God Is Our Refuge
Janet Bauman
Introduction
A couple of weeks ago, my neighbour pointed out a mourning dove sitting on a nest in their crab apple tree. She asked me if I would keep an eye on the nest for her, while she was away on vacation, and see if any birds hatched. We agreed it seemed late in the season for hatchlings, but we were both curious and eager to watch. A couple of days later I was walking home from an appointment, and remembered to check the nest. As I quietly approached the tree, I was delighted to see a small head poking up in the nest–a mourning dove chick had hatched! It had lots of feathers, and filled out the nest. It looked robust and healthy to me. I quietly took out my phone camera to get a picture to share with my neighbour. That’s when I realized that one of the free range cats that roam our neighbourhood was up in the tree, stalking that mourning dove chick!
I scolded him. I tried to “shoo” him down, but he didn’t “shoo”! I quickly changed tactics. He was a friendly cat who loved attention, so I turned on the charm, coaxing him down, giving him a belly rub, and trying to convince him to follow me into the back yard where I could keep an eye on him while I did some garden work. I figured there was no point in taking him back to his home, as he could come and go as he pleased. My only hope was to distract him long enough for the parent bird to return to defend the nest, and for him to forget about the baby bird.
It was no use. That cat, who shall remain nameless, had a one track mind. He soon sauntered away from me, under the car, behind some shrubs and he was at the base of the tree. I dashed over and once again tried to dissuade him with sweet talk, to no avail. In one leap he was up the trunk. I grabbed for him, but all I got was a handful of fur. In two more leaps he was on the nest. With a squawk and a crunch it was all over.
It was so upsetting! I know! He was just being a cat. Acting on his instincts. But all day long after that, as I worked in my flowerbeds I heard the mournful cry of the mourning dove parents crying over their lost baby. “I’m sorry”, I said. “I tried!” But I felt terrible for letting that baby bird die on my watch!
Bad things happen. Life can be tenuous and harsh. And it can change in a flash.
Overview of the Psalms
The incident with the cat and the bird made me think of the Psalms.They express so well the whole range of emotions and experiences. With one breath they express joy, delight and gratitude. With another they express fear, anger and horror. A bit like I felt with the bird and the cat. The Psalms are direct and honest. They articulate where we find ourselves. OT scholar Walter Brueggemann says the Psalms are “conversation with God about the things that matter most” (Walter Brueggemann, Spirituality of the Psalms, 1), from our deepest joy and gratitude, to our fear and rage against the terrors and disasters that stalk us and strike us. And our cries to God for shelter, for refuge and rescue.
There is an interesting shape to the Psalms that has been observed by biblical scholars. Walter Brueggemann describes it as having three parts: orientation, then disorientation and then re-orientation (or new orientation) (Brueggemann, Spirituality, viii). Psalms of orientation speak to the satisfying seasons of well-being. They evoke gratitude and a sense of being blessed.They articulate joy, delight and goodness, when there is beauty and coherence to life. God and Creation and God’s law are reliable and trustworthy.
Psalms of disorientation express seasons of anguish, alienation, suffering and death. These Psalms of complaint and lament evoke rage, resentment, self-pity, hostility and even hatred. Sometimes they also express feelings of guilt, shame, isolation and despair. They are raw and unfiltered.The old, known world is being dismantled. The sense of safety and confidence in a reliable God is relinquished. All that is left is to cry out, to plead with God to set things right.
Psalms of reorientation or new orientation express seasons of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God. Joy breaks through despair. Where there was only darkness, now there is light. The writers of these Psalms “regularly bear witness to the surprising gift of new life just when none had been expected” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, 47).
“[Psalms] of new orientation always have in their background statements of trouble” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, 48-49). The writers have experienced the dark and dangerous places, and have come through them. God hears and answers. “The relationship has been tested severely, and Yahweh has…[proved] to be profoundly reliable and powerful” (Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 152). Perhaps it is helpful here to picture a large U shape, or a wave, with a bit of a lip or ledge at the top of each side. This shape can help us to visualize orientation, disorientation, and new orientation.
Psalm 91
So where does Psalm 91 fall in this movement or this U shape? If we look at the book of Psalms as a whole, we can see this big, structural pattern (from notes I took at a bible study with Derek Suderman). Psalm 1 starts off with confidence. It describes life as it should be. It is a Psalm of orientation. “Happy are those [whose] delight is in the law of the Lord…they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all they do they prosper…the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (excerpts, Psalm 1). This is life as it should be. Good and fair and just. The righteous prosper, the wicked perish. All is right with the world. That lasts for 1 Psalm–all of 6 verses long.
From then on–from Psalm 2 to Psalm 89–the writers admit that all is not right with the world. In fact it goes so badly wrong that it seems that the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.
There are cries for mercy and justice, and even revenge. There are cries of anguish in suffering. By the end of Psalm 89 there is a sense of despair and disorientation. The writer fears that God has rejected the anointed King of Israel, and turned God’s wrath on the king and his people. The writer cries out, “how long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever? “(v 46). “Where is your steadfast love of old?” (v 49). This is disorientation, devastation.
This U shape I have described is also the shape of the story of the people of Israel. When they finally settle into the Promised Land, after wandering in the desert for 40 years, they enjoy a season of security, prosperity, strength, wealth and abundance. They cultivate the land. Their flocks and herds, fields and vineyards flourish and the people prosper. They anoint a succession of kings who defend them, win battles and expand their territory. They establish Jerusalem as their capital city and craft a stunning temple to God.They feel blessed by God. And last fall in our worship series we explored some of those stories about King David and King Solomon and the glory years of the kingdom.
But it doesn’t last. Inevitably, with prosperity comes complacency, ignoring the plight of the widows and orphans and strangers among them. With security there is less of a need to trust and rely on God. With alliances come other gods to worship. With kings come compromises military spending, infighting and tensions over the order of succession for the throne. Things begin to fray. The familiar structures are coming apart. There is tension, and division, even among those related to each other through family lines. The once united kingdom divides. There is some nervous shifting of alliances, placating other powerful leaders to no avail. Ruthless tyrants from neighbouring kingdoms on the rise take over first the northern Kingdom and then Judah in the south. The great city of Jerusalem falls, the temple and the city are plundered and anyone of consequence is carried off into exile in Babylon. It is the end of the life they had known. It seemed like the end of everything. It felt like God was punishing them, and abandoning them. It is the utter disorientation and despair reflected in the second half of Psalm 89.
But what happens in the book of Psalms after that disorientation and despair? From Psalm 90 onward, something shifts. From Psalm 89-93 there is a significant mood shift from lament and despair to praise, thanksgiving and hope. These Psalms respond to the crisis of exile.There is a reorientation. In the Psalms that follow there is an answer to the problem in the Psalms that come before. Don’t rely on human kings. They will disappoint you, exploit you, make futile alliances, lead you astray. They will fail to protect you, fail to save you. Instead, God is your king. God is the righteous one. God will set things right. God will protect you.
Psalm 91, which we heard this morning falls into this part of the Psalms. It is a Psalm of reorientation. It offers words of hope and assurance after what has been a bitter, frightening, and desperate season. At first glance it can seem like a naive, optimistic, prosperity gospel kind of message. Everything will go well with you if you only express your trust in God. Nothing bad will happen to you. God will protect you. It sounds so confident, so full of assurance, so positive and perfect as to sound more than a little naive in the face of reality.
But if we take a closer look we notice that Psalms of new orientation always have in their background statements of trouble” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, 48-49). This is a writer bearing witness to an experience of being saved and sheltered by God, in a hopeless situation. This is someone who has experienced rescue where none seemed possible.
For this writer the traps are real. The terrors of the night and the arrows that fly in the day are real. So are the dread diseases, the plagues and the disasters that strike out of nowhere. So are the frightening beasts encountered along the journey. The Psalmist says, “Do not be afraid of the terrors” (v 5) “No evil will conquer you” (v 10); angels will hold you up with their hands (v 12); God will rescue, protect, shelter and cover. “When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble” (v 15). These words do not deny or dismiss the danger. They assume it.
There are two kinds of images in this Psalm. There are safe places to hide from threats. One of the most notable images in Psalm 91 is of God as the mother bird, protecting her chicks under her wings. We will sing about this image later in our prayer song.
The other image is of a safe journey when one is exposed to threats. This journey is taken in the midst of chaos, where there is no guarantee of safe conduct. Yet God “makes safe passage possible” (Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 157). God is an attentive protector, adequate to any challenge, whether physical or spiritual. The claim of the Psalm is “that the awesome power and presence of Yahweh is made available to and is committed to this traveler who must go into dangerous places’ (Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 156).
The final verses of the Psalm shift to the voice of Yahweh, to make the promise of protection even more direct and clear. “I will rescue…I will protect…I will answer…I will be with them in trouble…I reward them with a long life and give them salvation (v 14-16).
Psalm 91 can be read as the “personal testimony of someone whose own experience makes the assurance of faith convincing and authentic” (Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms, 156). It represents hope rooted in the midst of loss and darkness, where God is surprisingly present. Out of the ‘fear not’ “we are marvelously given new life, we know not how” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, xiii).
So here in this Psalm we can see evidence of the 2 movements of faith that Brueggemann describes. One is the movement out of a settled orientation into a season of disorientation and the other from a context of disorientation to a new orientation. Remember the U shape we talked about earlier. Psalm 91 tells the tale of inversion, the reversal of fortune. Of rescue, deliverance, saving, healing, liberation. New coherence is made possible just when we thought all was lost. God’s way will prevail. Love will prevail.
This fall we will explore OT stories mostly about the time of sliding down into disorientation, despair and destruction. On full display for us will be the follies and failures of kings and kingdoms. We will also hear from the prophets, the promise that God is still with them. There is hope for renewal. And we will hear of the journey back–an experience of liberation, salvation and new orientation.
But we start off with a few weeks in the Psalms where we see these two movements so clearly. The Psalms can also help us hold a mirror up to ourselves and our culture. Brueggemann describes the Psalms as countercultural, even subversive because they challenge and subvert the dominant story that seeks continuity, growth, success, progress and wants to deny and cover over the darkness we are called to enter” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, xii) “the Psalms …invite us into a more honest facing of the darkness” (Brueggemann, Spirituality, xii-xiii). Because God “has promised to be in the darkness with us, we find the darkness strangely transformed, not by the power of easy light, but by the power of relentless solidarity” (Bruegemann, Spirituality, xiii).
Out of the difficult situation a new way is found. Out of death new life is born. Out of despair hope can be born anew. Out of pain and suffering there can grow new compassion and mercy. Out of sadness joy is born. I know that many of us have stories of new life out of the rubble of your old life.
Let me go back to the story of the cat and the bird that I started with this morning. A few days later when I was working out in my flower gardens again, I noticed the mourning dove parent bird was busy. She (or he, or perhaps it was both of them) was carrying bits of stems and twigs and grasses into the larger spruce tree in my back yard. In late August! It appeared they were building another nest, in a larger tree, hopefully a more protected location. What hope! What resilience! What promise! I had done a little bit of research about mourning doves and learned that they can have several clutches of eggs in a season, often 2 eggs at a time. So perhaps I may yet see a fledgling mourning dove before this fall is over. Or maybe, just maybe an earlier fledging did survive before the cat found the nest in the crab apple tree.
As I was writing this sermon, sitting on my back deck, and later standing at my back window, birds visited me. A northern flicker on the washline pole. A ruby throated hummingbird visiting the bee balm and the butterfly bush, and a northern cardinal pair in and out of the bushes. It was like the bird kingdom was reminding me, we are still here! There is life after death.
The Red Thread
You will have noticed all the red threads in our visuals this morning. Both on the communion table and in the panels behind me. They remind us that running all through the stories of the Israelite people there is a theme, a thread, a red thread. And running all through the Psalms there is a promise. There is a word. A Hebrew word. The hesed, the steadfast love of God is there, is always present. This word hesed appears 250 times in the OT, and over half of those references are in the Psalms. Hesed is translated as steadfast love, loving kindness, mercy, faithfulness. It encompasses all the qualities and characteristics of God. It is God’s tenacious, relentless solidarity with us.
Sometimes life is rough, and we are wounded, like this burlap panel behind me. Sometimes life is everyday, mundane and ordinary like this panel on my right. Sometimes life is more colourful, more dramatic, brighter, like this panel on my left. But all through all the seasons of our lives, all the ups and downs, all the times of disorientation and reorientation there runs a red thread. The hesed, the tenacious, relentless solidarity of God with us. And maybe you can’t see it, but the red threads on the front table here pool on the floor in front of the table, which symbolizes the abundance of that hesed. There is more than enough of it. And it is there for all of the next journeys and experiences of our lives. In spite of the suffering, in spite of the tragedy and loss, even in the face of unspeakable suffering, even when all seems lost, and done, and dead, even in the face of your worst fears, you are not alone. God is in the darkness with you. Thank you Kandace for creating this display for us. You took a rather fuzzy idea and turned it into a wonderful visual!
As we go through our worship series this fall, look for this 2 part movement in the stories of the people of Israel and in our own stories. The disorientation and the new orientation. And look for the red threads of God’s steadfast, tenacious, relentless solidarity. Look for them in the stories of the people of Israel, and notice them in the seasons and experiences of your life.
Each week we will build in a time of silence after the song of response. Our services are full of lots of words. So we want to give some space and time for quiet reflection. Today we will project once again, the image we saw earlier. The image of the mother bird protecting her young, one of the most compelling images from Psalm 91. In the time of silence you may want to consider your place in that image, your experience with that image of God. Or you may want to reflect on the red thread in your life story, the times when you can bear witness, as the Psalmist does, to the steadfast love, to the tenacious, relentless solidarity of God. Or something else may arise for you. As Derek Suderman writes in the Shine Curriculum resources for this Psalm text, “the claim that God is ‘my refuge’ appears most frequently in Psalms and often describes the act of praying. In effect, prayer appears to be the epitome of seeking refuge in the Lord.” So this time of silence is an opportunity to pray, to seek refuge in God.