This sermon was preached at First Congregational Church of Battle Creek on August 14th, 2022. The text is Psalm 46. I found my way back to it by fortunate accident upon finding some prep notes I had written for it saved in my work laptop’s browser cache a full year and a half later, and damn, it’s still a banger. Listen along here. Sermons were meant to be heard!

My friends, I speak in the name of the Crucified and Risen One. Amen.

It is not an understatement to suggest that we have indeed been through the wringer over the past several years. I don’t think it’s necessary to recount all of the world’s pain points in excruciating detail; we know the shape of the sea billows that roll and crest and break on the battered coast of human beingness as we sit here in 2022, as the pileup of pandemic, cultural trauma, exclusion, violence, scarcity, and fear exert the dread weight of sorrow on our being. 

We have felt the mountains shake in the heart of the sea as the cracks in our institutions and the common life we have so delicately constructed on their foundations gape wider and wider with each passing year. We have stood, startled and stunned, as the waters of chaos have roared and foamed and crashed and crushed, as the conflicts have raged on, as the tragedies have compounded, as those in power make feeble overtures to correct issues that never should have been allowed to happen in the first place. 

And all of us have been through something in the last two years that has caused us to cry out with the Psalmist, “save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck” (69.1). Many of us are tired. Many of us are grieving. Many of us are running on fumes and a prayer. And many of us are trying in vain to pretend that everything is actually okay and that we’re going back to normal and that all of this was a raucous fever dream from which we’ll wake up, sooner or later. “It is well with my soul,” after all.

I admit that I have struggled in the past with this hymn, with this psalm, with this kind of “everything will be okay someday” spirituality. Because there’s a way in which these kinds of sayings and their attendant spirituality are used not as a means of encouraging or accompanying those suffering. Instead, these sorts of sayings and stories become little charms we invoke to make the bad feelings quiet down without actually addressing what’s going on. Psychologists call these “thought terminating clichés: little nuggets of loaded language that are often passed on as “folk wisdom,” used to stop an argument or a story from proceeding further.

A lot of what passes for “spirituality” or even “common sense” these days is little more than an attempt to quiet any voice of doubt or contradiction or difficulty through invoking an anesthetizing optimism to bypass the gnarlier bits of the human experience. We see it all over the place as sloganeers and advertisers push promises of a return to greatness, of better days yet to come, of “all will be well”, of “keep calm and carry on.” There’s a darker side here, too: folks routinely use them to avoid the implications of difficult questions around power, privilege. The phrase “all lives matter,” with everything it implies and all the  painful truths its utterance seeks to silence, is a great example of this. 

But the Powers that Be aren’t the only ones who love a good thought-terminating cliché or two. When we’re confronted with a painful situation and are unsure what to say or do, or when the roiling seas of chaos and circumstance bring us face to face with our own tenderness, vulnerability, and limitation, the truth is that ordinary folks like us are liable to fall into the snare of their easy allure.

In contemporary Western culture, it’s a rare thing to be able to sit with someone who is sorrowful or suffering. So often that sorrow, that suffering, brings us close to the heart of our own tenderness and vulnerability–and it makes us anxious. It makes us squirrelly. It makes us wonder what we need to say or do in order to fix it.

And in that moment of anxiety, if we don’t know how to be still, to sit with our own anxiety and uncertainty in response to someone else’s, we’ll go reaching for something to try to be of comfort–not to the other person, but to ourselves. And often without recognizing it. I suspect I’m not the only one who has ever been told something like, “God works in mysterious ways” when their entire life is falling apart around them. And I know for a fact I’m not the only person here from whose mouth those words or others like them have tumbled while we are trying to be present for suffering loved ones.

But nevertheless, we continue to sing “It is Well With My Soul.” We continue to read psalms and scriptures that say things like, “God is our refuge and strength… therefore we will not fear.” There continues to be part of me that does actually believe that everything is going to be okay. Even after everything I’ve just said about the reality of suffering in this world, and the harms that an unexamined optimism can cause. But when I say, “everything will be okay,” I do not mean that everything will simply work out in the end if we keep our head in the sand long enough for it all to blow over. Not in the least.

The kind of deep spiritual truth that the words “it is well with my soul” and others like them contain is a truth which is distilled not from fleeing from the pain and the difficulty, nor from ignoring it. They are words of truth that can only be spoken when we make the courageous choice to turn toward the pain and the sorrow, facing it, looking it in the eye. They are truths that can only be spoken when we have consented in our deepest being to be present to the pain or the sorrow as it is, holding it, without closing our heart to the tenderness and the intensity of the experience.

This is the posture that Horatio Spafford was able to stand in when he received the tragic news that inspired the writing of this hymn. It is the very posture Jesus took when facing the cross, that Mary took when considering whether to allow her life to be derailed by the calling to be Jesus’ mother, that God undertook when considering whether to bring this universe into being, knowing that suffering would be part of the deal. “Let it be” was all that needed to be said.

Those words, “let it be,” are the words that bring new worlds into being. Those are the words that allow new stories to be told, the kind of story that inverts and unfolds the old myths of consumption, scarcity, and power that have built empires for the few on the backs of the suffering of this planet and its peoples. Those are the words that allow the structures and systems of this world to be undone by the radiance and beauty of human life freely offered in service and love, for the life of this world. Those are the words that raise the dead.

How do we get to “let it be?” How do we learn to stand in that posture?

The Psalmist sings of a river that flows in a water table deeper than any rational understanding can fathom, whose streams make glad the city of God. Here the Psalmist is not talking about a river running through the city of Jerusalem. They are speaking of something within us, an inner wellspring, an internal source of strength and presence whose fountainhead nurtures and strengthens the heart, the inner city, the dwelling of God, making it glad, making it strong enough to stand firm as the chaotic seas of time and change and circumstance break on our shore. At that fountainhead the words “the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge” are no longer a hopeful aphorism cast into the winds of an uncertain universe. They become a statement of fact.

And this fountainhead lies coiled within the heart of every human, waiting to be opened through silence, through stillness, through consent, through learning to become present to the Presence. “Be still, and know that I am God,” the Psalmist says. Sit down. Be quiet. Come into that stillness which makes the wars within us cease. Come into that loving presence which breaks the bow and shatters the spear of our internal conflict and calculation and consternation. The Psalmist calls us to know the inmost I AM whose radiant silence quiets our drive for power and survival long enough for us to be able to see clearly the suffering and pain in this world. Know the Presence by whose strength we meet this world’s deep pains with our hearts ablaze and agape.

In the words of the Quaker poet Gerard Guiton, “Stillness, deep, deep within us; in small beginnings it flows into the living water. The ocean of God, through our stillness, God moves.”

But perhaps even that stillness is beyond us. What then?

I am reminded that the Psalmist says here, “God is our refuge and strength…therefore we will not fear.”

I’ve shared with y’all a little bit in the past about my experiences working in the mental health world for several years, a world I began working in out of necessity after finishing seminary. I at least knew enough not to say stuff like “you just need to have the joy of the Lord!” to someone on suicide watch. But beyond that, I had little more to work with than my own presence. But as it happens, the gift of my own presence, rough and imperfect as it was (and still is), was more helpful than any words I could offer. 

My job was to sit and be with, so I sat, and was with. In those still and silent moments late at night on the floor, I had no choice but to sit and be still for the sake of the people in my care. I had no choice but to sit with the teenager who had self-harmed because of their family’s rejection. I had no choice but to stay steady as I held the trembling hand of someone whose body was going through withdrawal. 

Most nights, nothing remarkable happened; the clients would find their way to sleep, I’d keep watch, enter my notes, and go home to crash once the day shift showed up. But every so often, in the mysterious presence of that late-night stillness, there were moments where the roles of patient and caregiver evaporated. For fleeting glimpses there were simply two human hearts sitting in stillness and presence with one another, being, breathing, becoming. “Are you still with me?” I would ask. “I am,” they would say. Be still and know that “I am.” Be still and know that “we are.”

Perhaps that is what we have to offer when the waters have risen up to our necks. Simply by being present to the presence of others, by being with one another and not turning away from each other’s sorrow and pain, by choosing to show up for one another, we can find the kind of deep wellspring of being, of breathing, of becoming that allows us to hold each other steady when the world is coming apart at the seams.

Church, we need each other. And with one another, we can learn not to turn away from the pain of this world, but rather, to be still, and to stand firm. And in the radiance of our opened and awakened hearts that comes from a daily practice of saying “yes” to being here with the world as it is, with Christ’s presence feeding the deep wellsprings of our being, we can learn to love one another and this planet and its peoples with the strength and fortitude needed to midwife the rebirth of this world in peace, in justice, in equity, and in wholeness. Amen.