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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's May 2, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service. If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE. The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented. Lord, give me patience . . . and hurry up! Revelation 5:11-14; Psalm 23 Bethel 5/2/04 The Reverend Marc Sherrod A large number of saints are standing in line, waiting to enter heaven. Saint Peter, of course, has to check their credentials one by one, and that takes hours. But these are saintly people and they don’t mind waiting. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, someone comes wearing a white coat with a stethoscope in his pocket, who jumps the line, walks to the front and breezes in through the Pearly Gates. Now, all these saintly people have been patiently waiting a long time, and understandably they are irritated by this. So, one of the saints approaches St. Peter and says, “Hey, St. Peter, we’ve waited a long, long time, very patiently, and then all of a sudden that guy wearing a white coat with a stethoscope in his pocket just walks past you right into heaven. What’s that about? “Oh,” Saint Peter replies, “That’s God. He thinks he’s a doctor.” Few things can try our patience like doctors and hospitals, which is to say, at a deeper level, that few things try our patience like our own illness or our body’s inability to perform at the level we have come to expect it to perform. Medicine has become more powerful and more pervasive in our lives than almost anything else, including the church. We have come to expect so much from the medical community, that it can be hard for us to be patient in the face of pain or illness. A Christian ethicist who teaches at Duke, Stanley Hauerwas, says that “as a society, nothing upsets us more than having to wait for our bodies. Indeed, our bodies are like our cars: they are to serve as we direct without calling attention to themselves. Christians are called to be a patient people, in health and in sickness. Impatience is a crucial sin that carries us into other sins.” Of course, there is no more difficult place to practice patience than when we are a patient (Practicing Patience, The Hauerwas Reader, 349). That’s one of the places where Psalm 23 comes in. I would hazard a guess that, except for perhaps the Lord’s Prayer, there is no portion of scripture more often remembered or repeated in hospitals, convalescent centers, funerals than this one. In our Presbyterian hymnal alone, there are six versions of Psalm 23 and who knows how many total times this Psalm has been set to music and in how many different translations? There is probably no other scripture that grasps the memory and the affections like this Psalm, a Psalm of confidence and trust . . . we might even add, a Psalm of patience, a confession of faith that gives insight into the “shepherding heart of God” and the “experiential affirmation of trust” that we all long for when we find ourselves on the margins of life, such as when we are ill or have to cross deep, dark, and troubling waters. Patrick Miller writes that less of a communal credo, this Psalm is the “song of trust of someone who knows in the midst of the vicissitudes of her or his personal life and over the course of the years that he or she has been carried in the bosom of God, sheltered from harm, and given rest. That is why the psalm has had such a central place in personal piety and the devotional life.” (p. 113). There are many ways to turn this little jewel of a text, this Psalm, this poem, so that it catches and sparkles in the light. Notice, for instance, how the word “Lord” or in Hebrew “Yahweh” is used at the beginning and at the end of this Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd . . . I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long. “The Lord” is the lofty sounding name that sets the parameters of life and speech, but in between is the very personal “thou” in the familiar King James Translation Thou preparest a table . . . .Thou anointest my head. Thou. Placed between two “Lords” is Thou. It is, perhaps, the single most powerful word in all of scripture, for the Psalmist knows that he can address God in familiar fashion, in the friendly terms of companionship that transforms every situation, every difficulty, every rough spot along the road. Yes, there will be times of insecurity and feeling deserted, but these are the times when the Yahweh’s provision of green pastures and still waters will be felt at their deepest; yes, there will be times of wondering and feeling lost and afraid, but the path of justice will be never far from the pilgrim who trusts in Jehovah. One commentator has said that the fourth verse, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. . . “ is the “gospel kernel of the Old Testament . . . you don’t have to be afraid . . . there is always assurance of the Lord’s deliverance in the face of death.” (Miller, 115) Confidence in God is the source of a new orientation, a new direction. The Psalm doesn’t gloss over the fact that enemies and evil persist in the world, for they in fact surround the table, but when God is known as “Thou”, neither the enemy nor the evil is finally to be feared. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” Against all odds, the Lord hosts a meal where heads receive the anointment and renewal of cleansing oil, where cups overflow with the goodness of God, until, in the end, one’s dwelling place becomes one with the Lord’s. I don’t know whether it is all of the pastoral imagery that appeals to we modern folk with our “addiction to hyperactivity” and our “restless freedom” or whether it is the cadence or the use of personal pronouns like “Thou”, but Psalm 23 has been and can be yet again a personal mantra for impatient people, ordinary people like us, who often find ourselves in places and in situations where we otherwise have great difficulty practicing the virtue of patience. The Church Father Tertullian attributed the creation of impatience to the devil. “The devil passed to Eve impatience, when, through his speech, ‘he breathed on her a spirit infected with impatience: so certain is it that she would have never sinned at all, if she had honored the divine edict by maintaining her patience to the end.’ She passed her impatience on to Adam, which in turn produced impatient sons. The very impatience that ‘had immersed Adam and Eve in death, taught their son, too, to begin with murder.’ Murder was the fruit of impatience, as Cain impatiently refused his God-given obligation to care for his brother.” (Hauwerwas, 363) Psalm 23 is about trust, but it is also about patience. But maybe the opposite of “impatience” is not so much “patience,” but rather maybe the opposite is “hope.” And maybe Psalm 23, in teaching us about patience and especially how to be patient patients, really teaches us even more about how to be a people of hope. There is a new book out called The Anatomy of Hope, subtitled, How People Prevail in the Face of Illness. The author, an oncologist and hemotologist, has written about his interactions with cancer patients and the many different reactions they had to the news of their situation and their varying responses to the concept of “hope.” What the author tries to value in his practice of medicine is the patient’s experience of illness and not just the biology of disease (p.93). “Hope,” he writes, “can arrive only when you recognize that there are real options and that you have genuine choices. Hope can flourish only when you believe that what you do can make a difference.” (p.26) He recognizes, furthermore that the flow of hope is not linear, that is, the patient will always circle back to moments of doubt and fear. Gradually, over the course of the book, which correlates roughly to the journey of the author’s own life and the unfolding of his professional career, religion, or what we might call spirituality, assumes a place of greater and greater importance in his narrative. One of the more poignant episodes he recounts was the case of George Griffin, chair of the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of stomach cancer who choose, against the advice of the author and against the advice of other specialists, to undergo high doses of chemotherapy and intensive radiation in the very slim hope of a cure. To medical insiders, his choice seemed ludicrous since the chances of beating that cancer were all but nil, and the sacrifice in quality of life matters would be so severe. But thirteen years later, the author sees George in the atrium café of the hospital and has this conversation: “Even when I was down at the bottom,” George said, “I knew exactly what the numbers were. . . . I knew all the arguments made in cases like mine. Treatment would cause unnecessary suffering – for me and my familiy. Add in that it throws away society’s money on a doomed person.. . . [but] even if I didn’t prevail – and I didn’t expect to – it was my only chance. I deeply wanted to live, so I had to fight. Then I could tell myself that I had tried, that I had done everything possible. There would be no regrets. . . . Once I decided to go for it, I thought of my forebears. They were pioneers who embarked on a journey west that was perilous and uncertain. Most knew they would perish on the way. But they persisted. . . . And I recited the 23rd Psalm – before, during, and after each treatment. It spoke so beautifully, so directly, to my plight. . . . words that captured the courage and comfort faith provides.” (pp.75-77) George went on to say that as a scientist, he knew how hard it is to be a person of faith and a person of science, but he had found a way, and it was the prayers of the physicians and scientists of many faiths – Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims – and it was Psalm 23, or more specifically, it is the Shepherd God, the Thou at the heart of the Psalm, that carried him through to healing and wholeness. And so it is that this Psalm of patient trust, for patients and for all of us, brings hope to the darkest night of despair and assures us that we never walk through the valley alone. I want to close with a recent translation of this Psalm by the choirmaster of the Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.
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