Greetings to all of you. I’m Pastor Larry Wohlrabe, currently serving
as interim bishop of the Eastern North Dakota Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America.
I’m so glad we can share this online devotion as we
approach the Fourth Sunday in Lent.
The
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy
Spirit be with you all.
Let us pray: Bend your ear to our prayers, Lord Christ,
and come among us. By your gracious
life and death for us, bring light into the darkness of our hearts, and anoint
us with your Spirit, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy
Spirit, one God, now and forever.”
Amen. (Prayer of the day for the Fourth Sunday in
Lent, Year A, ELW p. 28)
Like a surprising but most welcome guest, we hear the
appointed psalm for today, Psalm 23:
The Lord is
my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even
though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
You
prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.
Here ends our psalm.
Dear friends in Christ: grace, mercy and peace be multiplied unto you
through Jesus our Savior.
In the summer of 1977, eight weeks before my fianceé
and I got married, I dived into an intensive language course at Luther Seminary
in St Paul that immersed and marinated me in the Hebrew language—the mother
tongue of our Old Testament.
Learning a new language is always an enlightening, eye-opening
experience….and during those eight weeks I received some new tools that enabled
me to take a fresh look at Bible passages I had lived with all my life.
Take, for example, verse 4 of this beloved psalm. When I started to translate this from the original Hebrew, I didn’t find what
I expected to find: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death….”
Instead I discovered words that are best translated as
we just heard them: “Even though I walk
through the darkest valley…”
Walter Brueggemann, a veteran teacher of the Old
Testament says that this beloved psalm “is not idyllic and romantic…[but]
rather the psalmist speaks out of a context of deep danger….Entry into ‘death
valley’ is indeed ominous….a high-risk exposure that makes the traveler
exceedingly vulnerable.”[1] (p. 125)
My friends, doesn’t that sound like what we’re
experiencing right now with the the
corona-virus pandemic sweeping across the globe?
Indeed these are dark days….not necessarily a literal
darkness, but an emotional, mental, and spiritual darkness of anxious
uncertainty. Never before in my 65
years have I felt so engulfed by a situation like this, a pause in “business as
usual” that could last for a long, long time.
As so many of us are “sheltering in place,” hunkered
down in our homes, waiting for this crisis to pass, we have no clue how long
that will take—no idea about when we’ll be able to step out into the light
again.
Earlier this month, I heard our church body’s
presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, preach an amazing sermon on the promise and
the blessing of darkness.
What? (you might be wondering)… Isn’t darkness a thing
to be feared—filled only with doom, gloom and terror?
How could anyone speak of darkness as a time of
promise, blessing, or fresh possibilities?
Bishop Eaton in her sermon, simply walked us through
the Bible, drawing our attention to things many of us had missed about the
redemptive possibilities of darkness.
So, she reminded us, the creation of the world
according to Genesis began in darkness….darkness
that covered an as-yet unformed void…that primeval darkness that blanketed the
water, over which the Spirit of God hovered…the Spirit who was preparing to
create light and every thing else--a very good creation that began in darkness.
Later, when God called Abraham and Sarah to set out
for the Promised Land in order to be fruitful and multiply into God’s chosen
people….it began with the darkness of the night sky, so they could see the
stars and realize how vast God’s promises to them would become.
Centuries later, when Abraham’s and Sarah’s descendants
were enslaved in Egypt, God set them free in the darkness of the night of
Passover….when the slaves burst their bonds and escaped from cruel Pharaoh….
And then in the fullness of time, when God took on
human flesh in Bethlehem’s manger, the birth of Jesus happened in the darkness,
on a night when shepherds were awakened by angels piercing the night sky with
their own Hallelujah Chorus…
And when that child became a man who went to the Cross
for us….he entered that eerie mid-afternoon darkness on Good Friday in order to
win God’s decisive victory over sin, death and the devil…
And when the crucified Jesus was buried--it was in a borrowed
tomb…wherein the utter darkness of Holy Saturday slowly gave way to the first
streaks of sunlight on Easter morning….as the Resurrection began in darkness….
And we could go on and on and on through the
scriptures—and if we did, we’d come across other tales of how darkness is always
about more than doom and gloom…because this same darkness is also the first
inkling, the harbinger of God’s next new creation!
What if the darkness in which God is working right here
and now—what if the shadows of this pandemic—what if this strange,
uncomfortably dark time turns out to be a cosmic “reset”--an unanticipated
“reboot” of life as we have known it.
Author Ann Lamott in a popular TED talk entitled
“Twelve Truths I Learned from Life and Writing”…Ann Lamott says that “almost
everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you!”[2]
What if THAT’s what’s going on right now? This darkness of anxious uncertainty we’re
experiencing--what if it’s also a time for us and the world and the church to
be reset by our Creator?
And what if this isn’t the darkness of death
valley—but rather the darkness that hung over the formless void before God
began the good work of creation? Or
what if this weird situation we’re in…turns out to be like the pre-dawn
darkness through which those daring women scurried only to find Jesus’ borrowed
tomb empty?
What if you and I and everyone else are experiencing
in this dark time an amazing “this changes everything” hint of God’s next new
thing?
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
[1]
Walter Brueggemann and William H. Bellinger, Jr., Psalms (New Cambridge Bible
Commentary, 2014), p. 125.
No comments:
Post a Comment