April 21, 2024

Psalm 42 & 43
Rev. Christie Dahlin

Psalm 42 and 43
Inclusive Bible Version
Like a stag, a doe,
Longing for streams of cool water,
My whole being longs for you, my God.

My soul aches with thirst for God,
For a god that lives!
When can I go and see God face to face?
My only food, day or night, is my tears;
They recriminate me:
“Where is your God?” they say.

These things I will remember
as I pour out my soul like water-
How I’d go with the crowds
And lead them into God’s house,
Amid cries of gladness and thanksgiving,
Drunk with the dance of celebration.

“Why so dispirited?” I ask myself. “Why so churned up inside? Hope in God!”
I know I’ll praise God once again,
For you are my Deliverance
You are my God.

This is why my heart despairs:
I remember other days with you,
In the land of Jordan, on Mount Hermon
And the HIll of Mizar.

The primeval Deep is echoing in the sound of your waterfalls;
Your torrents rage and break over me, overwhelming me.
Everyday, YHWH, you ordain your love toward me,
And during the night you bring me your song.
In my prayers to the God of my life,
I say to God, my rock:
“Why have you forgotten me? Why do you keep me in mourning,
Oppressed by an unseen enemy?”
My bones are shattered by their words,
Foes taunt me constantly:
“Where is your God?” they say.

“Why so dispirited?” I ask myself. “Why so churned up inside? Hope in God!”
I know I’ll praise God once again,
For you are my Deliverance
You are my God.

Vindicate me, God!
Plead my cause before unjust judges!
Rescue me from a lying, deceitful accuser.

For you, O God, are my stronghold, my defense.
“Why have you forgotten me? Why do you keep me in mourning,
Oppressed by an unseen enemy?”

Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me,
Let them bring me to your holy mountain,
To your dwelling place.
Then at last I’ll go up again to the altar of God,
The God of my joy and delight.
My harp and lyre will sing your praise once again,
O God, my God.

“Why so dispirited?” I ask myself. “Why so churned up inside? Hope in God!”
I know I’ll praise God once again,
For you are my Deliverance
You are my God.

Sermon
It is wonderful to get to join you all this morning.

Earth day is tomorrow, a day to celebrate the beautiful planet we live on.
a day to intentionally consider our role in caring for this planet,
And be reminded of our complicity in our dear earth’s shifting climate
which we can already see playing out in so many ways around the world.
I could list them all, but I am sure you each are aware of ways the climate is shifting right in your ecosystems.

As I thought about earth day this year,
I felt the need to make space for grief as well as celebrating this beautiful earth we live
and I turned to this psalm of lament,
I was especially drawn to the refrain in the psalm,
“Why so dispirited?” I ask myself. “Why so churned up inside? Hope in God!”
I know I’ll praise God once again,
For you are my Deliverance
You are my God.

This psalm invites us into an ebb and flow of both crying out to God and also clinging to hope.
In this time of climate chaos,
we need space to lament,
to mourn, but to not to get stuck there.

One of the first times I clearly remember this ebb and flow of feelings around climate change was a summer in college when I lived in East Glacier, Montana.
It is a small town outside of Glacier National Park on the Blackfeet reservation.
I spent the summer working in a bakery part of the week and hiking and exploring the park the rest of the week.
During hikes among some of the most beautiful mountains, lakes, and meadows I have ever hiked in,
The reality of climate change sunk in, in a new way.

It sunk in as I read signs about glaciers melting,
Signs predicting that most of the glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone by 2030, which already felt soon then, (it was 2013) and now is only 6 years away.
The reality of climate change sunk in, as I hiked next to a few of the remaining glaciers,
wondering what these mountains and lakes would look like without glaciers,
The lakes and streams will lose their teal colors, if they are not fed by glacial silt,
the mountains will look different, and these are just changes seen from a surface, not to mention the much larger rippling effects of shifting ecosystems and climate change around the world.

While noticing all this, I was also falling in love with the place,
Coming to know the names of the mountains, lakes, flowers and the people of the land.

Two years later I sat in a car far from Glacier,
reading articles about a huge fire in the park.
The places I love, places I had hiked,
were burning,
and while fire is natural and needed for forest regrowth and regeneration,
this fire was much larger and burning much faster.
And the pattern of fires has continued in the years since, not just in Glacier, but in much of the west coast.

Through my summer living in Glacier and the summers of fire that have followed,
I felt the grief of climate change hitting in a new way.
I recently moved to Portland, Maine and this winter was one with little snow, but big rain, wind and ice storms, which led to historic flooding and many power outages.
Locals keep telling us this isn’t normal,
but of course we know we are now living in a time of a new normal,
or a time of climate chaos.

As I look around at this climate chaos, wondering what the world will be like for my 4 year old and the child in my womb,
I feel grief, lament,
I feel what the psalmist proclaimed:
“Why so dispirited?” I ask myself. “Why so churned up inside?
It is hard to not sink into despair as we read headlines about climate change,
The grief and anxiety can feel all consuming and tempting to just numb it out, especially adding in all the other layers of pain and violence happening in our world today, where this psalm of lament and crying out to God is equally fitting.
I feel like joining the taunting voices in the psalm asking, Where is your God?!

Yet, within the longing and the questioning voices of where is your God?
the psalmist continues,
God is in the chaos of it all, God’s love is still present with us,
present within the chaos of creation.
As the psalmist says:
The primeval Deep is echoing in the sound of your waterfalls;
Your torrents rage and break over me, overwhelming me.
Everyday, YHWH, you ordain your love toward me,
And during the night you bring me your song.

That summer in Glacier I felt the ebb and flow of this psalm,
A longing and crying out,
what have we done to the planet?!
And yet it was also a summer of finding hope in creation,
I sensed God around me in a new way.
In the wind swirling around me on Dawson Pass,
In seeing mountain goats on Logan Pass
Swimming in mountain lakes, or under waterfalls,
In the stories and presence of the Blackfeet Tribe and their care and love of the land,
Holding all of this next to the reality that this wild place is changing so drastically
It brought up the tension of grief and hope.

Within the tension,
Within the ebb and flow,
The determined words of the psalmist ring true,

Hope in God!
I know I’ll praise God once again,
For you are my Deliverance
You are my God.

The psalmist is declaring:
I will hope, I will praise God again,
even if right now I am not sure where God is in all of this?

It brings to mind the importance of allowing space for mourning and noticing.
To then be able to turn to hope, to action, to living.

As my friend Benni Isaak-Kaus wrote in an article in The Mennonite years ago:
“Mourning is different from despair. Despair freezes up the body. Mourning is a way to break out of the cycles of despair and trauma and face the truth without getting paralyzed… Mourning commits us to remember the dead as well as to fight for the living.”

My time in Glacier is just one story of holding the tension of mourning next to hope,
I Invite you to ponder,
What is your story of the tension of longing next to hope?
Where do you experience longing or grief and wrestle with what to do with it?
How do you hold it?

I wonder how we might be held in the ebb and flow of these words from the psalmist?
This psalm speaks to what we experience daily and deeply in life.
How do we hold our grief and doubt and yet not sink into depths of despair?
There has to be hope or what do we rest in?
How do we find semblance of meaning?
As we thirst for God, like a deer craving for a stream of water,
As we thirst for righteousness and justice for all of creation.

This psalm invites us into the ebb and flow,
of crying out and then resting in hope
Invites us into a determined naming,
even if it is just one of trying to convince ourselves.
I WIll again find hope in God.
Find hope within the mourning of climate change.

And acknowledging hope, clinging to hope
doesn’t mean we ignore the bleak, the pain, or the grief.
The word hope is often tossed around and maybe overused.
I believe the hope the psalmist is declaring is not a hope of “rainbows and unicorns” not an unrealistic or idealistic hope.
It is a hope that names the darkness, names the bleak and yet proclaims I shall again hope in God.

We cling to these glimmers of God’s love shining through,
We cling to hope, because without hope how can we move forward?”
This is a hope of imagining an alternative future, a hope that names we don’t have to stay here, we can be creative, we can gather in community and work toward shifts in our changing world.

I was reading a blog post by Laura Alary, and she shared a review she wrote for Lydia Wylie-Kellermen’s book: This Sweet Earth. The words Laura wrote about hope resonated with me:
“In this truthful and intimate meditation, Wylie-Kellerman leads us through grief and lament into a space of imagining how—whatever comes—we might choose to nurture communities of reciprocity where we are and learn to thrive with less. This book left me feeling both calmer and braver, conscious that there is an alternative to the terrifying alternative of hunkering down behind walls and hoarding possessions. I am grateful for this different kind of hope.”
This is the kind of hope we need, the kind of hope that I wonder if the psalmist is declaring.

Not a hope that says everything will work out,
But a hope that imagines an alternative and seeks to live into that.
A hope that reminds us that God is present with us.
That we get to be a part of the story and our mourning can lead to living for an alternative future.
Sometimes all the action we need to do is to go outside, sit on the ground, look up at the sky and remember we are part of this earth too.
to re-member our connection with the very land we live on.

May we acknowledged the grief of the shifts and changes in our climate and in our ecosystems
And keep tending and caring for the land, plants, and animals right in front of us, coming to know and love the places we live.
And as the grief comes, may we lean into the ebbs and flows, clinging to hope in a God who is with us and with all of creation.
May it be so. Amen.

Benediction:
I send you with this Cherokee blessing:
May the warm winds of heaven blow softly upon you,
And may the Great Spirit make Sunrise in your heart.
Go clinging to hope and go in Christ’s peace.