Shade

a sermon given by the Rev. Roger Paine

on Sunday, August 30, 2009

 at St. Andrew’s Dune Church

Southampton, Long Island, New York

“The Lord is your shade on your right hand.”

– Psalm 121

READINGS:

1.  Our first lesson is from an essay called “Ground Truthing” by Terry Tempest Williams. Terry is a naturalist with an open-armed faith closely tied to her love of the outdoors. Ground truthing is walking the ground to verify a map based on observations made from the air. You walk the ground to see if the airborne observations hold true. Terry spent several weeks walking the terrain in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and here are a few of her notes:

You cannot afford to make careless mistakes, like losing a glove, or not securing your tent down properly.  Death is a daily occurrence in the wild, not noticed, not respected, not mourned.  

Choose your traveling companions well.  Physical strength and prudence are necessary.  Imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits.

Expect anything.

Pay attention, listen. We are most alive when discovering.

Humility is the capacity to see.

We are meant to live simply.

We are meant to be joyful.

Life continues with and without us.

And beauty is another word for God.

2.  Our second reading is the 121^st Psalm:

I lift up mine eyes to the hills.  From whence does my help come?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  He will not let your foot be moved, he who watches over you will not slumber.  He who keeps watch over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand.  The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night.  The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.  The Lord will watch over your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.

The 121^st Psalm was originally written for travelers.

It’s a declaration of faith in God’s providence.

It’s a way of saying, “Vaya con Dios – Go with God,” and then adding:

God will watch over you all along the way – “the Lord is your shade at your right hand.”

When my wife, Kay, and I are traveling, one of our favorite places to camp out  is the red-rock desert in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park in Utah –  and in mid-summer, it’s a place where shade is crucial. The “needles” are salmon-red sandstone spires that line the horizon. The sky above them is a blue so deep that it must be God’s original vision of blue. You have to drive 35 miles off the main highway to get to the Needles on a road that dead-ends at the park and washes out after a bad storm.

But you are enchanted once you’re there. You see more stars at night than almost anywhere else in America, during the day the silence is broken only by the cascading song of the canyon wren, and there are miles of spectacular trails marked by cairns to guide you.

Some of the rock formations have spiritual names – Angel Arch and the Devil’s Kitchen.

The best months to go are May, September and October when the desert cools off,  but our vacation time always came in the summer, so we were there when the temperature is 105 to 110 before noon.

Yes, it’s a “dry heat” – but it can take your breath away.

The author of the 121^st Psalm knew about that kind of heat. Summer temperatures in ancient Israel were often over 100 degrees, so when the psalmist wrote, “The Lord is your shade at your right hand,”  he or she knew that for a traveler in the desert, shade is the difference between life and death.

One summer Kay and I spent five days camped in the Canyonlands in July.

Several large junipers in our campsite gave us plenty of God’s own shade.

And at night we slept on top of our sleeping bags, looking up at the Milky Way.

But every afternoon the heat was so intense that by noon on the fifth day, we needed a break.

We wanted air conditioning and a cool shower!

So we hopped in our car, planning to come back to our campsite at sunset, we drove to the nearest town, 45 miles away, and we spotted a little motel that looked both cheap and clean.

When we walked into the office, the woman behind the counter greeted us, and I smiled and said, “We’d like a room – but we only need it for the afternoon...”

Now, mind you, this was Mormon country – but that wonderful woman didn’t bat an eye.

She said, “I think they just finished cleaning the nicest room we have – let me give you that one – but I’ll have to charge you for a full day – it’ll be $35.”

That afternoon, in that air conditioned room and under that cool shower, God had to be smiling. And when evening came, we drove happily back to our campsite.

There are times in this life when we need a stranger to say, “Let me give you the nicest room we have,” when we need a friend to say, “Let’s go have lunch and catch up,” or “Let me watch the baby so the two of you can go out and have an evening to yourselves.”

There are times when you and I co-partner with God to provide some shade. 

This is how the God in the 121^st Psalm is not some distant deity.

This is how the God in the 121^st Psalm shows a personal concern for each of us.

And this is, of course, an easy belief to mock. The late Oxford professor, Richard Dawkins, in his book, The God Delusion, says that if you believe in the watchful and loving God of the 121^st Psalm, you are seriously delusional...  How can any sensible person believe in a God with the bandwidth to pay attention to every one of us all of the time?

Now, let’s pause here to add: do we really want God to be paying attention to us all of the time? Even the saints must have hoped not!

I believe that God is watching, and is good at looking the other way at times, and absolutely cares about each one of us. And this belief is not delusional because you come to it as a result of ground truthing. The “a-ha” moments we all have as we walk the life we’ve been given.

There’s an old joke about the children at a Catholic elementary school who are all lined up for lunch, and at the head of the lunch counter there’s a large pile of apples.The nun in charge of the cafeteria has posted a note next to the apples: “Take only one!  God is watching.” At the other end of the counter there’s a large pile of chocolate chip cookies.  

One of the kids had scribbled out a quick note: “Take all you want.  God is watching the apples.”

My favorite vision of God comes from the Harvard mathematician and philosopher,  Alfred North Whitehead, who called God “the poet of the world, leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.” The poet of the world needs us to become divine co-partners to fulfill that vision. (And we can forgive Whitehead for the word “his” – he was writing in 1928.)

God is our shade on our right hand.

And we are each other’s shade.

We are living at a pivotal moment in our country’s history. Who we are is up for grabs.

There are no easy answers. But God is asking us to bring our moral imagination to this moment. As Terry Tempest Williams says,“Imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits.”

Here’s a true story about what can happen when good people do a little ground truthing.

Back when the British colonized India, they built a golf course in Calcutta. But the problem with golf in Calcutta was that monkeys would drop out of the trees,

 scramble across the fairway, and pick up the golf balls. They’d play with the balls, tossing them here and there, and then drop them when they got bored.

The golfer's first strategy was to build high fences around the fairways and greens.

But they soon learned that a fence is no problem for an ambitious monkey.

So they tried trapping the monkeys and carting them off – but there were always other monkeys to take the place of the ones they’d carted away.

So in the end they adopted a new ground rule: play the ball where the monkey drops it.

There was a British sense of fairness about it. You might hit a beautiful drive down the center of the fairway that would be picked up by a monkey and dropped in the rough –  but the opposite also happened: a hook or a slice resulting in a miserable lie would be picked up and flung out onto the fairway. So golf in Calcutta turned out to be a bit like life itself: you play the ball where the monkey drops it.

This past year the old ground rules for this country of ours stopped working.

The monkeys are having a field day.

One terrible result is: more people than ever on the downside of advantage.

But Terry Tempest is right: imagination and ingenuity are our finest traits – we can make our way back.

We’re being invited into undiscovered country – we’re being asked to see new possibilities for ourselves and for the land we love, and God is doing the asking.

The 121^st Psalm was written for travelers – and we have miles to travel. But here in this church we have marvelous traveling companions. We’re good at ground-truthing. And we know that while “the Lord is your shade at your right hand,” this same God also needs us to be each other’s shade, and in those moments, we become co-partners with truth, beauty, and goodness.

Amen.