Seeing Good

Sermon

Today I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, and probably won’t do again—I’m going to preach from this one great psalm and about 1,000 index cards that over 100 of us wrote our worries and hopes on late last year.

New year, new goals, I guess, but let’s start with the psalm, so I can keep my forever goal of preaching on scripture and not whatever I think I should talk about. I promise I’ll tell you about the 1,000 index cards and the bulletin insert shortly.

Psalm 27 is a jewel of a psalm. Even if you are new to church or the Bible, you’ve probably heard bits of it before, and if you are the person of faith in your family or friend group and you want to look cool and add meaning to a situation while also not appearing overbearing about your beliefs, I can recommend Psalm 27 to you. With all its talk of beauty and light, it’s approachable. And with all the adversarial language, it allows us to see and say things in scripture that we often avoid in our own anger and fear and sadness.

I was taught that scripture usually has four basic messages for us: YES (affirmative), NO (not that, like don’t murder), GO/DO (verbs, love your neighbor) and HA. The YES in Psalm 27 could be salvation or beauty or the writer remembering where they’ve seen goodness before. The NO might be the calling out to God and saying, NO, don’t hide, or NO, don’t let me be trampled by accusers. The DO could be the action of seeking God’s face or giving thanks. The HA I see is that this writer seems to be pretty self-focused. I’d do this exercise with college students in reading psalms and adding our own adversaries—the bursar, a roommate who doesn’t wash their dishes, a teacher who doesn’t understand you—those adversaries that seemed silly and not at all adversarial could easily turn the conversation and prayer to disordered eating, a parent’s cancer diagnosis, acceptance. That led us to seeing this wasn’t only self-focused, it could be wider: student loans, sexism, unaffordable healthcare.

Psalm 27 is categorized as a lament psalm or a psalm of lament (yes, some academics have categorized them). And my initial, non-academic, reaction to that is: but the beauty and light! And then I remembered that being a lament psalm doesn’t mean that it’s all sad and mad. The label is the start. Lament helps the writer and the reader remember God’s goodness, revealing and moving through anger and fear. It makes sense that Psalm 27 comes up in the lectionary in Epiphany, the season of light, as it starts with light, the Lord is our light and salvation, but the light also reveals things we may not want to see. And because the psalms, particularly lament psalms, can bring us to a place of greater clarity…

Ever since January 6^th, 2021, Epiphany five years ago, I associate Epiphany with things I didn’t want to see—images and videos I didn’t see coming. I remember preaching the weeks following the January 6^th insurrection, reminding myself not to preach on whatever I wanted to talk about because more would be revealed. The Epiphany light was revealing then and now it’s revealing again. Videos, audio recordings… children, without their families, whether they’re citizens or not, which we’re told was never the goal, of course… parents having to identify the bodies of their children, citizens exercising even a most basic right.

I don’t have a lot of good to add to those revealing videos and audio recordings, so here’s where I’m grateful the 1,000 index cards written on by 100+ of you can join me in the pulpit. And if you don’t remember or you’re visiting today, as weird as this all might sound, hang with me while I offer more light. The Presbyterian Church (USA), this church and a denomination, has a tradition of reflection, of looking at what we’re afraid of, even within ourselves.

We have a group of church members now, a taskforce, helping the church to think about vision and strategy for the immediate future, even though we know to think immediately we also have to think beyond and before. We know that we’re supporting the reflective work that others did before us and more work to come. And the way I best explain vision and strategy for the church, now, since they’re words with meanings in other settings, is that vision is what we’re worried about and hoping for, and strategy is what we’re going to do about it.

We’ve tried to focus on the immediate, because that’s what’s needed and everything feels very immediate right now; so when we hosted a conversation with at least 100 of you in attendance last fall, we wanted to make sure that was an affirming experience immediately, beyond asking for data we’d use later. And we asked you to talk with each other about what you were worried about and what you were hopeful for, and to write those things down, as best you could, on index cards. Somewhat surprisingly, many of you stuck around for a long time chatting, nodding at what someone else said, laughing, sighing… handing your cards to us.

Less surprisingly, we got a lot of index cards with worries on them: worries about A.I., building upkeep, funding for church programs and staff, burnout, healthcare, systemic racism, worries about if we belonged here, worries about our children. We got more worries than anything else, but we also got a lot of beautiful hopes, silly quotes, and advice to keep going and reminders of what is good. Some of you who weren’t there spent time with a task force member who hosted the conversation to give your thoughts to us; others wrote in or emailed us.

There will still be opportunities to make your voice heard more clearly and you’ll hear about that soon. But I believe and I’m grateful that we got a good representation of our community: more than six or seven cards had “6/7” on them, so we know we got some “youth” narrative data. And those on the task force that hosted these conversations represent different ages and stages at Westminster—I do hope you’ll spend some more time with them—they are a gift. One thing I think they’d tell you in their own words about our processing what you gave us is that even though we asked what you were worried about and what you were hopeful for, we didn’t keep your cares that way. We asked each other if we should keep them separate.

But I think we remembered as we were reading 1,000 index cards, and emails and notes from conversations we’d had with you, that hope and worry are like a lament psalm that moves from anger to joy, from confusion to clarity. If we revisited a card that said “racism” on it, we knew that was a worry, that anti-racism is something Westminster has been working for for a long time, especially after a period of self-reflection. And if we read a card that said “safety,” we knew that could reflect a hope and a worry and a goal, and most importantly it showed a care that we should take seriously—that you, and we all, should care about.

We treated these index cards, these cares you gave us, with great care—we locked them up in the office, and we read through each one at least three times together, and now you can find many of the index cards you wrote on up on the trifold displays we’ve made and aligned into the nine or ten focuses or themes found on the grid in your bulletin insert.

I can’t speak to the whole bulletin insert now, but I want to speak to how these focuses are connected for a minute. The three in the middle, social justice, reaffirming core values, and filling in age gaps, are where we received the most narrative data, the most hope and worry. A pair of us each took one of those focuses and two randomly assigned side themes. So, in the bulletin insert, it’s like you’re looking at the trifold boards we made stacked on top of each other. Social justice is maybe the most clear for the year we’re living in, even though it is a broad concept with many meanings, but how we interpreted what we were given was that the bulk of our cares are about the state of U.S. democracy, and then wider, to ongoing world conflicts that are certainly connected: wealth disparity, conflicts overseas, gun proliferation.

There are connections to be made between things in this grid, like art and music, back to the psalm, and to beauty… to our art gallery, and our handbell choir, which reflects a mix of folks at different ages and stages and always makes me feel like saying YES, even “Yes, thank you.” And a desire to feel more connected across age ranges always encourages me, but it didn’t surprise me here. There’s data for that in many fields, and especially in mainline churches like this one, where people often attend because there are folks outside of their age range.

Something that did surprise me was how many index cards we got that just seemed like people writing down concepts, which as we received more and more cards like that, we realized were better described as values, reminding ourselves and the folks we were talking to what is good—humor, self-awareness, the ability to change, courage, education, science, equality, inclusion, that prayer should be accompanied by action. And even though these notes were the clearest, it took us a while to interpret what they all might mean, but it makes even more sense to me now, especially in reading this psalm that remembers and asks for good.

We need to remind ourselves of goodness, of who God is, of who we are, of our values, and we need to be able to communicate it to each other and those around us. There are systemic adversaries that will communicate evil. So, seeing or knowing good isn’t good enough, it needs to be shared. Some of the cards in this focus also said things like: the church should be known for what it’s about, people should know the church as a source of change.

As the season of light continues, as we say yes to light’s good warmth and guidance, comfort, how do we also know what we’re saying no to…? What will we do?

I love writer and minister Frederick Buechner, and he offers a HA here to that yes, no, do, ha formula. He said the church is like Noah’s Ark, and if it wasn’t for the storm seen out there you wouldn’t put up with the smell in here. That connects with Psalm 27. And I hope you do feel comfort here. And I know from hundreds of index cards that you’re also here because you want to be light and communicate good. See good. Share good. Amen.