{"id":668,"date":"2013-02-17T11:00:43","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T16:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=668"},"modified":"2021-02-25T09:21:11","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T14:21:11","slug":"abide-in-the-shadow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2013\/02\/17\/abide-in-the-shadow\/","title":{"rendered":"Abide in the Shadow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Romans 10<\/a><\/p>\n

Luke 13<\/a><\/p>\n

Psalm 31<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Frontispiece<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There come wintery episodes in the course of a snow battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows.\u00a0\u00a0 If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move forward, for our foresight and insight and eyesight are so limited.\u00a0 We may become frozen, snowed in.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You may have known this condition\u2014of confusion or disorientation or ennui or acedia.\u00a0 You may know it still.\u00a0 The death of a loved one can bring such a feeling.\u00a0 The loss of a position or job can bring such a feeling.\u00a0 The recognition of a major life mistake can bring such a feeling.\u00a0 The recollection of a past loss can bring such a feeling.\u00a0 The disappearance of a once radiant affection, or love, for a person or a cause or an institution can bring such a feeling.\u00a0 The senselessness of violence inflicted on the innocent can bring such a feeling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Over the years I have grown frustrated by my own mother tongue in various ways. \u00a0English places such a fence between thought and feeling, when real thought is almost always deeply felt, and real feeling is almost always keenly thought. \u00a0We need another word like thoughtfeeling<\/i> or feltthought. <\/i>When C Wesley sang \u2018unite the pair so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety, learning and holiness combined, and truth and love let us all see\u2019 he described something so bone marrow close to my own life, happiness, hope, ministry, faith. \u00a0And he also I think was wrestling with the limits of our beautiful language.\u00a0 Anyway, you by nature and discipline live the thoughtfeeling <\/i>gospel, and for that I am lastingly thankful.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Be it then thought or feeling or thoughtfeeling<\/i>, there do come episodes, all in a lifetime, that place us, if not in the dark, at least well into the shadows.\u00a0 You may have known all about this at one time.\u00a0 You may know it still.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Come Sunday, some snippet of song, or verse, or preachment, or prayer, it may be, will touch you as you meander about in the dim shadow twilight.\u00a0 Hold onto that snippet.\u00a0 Follow its contours along the cave of darkness in which you now move.\u00a0 Let the snippet\u2014song, verse, sermon, prayer\u2014let it guide you along.\u00a0 So you may be able to murmur: \u2018I can do this\u2026I can make my way\u2026I can find a handhold or foothold\u2026I can abide in this shadow\u2026For now I can abide here\u2026I can make it for now, at least for now, for the time being.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This Lent we shall await a word about war and peace, about drones and defense, about our beloved country in this year of our Lord. \u00a0We will rightly desire a word of interpretation about a passage in Scripture\u2014Old Testament, Gen. 22, or Epistle, Rom 10. or Gospel, Luke 4. \u00a0\u00a0This Lent we will rightly desire a communication about how to live, in discipline and obedience and faith, during a time of penitence and preparation and we will want a word from our Lenten conversation partner Marilynn Robinson.\u00a0 All in due time.\u00a0 Today , first, though, the word, near to us, on our lips and in our heart, is a word of faith, the given courage to abide in the shadow. <\/i> Health is such a word, and very salvation, for those who are stumbling a bit and stumbling about in the dark today.\u00a0 On this plea for faith all our other attentions depend.\u00a0 So says the 91 Psalm.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today the psalmist lifts a hymn of faith, a song of courage in the face of adversity.\u00a0 He speaks from his experience.\u00a0 He teaches, like a grandfather teaching a grandson.\u00a0 Spinning a fishing fly.\u00a0 Boiling the sap down in the sugar house.\u00a0 Watching a basketball game.\u00a0 Watching the sun set.<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Given the wintery snares, cold air illness, icy night terrors, and snow bound disease, noonday destruction, evil, scourge, wild beasts of this very day, it could be that a sober reading of the 91st<\/sup> psalm, a trusting hymn of a faithful heart, will sustain us this morning.\u00a0 In this psalm we are promised<\/i> divine deliverance in five ways\u2026So\u2026<\/p>\n

1. Deliverance from snares\u2026<\/p>\n

Our singer is a person of simple faith.\u00a0 He has one, and only one, word for us:\u00a0 You are covered.\u00a0 Abide in the shadow.<\/p>\n

We could make many complaints about this hymn and its singer.\u00a0 He has a dangerously simple view of evil, especially for the complexity of a post-modern world.\u00a0 He has a way of implying that trust, or belief, are rewarded with safety, a notion that Jesus in Luke 13 scornfully dismisses, and we know to be untrue.\u00a0 He has an appalling lack of interest in the scores of others, other than you, who fall by the wayside.\u00a0 He seems to celebrate a foreordained, foreknown providence that ill fits our sense of the openness of God to the future, and the open freedom God has given us for the future.\u00a0 He makes dramatic and outlandish promises not about what might happen, but about what will be.\u00a0 As a thinking theologian, this psalmist of psalm 91 fails.\u00a0 He fails us in our need to rely on something sounder and truer than blind faith.\u00a0 He seems to us to be whistling past the graveyard.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026 for those who have walked past a February graveyard or two, for those who have walked the valley of the shadow of death, for a country at war for a decade now, for a world searching to match its ideals of peace with its realities of hatred, for you today if you are in trouble, and who are worried today about others and other graves and other yards, and who have seen the hidden traps, unforeseeable dangers, and steel jawed snares of life, there is something encouraging about this simple song:\u00a0 \u201che will deliver you from the snare of the fowler\u201d.<\/p>\n

2. Deliverance from illness\u2026<\/p>\n

Our writer is not a philosopher.\u00a0 He is a musician, perhaps, but not a systematic thinker.\u00a0 He has one interest:\u00a0 getting by, getting through, getting out, and getting home.\u00a0 So he does not worry about the small stuff.\u00a0 In fact, I have a sense that the psalmist is desperate.\u00a0 His song is one for that point on the road when you just have to go ahead and risk and jump.\u00a0 You have made your assessment, you have made your plan, you have made your study, then you have prayed.\u00a0 Yet you see all the pestilence about you in homes and institutions and nations, so you wonder, is it worth the risk?\u00a0 You are not sure.<\/p>\n

This hymn of the heart is one you sing when you are not sure, but you are confident.\u00a0 Not certain, but confident.\u00a0 You can be confident without being certain.\u00a0 In fact, a genuine honest confidence includes the confidence to admit you are not sure.\u00a0 Faith means risk.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that part of what we mean by faith?\u00a0 Our writer is at that point, the point of decision.\u00a0 Once you are there, you have to choose between walking forward and slinking away.\u00a0 It becomes very simple.\u00a0 Either God lives or not.\u00a0 Either God is in Christ or not.\u00a0 Either God in Christ touches us by Spirit or not.\u00a0 Either we move forward in faith, or not.\u00a0 Choose.\u00a0 And the Psalmist wants his student or grandson or parishioner to choose in faith.\u00a0 So he urges:\u00a0 abide in the shadow of the Almighty … \u201cHe will deliver you from the deadly pestilence.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Deliverance from night terror\u2026<\/p>\n

Our psalmist is speaking just here to our immediate need.\u00a0 Fear not the terror of the night.\u00a0 Go about your discipleship:\u00a0 pray, study, learn, make peace, love your neighbor, agree to disagree agreeably, every one be convinced in his own mind.\u00a0 The night is not as terrifying as you fear\u2026\u201dYou will not fear the terror of the night\u201d.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Deliverance from noonday destruction\u2026<\/p>\n

It is in the heart of the Psalm that one senses the singer\u2019s desperation.\u00a0 There is an irrational side to his message.\u00a0 \u2018Thousands will fall but you will be spared.\u2019\u00a0 It will not help us to ask about the ethics of this promise.\u00a0 Nor will it help us to question the sense of destiny involved here.\u00a0 I hear this psalm in another way.\u00a0 I hear it as a father\u2019s prayer, or a mother\u2019s dearest hope.\u00a0 I cannot help but think that this psalm perfectly captures the hope, the visceral hope, which this decade has been on the minds of our own parents of soldiers and sailors.\u00a0 Noonday destruction will not come near you.\u00a0 I pray that noonday destruction will not come near you.<\/p>\n

I remember a Day Care center where I used to see notes pinned to the coats and sweaters of daycare toddlers.\u00a0\u00a0 This psalm is a note pinned to the shirt of a loved one heading into danger.\u00a0 When there is nothing else we can give our daughters and sons we want them to have faith.\u00a0 Faith to go forward, bravely, without being sure of what they will find at noonday.\u00a0 And we are passionately desperate for one hope: that they will come home.\u00a0 And we sing the song without any chords of doubt, because we want to admit none.\u00a0 We make no uncertain sound because we want our beloved to carry no worry, but to be armed with the confidence of the Lord.\u00a0 This is a battle hymn.\u00a0 It is the kind of song you sing to yourself when all about you there is mayhem.\u00a0 If I were a chaplain it is the kind of psalm I might give to a soldier to memorize by day and recite by night in the face of mayhem.\u00a0 \u201cYou will not fear the destruction that wastes at noonday.\u201d<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 Deliverance from evil\u2026<\/p>\n

The teacher implores his student to make God his place of dwelling, his home.\u00a0 To rest in God, so that all else is secondary.\u00a0 Evil will not befall, or at least will not define, such an one.\u00a0 How can someone escape all evil?\u00a0 We know better.\u00a0 We know that evil touches us all.\u00a0 But this misses the meaning of the poem.\u00a0 The writer is praying!\u00a0 In the same way we pray, every Sunday.\u00a0 Deliver him from evil!\u00a0 Not from some, or most, almost all evil, but from evil!\u00a0 Religion is a matter of the heart before it is a matter of the head.\u00a0 As Wesley said, the mind is the bit and bridle, but the heart is the great horse, the mighty steed of faith.\u00a0 \u201cHe will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways.\u00a0 On their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coda:\u00a0 \u201cI will deliver him\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Deliverance from snares, illness, terror, destruction, and evil.<\/p>\n

Our psalm ends, as does this sermon, at the edge of a remarkable announcement.\u00a0 Like lightening flashing over a darkened sky, or like a burst of sunlight separating clouds, the voice of the poem shifts.\u00a0 God speaks directly to the human heart.\u00a0 It is a shift devoutly to be desired.\u00a0 All of the speaking, from teacher to student and grandfather to grandson, all of the instructional lines are now interrupted, and on a grand scale, and on a profound scale.\u00a0 Like Yahweh addressing Job, the psalm ends with a divine word.\u00a0 It is a shift, yes, devoutly to be desired.\u00a0 It is what we hope will happen with every one of our children.\u00a0 It is what we hope will happen in every one of our worship services.\u00a0 Frankly, it is what we hope will happen in every sermon.\u00a0 All the rest gives way to\u2026God.\u00a0 Now the fumbling voice of the teacher is replaced by a divine voice. Now the Lord speaks in the first person, and his word is a lasting joy:\u00a0 \u201cI will deliver him\u2026I will protect him\u2026I will answer him\u2026I will be with him\u2026I will rescue him\u2026I will honor him\u201d<\/p>\n

When we have nothing else to go on, there is something irreducibly solid, something strong and good\u2014the divine voice in the faith of Christ—to which we may cleave and cling.\u00a0 Finally, this is what brings you to the pew and me to the pulpit and us to the church, the hope that something may be said and heard that is divine, saving, satisfying and true.\u00a0 In the silence that follows all our speaking, like the priestly verses that follow the human voice in this psalm, we may hear something that changes everything.\u00a0 So Charles Wesley, as ever, in perfect pitch:<\/p>\n

Let us plead for faith alone<\/i><\/p>\n

Faith which by our works is shown<\/i><\/p>\n

God it is who justifies<\/i><\/p>\n

Only faith the grace supplies<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

Active faith that lives within<\/i><\/p>\n

Conquers hell and death and sin<\/i><\/p>\n

Hallows whom it first made whole<\/i><\/p>\n

Forms the Savior in the soul<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Romans 10 Luke 13 Psalm 31 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only.   Frontispiece   There come wintery episodes in the course of a snow battered lifetime that place us deep in the shadows.\u00a0\u00a0 If the shadow is dark enough, we may not feel able to move […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[46,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2480,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668\/revisions\/2480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}