A sermon about praising God when things are bad and lessons in carpentry

Psalm 33:12-20
Some years ago when I worked with the domestic violence organization, one of the clinicians and I led a therapeutic writing group for survivors of abuse.  One of the prompts that the groups would reflect on had to do with what home felt like.  We weren’t necessarily talking about what someone’s house or apartment was like but the idea of home or the feeling of home. Home was a place where they felt safe, empowered, capable, loved, that kind of thing.  Some folks in those writing groups reflected on feeling “at home” in their childhood home or in college.  Some mentioned certain friends that made them feel like home.  I can’t remember any specifics of what people wrote, but I remember words like: “comfortable, safe, peaceful” as words that described that feeling of home.  There is a word in Spanish that keeps coming to mind when I think of what home means: Plena. It means whole, complete, content, full hearted. 

What makes you feel like you’re at home?  (or who?)
Where are the spaces where you feel at home?

Early last week, I erased the psalm from the service. In my defense, we try to keep the services shorter in the summer and we do less readings.  But that wasn’t entirely my motivation.  I eliminated it because singing praise of God and dancing around with a lyre, tambourine and joyous shouts wasn’t totally vibing for me this week.  It felt tone deaf. The earth, the psalm says, is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.  I took a walk recently with one of our high-schoolers who specifically mentioned that it sure didn’t feel like the earth was full of God’s love.  I didn’t argue. 

I was not at home with the psalm and I quietly erased it from the service. 

You’ll notice, it’s back. 

In the writing group at the shelter, it was occasionally a process to realize that a person didn’t feel very “at home” in their house or apartment.  When you don’t feel at home, but you long for it, that can be called that homesick.  Think summer camp or even a sleepover as a kid.  Did you ever feel homesick? I did. 

Or, as an adult, I remember moving to a new house and staring at the ceiling my first night in my new room and not quite feeling at home. I would feel that homesickness deep in my belly. Even today, I’m occasionally struck with a twinge when I miss someone who is gone, like my mother, in a sense, homesick for her. But I also feel that same thing when I think of what I long for in the world that isn’t here yet.  

I long for that feeling of safety or security and love for my kids, for all of us.  And there are times when it’s clear that it’s not here. Sure, there are pockets of it, but when I look around at some of the wounds in our world or our city and our neighborhood, I know we are not there yet—and I long and I ache for something different. 

About 100 years ago, philosopher Ernst Bloch equated Heimweh (which could be translated as homesickness) with a feeling of hope.  Hope. He said it’s a feeling of home that is just out of reach. Hope is a longing for that feeling of home. It’s a kind of homesickness.

So back to that time earlier in the week when I erased the psalm.  Last week, as many of you know, we found those tiki torches outside the church on Sunday. It robbed some of us of a feeling of home and safety here at church or here in our neighborhood.  There have been unsettling events in the news and our neighborhood.  Some of you have personal strife that you’re working through:  diagnosis, anxiety, that kind of thing.  We long for that feeling of home. How, I wondered, could I pray those first joyful verses of the psalm with confidence?  

This psalm sings of a God that bottles up all of the deepest, shadow-iest dangers and carries them away.  But that image of God wasn’t squaring for me with real life. “Faith,” Hebrews says, “is the assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things not seen.”  And perhaps, just in that, there was a side to this psalm that I not seeing.  I assumed that the psalmist saw God as so strong and so mighty so joyful, so oblivious to the frayed ends around us. Or, was there a side to God in the psalm that I was missing?

In vs. 15 of the psalm, we sing of a God who fashions the hearts of all people. That word for fashioned is the same word used in one of the ancient creation stories from Genesis where God fashioned and formed all of the different people and animals in the garden.  Rachel Wrenn commented that God is like an intimate potter, puttering around, with be-speckled glasses, divine lips quirking up in a smile with what is coming to shape before their eyes. That, she said, was an image of God fashioning us, molding us and shaping us day after day.

But, while God fashions and forms and molds us, the person who wrote this psalm acknowledged that in their daily ancient life, there was still actually famine, fear and pain.  The psalm says that God’s eye is upon us. God is watching us, God is with us, and will save us; but we, who sing this psalm are still waiting and hoping and longing for the Lord who is our help and our shield.  We are still homesick and aching for what is not yet here.  

How was it that these ancient people could praise God like this while they were in the midst of such famine and fear and distress? 

Many years ago, my youth group participated in one of these mission trips where we were sent to a small town with several hundred other high school youth. They split us into teams and then dispatched us to go do construction projects for a week.  On that very first trip, I think it was to West Virginia, I was set up with a crew and we worked on the roof of a woman who we called Granny. Our project was to patch a couple of rotted pieces of plywood in the roof above her front porch and then re-shingle it.  That is until one of my crewmates almost fell through the roof, and our crew leader determined that the we would have to do some additional structural work.  

The roof was sagging, but we would be able to save some of the support beams through what is known in carpentry as “sistering.”  When you sister a board or a joist, you put a healthy beam right alongside of the saggy one. You fasten the two together and it adds this extra support and strengthens the jenky beam.  

This is precisely what we did for granny’s roof.  We cut new pieces of wood and then scooched them right up next to the weak beams. They added support and they kept the roof up.  

This is what praise does for the longing, aching heart in this psalm.  It pulls in that strong beam of God’s goodness and it fastens itself to the original beam for support.  Praise sisters us to God, it comes along side of us, supports us. It reminds us of a God who provides for us, who is quietly at work in our lives.  Praise is a way to fasten our hearts to God.

And it sounds like this: “We praise you, God for another day.  From the moment our feet hit the floor in the morning, we thank you for this incredibly beautiful gift of being alive.” And we fasten God to our hearts.

“We praise you God for the beauty of creation around us: for the rain and the sky and the air we breathe.”And we fasten our hearts to God.

We give our thanks and praise
For our families
For our neighbors
For the mail carrier
For a perfect tomato at lunch
For the friend that sent the funny text
For the fan blowing hot air on me in the impossibly hot church
And God buttons into us.

We praise God, and we fasten our hearts to God.

And there are more things that sister us besides praise.  You all have sistered me as strong support that has come up along side of me in times of need. Sistering is holy work. And it’s not something that just the sisters do. I’ve been sistered by some incredible brothers this week. We are sistered by our neighborhood that responds to us with support and compassion after what happened last week.  We are sistered by each other.

What has sistered you?
What has been the support that comes up alongside of you?

For what do you give thanks and praise to God?

While it might seem like this psalm with its’ joyous praise is annoyingly tone deaf to the pain of real life, it turns out that praise is a practice (a spiritual practice) to draw close to God and to draw God precisely into those places of fear and famine and death. Praise opens a window into our hearts. In through that window comes God who sisters themselves right up along side of us.

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It has been a week where my sense of home has been shaken.  Maybe yours has too, for any number of reasons. And THAT is the story of why I added the psalm back into the service.
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I wrote to you earlier this week that we are living in extraordinary times.  These are times when it feels like the world is shifting under our very feet.  It is frightening, exhilarating, disorienting.  It is a time of homesickness for what was and hope for what will be.  What a time to be alive! Right now, by the grace of God, we have the opportunity to be a part of shaping this world into what we long for, for ourselves and our children. Despite every evidence to the contrary, in the face of famine and death, of racism and hatred, of homophobia and transphobia and evil, with all these things that make us homesick and full of longing, We will sing our praise and thanksgiving to God, and the Holy One will fasten themselves to us as we sing of  God’s endless steadfast love.

Truly, your eye is upon those who fear you, O LORD,
  upon those who wait for your steadfast love,
 to deliver their lives from death,
  and to keep them alive in time of famine. 
 Our innermost being waits for you, O LORD,
  our helper and our shield.
 Surely, our heart rejoices in you,
  for in your holy name we put our trust.
 Let your lovingkindness, O LORD, be upon us,
  even as we place our hope in you.