Keeping

What the Resurrection of Jesus Christ Means to Me

6. “Keeping”

Psalm 121 and Mark 16:1-8

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

April 12, 2009

Easter Day

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Alzare mis ojos a los montes;

?De donde vendra mi socorro?

Mi socorro viene de Jehovah,

Que hizo los cielos y la tierra.

Can you tell that I have been straddling the border of Mexico and Arizona this week? (I will do the rest of the sermon in English!) How reminiscent the borderlands are of Psalm 121 as those sky mountains there – so named because they appear as if they have been painted against the sky – rise up from the desert floor in such breathtaking grandeur. They do, in their sheer, stark, spartan beauty evoke the kind of awe that is reserved in us for those things that only can be attributed to God.

In the Bible, Psalms 120-134 are called “Psalms of Ascent” because they are the worship songs the Jewish pilgrims sang as they trekked up the mountains on their way to Jerusalem to celebrate their high holy festival days. The mountains inspired a similar wonderment in them as the sky mountains did in me this week, the pilgrims singing, “I lift my eyes to the mountains, to the hills; from where will my help come?” It is not that they believed that the mountains themselves – so strong and sturdy and seemingly immovable – are their salvation but rather whoever it was who could create such majestic strongholds. So, they continued singing, “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

Why? What was it about God that evinced their trust and confidence? Here, the psalm moves from personal affirmation – “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” – to something more akin to evangelism: “God will not let your foot be moved; God who keeps you will not slumber; God who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” There is more. “The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.” Yet even more. “The Lord will keep you from all evil; the Lord will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.”

Three possibilities for harm to travelers are given reference in the psalm. Those Hebrew pilgrims climbing up the mountains could, at any moment, lose their footing on loose stones and sprain an ankle or worse. A person traveling on foot under protracted exposure to a hot sun (like the Mexican migrants crossing the desert to the United States ), could become faint with heat or sunstroke. A person journeying a long distance on foot, under the twin pressures of fatigue and anxiety, could become emotionally ill, which was described by the ancients as moonstroke (and by us moderns, sometimes, as lunacy.)

We can update the list, of course. A crazed person with a handgun can kill several handfuls of innocents in a Binghamton minute. A drunk driver can careen through a red light and kill a carload of young people in a blink of an eye and no one is immune, not even a promising young major league baseball player, as happened this week. Our life can be “full speed ahead” until, at the end of an afternoon that did not seem any different from any other, your boss calls you into her office to tell you that your services are no longer needed because the company is getting “leaner and meaner.” Or your doctor says in hushed voice, “I am sorry to have to tell you…”

The psalmist does not presume that people of faith are exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes of life. What the psalmist does affirm is that none of them will have evil or ultimate power over us as we stay yoked to God. None of them will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us. None of them will be able to shake us loose from God. None of them finally will destroy us.

Why? Because God is our keeper. Six times the psalmist says it: “He who keeps you will not slumber.” “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” “The Lord is your keeper.” “The Lord will keep you from all evil.” “He will keep your life.” “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in…”

Carrie (Pawelski) was my (captive) seatmate on our flight from Phoenix to Atlanta this week on whom I poured an overflowing chalice of poetry. She was good-natured about it and even seemed to like one by Denise Levertov that encourages us, like the saints, not to live our lives in fear because God is the One in whom we live and move and have our being, and because God is our keeper. Levertov writes:

In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being

Birds afloat in air’s current,

sacred breath? No, not breath of God,

it seems, but God

the air enveloping the whole

globe of being.

It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,

leaves astir, our wings

rising, ruffled – but only the saints

take flight. We cower

in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly

on branches close to the nest. The wind

marks the passage of holy ones riding

that ocean of air. Slowly their wake

reaches us, rocks us.

But storm or still,

numb or poised in attention,

we inhale, exhale, inhale,

encompassed, encompassed.

Yes, yes…we are encompassed by the One who promises to keep our lives and so enables us to live beyond our fears and into our hopes.

John Calvin, our Presbyterian progenitor, says that both the Old Testament and the New Testament are cut from the same cloth. There is no disparity, no discontinuity between them. Any seeming difference, he says, is that in the Old Testament the gospel sometimes is seen more dimly, as if we are looking into a smoky mirror. But, in the New Testament, and in Jesus the Christ, the gospel of God comes out of the shadows and is clearly displayed. That is why Psalm 121 is to me an Old Testament Easter song. To me, the resurrection of Jesus Christ means to tell us that God keeps us through all our trials and terrors, fears and failures, hurts and humiliations, through all our goings out and all our comings in, through all our sufferings and every death, and is building in us and through us a beloved community in which it is good and well for all.

Of all I experienced at the border this past week, that which most moved my heart was our visit to the federal courthouse in Tucson to witness what is called “Operation Streamline.” Until a year or so ago, border policy had it that if migrants from Mexico were caught crossing the border into the United States , they would be returned quickly to Mexico , a process called “catch and release.” But now, when migrants without documents are caught in the desert, they are detained and criminalized and charged with illegal entry.

When our group entered the courtroom in Tucson as observers, there were perhaps seventy-five so-called illegals awaiting a hearing that, if they had no prior record, would end with the sentence of time served and deportation. (This assembly line of so-called justice now takes place five days a week, every week.) With a criminal mark on their record, any hope of ever being able to enter our country legally is voided and any subsequent attempt at crossing the border will be punished as a felony.

This sermon is not the place to debate complex border policy, but I was sitting within ten feet of where each of these migrants, still shackled, made their way after judgment out of the courtroom. These men (most of them were men though there was a smattering of women) had not been criminals, mostly, but young people trying to do well by their families, desperate to provide for them, and they had had the courage to risk everything to try to make it through the scorching desert to a job that would put food on their tables back home and lead to a better life. I tried to make eye contact with each of them, knowing that there is a story to each of their lives, and trembling at what, at such a young age, they already have had to experience and endure. How different my life has been by the caprice of my birth in this country. I wanted to stand and shout to each one of those brave souls as they went by, except that a citation for contempt was not in our itinerary for the week, I wanted to tell them that “the Lord will keep your goings out and your comings in” and that somehow God would work for good in them. I wanted to tell each one that somehow God would make a way for them where there seemed to be no way. I wanted to tell each one that “God will keep their life.” And, if that seemed to be pie-in-the-sky, I wanted to tell them something that Karen Lipinczyk once preached from this pulpit, saying that if we are struggling to see how the spiritual blessings of God are having an impact on what is happening materially and physically in our lives, we are to trust that just out of the range of our vision are the fulfillment of those things that the Christ has promised, and the time is coming, the time is coming when we shall see them in full flower.

When Jesus crossed the social, political, and religious borders of his day in support of a more human and humane way of life, he, too, paid the price that the establishment always seeks to exact in order to maintain its privilege. But even death is no match for the dream and determination of God for a world in which love has no boundaries or limits and the oneness of all life is raised up and honored and practiced. I like the way George Bernard Shaw says it in his play called Pygmalion.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners

or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner

for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven,

where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as

another.

So, we celebrate Easter Day today, but it is an Easter life to which we are being called. Though the women in Mark’s account of the resurrection were amazed and frightened by what they found, or rather did not find, at the tomb, unlike them we now know the story. So do not be afraid to live the Easter life, do not fear, have no fear for “God will not let your foot be moved. God who keeps you will not slumber. God will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper. The Lord will keep your life. The Lord will keep your goings out and your comings in from this time on and forevermore.” That is God’s message to each of us and then to all of us together as we seek to live more fully into the kingdom, or, as we prefer it here, the kindom of God where joy is boundless, borderless, and bountiful. That is what the resurrection of Jesus Christ means to me.

Amen.

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