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Sermon for Sunday, July 13, 2008
“When it’s Awful and Wonderful”
Psalm 23
Near the end of Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” there is a brief scene in which we get to listen in on a conversation among some people who have long been dead. If you remember the play from your school years you will remember that much of the third act took place from a cemetery in which folks were observing what going on in Grover’s Corner. From their vantage point in what Wilder calls “the land of the dead,” they are looking down on the funeral of a bright and wonderful young woman when one of them, a lady named Mrs. Soames, says that she had forgotten just how painful life could be, which leads her to observe, “My, wasn’t life awful.” Then, after a long pause, she adds, “and wonderful.”
“Wasn’t life awful….and wonderful?” Isn’t that a great sentence and isn’t it true? Chuck Pole says that her observation that life was both awful and wonderful sounds a lot like something you some times see in the Psalms.
Take Psalm 13: In verse 2, life is awful: “How long must I bear pain in my soul?” but by verse six, life is wonderful: “I will sing to the Lord because the Lord has been good to me.” Then there is Psalm 18, where life is awful in verse four, “The pains of death surrounded me” and wonderful in verse 19, “The Lord supported me and brought me out to a good place.”
In Psalm 22, life is awful in verse one, “My God, my God, why have forsaken me?” and wonderful in verse 24, “God did not hide from me, but heard me when I cried.”
Read Psalm 55 where life is awful. In verse four, “My heart is in anguish” and wonderful in verse eighteen, “God will redeem me unharmed from the battle I must wage.”
And then there is that Psalm that was read a few moments ago. It is the all time, number one, best known, most popular, most read, top of the chart, best selling Psalm of all Psalms, where awful and wonderful are found not only in the same Psalm, but are found sitting together in the same sentence. Right in the center of Psalm 23 is that sentence that starts out awful: “In the valley of the shadow of death,” and ends up wonderful: “Fearing no evil,” comforted and cared for by God, the One who is the Shepherd, the good Shepherd.
When the psalmist talks about going “through the valley of the shadow of death,” he is speaking a language we understand. We get it. We get it because we have been there, done that. We are not strangers to those deep, dark, long exhausted valleys that have to be gone through because they cannot be gotten around. There is a long list of ways that things can go wrong in life. None of us will go through them all, but all of us will go through some of them, and the worst of them will leave us saying what the Psalmist said, that we are walking “through the valley of the shadow of death.”
If you have been there, you know how awful it can be, but you also know that even when life is awful, there is also something wonderful about the way God goes with us through the awfulness: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because God is with me and God comforts me.” That’s the way the Psalmist said it. And it is true. Even when we’re going through the most awful valleys, God is still doing the most wonderful things. Even when some parts of our lives are awful because we couldn’t stay out of the valley, other parts of our lives are wonderful because God is going through the valley with us.
Now all of that can raise the question at least for me, “if God is that involved with us in the awful valley, who didn’t He just stop it in the first place, why didn’t He shepherd us around the awful valley and let us avoid it all together?” You have heard, read, and experienced the awful things that happen in the lives of people. Why didn’t God move them around that valley? I just finished reading “A Day with a Perfect Stranger,” which was written by the same person who wrote, “Dinner with a Perfect Stranger.” Mattie asks some of those hard questions, why God didn’t stop some of the awful things that had happened in her life.
Apparently that is not the way life works. You know that and I know that. Sometimes, perhaps, but not always.
That then raises another question, “if God sometimes protects us from awful things, why doesn’t God always protect us from awful things?” I do not know. I remember reading an account of what William Sloan Coffin wrote after the death of his son, “This time, God gave us minimum protection and maximum support.” The Coffin family did not get enough protection to get them around the valley of the shadow, but they did get enough support to take them through it, which has been the experience of most.
I’m a pastor. I think about this sort of stuff a lot. I have found myself thinking about it more than usual these past months as I stood beside those who were/are walking through the valley of the shadow. I thought about it a lot when some of you stood beside us when we walked through the valley. Maximum support.
“Life was awful,’ were the words of the woman at the end of the play that I used at the beginning of the sermon. “Life was awful….and wonderful. And she was right…both times. It is awful what people have to go through. And people have to go through some awful things in life. And it is wonderful the way God and the people of God, go with us through the hard valleys with the dark shadows.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil, for thou art with me.” Whatever that means, I do know that it means that we are never forsaken and never alone. It means that God gives us the strength to live through things that, if some one told us ahead of time that we would have to go through, we would not thought we could, but we do go through. By the grace of God, with the people of God, in the arms of God, we do go through.
This God who came to us reaching out to us in love. This God that we have so often rejected and abandoned. This God that was nailed to a bloody cross has kept reaching out to us, embracing us, loving us, forgiving us, and promising never to leave or forsake us, no matter what. Even when we have to walk through the worst valleys and the darkest shadows, that’s an awfully, wonderful thing to know. Amen.
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