A sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Easter
Preached at Episcopal Church at Yale
April 21, 2013
The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
When I first looked at today’s lessons, now several weeks ago, I was really excited to be preaching today. As I did my first read-through of these lessons to begin thinking about what exactly I would say in my sermon, there seemed to be a hundred different things that caught my attention, things I wanted to point out to you all today.
In the lesson from Acts, we hear about a disciple named Tabitha, the only instance in the New Testament of the Greek feminine form of the word ‘disciple.’ As I first read this lesson, I silently cheered to myself. How cool would it be to preach about a female disciple?
And when I read the Revelation lesson, I was struck by the fact that people from every nation and tribe were around the throne of God together. And again I silently cheered to myself, thinking about all of the really great messages from this passage I could highlight.
And, of course, today we have that wonderful sheep and shepherd metaphor in both the Gospel lesson and the Psalm.
Basically, I hit the lectionary jackpot. It couldn’t get much better than these lessons if I’d handpicked the readings for myself.
But then, on Monday, everything changed.
In the midst of one of the world’s greatest athletic events, an event that brings together people from around the world in a great test of strength and endurance, tragedy struck.
And on Wednesday, everything changed again.
As I checked Facebook before going to bed, I saw a status alerting me to what was happening in Texas. I flipped to a news website and read, in horror, of the explosion at the fertilizer plant in West.
And then, on Thursday night, I saw a news report of the MIT officer who was shot in Boston.
And I woke up on Friday morning to hear that the city was on lockdown. I spent my day like many of you, probably, with my iPhone glued to my hand, reading the Facebook statuses and texts messages from friends stuck in their homes in Boston and unable to stop myself from checking the news every ten minutes.
As I walked out of a choir concert at Woolsey Hall that night, I was inundated with the chatter of those around me who were checking their phones for the first time in an hour and half, and the crowd buzzed with the news that the second Boston bomber had been captured.
Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized that I couldn’t stand here today and say what I’d planned on saying.
I realized, as I read through these lessons again, that the words “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want” sounded a lot different a week ago, before two terrible tragedies struck our nation.
These words, words we hear so often at times of death or other tragedies, words that can comfort us by their familiarity and by the hopeful message of a loving God, a God who takes care of us, can, in fact, be really, really difficult to hear.
As I pored over these words and prayed over these words, I thought about the people of Boston and the people of West.“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.”
Really? I shall not want?
How comforting is that to hear? As I read these words, I couldn’t help thinking that the people of Boston and West probably want a lot of things right now: for their loved ones to be alive and healthy, their homes and businesses to be intact, to return to a time when they felt safe and secure in their homes and neighborhoods: things we probably all want.
And so, in the midst of these tragedies, tragedies that only compound all of the war and strife already taking place in the world, how can we proclaim, “The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want” and that goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our life? If you have turned on the news or looked at the front page of a newspaper in the last week, it might seem impossible to make these statements without your fingers crossed behind your back.
Unfortunately, while God promises us many things, one of them is not that life will be without pain and suffering. God does not promise us that life will be easy. But God does promise us one thing: his presence. God promises us that he, our shepherd, will walk with us through this pain and suffering, through the valley of the shadow of death.
God promises Himself to us, a loving, self-giving shepherd, a shepherd who who leads and guides, who feeds, tends the sick, and is, above all, ever present.
I have heard more than one grief-stricken person ask, this week, “where is God in this?”
Where is God in the midst of disaster?
Where is God in the carnage and debris?
Where is God in the tears and anguish of those who have lost family members and friends?
Where is God?
Unfortunately, no one sermon can definitively answer all of these questions or rid us of all of our sadness and fear. What we can do, though, is look again at this broken mess, at these tragedies, and find where we see glimpses of God, because although we don’t know how God will be present, we know that he will be present.
For me, God appeared when I looked at pictures of the explosions in Boston and, amidst all the people running away from the explosions, I saw people running back to help.
And God appeared in the pictures of those on the ground, tending to the bombing victims.
God appeared in a police officer in Watertown, Massachusetts who was bringing a gallon of milk to a family on lockdown who had young children but was out of groceries.
God appeared when I read the stories of the first responders in Texas who gave their lives to protect the safety of the people of West.
No, God doesn’t always tell us how he will show up, but only that he will show up.
In today’s lesson from Acts, we heard the story of Tabitha, a disciple in Joppa. The beginning of this story sounds a lot like another, better-known story: the story of Lazarus. Like Lazarus, Tabitha took sick and died. In the story of Lazarus, Christ famously raised him from the dead although he had already been dead for days.
But, Christ isn’t there this time. Jesus has been crucified, resurrected, and has ascended into heaven.
This time, it’s just Peter, a few grieving widows, and the body of Tabitha.
This scene seems bleak at best. Yet then everything changes. Peter kneels. Peter prays. And Tabitha stands, alive, healed, and restored.
Of course, it wasn’t Peter who healed Tabitha. God healed Tabitha.
The same God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead was present and acted through the prayers of his servant, Peter. The God who healed Tabitha is the God who promises us that he will walk with us through the valley of the shadow of death and who gives himself to us in every moment, in ways we can see quite plainly and in ways we cannot even begin to understand.
So, what does this mean for us? What does it mean that, approximately 2000 years ago, a man prayed for a woman to be healed and it worked?
This means that God doesn’t just give himself to us, but God also gives himself through us.
In God, we find a model of love and selflessness that teaches us about being in relationship with all those we encounter. God our shepherd pours out goodness and mercy upon us, nourishing and strengthening us.
By encountering this self-giving love from God, we, then, are strengthened for our own lives in this broken world. Through the love of God, we can be like those who ran back into the bomb blasts in Boston, like the first responders who battled fire in Texas, and like the police officer who brought milk to the hungry family in Massachusetts.
Because we have encountered God, we can, therefore, help others encounter God. We are fed so that we may feed those around us.
We have known the Good Shepherd so that we may become shepherds to all those we meet, making manifest the deep and abiding love of the God who walks with us, even through the valley of the shadow of death.
Amen.
Prospects from Prospect Street 