Lent I’m going there intentionally and I’ll be back with you in two weeks and do the same.

Today I want to call your attention to Psalm 63. Just the opening verse. And I want to use a translation by Robert Alter which is closer to the Hebrew than we are used to – closer to the Hebrew than what we prayed together. Alter also seems able to retain more of a poetic sense. You ready?

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

God, my God, for You, I search. This prayer and our prayers are not addressed to a generic deity- not only to the Creator of the heavens and earth. But my God. Our God. The God who loves us, who claims us, who marks and seals us – the One who calls us each by name. The One who knows us better than we know ourselves. And yet the God whom it is not always is near – the God for whom sometimes we must search.

My throat thirsts for you… The word that we heard translated as soul earlier, doesn’t quite get it in English, so Alter pushes us back to the original core meaning of nephesh.  It does mean soul, but in a Hebrew way, not a Greek way. The Greeks tended to be more dualistic. Body and soul; as if those were two separate things. But the Bible is more holistic. We are clay vessels, given the breath of God. We are fleshy souls or soulful flesh. Literally nephesh really does mean throat. If you cut your throat, where your carotid artery is, you are not long for this world. You literally can’t breathe anymore. That’s nephesh. Not a soul inside of our bodies but our life-force. So Alter opts to keep the consistent metaphor: the poet’s throat is parched. The poet’s whole life-force, body and spirit, thirsts for the living God. Only God. Are you with me?

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

One of the traditional last words of Jesus, from the cross, is “I thirst.” It’s in John’s Gospel the twenty-eighth verse of the nineteenth chapter. It’s where this Lenten journey is headed, to the place of the skull, on a hill outside of the city, to an old rugged cross.  

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.”

Jesus learned to pray the psalms the same way we learn to sing hymns. Now I know that when you talk about hymns in the Episcopal Church this is sometimes a dangerous thing. We have too many books and yes, I know that here at SCEC you use that screen that includes even more music resources!

But you aren’t alone. Across this diocese, even those who think they know and love the blue hymnal really only know a selection within that and within  every congregation I know, people have very different favorites. And then there is Wonder, Love, and Praise and still others love LEVAS. When I served in Holden our Saturday music was closer to your music here and we used a little hymnal called Come Celebrate and the Roman Catholic Hymnal, Gather. This makes it hard to figure out what our core hymns are – and trust me I realize this in diocesan liturgies when the planners will say, “everybody knows this,” but half the people gathered do not.

Neverthless… Even if we can’t agree on the favorites, I bet you all do have your own favorite hymns. Maybe even some you hope that one of those hymns will be sung at your funeral, if you ever stop to think about that. I’m not leaving anything to chance. For me, the one that must be sung when I die is “For All the Saints.” I am one of those people who has my funeral plans all written out on a Google doc. The readings, the hymns, even the preacher. My wife and kids all know this and they also know I update it every now and again, usually around the time of my birthday. While they also know they can do whatever they want, I’ve been a priest long enough to know that it’s helpful to do this sort of thing and in writing. One of the non-negotiables about my funeral is that we’ll end with “For All the Saints.” All eight verses. Occasionally I suggest that it could even be sung all the way through, twice.

So every time I sing that hymn, often at funerals and usually on All Saints Day, I think to myself: this will be sung at my funeral as well. And it brings me a kind of peace to know that.

For all the saints, who from their labors rest, who thee, by faith, before the world confessed they name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.

So it doesn’t seem weird to me at all that Jesus would be singing a psalm as he took his last breath. As he was about to give up his nephesh to God on the cross, he said, “I thirst.” There are many thirsty psalms he could have prayed, but maybe it was this one that he was thinking about, Psalm 63, our psalm for this day.

God, my God; for You I search.
My throat thirsts for you, my flesh yearns for you, in a land waste and parched, with no water.

Or perhaps it was these words, from Psalm 42: As the deer pants for streams of water, so my nephesh pants for you, my God. Or maybe, from Psalm 69: For my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink.

The word “thirst” comes up seventy-seven times in the Bible. That is not surprising in a desert climate. It comes up a lot in the wilderness of the Sinai Desert, where the people are often both thirsty and hungry. The thing is that after that call of Moses that we heard about in this morning’s reading – out there by the burning bush – that marked the beginning of a four-decade long journey. Moses didn’t just go up to old Pharaoh and say “let my people go” and then Pharaoh said “ok” and then they packed up the moving van and settled the Promised Land. It doesn’t work like that. Even after the plagues and the late night escape and the crossing of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army in hot pursuit, what lay head were lots of years of wandering. Forty, according to the storyteller. 480 months. 2080 weeks. 14,600 days.

And probably every single one of those 14,600 days there was more thirst than water in the Sinai Desert. This is why it comes up so often. Yes, the Lord provided manna from heaven and water from the flinty rock. Yes, God was good – all the time. All the time, God was good. But they also must have spent a lot of time hungry and thirsty. They knew what it was like to not take those things for granted. They were learning, as they made that journey from slavery to freedom, how to live life one day at a time. To rely on God, our God, one day at a time.

Thirst. I’m making a big deal of one little word but it’s so very important. Did you know that our bodies are sixty-percent water? If you want to lose weight you can start removing water; but be very, very careful! We take it for granted and we’ve learned how important it is to stay hydrated. But that’s not so easy in Flint, Michigan or in most of the third world.

When I googled the word “thirst” this past week I came up with a hit on a site called www.charitywater.org. That took me to a book called “Thirst” by a guy named Scott Harrison. Maybe you all know about his work; I did not. I literally stumbled upon him by way of Google. But here is what I learned from that website:

At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models—repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience, Harrison founded charity: water. Today, his organization has raised over $300 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 9.5 million people around the globe.

So, the book is called Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World. I have not read it. You now literally know all that I know about Scott Harrison and his work. But I find his story, and that title, inspiring. I find it encouraging that people do turn their lives around and find meaning even though our culture works against that kind of commitment. I find it humbling to know that every single time I turn on the tap at home and clean water comes out I should pray “thank you, God.” But I forget, because it’s just there and because the thirstiest I usually get is on a hot summer day after mowing the lawn.

In a culture where potable water was not so taken for granted, in the Book of Proverbs, we read:

If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink. (Proverbs 25:21)

Jesus picks up on that same theme again and again. It comes up in the Sermon on the Mount and it also comes up in Matthew 25, where Jesus says that when we give a thirsty person a drink of water, we give it to him.

People literally get thirsty. We are dust and to dust we shall return, we were reminded a couple of weeks ago. That’s what happens when all that water, sixty percent of us, is gone. That is why we stay hydrated – to be alive. Because without the water and God’s breath, we are back to dust pretty quickly.

But in the Bible, thirst becomes a metaphor for something even more, in both testaments. In John’s Gospel you may remember Jesus engaging in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. He asks her for a drink of water but ends up talking about himself as water and says that those who drink of the water he gives will never thirst again. In the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of John, the thirsty are given this water as a gift from the spring of life. The water of life as a gift, no longer just for that first-century woman from Samaria at the well in the middle of the day but for you and for me, For all of us who thirst for righteousness. For all of us who thirst like a deer panting at the river. Water as a gift from God, from the spring of life.

So I ask you, Southwick Community Episcopal Church: what are you thirsting for this Lent and beyond, as you get ready to call a new rector? We live in a culture where our loyalties are easily pulled in many different directions. We come to church on Sunday, but the rest of the time there are bills to pay and soccer practice and Pilates classes, and all the rest. And it’s all good stuff. God is surely in the midst of it all, in the joys and sorrows of our lives. I believe that. Wherever we go, God is there.

We can take that for granted however, like we take tap water for granted. What the Psalmist reminds me of on this day – and what I want to remind you all about – is that we are made to be in relationship with God. And with our neighbor. We all thirst. Not just Christians. Our bodies are made in the same way, in the image of the living God. Believers and unbelievers. Americans and people from every tribe and language and people and nation. Each breath we take in reminds us of our humanity. We are hydrated dust. Our nepheshes need the living God and the gift of living water, from the spring of life.

Lent is about water – the kind we drink in but also the living water that Jesus gives to us in Holy Baptism – claiming us, and marking us, and sealing us, and giving us work to do. By water and the Holy Spirit, we are loved into full and abundant life. And we are called, like Scott Harrison, to a mission in a thirsty world – a mission of redemption and compassion. 

A mission of love.

A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent

This Sunday, The First Sunday in Lent, I am at St. John's, Williamstown. I'm there at the invitation of their (still new) rector, Nathaniel Anderson. One big part of my work is to walk with congregations through clergy transitions. I was in Williamstown over two years ago, the Sunday after their previous rector retired after serving thirty years. Through the season of an interim rector, I returned several times as they began their search process to ultimately call Nathaniel as their rector. He's now been there about ten months. It is a great privilege to walk with congregations like this one through this kind of transition and to glimpse the new thing that God is doing in their midst. Thanks be to God!

In my last post, I mentioned that I am going to be preaching on the Psalms for a while in my itinerant preaching around our diocese. This week's Psalm is Psalm 91, and my sermon text is just the first two verses of that Psalm. 

The one who dwells in the Most High’s shelter, in the shadow of Shaddai lies at night - I say to the Lord, “My refuge and bastion,my God, in whom I trust.” (Psalm 91:1-2, Robert Alter) 

St. John’s, it is good to be with you again. It has been a while. Some of you may recall that my first time here was on the Sunday after the 2016 election. It also happened to be the Sunday after you had said goodbye to a rector who served here for three decades. A lot has happened since then, both here and in this nation. I'm going to stay focused today, however, on this parish.

I’m not sure anyone heard much of what I had to say that day. You looked a little shell-shocked. But I went back and looked and basically what I said was, “do not be afraid.” We knew then that Libby Wade would be arriving soon, but Nathaniel was not even yet a glimmer in your collective eye. I encouraged you to use that time for asking questions, for being open, for getting clear about where you put your trust. For using that time between trapeze bars as a gift.

I also said to you in November 2016, as I always do to congregations about to enter a time of transition that your season of transition would not end when a new rector arrives. It takes some time. By all accounts, this has been a pretty smooth transition and there seems to be much joy in Williamstown. The last time I was here was at a wonderful Celebration of New Ministry, and it was nice for me that people kept coming up to me and saying “thank you…we found a good one!”

I am pretty clear that in our polity I can’t take the credit for that. I give the credit to all of you, and to Nathaniel, for the good discernment work you did. And of course to the Holy Spirit. But I will say that it makes my heart glad, and that it’s a privilege for me to back here with you today. Thanks be to God!

I don’t want to bury the lead today so let me just say that even after all that has unfolded since we first met, I’m going to return to this same theme today on the First Sunday of Lent, and encourage you to use these forty days to get clear on where you put your trust. And to come at that by way of today’s psalm.

Across this diocese and around the world, we are making the journey to Easter. Some of you have given things up for Lent. Others may be adding new practices or reading the Bible daily. But however you embark on this journey, it is good to set aside some time for this important work. This past Wednesday, your rector invited you all, on behalf of the Church, into a holy Lent. Many of you have been doing that for a while now while the whole idea may be new to still others. But here we are. I’m grateful to be among you. At the Ash Wednesday Liturgy, Nathaniel reminded you about how:

…the first Christians observed with great devotion the days of our Lord’s passion and resurrection, and it became the custom of the Church to prepare for them by a season of penitence and fasting.

These forty days provided a time to form new Christians by preparing them for Holy Baptism, because as Tertullian put it, “Christians are not born, they are made.” Lent was, for the early Church, also a time for people who had slipped away to come home. As a parish priest I often wished we could revive that practice somehow because most people who leave Church don’t leave in a huff; they just slip away. And I wish we could make Lent more of a time to help people find their way home again.

Lent was, and it remains, a season of penitence. But that’s not about shame or fear. It’s about the message of pardon and absolution set forth in the Gospel of our Savior. We all are invited to repent and to renew our faith by self-examination and by turning back to God; by prayer, and fasting, and by remembering the world doesn’t revolve around us. We do that by reading and marking and learning and inwardly digesting Holy Scripture, so that we might become what we eat; so that we become a word about the Word. We do that by getting clear about where we put our trust.

We are dust and to dust we shall return. Which is a poetic way to say that we are creatures, not the Creator. We were born and we will die. Not “pass away.” Ash Wednesday refuses that kind of euphemistic language about our mortality. We are mortal and what we are all doing right now, by taking in breath and exhaling; we won’t do that forever. None of us. Sorry. So Ash Wednesday in particular and this whole season of Lent are about remembering this, and therefore living each day as present as we dare to each breath – each moment. To live with gratitude and to live in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. To take it, as they say in twelve-step programs, one day at a time.

That’s a lot. Lent can be intense. T. S. Eliot once wrote in one of the four quartets, “…human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” I think that’s right. And I think Lent pushes us to the limits. It pushes us into reality by refusing to let us live in denial. It pushes us away from wishful thinking and toward grounded Christian hope. It pushes us into the reality of our messy lives and to make amends where we fall short, not as a narcissistic exercise but as a way that makes authentic relationships and community possible. Lent is a season for truth-telling.

The poets help us to do that, I think, in ways that prose cannot. We are inundated with information. But the poets invite us to see things we might otherwise miss. Eliot, already quoted, was a master at this. So was Mary Oliver, who died just two months ago. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one, wild and precious life? Now there is a Lenten question for you to ponder over these forty days as you consider the fact that you are dust and to dust you shall return!

In fact, I think that Jesus was doing just that out there in the wilderness for those forty days. Figuring out what his life meant. I think it was something like what Native Americans call a vision quest. Of course he was also remembering the story of his own people, who spent forty years in the Sinai Desert, moving from slavery toward freedom. He took with him Torah, for sure. His responses to the devil reveal his familiarity with the Five Books of Moses, especially Deuteronomy. But he also took the poets with him. Or as we call them, the psalmists. He clearly knew the deep meaning of the psalm we prayed today. I like Robert Alter’s translation which helps us to hear what may be familiar words in new ways.

[The one] who dwells in the Most High’s shelter
    in the shadow of Shaddai lies at night -
     I say to the Lord, “My refuge and bastion,
    my God, in whom I trust.”

Psalm 91 is a poem about trust. Like all great poetry is jam-packed – way more than prose could ever aspire to be. That’s the thing about poets; in just a line or two they can send us on our way.

·    

• Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
• Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
• I say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust!”

Trust takes us right into the heart of faith. On the second week of Easter, we will remember Thomas – who is told by Jesus not to lack trust, but to trust. It’s a misunderstanding to translate that as belief. Beliefs change over time, based on new evidence. The heart of Christian faith is not about our core beliefs but about trust, which is the antidote to fear. The whole of Scripture is about where we put our trust.

Psalm 91 is a poem about trust. Maybe it’s even a little bit naïve as the poem unfolds. The poet may even be so self-assured as to assume that nothing bad will ever happen to those who trust God. That’s the part of the psalm the devil quotes to Jesus in the desert. You heard that, right? The part about how the angels will be sent to protect Jesus. Even a poem can get quoted out of context and misused – because real life is always complex. Trust isn't magic. 

But Jesus won’t be fooled. He knows it doesn’t work like that. He knows the other psalms, too, those poems of lament for when life is not fair, when one feels abandoned by God. He knows above all else this: that trust in God isn’t an inoculation from being human. That trust in God doesn’t keep us from ever dashing our foot against a stone. When bad things do happen in this world – to good people, to bad people, to people like us who are probably a mix – this doesn’t mean our trust in God was misplaced. There is suffering in this world and maybe in your own life right now too. But that’s not an argument to put our trust into the hands of a crafty tempter. The poet knows, and Jesus as a pray-er of this psalm knows, that God is worthy of our trust.  

The biggest challenges in life may even result from those times when we put our trust in the wrong place. Only the living God is worthy of our whole trust. We know this already. In fact I would even venture to say that whether you’ve been here at St. John’s a long time or just a little while, you who have been claimed and sealed and marked as Christ’s own forever already know this. You who live in the shelter of the Most High, you who abide in the shadow of the living God, you already know that God is our refuge. Who was that guy again, who wrote “a mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing?”

I think Lent is a chance to remember what our best selves already know: that we are called to return, to reorient, to recommit to this living God made known to us in Jesus. And so I invite you to use this time to do just that. Not only as individuals but as a community of faith. How can St. John’s return, reorient, recommit to the living God made known in Jesus in order to serve this community of Williamstown and this part of Berkshire County? I cannot promise you that nothing hard or difficult or bad will ever come your way. We are traveling on the way to Jerusalem after all and to the foot of the cross. We who embark on this Lenten journey know where we are headed. But we also know – even from this vantage point – that Good Friday doesn’t get the last word. Not in the life of Jesus and not for us. We know that the God who raised Jesus on the third day is worthy of our trust.

An Earthy Spirituality

In 2005, I was awarded a D.Min. degree from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. One of my teachers there was Walter Brueggemann and one of the classes I took for my program in "Gospel and Culture" was on the Psalms. Walter called it "Earthy Spirituality." Fabulous stuff.

That class and Walter's book, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary have inspired me over the past fourteen years or so to teach and pray the psalms in new ways. I've done Lenten studies and taught adult education courses based around Walter's idea that there are psalms of orientation, of disorientation, and of new orientation. But one thing I have done very infrequently is to preach on the psalms.

Recently I participated in a pre-Lenten retreat with Ellen Davis. She was wonderful and rekindled my love for the Psalms in a complementary but fresh way to what I learned from Walter. When I left that conference, I felt inspired to purchase Robert Alter's translation of the Psalms which is wonderful. 

This has led me to feel inspired and committed to preaching on the Psalms this Lent, and perhaps beyond Lent as well.  

This is the challenge I've faced: as much as I love to teach and pray the psalms, as a preacher I am a sucker for a good story. I tend to preach Old Testament texts about half the time or maybe a little more. I'm drawn more to the Abrahamic narratives and the Exodus, and the David stories and to Esther and Jonah and Ruth. I find that people don't know these stories very well, so as a preacher I can have some fun. 

The parables function in a similar way, even as much shorter compact narratives. Parables like the one about the lost (prodigal) son or the "good" Samaritan invite us into the story and give me a "hook" to work with. On the other hand, I tend to shy away from Paul and even the prophets from the pulpit. I draw from them deeply for theological depth and I've taught them in various settings. But, and this is very personal, I just don't know how to enter in as well from the pulpit. You can do some history or talk about the context, sure. But when Micah asks "what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God?" I want to just say amen and sit down. Perhaps taking on these texts would make my sermons shorter but they seem to say what they mean, and mean what they say. And I feel I have very little to add. 

So, as a former English major, I preach narratives most of the time. And generally speaking - in spite of my love for the Psalms in my spiritual life - I have mostly steered clear of the poetry of the Bible as a resource for preaching. I think in part this is because I have wanted to avoid "lecturing" on poetry. I'm reminded of that scene in The Dead Poets' Society when the teacher, played by Robin Williams, has his students rip out the essay about how to analyze poetry. Preaching about the Psalms is fraught with danger! Rip, rip, rip!

Even so, this Lent I'm going all in. Ellen Davis has inspired me and modeled a way in that is evocative and I hope will be productive. I have several preaching opportunities that I think lend themselves to fresh approaches. Stay tuned; those sermons will no doubt be posted here as they are preached. And, as always, I'd welcome your feedback.