sermons
Summer at Reservoir
“Hello” to Wide Open Spaces
Ivy Anthony
Sep 01, 2024
Well folks this is the last sermon before we start our more organized sermon series for September and beyond. Next week we’ll start our series that we love to return to each Fall — “We are Reservoir” — followed by a meaningful new series that will lead us into October and November.
What I love though about our summer weeks is that while for the most part we preach on whatever we feel so led to speak on — our sermons sometimes unsurprisingly play off of one another. An affirmation not only that we pay attention and listen to one another, but also that the spirit of God is at work, summoning us to listen deeper.
Steve’s sermon last week (if you didn’t have the chance to hear it, I encourage you to find some time to do so) it’s one of those experiences that completely undoes you and also somehow puts you back together again in a 25 minute span.
So if at some point this week you feel like
“You know what I need right now? To be totally re-arranged — I need some heart whiplash!”
like in a good way — listen to Steve’s sermon. He talks about the beauty, the ache of what it is to love, and the gift of what it is to be present to what is, the “‘what-is’ of now”, to find reality as the friend of God.
I had noted in our sermon planning document that this week I’d preach on Psalm 118. And as I listened to Steve’s sermon I thought,
“great! This follows suit” — one of Psalm 118’s more well known verses is “this is the day the Lord has made – let us rejoice and be glad in it!”
And I thought —
“oof, I need that truth as the summer ends (and the days get shorter, and colder and darker)… I need these words as an embodied practice as I look at our national landscape this Fall… and for all of the reasons it’s a beautiful daily reminder of what a gift each day can be.”
However, as I returned to the Psalm this week — I kept being drawn to the first few verses — would you read them with me?
Psalm 118: 1-5 (Common English Bible)
1 Give thanks to the Lord because God is good,
because God’s faithful love lasts forever.
2 Let Israel say it:
“God’s faithful love lasts forever!”3 Let the house of Aaron say it:
“God’s faithful love lasts forever!”
4 Let those who honor the Lord say it:
“God’s faithful love lasts forever!”
5 In tight circumstances, I cried out to the Lord.
The Lord answered me with wide-open spaces.
These are the verses we’ll explore and take in this morning. We’ll think about tight circumstances, wide-open spaces and what that means with a backdrop of God’s enduring faithful love — and we’ll touch on a couple of recurrent themes from last week’s sermon as well.
Prayer
God of this morning and every morning — help us to lean in as much as we can today. To you, to this community, to ourselves. Remind us what wide open spaces feel like. How it is to wander in them and explore and discover and be held by your loving presence even at the furthest edges – even when we are at the edge of ourselves. Help us to find the treasures of wonder and awe placed in these wide expanses and also placed in the micro moments of our everyday lives. Oh God of the ordinary and the holy — help us to find these truths wrapped around each other and us this morning. Amen.
I’ve been remembering some of my “back to school moments” which has been a notable exercise. So many of my memories are so clear and detailed — I can quickly feel the energy, the emotions — a lot of it really revolving around choosing those first day outfits. For me, this also entailed writing in sharpie on my white, canvas sneakers whatever brand name was in that year — Keds, Capezio, Esprit. Making sure I wasn’t labeled as the poor kid with department store shoes on, ugh — so many more memories — all of them key formative moments of my childhood. I could quickly tell you a story of every “Ivy” that was represented in each era. Especially the culotte era (which wasn’t of my choosing), but it overlapped with the Milli Vanilli era — which surprisingly worked really well together.
Similarly, my first day of grad school was memorable — I met one of my very best friends in my first class. Who still is one of my very best friends. We synched up for a group project and she invited me to a Celtics game and we got to learning each other’s stories rather quickly in the nosebleed seats of the Garden.
She was at a pivotal juncture in her life — leaving a job in the corporate world of which she had hustled and put herself through college — and was now exploring this whole new field of public health and advocacy. The impetus was the abrupt death of her Dad, leaving her unmoored with grief and questions and a fierce drive and determination to make sense of it all, find answers and create a new path. *more on this in a moment*
Psalm 118
Psalm 118 is one of six Egyptian Hallel Psalms that were recited during the Passover and other major Jewish festivals. The Hallel Psalms celebrated the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery.
These Psalms (113 -118), much like the Hebrew word “hallel” from which the word “hallelujah” originates, give thanks and praise to God — highlighting the characteristics that distinguish God from other deities of the time. The repetition in these first four verses of “God’s faithful love that lasts forever!” is as much a profession as it is a lived experience of the ancestors and people of God. A song to be sung and a story kept alive of not only a God of the heavens — but one to be found in the fleshy, Earth-level journey of life as well.
Parts of these Hallel Psalms ripple through the Gospels. On the occasion of Jesus’ triumphant entrance into Jerusalem — annunciating the joy, the hope, the celebration of the messiah, the savior everyone had been waiting for. And it’s also thought that some of this Psalm was sung at the end of the Last Supper – as Jesus and his followers hoped that this good God could help as God had done in the past — make a way forward in the excruciating hours that would come.
This is a Psalm of thanksgiving and of praise.
And what’s to be noted about a psalm of thanksgiving is, that first of all, it is a response to a heard lament.
It’s why this verse 5 — after the rousing community praise of such a good God — stands out to me, let’s read it again,
“In tight circumstances, I cried out to the Lord. The Lord answered me with wide-open spaces.”
I don’t know — it could be just me —
But there is something about this verse, maybe this translation – that just catches my breath. A knowing of that feeling in your body? Tight spaces. Points in your life — in a day — where you just can’t get enough elbow-room from your circumstances, or the thoughts in your head, or the hurt, or the worry, from the voices that threaten to shape you into narrower versions of yourself. Not enough elbow room for anything to slide in alongside — -not hope, not faith, not a prayer.
And yet it says,
“In tight circumstances — the Lord answers with wide-open spaces.”
Another translation says,
“in my distress – the Lord answers with freedom.”
Gah.
Psychologists say that common causes of psychological distress include:
- Traumatic experiences
- Major life events (even if those major life events are positive)
- Everyday stressors, such as workplace stress, family stress, and relationships
- Health issues
- Financial difficulties
- Losing a job, a loved one, or a familiar routine
- Discrimination, oppression, or microaggressions
Which — sounds — you know, like a lot of life. Pretty all encompassing.
And so what do we do with that!? What’s the answer to such a plethora of tight spaces?
This too, is what my grad school friend was trying to get to the bottom of.
STORY
If there’s one thing about my friend that was and still is true — she loves a good answer. What’s that saying,
“there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers?”
Yah she would say,
“there are only good questions and good answers.”
And she was truly on a hunt for those good answers. Her Dad’s death had left her with mounting spiritual questions — and also questions about what types of cancers get research funding, who gets into trial pools, who gets all the information about treatment and access — what societal barriers exist and how do we change them! She was going to shape those answers into being… if she had to single-handedly do it.
And while centering her life around this, while in the wake of immense grief — studying, interviewing and starting over — my friend also would find out that she was losing her hearing.
Throughout her life she had periodic appointments and adjustments to her hearing aids. But it was never clearly relayed to her that her hearing loss was progressive. So progressive at this point that hearing aids would no longer do anything. And her choices were to be implanted — to get a cochlear implant — or carry on as long as possible with lip-reading. And as you might imagine my friend felt locked in to a body that was betraying her — grief and fear were more audible than anything.
Grief and fear know no bounds. They seem to both prowl in the wide open spaces of our lives and also lock us into tight spaces.
“Locked-in”
In the gospel of John there is a scene that plays out between the resurrected Jesus and his disciples that I think helps us imagine some ways to move from tight spaces to wide-open spaces with God. The scene reads like this in
John 20:19
“the doors were locked where the disciples were… for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” (John 20:19)
Jesus appears among them. The last they saw Jesus he was being killed. But here is the resurrected Jesus — free of his tomb. He stands with the disciples who are locked in a tomb of grief and of fear. Fear of the Jewish authorities, fear of themselves, fear of Jesus who is now with them. And yet Jesus appears and doesn’t chide or admonish, instead he says
“Peace be with you”
which in the Aramaic of his day was simply a standard – ordinary – greeting.
“Hello.”
Hello
“welcoming them to a place of deep encounter: encounter with themselves, with their fear, with each other and with the incarnate one in their midst.” (Back cover of In the Shelter, Padraig O’Tuama)
God’s faithful love lasts forever, and sometimes our way to experiencing that is by simply saying “hello” to what is in the room with us.
The good questions my friend kept asking on repeat, (in a variety of ways) were
-
What does this all mean?
-
And what does this mean of God?
-
How do I greet this day? This life?
We both were pulling from our childhood faith traditions and experiences (hers Catholic and mine evangelical), to make sense of these questions. Questions that she & I knew weren’t just hers but were universal questions of being human. And we were trying on answers that had long been formed for us.. Trying our best to evolve our faith — bringing new ideas and ancient paths together. I absolutely know that early on in our conversations — our many, many late night conversations that I offered her answers — written in Sharpie — that kept her locked in a tight space. Answers that were “on brand” to the Christianity I was raised in — like “well you know ….nevertheless God’s faithful love lasts forever.” And she’d call my bluff — she’d say “you know that’s fake.”
Now, here’s the thing — it’s not fake. I do believe that faith is rooted in the unconditional never-ending love of God. And a verse like this one, “God’s faithful love lasts forever” is a promise of God, BUT IT IS also an invitation to a lived experience of such a promise, and such a love and such a truth. And that is very different than an answer. It is something to discover in our loneliest places and our deepest questions, one to be explored, one to wander around in a bit, to be doubted — as much as regarded as undeniable, unshakeable in our laments in our distress. Because then it really can break open and give voice to what needs to be heard in our spirit in our body — and that is freeing.
In the midst of losing all of her hearing — my friend found she was listening to and greeting her life in a different way. She took on a spiritual practice of sorts of telling the truth of the things happening in her life — of saying “hello” to these things even if she didn’t like them, even if they weren’t convenient, or wise, or holy, or easy, or CERTAIN.
Jesus shows these disciples and us the art of greeting our life as it is — greeting it with fear or not fear — or greeting the fear with which you greet your life. Greeting it with integrity.
Jesus again and again throughout the gospels greets people who are in tight spaces or who have been put in tight places — and invites them into freedom. Most often, by greeting them where they are at — right where their story intersects with God’s story. As rough and undone as it might be. This is an honest faith, a real faith.
The woman with the condition of bleeding — he greets her in the tight margins of her life, at the edges of society, at the edges of a cloak — and invites her into the abundance of compassion and belonging and love.
The woman at the well – – he greets her in her thirst for being known – and invites her into the expanse of compassion and belonging and love.
And he greets a tax collector Zaccheus, and he greets lepers, and a centurion, and a eunuch, and Matthew, Mark, and Martha, and Thomas and Judas, and Pontius Pilate, and Philip and Simon, and Mary, and you and me. He greets us with “hello,” and opens our stories unto wide-open places — unto compassion and belonging and love and mercy and hope. And to the wild and beautiful journey of this world — where we hope our stories melded with the story of God can create more than destroy.
My friend got two cochlear implants. And I was with her on “activation” day, witnessing sound and music be part of her story again. Over the last 20 years (or so), I’ve gotten to witness her story evolve. Continue to say ‘hello’ to her real emotions, her on-going questions, and (quite literally) “hello” to new people she’s met — and ‘hello’ to becoming a public policy advisor at the State house for disability access. “Hello” to the director of disabilities for the State of Massachusetts. Her advocacy work was fueled by the stories she listened to — the stories of people who faced challenges and who challenged the status quo, the stories of people who were protested against and those who protested the answers of law-makers that said “it’s just the way things are.”
Their stories.
Her story.
God’s story.
Breaking open — wild and wide-open spaces — never before perceived.
I met up with her recently for dinner to celebrate clear margins after a surgery she had, “hello to beating breast cancer.” And as we clinked glasses, she said
‘everyday is truly a gift, if we could only fully unwrap it.’
I guess part of the gift is in the ongoing unwrapping — and the answers we so often seek are in our unfolding stories — who said,
“God comes to us disguised as our very lives?” (Paula D’Arcy)
I think that’s true — our very lives, our stories that aren’t finished. Our stories that are nestled in the story of God. These are stories that can’t be contained — In the gospel of John it says,
“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did, many other stories. .. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
Jesus is continuing to open and unfold our stories unto wide-open spaces .. they are indeed still being written as we live our very lives. Our lives, in the small moments of every day hold so much that is larger — so many treasures that allow us to feel the truth of,
“God’s faithful love lasts forever.”
“God’s faithful love lasts forever.”
In these unknown months ahead, I need these direct promises of God front and center — without any nuance – the goodness of God just laid bare. I need them to be spoken and shared as everlasting truths. Through stories and through scripture and through cries — the goodness of God, the mercy of God, the steadfastness of God, the God that will never leave or forsake us, the God that is for us, that will help us. Believing that there is contagious hope in the power of such truths, believing that there is more wide open space than I can perceive. A wide open space where we can be curious, and dream and imagine together new ways of being human to one another – – to being a nation to other nations — new ways of weaving our stories together — ancient and new.
And much of that starts with facing and saying “hello” to what is .… A potent spiritual practice. I want to leave us with a poem that is a prayer, a blessing, a practice all-in-one. Perhaps you can continue to unwrap it in the tight spaces you might find yourself in — and adapt it to be your own.
I invite you to close your eyes — and take in the words of poet and theologian Padraig O’Tuama of which this sermon is greatly inspired by, here you go:
Neither I nor the poets I love have found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognize and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet.
“Hello” to God’s Faithful love, that lasts forever. – -Amen
—- Padraig O’Tuama