Can We Really Be Sure?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

 April 20, 1997

Psalm 23

I don't know what prayers you said as a child. Perhaps none. But every night before we went to sleep my mother would make her stops at each of her children's rooms, review the day in gentle fashion, look forward to the morrow and prompt us in our prayers. I suppose ours were not a lot different from yours. In those days we said: "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Wake me in the morning bright to deeds of kindness, joy and light. God bless mommy and daddy, and Jimmy and Betsy and Sally and keep them all well and happy. Amen." Frequently our catalog of blessings might go on and on, asking God to bless our cats, the teddy bears or mascots or little buddies who slept with us. I remember mine was that last of Snow White's little friends, "Dopey." In any case, a substantial portion of my own religious life began in that setting, and perhaps much of yours did as well.

In addition to this evening prayer I occasionally recall learning the tunes to nursery rhymes, like Jack and Jill, and Little Bo Peep and Little Jack Horner. And among them was a text you all know:

Rock-a-bye-baby on the tree top;
 When the wind blows the cradle will rock.
 When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall;
 And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Remember that? A child's rhyme with at best an ambivalent ending, a child's rhyme loaded with a threat at the close: all is not well, the bough breaks, the cradle falls, the baby, rocking and secure in the gentle breeze, spills to the ground.  This little four-lined rhyme, is a child's verse, to be sure, but perhaps a precursor to the to the reality of the child's future-- bumpy, unpredictable, jarring, indicating the radical insecurity of our lives: calm one moment, the rug pulled out the next; smooth sailing on a placid sea, perhaps for a while, then caught in a squall, a hurricane, the hull gashed, the sails a shambles, the boat taking on water, the bow headed for the shoals. That little verse we sang in our infancy, in nursery school, in kindergarten--wherever--that little verse knows what is ahead for us.

All of this is leading to another poem, another prayer we may have learned in your youth but a prayer written by someone, King David perhaps, who has been through much of the worst life can dish out. This prayer, the 23rd Psalm, arises from maturity. This prayer speaks to the depths, the struggles, the contingencies, the thunderbolts, the threats to and the final crisis of the human condition. We may have learned it in church school, but as we grow older we realize it deals with the full dimensions of our lives. It speaks to security in a troubled and threatening world. It affirms an ultimate confidence amid the shattering of all those things we bet on. It testifies, finally, to faith in One who whatever life throws at us, including death itself, will, through everything, never let us go.

I

On this fourth Sunday of Easter, known in the church year as Good Shepherd Sunday, can you believe that? Like the Psalmist, who sings with such confidence that the Lord is his shepherd, that through the valley of the shadow there is One who stands with him, that in the face of enemies confesses One who enables him to eat in confidence of Divine protection, that finally he knows Divine love and hope cradle him forever--when catastrophe strikes, when death comes he rests securely in the everlasting arms. Can we really believe that?

So much seems to fly in the face of that testimony. So much in our lives seems to run against it. I am intrigued, especially this morning, with the little phrase  of the Psalmist, "I will fear no evil." How many of us can say that? On the lighter side, I suppose we might speculate that those of you who plan to run in the marathon tomorrow anticipate it with urgency and a high sense of expectation. There is worry involved, of course. Maybe among some of you, even a little fear. A make-believe mile-post in the Globe throughout the week read this way: "At 7miles,  blisters; at 12 miles, cramps; at 19 miles, nausea; at 26.2 miles--well, the big finish line outside our front door. Whatever you fear this morning, good luck to you and God bless.

But I am thinking this morning of another fear: the fear of each other. The fear of evil that threatens us when we fail to love each other. Remember the wonderful affirmation in the letters of John: Love casts out fear, he writes. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is fear. I have been thinking of that this week as we watched Tiger Woods win the Masters and celebrated one of the 20th century's most significant events: Jackie Robinson's debut fifty years ago with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Monday's New York Times carried the headlines, "Woods tears up Augusta and tears down more racial barriers." Tucked away in the article lay a reference to a letter he received the first time he went to Augusta two years ago amid a ton of hate mail. One letter in particular said to him, "Just what we don't need, another nigger in sports." Tiger Woods kept that letter as a symbol of what he plowed through last Sunday: fear. Fear!

And Jackie Robinson: I suspect any number of you have read one of the monumental interpretive books of our time: The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn's story of the Jackie Robinson Dodgers, memories of Kahn's years as a sports reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Kahn tells of the great figures of those Dodger years: Carl Furillo in right, Duke Snider in center, Pee Wee Reese at short, Gil Hodges at first, Billy Cox at third. "But Robinson," writes Kahn,

was the cynosure of all eyes. For a long time he shocked people seeing him for the first time simply by the fact of his color: uncompromising ebony. All the baseball heroes had been white men. Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson and John McGraw and Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean were white. Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Bill Klem and Connie Mack were white. Every coach, every manager, every umpire, every batting practice pitcher, every human being one had ever seen in uniform on a major league field was white. Without realizing it, one had become conditioned. The grass was green, the dirt was brown and the ball players were white. Suddenly, in Ebbets Field, under a white uniform, two muscled arms extended like black hawsers. Black!. . . The new color jolted the consciousness, in a profound and not quite definable way. Amid twenty snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of a blackbird.

And hatred. Roger Kahn writes,

As many players, officials, umpires and journalists envisioned it, the entity of baseball rose in alabaster, a temple of white supremacy. To them the Robinson presence was a defilement and the whites who consented to play at his side were whores. Opposing pitchers forever threw fast balls at Dodger heads. Opposing bench jocks forever shouted, "black bastard," "nigger lover". . . and worse. Hate was always threatening them. . .

And fear. Fear clouds this story--a fear that this Black man would bunt, run, steal, field and hit better than those white athletes could, and their world would collapse. And he did. And their world did not collapse. It changed. But it did not collapse. And as of this week, all across baseball, number 42 is forever retired.

Why this story? Because the evil we fear so often lies in the connections between us. Protestants burning Catholic churches this week in Northern Ireland. Fear! Refugees starving in Zaire. Fear! Fear separates cities; it throws up walls among the races; it hurts churches; it erodes families.

Perfect love, says John, casts out fear. I do not know about you, but the hardest prayer it seems to me one can offer is the prayer we make for the one who does us injury, for the person who stirs us most with fear. "Gracious God," can we say it? "Gracious God, for my father, my mother, my daughter, my wife, my husband, my boss, that mysteriously estranged friend, Gracious God, I pray for him or for her, that they may know your joy and peace; that this day may be one of adventure and a sure knowledge of your grace; that they may know you care for them with an unfathomable love and desire their life may point toward goodness and prosperity. Forgive my failure, my weakness, my incapacity to love; dissolve my fear in your unmerited grace and kindness and grant me the strength to love them, a task I could not do without you." Perfect love casts out evil; it casts out fear.

I read not long ago of an initiative taken by President Clinton back in 1993. At the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord at the White House he invited 46 Israeli and Arab boys to attend. They ranged in age from eleven to fourteen, and spent the close of the summer together at camp in Maine sponsored by a program called "Seeds for Peace." In Maine, each boy found himself matched with another from the opposite delegation in a sort of buddy system.

Each boy arrived in camp well aware and probably overflowing with the terrible history and unimaginable pain experienced by his own people. Each had lost parents, grandparents, siblings; each had known the threat of terrorists; each had been immersed for all of their lives in the propaganda, the prejudices, the furious and cruel images of the other, each of them, depending where they were from, immersed in stories of the holocaust on one hand, or, on the other, the random furies and massacres on the West Bank. An early exercise required these young boys to draw pictures of their buddies and exchange them. One of the Palestinian boys covered his picture with hearts, peace signs--and swastikas!

Crisis! Blowup! One boy, a cousin of Elie Weisel, began crying hysterically. A Palestinian boy could hardly believe his eyes and his ears. After all, this young Israeli was crying for ancestors he never knew, whereas he, the Palestinian, had lost siblings and cousins, immediate family. Chaos. Devastation. The group splintered. The experiment, thought one of its devisors, down the drain.

Wrong! Wrong! The crisis of tears, the mutual expression of pain, the pouring out of grief, the stuttering and stumbling out of stories did not finally separate these boys--these buddies. It drew them closer together. It united them through the forces dividing them. For the first time they saw their own tears in the eyes of the other. They heard an echo of their own story spill from the lips of the other. They realized a new kinship. And before they left Washington, three of the Palestinians asked if the final day's agenda might be changed so they could visit the Holocaust museum. Love casts out fear. Walking through the valley of the shadow, and death, separation, hatred, violence, betrayal--I will fear no evil, for you, who is Love, abide with me.

II

We began this morning with a word about trust, a reference to the Psalmist's assurance of his being sustained by God's love and hope. We touched these last few moments on how that confidence may be a component in healing the wounds separating us. Let me close with just a brief word--and a prayer, composed by a contemporary as he faced the ultimate insecurity of a world where the worst of our fears, sickness and death, would shout at us that they have the last word. Just as we would rest in the Divine love as we seek to reconcile ourselves with those from whom we are separated, so we confess with the Psalmist, under all circumstances, that whatever happens we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

John Carmody testifies to that promise this way. John Carmody suffered cancer and died from it. From the beginning he was labeled "terminal." In the remaining months of his life he composed a little book of prayers he called, Psalms for Times of Trouble. One of them speaks with assurance of our present and future resting place.

  Do not turn aside from us, O God,
now that we call to you in need.
  Do not hide your face forever
while we languish without comfort.
  You have made us to seek your face
and to ask for your help.
  You have made us to find here on Earth
no lasting city.
  So you must yourself be our city
the place where we love to dwell.
  And you must yourself be our refuge
our shade in the heat of day
our breeze in the cool of evening.
  There can be for us none but you.
  Without you we lack our reason to be.
  The best of friends cannot sustain us.
  The worst of enemies cannot ruin us.
  No matter what the circumstance
you are our crux.
  In both good times and bad
you are our measure and meaning.
  Be merciful to us, then,
and respect what you have made.
  Take us from our depths into yourself--
your love from time out of mind.
  Make it right that for us there is you alone.