Pursued by steadfast love

Recently, our family watched Mary Poppins Returns together. I found myself particularly captivated by a song from that movie entitled Where the lost things go.

It begins:

Do you ever lie awake at night?

Just between the dark and the morning light

Searching for the things you used to know

Looking for the place

Where the lost things go?

And continues:

Do you ever dream or reminisce?

Wondering where to find

What you truly miss
. . . . . .

Memories you shared.
Gone for good you feared
They're all around you still
Though they've disappeared
Nothing's really left or lost without a trace
Nothing's gone forever
Only out of place

I was moved by this song. I think it part because it reminds me of a song we sing frequently at church and at funerals:

Nothing is lost on the breath of God; 

Nothing is lost forever. 

God’s breath is love and that love will remain

Holding the world forever.

Mary Poppins Returns, although a children’s movie, is dealing with the universal human experience of loss: death, loss of capacity, loss of possessions, loss of a shared past.

And the song articulates a kind of basic human longing....a desire to know: where do all the lost things go?It is both comforting and vague.

So maybe now the dish

And my best spoon

Are playing hide and seek

Just behind the moon

The hymn Nothing is Lost also is working with this question: Where do the lost things go?” A feather so light, a hair so fine … a life cut short, our stilted intentions? This hymn does not offer a vague articulation of hope, but a statement of faith. It is God who holds the bits, baubles, fragments, pieces, the lost, forsaken, forgotten.

My deepest faith struggle is not between belief or unbelief; hope or a rejection of hope. My greatest faith struggle is how do I keep hold of a vision of a loving and personal God in the world such as it is? In truth, I am not so much tempted to no longer believe in God, but I am often tempted to radically depersonalize God. I am tempted towards vague answers to questions such as: Where do all the lost things go?

I might answer: “I am not sure-…. but surely there must be some force making things right. Mustn’t there?” And yet our scripture rarely speaks in vague affirmations. Instead, in scripture we are confronted with a personal God who actively seeks out what is lost and gathers the broken bits together.

I was reminded of this as I read through the 23rd Psalm recently in preparation for a sermon I was initially leery of preaching. What can be said about the passage that is the lectionary Psalm for today that has not already worn over like a garment that should have been thrown out a decade ago? 

Somehow, still, this is a piece of scripture within which all varieties of people seem to be able to find a place. There is a startling universality to this Scripture passage.

If you are looking for words of scripture to penetrate through the fog of dementia….

..then there is power is these words “The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not Want.

If you are seeking, words for a funeral for someone who has not darkened a church door in decades…

….these words: “thy rod and they staff they comfort me” somehow resonate.

When I visited in a prison, this Psalm was often mentioned...

…. “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.”

And even a child can find themselves between the stanzas both confused and comforted by the surely goodness and surely mercy of God.

It is beautiful poetry and for this reason the 23rd Psalm is frequently anthologized in books of global poetry. Its main poetic devise is a mixed metaphor. The poem begins by comparing God to a shepherd and ends by comparing God to a host. 

And yet this mixing of divine metaphors is not slapdash. Its is intentional.

We could say that in the 23rd Psalm that the shepherd becomes the host, or that the host proves to have been a shepherd all along. The shepherd is always a host--providing green grass and still, clean waters; beds and foods. And the table host remains the dutiful shepherd. A shepherd who doesn’t merely prepare a banquet, but also seeks out and follows the guests. God is a host who will keep providing goodness and mercy even when the guest has so since left the table.

Both Shepherd and Host are persistent metaphors used to describe God. Both metaphors are ones that Jesus employed to speak of himself. These metaphors shares similarities with other persistent metaphors that are used to describe God. God is a gatherer:

Like the farmer gather crops

Like a parent gathers a child in their arms

Like a mother hen gathers her chicks

God shall carry the lambs with his arms and

carry them next to her bosom.

God will gather God’s people from the four corners of the world for a great banquet

The table in 23rd Psalm is a shepherd’s table where we have been gathered: the rich, haughty, young, 

fearful, forsaken, tired and weary. In this Psalm God promises to pursue us. That is actually the word that gets translated in the NRSV as “follow.” It is a word that is used when Saul seeks David to kill him. It is a word that is used for a lion seeking its prey. The Psalmist says surely your goodness and mercy will hunt me down all the days of my life. The word here for mercy is hesed. It is a word that is sometimes translated faithful, loving kindness, or steadfast love. It is the word used to describe God’s love, God’s covenantal love: to affirm the love of God wherein God’s keeps God’s promises to humans even when human’s don’t hold up their end of the bargain. Hesed is saving love: Steady as a mountain, unmovable, unearned, unmerited. The closest English translation is neither mercy or love, but the word grace.

This 23rd Psalm speaks to the basic facts of our existence--we come into this world loved more than we will ever be able to merit, and this Psalm promises that we are being hotly pursued by this love for all of our days.

I find comfort in that. There are times it is hard for me to believe in a personal God. I think as a child I was too caught up in a vision of God that insured material blessings for God’s people. A God that will make your marriage better, and your family better, and your finances better. A god of clean living and secure futures. A God that will keep us safe.

But as the saint Julian of Norwich wrote

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

This is a time of losses. No matter how blessed you are: loss of dreams and capacity; loss of friends and family; loss of certainty and purpose. As Christians we have lost our capacity to gather together as a community. I am not going to flinch here. Who knows how much we are all going to lose from this pandemic? Will the shuttered business open again? When will our children gather in classrooms? When we hear the organ in our church or raise our voices all together in our sanctuaries? Will there be summer camps this year?  

We are on the cusp of a time of profound losing.  

And so it feels a bit stilted to merely say that God has promised to be with us and this Presence is going to be enough—no more than enough—a cup overflowing, a table of plenty, calm waters, quiet pastures.

Yet, these words find us here, 3,000 years after they were written, words that have hotly pursued people through plagues, battlefields, prisons, deformity, sickness, death.  Words that have been prayed before in quarantines, and in trenches, and in hospital wards, in exile, recited while hiding in jungles, or facing down the crematoriums.  Words that have seen gallows, sinking ships, bread lines, and locusts. 

These are not my words, but the words of God in hot pursuit of all the lost things: a God in the shadow of the valley of death.