Mapmaking in the Wilderness

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Good morning, friends. Before we hear from God, let's take a moment and pray. Holy and gracious God, give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that with our hearts enlightened, we may know the hope to which Christ has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance among us and the greatness of his power for those who believe. Amen. Our reading this morning is Psalm 46, which you will find on page 450 of your Pew Bible. Let's hear from God. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear. Though the earth should change, Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, Though its waters roar and foam, Though the mountains tremble with its tumult, There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of the city. It shall not be moved. God will help it. When the morning dawns. The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter. He utters his voice. The earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob, our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord. See what desolation he has brought to the earth. He makes war cease to the end of the earth. He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. He burns the shields with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations. I am exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our refuge. This has been the word of the Lord. [00:01:53] Speaker B: Thanks be to God. Good morning, church. It is a gift to me to be with you today. I have been holding you in my heart and in our prayers and to share worship with you is an extra blessing I bring you greetings from our home church of Culver City Presbyterian Church in of all places, Culver City and from the broader presbytery of the Pacific. I want to begin with a story of one of my patients from back in my days over at LA County General. I'll call him David. I would begin my rounds every morning just after dawn in the emergency trauma center there. Hardly anybody was awake when I would come by. Even fewer were interested in chit chatting with a chaplain. Honestly, of course, people were grumpy. Nobody ever plans to come to the county emergency trauma center. There's an accident, there's an illness, there's sudden terrible symptoms and people wake up there. David was young and skinny, like he had been missing quite a few meals and living outside. He was surly when he snapped at the nurse, he kept watch on his narrow gurney. He was sitting up on it, his hospital gown kind of draping off his shoulders. He had, like, IV lines and all sorts of things intersecting his tattoos. He was in the section that was reserved for the most fragile of patients, the sickest. And when I approached him, he told me the news from the doctors had not been good. And he was like, blinking, just trying to make sense of what his body was telling him, what the doctors were saying. And then he abruptly clarified that he was a person of faith. And he asked, well, almost demanded if we could pray. So he. The way it would normally go is they'll say, chaplain, would you offer a prayer? But this wasn't that moment. He, like, grabs my hands and starts praying. And he dove in with Psalm 46 by heart, verse by verse, all of it. He savored each word as he prayed it to me. He literally was taking refuge in the psalm. It was like he was drawing it around himself like a blanket, or maybe pitching it like a tent over the both of us to keep us dry in the storm. It hadn't been enough, clearly, for him to say it to himself over and over again during the night, alone. He needed a witness. He needed me to hear him. He needed someone to witness him naming his fear. He needed someone to witness his turning towards God in that moment and tapping down the stakes of his tent that would keep him from being lost in this wilderness. Now, as a chaplain, it is not unusual for people to drop a line or 2 from the 23rd Psalm or give me a John 3:16. But David opened up a whole new understanding for me as a chaplain about what it means for us to inhabit the word of God in our moment of crisis. It was as if that psalm, which we all know was written years ago in a different language for a different moment, was making it possible for him, David, to navigate the most upside down version of his life. And even if every recognizable feature of his life and landscape, interior and exterior, if they were all lost to him, he was still able to find his way home. Now, there is a lot of confusion about what chaplaincy actually looks like. Often people, not you, of course, but other people imagine it's somebody coming by wearing black, offering a nice little prayer, sprinkling some water, sort of a hit and run band aid of God's blessing, if you will. But chaplaincy is really more like what everyday Christians do for people as life happens, the things that you do for each other, showing up for each other, holding space for what is unfolding and keeping an eye trained on what God is doing in that moment. As David and I were praying Psalm 46 together, it was as if we were inhabiting two places at once. One foot solidly in that emergency room, kicking against this difficult news from the doctors, and another foot firmly in God's ability and willingness to walk with him in the storm. And that is what we can expect from Psalms in general. As Thomas Merton puts it, the Psalter will above all tell us not merely what we ought to be, but the unbelievable thing that we already are. At the same time we are in the desert and in the promised land. The Psalms are our bread of heaven and our wilderness of the Exodus. And Psalm 46 names it all right. The earth is changing, mountains are shaking, and at the same time God is our refuge and our strength. And we can be still now. That morning David's world was falling apart, and that morning God was his refuge. As you well know, fellow Christians, we are not just spectators to someone else's nightmare. God invites us to bear witness to both the desert experience and and the blessing of the promised land. We bear witness to what God is doing when life takes an unexpected turn. We bear witness to what God is doing at those intersections. Those intersections of health and sickness, of questions and answers, of faith and doubt, miracles of recovery or the miracle of a peaceful death. Notice Church. We are not standing at these intersections like some kind of self appointed traffic cop telling people which way to go, not slapping Bible quotes on their bumper stickers. Bearing witness is an invitation to bear a heavy load, like bearing down in labor when the baby begins to crown. Bearing witness is when we are 100% present to the difficulties at hand and 100% present to God's work and presence unfolding in the moment. We attune our hearts to that new thing that God is doing and reflect it back. We offer it back so that the other person can get a glimpse of it. Now, mind you, bearing witness is a present tense activity. There is no use for us to impose an old map on top of a new reality. Rather, it is us coming alongside in the confusion that defines these intersections. When we've been healthy all our life and find ourselves in the emergency room, it's not clear what's going to happen next. When the faith we've held since our time in Sunday school suddenly does not seem sturdy enough for our grown up problems, there's confusion at that intersection as we seek to regain our footing in our faith. So we come alongside, dear friends, acknowledging how and what is unfolding the picture that is no longer pretty or decent and in order. And as we stand there, we are on the lookout for what God is doing, how God is showing up in that confusion where the light and presence of our Lord is leading, discerning what it will mean to take the next step in navigating this new reality. Now, I don't know about you, but when I see the aerial footage or the photos of the homes that have burned here and over in the Palisades, I can't even make sense of it. I can't tell really what I'm looking at. I mean, I know the street names, but all that's familiar is lost to me. When I look at those photos. I've lost all my reference points. The old maps won't do. Google's street map view is of no use now. These fires are a devastating example. But church. The deeper truth is that our geography is. Is constantly changing. What we thought we knew for sure is not that sometimes our bodies will betray us, or our politics or our workplace or the climate, or our church or our faith. And what we could navigate with ease last month is no longer available to us. Suddenly, our neighborhood has become a wilderness and we're strangers to our old life. This is when we need each other most. We need each other to redraw the maps. We need each other to bear witness, someone to see who we are and whose we are. This is the cartography of faith. It's an exercise of spiritual gps. You know, regular GPS works something like this. If you turn your phone on airplane mode, it's unfindable, you're unfindable. But if you turn it on, turn your phone on regular. Suddenly there is a signal that bounces up to a satellite up in the heavens and then bounces down to a receiving tower and then another signal to another satellite and a tower and another satellite and the tower, and pretty soon all those signals, all that conversation locates your phone. Altitude, longitude, latitude, and you're found. It's like that with our faith. We cannot do this work alone. We need each other. Host of witnesses, satellites of faith to each other. We need each other to name the contours of our own personal need, to mark down those places where we personally are feeling cut to the bone. Now, we don't make these lists to compete with each other and outdo one another in our experience of tragedy and trauma. We name these hard things within our community of faith because we need the traction. We need to know what is and what has been lost in order for us to understand what's next. And sometimes that information is only available to us when we are being beheld by another. It's the way that the signals find us now. These intersections of need and provision, they orient us. When we can explain with clarity where we are and where our confusion lies, then we can begin to take note of the places where God's love and the flesh has shown up, maybe in the kindness of a stranger, a miracle of healing, the mercy of, a forgiveness we know we didn't deserve. These are the intersections, need and then provision, that begin to orient us, begin us in that task of renaming, of reclaiming and bringing us back to the rest of our truth, bringing us back to God and to ourselves. Our map making in the wilderness gives us our bearings so that we can find our way home. Our map making equips us, my friends, for the next storm that is sure to come. Now I can't leave our sermon without mentioning a little something on verse 10. Be still and know that I am God now, that if there was going to be a bumper sticker out of this psalm, it'd probably make it right. Be still and know that I am God Now. I do not believe that being still is an invitation for us to be a doormat and just get out of God's way. I believe that this invitation to stillness actually is the invitation to the classic chaplain posture. For those of you who've done cpe, you probably know the mandate. Don't just do something. Sit there, my friends. The Santa Monica watershed is an ecosystem awash in trauma. This month so much has burned. There has been so much change, so much has awakened, past traumas that we carry in our bodies. And that's what is dear church. And God isn't calling us necessarily to push back and kick against it all. We don't have to achieve and perform and fix everything. In the midst of this upheaval, the psalmist is inviting us to inhabit a counter intuitive posture instead of a frenzy of activity, to be still and hold space for what is happening, for what is hoped for, for how God is showing up in this moment. We need to hold space both for what is and for what God is doing. You know as well as I do it is so much easier just to fill that rough silence with cheerful Christian chatter, trying to dole out helpful advice and words of wisdom. But the thing is, this psalm invites us to bear witness in a way that involves staying present, oftentimes without commentary. Adrienne Maree Brown's invitation to remember the future is unwritten, settled me into this space as I was preparing for our time together today settled me into this place of inhabiting God's Word. We are not in a story of trauma, even if we are impacted by it. We have to keep writing and living our stories, the ones where God's justice and love and equality and material well being and care and connection and freedom and safety and dignity and belonging are at the center. This is the story that God is writing in us, in our church, home, in our community. This is the story that I believe the psalmist invites us to inhabit and to hold on to that stillness so that we can be the ones to behold God in our midst and to behold the way that God is leading for us to find our way home together. May it be so among us. Amen.