Fasting for Faithfulness: Psalm 91
First Sunday in Lent
Living in the Most High’s shelter,
camping in the Almighty’s shade,
2 I say to the Lord, “You
are my refuge, my stronghold!
You are my God—the one I trust!”
3 God will save you from
the hunter’s trap
and from deadly sickness.
4 God will protect you with his pinions;
you’ll find refuge under his wings.
His faithfulness is a protective shield.
5 Don’t be afraid of terrors at night,
arrows that fly in daylight,
6 or sickness that prowls in the
dark,
destruction that ravages at noontime.
7 Even if one thousand people
fall dead next to you,
ten thousand right beside you—
it won’t happen to you.
8 Just look with your eyes,
and you will see the wicked punished.
9 Because you’ve made the Lord my refuge,
the Most High, your place of residence—
10 no
evil will happen to you;
no disease will come close to
your tent.
11 Because he will order his messengers to help you,
to protect you wherever you go.
12 They will carry you with their own hands
so you don’t bruise your foot on a stone.
13 You’ll march on top of lions and vipers;
you’ll trample young lions and serpents underfoot.
14 God says, “Because
you are devoted to me,
I’ll rescue you.
I’ll protect you because you know my name.
15 Whenever you cry out to me,
I’ll answer.
I’ll be with you in troubling times.
I’ll save you and glorify you.
16 I’ll fill you full with old
age.
I’ll show you my salvation.” (CEB)
“I ask you, Brother, to appeal to
Vladimir Putin to stop the senseless warfare against the Ukrainian people,”
Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki said in a letter to Russian Orthodox
Patriarch Kirill this week. “I ask you in the most humble way to call for the
withdrawal of the Russian troops from the sovereign state that is Ukraine…I
also ask you to appeal to Russian soldiers not to take part in this unjust war,
to refuse to carry out orders which, as we have already seen, lead to many war
crimes…Refusing to follow orders in such a situation is a moral obligation.”[1]
It is Lent—for us in the traditions
out of the Roman Catholic Church, anyway.
Orthodox denominations count Easter and Lent differently—it is one of
the many, many ways that the Body of Christ is rather less unified than we
might like to think. For the Orthodox,
Lent begins tomorrow—and yet the Orthodox faithful and all other flavors of
Christian faithful and the Jewish and Muslim faithful and people faithful to no
religion at all in Ukraine have spent this last week in the shadow of mortality
just as surely as any Ash Wednesday celebration we had here.
Ukraine is a nation where the
majority of the population is Orthodox Christian. They, too, have this text, this psalm; the
Christian and Jewish and Muslim faithful alike consider the book of Psalms a
holy collection of wisdom and experience.
From their lips comes the prayer, “You are my refuge, my stronghold! You are my God—the one I trust!”
And yet Russia has still
invaded. There are faithful people in
Russia, too, who speak with reverent voices, Even if one thousand people
fall dead next to you, ten thousand right beside you—it won’t happen to you. There are faithful people of the Abrahamic
religions all over the world and there are still wars, and still casualties,
and still people whose feet are bruised and bloodied by stones. Is this just empty poetry, a soothing trinket
better left to its own past?
“This psalm gives us no clues as to
when during the long history of ancient[s] it was composed – except that the
names it uses for God in verse 1, El-Elyon or ‘Most High’
and Shaddai, translated here, as usual, ‘Almighty,’ are old –
scholars think ancient Canaanite names for God,” writes Dr. Heather Anne
Thiessen. “The fears that trust in God
protects from are general, not suggesting any particular historical event, but
the timeless human condition.”[2] Jewish tradition ascribes this psalm to Moses
as he led the Israelites away from the anger of the Egyptians and toward Mount
Sinai and the God Who claimed them. From
its beginning, this psalm has been raised on voices that were precariously
offered by a people who experienced war and fear and death and everything that
this psalm says will stop happening because this is not a blueprint but a
blessing.
We must take care, we 21st
century Christians, when we read something as holy and long-lasting as the
Bible. Thousands of years of people’s
hope are bound into its pages; billions of lives and untold stories rest in its
verses. The great cloud of witnesses is
vast, and we who join the long story of faith cannot say that this was surely
written for us alone, we who are the pinnacle of history. But we speak of this as a living word, a text
that means something, that does apply to the lives we lead.
What does it mean, if not safety for
the people of Ukraine—or of any of the other places where the hunter’s trap and
the young lions alike are still at full power, especially the places where the
refugees are not white and not welcome?
Pastor Scott Hoezee writes, “Throughout
this psalm God is presented in several ways but all of them deliver the same
message: security. The God of Israel is said to be like a fortress, a
refuge, a high tower in whose shadow you can be concealed from those who are
out to get you. God is compared to a mother bird who will cover you with
the feathers of her wings. The faithfulness of God is compared to a
shield, a fortified rampart or wall. God is a kind of ‘safe house’ where
angels are at work to keep evil at bay and to catch you even if somehow you do
still fall.
“To put it mildly, the language of
Psalm 91 is unstintingly confident. There is no hesitation here.
There is not even the hint of a proviso, caveat, or conditional phrase… Ironically, the single most
well-known recital of this psalm came from the lips of the devil himself (which
is why in the [Revised Common Lectionary] this psalm is paired with Luke 4 in
the Gospel lection). Satan led Jesus up to a very high place and tempted
Jesus to step right off the edge because, after all, didn’t God promise in
Psalm 91, ‘He will give his angels charge over you so that you will not dash your
foot upon a stone’?”[3]
And Jesus—Jesus, Who would later die,
voluntarily but painfully, heart-wrenchingly—said “nope. I know that God is not to be tested like
this. I know that the promise of
security does not mean an absence of pain.
And I will follow anyway.”
Why? Because God said God would
lead.
“Rarely does the psalter exhibit
extended one-way speech,” writes Pastor Bobby Morris, “but rather far more
often is characterized by some kind of dialogue. In other words, the psalms do
not emerge from and are not intended strictly for isolated, quiet pondering.
Instead, they are bound up in the setting of conversation. This is most
certainly true for the processing of fear. It is not something that can be readily
accomplished alone, but requires conversational accompaniment—with those around
us who may have some familiarity with some of our fears, and with the one who
knows all our fears. We have all three parties present in Psalm 91…The power of
this psalm lies not in the notion of a magic trick that makes all things that
might cause fear to vanish, but rather in the notion of companions in our
processing, and most especially, a God who prevents those things from having
dominion over us. In the midst of all the first person commitments made by God
in the last verses, there is no promise to ensure that we avoid anything that
would cause fear. Instead, what God does promise is, from the midst of such
things, to ‘answer,’ ‘be with,’ ‘protect,’ and ‘deliver’ (verse 14).”[4]
Whenever you cry out to me, I’ll
answer, God insists
in this psalm. I’ll be with you in troubling times. The Orthodox faithful—the Roman Catholic and
Protestant and Jewish and Muslim faithful—of Ukraine have shown incredible
courage and strength this last week that is grounded in a deep commitment to
the notion that they are not facing this alone.
Much of the world has rallied around them not because God loves them
more but because we, sometimes, hear God’s call to be part of the work in the
world that brings the salvation of rescue, of protection, of presence. When we hear—when we answer as God’s hands
and feet in the world, we are bringing about the promise of this psalm. God will hear. God will answer. We are invited along for the ride.
We gather today, we who are not in
Ukraine but who may be praying this psalm in fervent hope for salvation from
other troubling times or arrows in the daylight, and we will celebrate
communion. It is a strange practice,
this mouthful of wafer and juice, and it was strange at its beginning. But it is an act of remembrance that binds us
together in the Body of Christ that stumbles but does not break. It is a reminder that we look to the One Who
quoted this psalm in thirst and exhaustion in the middle of the wilderness and
went on to change the world in three years of ministry. The ritual of communion, like this psalm, is
a promise “not that we will never suffer, but that trouble and trial will not
conquer, and will not make an end of us.”[5] “Don’t be afraid of terrors at night” not
because there are no terrors but because we hold the powerful confidence that
we are never alone in facing them, we who have made the Lord our shelter.
This may still feel
unsatisfactory. It may still be
frustrating that the psalmist puts words on your lips of refuge when you still
feel like you’re running out in the dangerous open. Okay.
It is the first Sunday of Lent—we have forty days to wander about in
this wilderness together. We will be
unpacking a psalm every Sunday, looking for ways in which the prophet Isaiah challenges
us to declare what kind of fast we will choose in our offering of ourselves to
God. We often think of fasting as a
thing from that which we readily identify as problematic—I fast from eating
junk food, or from gossiping. But it can
also be a fast from the things that are much less obvious: I fast from
despair. I fast from rage.
Today, is this the fast you choose—to
abstain from believing that the world being a mess means God has forgotten any
one of us? Will you fast toward
faithfulness, learning from the One Who promises faithfulness to us always?
May we let our doubts be our doubts
and our faith be stronger yet. May peace
cover the lands in strife. And may Lent
bring us hope as we wander through the wilderness with the lions and the
snares. Amen.
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