August 23, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

A Resting Place

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 46

A god is that to which we look for all good and where we resort for help in every time of need; to have a god is simply to trust and believe in one with our whole heart. . . . The confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. . . . Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God.

Martin Luther, Large Catechism
(translated by John Nicholas Lenker)

Over the course of this past week, I have had the pleasure of spending my days participating in our church’s Vacation Bible School. The theme for the week this year was “Crocodile Dock.” So every day instead of heading up to my office in business attire to answer emails and phone calls, I would put on my rain boots and a fishing vest and traipse to the swamp that was once Blair Chapel, so that the children and I could wade through the Bible story of the Israelite’s Exodus from Egypt. There aren’t many other times in your pastoral career where you are given the opportunity to don what some would consider full fishing gear all the while facilitating a discussion around the swamp “Monster Croc” about the Exodus and Jesus. At one point I even discovered one of our other pastoral residents, Joann Lee, wrapped in a large piece of cotton batting as she reenacted the presence of the pillar of the cloud in the Israelites’ crossing of the Red Sea.

And yet despite the unusual daily work attire and the presence of the “Monster Croc” in my theological reflection, VBS always makes for a great week, in which a large part of the church is transformed into another world and kids of all ages run wild through the building, discovering Bible stories, singing songs, and playing games.

One of my favorite parts of the week is the constant chorus of voices that can be heard throughout the building. This year, as the children marched from activity to activity around the church, they learned to shout the refrain “Fear not!” each time they heard someone say something in reference to a Bible verse they had learned. Echoes of “Fear not!” could be heard in every nook and cranny of this building, little hands and voices raising in triumph as they shouted the refrain of God’s faithfulness and presence. “Fear not!” they would cry out on their way down to the dining room for a snack of “promise pizzas” or “plagues and boils snack mix.” “Fear not!” they would shout while reenacting Moses’ crossing of the Red Sea. “Fear not!” they would shout while sharing the problems they face at home and at school. They were full-time cheerleaders for the promises of God.

Of course, the children of Fourth Church’s Vacation Bible School are not the first people to champion God’s faithfulness and presence in our lives. In our scripture passage for this morning, we discover someone who has found a resting place, a refuge from all that life demands, in the promises of God, an inward strength for outward challenges of life. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear,” the psalmist writes.

We don’t know exactly who wrote these words, most likely someone from Jerusalem’s faith community, someone like you or like me, just trying to work out the intersection between faith and life. But we do know this person hasn’t skated through life, isn’t offering these words of affirmation about God’s presence in a vacuum where life is perfect. No, the writer of these words is someone who knows the trials and tribulations of this life—the loss of a job or a loved one, an illness, an uncertain future or relationship, the anxieties of daily living, the wrongs, the hard times that befall all of us in one way or another, sometimes shaking the very foundations of our lives.

Following the words of affirmation about God, the psalmist writes, “The earth will change, the mountains will shake in the heart of the sea. . . . The waters will roar and foam. . . . The mountains will tremble with its tumult.” In the world of the ancient Near East, the mountains were literally those things that anchored the earth to everything else, as well as the pillars that held up the sky. Thus the worst possible thing that could happen to the psalmist would be for the mountains to shake and to tremble, for the earth to be threatened from below by water and above by the falling sky. This is the ancient version of circumstances that, to use Martin Luther’s words, “threaten to undo us.” These words aren’t just fancy, exaggerated poetry. They are frank, unrestrained discourse about life.

Therefore, it is astounding that having known and experienced all that is hard about this life, the psalmist is still able to claim refuge in the promises of God, that “God is our refuge and strength, our very present help in times of trouble.” It is a bold claim, and it is a deeply theological one that is woven into the fabric of the Christian life. It is an understanding of the world and of our lives that places our security not in our circumstances, our own strength, our human systems, or even our possessions, but in the power and presence of God. It is a new model for where we might draw stability and strength for our lives, and it is called sovereignty.

Often located first in the category of politics, sovereignty is most basically defined as that thing that is given supreme authority in a territory or a state. But when we look at it under the lens of our life with God, sovereignty becomes that thing that rules our lives; whatever we place our ultimate security in is the thing that is sovereign in our lives.

The psalmist’s words from this morning are a bold invitation to reorient our lives in such a way that is not naïve to the difficulties that we face, but rather places them within the grand narrative of the sovereign God, who holds all of our days. It is a freeing way to think and to live: when we are tempted to toil and spin and conclude that our security depends on ourselves and the effectiveness that we can have, we can rest knowing that our security is found in the presence of God.

The reformers of the Protestant Reformation thought a lot about this idea of God’s sovereignty. And wrote about it. The documents that have become a part of our church tradition and that are bound together in a volume known simply as The Book of Confessions are often thought to be outdated forms of writing filled with thick theological vocabulary—and I will admit that they not exactly your quick, easy beach read.

But scattered throughout our church’s confessions are centuries of affirmations of God’s faithful involvement in our lives and in our world. The opening line of the Heidelberg Catechism, a faith confession written in 1562, begins with the affirmation that our comfort in life and in death is that “we belong body and soul, in life and in death” to God. This same affirmation still appears centuries later in our church’s most recent 1983 confession, A Brief Statement of Faith. The opening line of the Brief Statement reads, “In life and death we belong to God.” Throughout all that time, God’s people have continually found the courage to affirm the sovereignty of God.

In the book Conversations with the Confessions, Cynthia Rigby writes, “The purpose of the confessions is [shockingly] not to disseminate theological information, but to bear witness to the ‘nonsensical’ reality that we are known, loved, and cared for by the creator of the universe.”

I think that what is still hard about this doctrine of sovereignty is that despite the psalmist’s recognition of the difficulty of the human experience, the doctrine of sovereignty still seems to fly in the face of the way the world appears to work and doesn’t provide all of the answers for how exactly we are to reconcile the promise of God’s presence in the face of radical evil and suffering.

Several years ago, a popular book entitled When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold Kushner, landed on the bookshelves. It attempted to explain just that: how we recognize suffering and the presence of God. The basic argument of Kushner’s book is that we are more comforted in the face of the suffering and hardship of our lives when we realize that the God to whom we belong “cannot do everything.” While Kushner’s questions about suffering are more than valid and there is no theology that provides easy answers—I certainly don’t intend to provide one—Kushner’s explanation just doesn’t fit with what we know about the character of God.

Toward the end of Psalm 46, a strange thing happens. The voice of the narrator changes from the psalmist to God. We hear the divine voice ring out, “Be still, and know that I am God.” This seemingly innocuous sentence is a firm reminder of the character of the God in whom we find refuge. You might remember that back in the book of Exodus, God reveals his presence to Moses at the burning bush and asks Moses to go forth as God’s emissary, leading the people out of Egypt. “I am sending you to bring my people out of Egypt,” God says. And in a very honest voice, Moses shoots back, “Who the heck am I supposed to say sent me on this journey?” And God answers not with a name but a promise: “I will be with you.”

God’s ways are strange indeed. We will never fully understand them. But we belong to the God whose very being is an action of presence, a God who is with us and for us—and who later becomes with us and for us in Jesus Christ. This is the God to whom we belong and who directs all our days.

I was reminded of the affirmation of God’s sovereignty in a strange way this week as I talked with a friend of mine who learned for the first time where I worked. Often when people identify or locate this church within the city of Chicago, they recognize it by its location across from the John Hancock building or by the blue bows that every year fill the trees outside the Garth, raising awareness for the prevention of child abuse, or simply by its presence on the shopping strip of Michigan Avenue. But when I told my friend where I worked, he surprised me when he said, “Oh, I know that church. That is the church whose doors remained open on September 11.”

September 11, 2001, was a day several years before I was here on staff, but it is a day that I often hear referred to by members of this congregation and others who, like my friend, found a refuge here on that day when the chaos and fears of our lives became public in a horrifyingly tragic way. As people panicked and stores closed and many vacated the city, Fourth Church Pastor John Buchanan said that the doors of this church were to remain open, particularly so on that day. The doors of this church were to remain open so that anyone, regardless of faith tradition or belief, might gather here in this sanctuary to find solace and refuge. Rather than place our security in red or orange alerts or government retaliation, this church’s open doors were a strong and public affirmation of the psalmist’s belief that our lives, sometimes overwhelmed with struggle, can find refuge in the presence of something larger than ourselves—namely the God that directs and holds all our days.

When we are tempted to toil and spin, to find our ultimate security in ourselves, our technologies and our ideologies, in the scrambling that we do to try to make sense of it all, we can take a deep breath and remember that our lives are intimately connected to the God who is with us and for us, whose abiding faithfulness will always grant us a resting place amidst the chaos in this world.

My hope is that as you go forth from this place that you will discover the abiding presence of the God who knows you and loves you and holds all of your days.

“Fear not!” dear friends. “Fear not!”

All thanks be to God. Amen.