Darla Blatnik
Second Presbyterian Church
Sermons: March 2, 2008

"‘Love Shall Pursue Me’"

Today we return to the lectionary, which sends us, on this fourth Sunday in Lent, to today’s readings from the gospel according to John and the psalms. Psalm 23, which was just read, may be familiar to many of you. You may have memorized it as a child or, as an adult, heard it read at a sick bed or maybe often at a funeral. This psalm is one of those sure and certain statements of faith capable of penetrating the darkest shadows of fear and grief. And, its words assuring a divine presence often seem to be heard through the veils of comas, dementia or even disbelief. An innate sense of well-being pervades when we hear the words of this psalm.

The story of the blind man from the first reading in John, on the other hand, may be less familiar and certainly seems less comforting than the familiar psalm. The verses from John are more thought provoking than comforting. In the verses preceding ours, the religious leaders are boasting of their piety. In today’s reading, Jesus rebukes their self-confidence by telling them that their claims of being able to see the truth keeps them in sin.

This reading from John seems a rather odd companion to the wonderfully reassuring and familiar words of Psalm 23. This morning, therefore, we are going to try to find some meaning in the reading of these two passages together. What does the comfort of the psalm have to do with the rebuke in John.

The first place to start is by noticing that the two texts, that is Psalm 23 and John 9, are not worlds apart. In John, chapter 10, the very next chapter after today’s reading, Jesus echoes much of the same comforting sentiment of the psalm when he describes himself as the shepherd whose sheep know his name and will follow him, the good shepherd who lays down his very life for the sheep (see John 10:1-18). And, in the very last chapters of John, the resurrected Jesus tells Peter three times that, if he loves Jesus, Peter will care for his sheep – loving and feeding them. We may also remember that Jesus reminds us, through the parable of the lost sheep in both Luke and Matthew, that as Jesus’ sheep, we are each so important that he will go after us even if (or when) we stray from the flock. The gospels make clear that Jesus is the very embodiment of the shepherd God of comfort and assurance of the 23^rd Psalm.

Yet, we still have the story of the blind man and Jesus’ words of rebuke from the first reading. In that story, no one wants to acknowledge the miracle in their midst – not the man’s neighbors, not his parents and finally certainly not the religious leaders. In fact, they reviled the man with their taunts of religious superiority and drove him out of their midst only to hear Jesus talk about coming "so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind" (John 9:39). Perhaps in disbelief at these words, the religious leaders question Jesus, "‘Surely, we are not blind, are we?’" (John 9:40). These Pharisees had no reason to doubt their ability to see the truth (either literally or spiritually). After all, they had been known, at least for several centuries in the Jewish community, as the pious ones separated from the heathens and charged with keeping the letter of the religious law.

These were the religious leaders of the chosen people whose chosen King David penned those assuring promises of the 23^rd Psalm. Yes, the people of Israel and their leaders were chosen, just as the church has been chosen by inheritance through Israel. Yet, despite God’s favor, Israel, whose very name means "struggles with God," had failed again and again to put their trust in God. The promises of God as shepherd weren’t enough to keep them from turning from the one, true God to the gods of their cultures – the gods of wealth, pleasure, idols – the gods of self. And so, in John, we hear Jesus saying to these religious leaders and even to us that only complete trust in the God in our midst will open our eyes to the promises that are ours in that God.

Let’s turn again to the words of Psalm 23. For it is here that we find full expression of this kind of complete trust, a trust that leads to what many of us have heard for years as, the psalm’s ultimate expression of assurance and comfort in life and in death:

"The Lord is my shepherd." In other words, I confess, we each confess that God is our alpha and omega, our protector, our leader, that God is the very source of our living and dying. As hard as it may to be to fathom, we are confessing that the incomprehensible God of all things seen and unseen is a personal God who cares about each of us, me and you, as sheep in his fold, as children of his kingdom. Yet, this isn’t just an idle confession. It goes one step further by declaring that because I know that God is my shepherd, I also know that "I shall not want." We don’t need to worry, because we can trust God as the beginning and end of all that has meaning and purpose. We shall not want because we can trust, not in ourselves, not in the gods of love, or success, or wealth, or health, we shall trust in the one true, the one living God.

For it is this God who gives us green pastures to eat from and still waters to drink from. It is this God who is able to restore our beings – body and soul. It is this God who is the source of protection and blessing in all things, through all times, even unto death, even in the presence of our enemies. It is this God who will follow us in goodness and mercy all our days. And, it is in this God’s household, with all those who call him Lord, that we will dwell for ever.

Trust God, the psalmist says and all will be well both now and forever. Trust God – an ultimate trust that allows us to proclaim, "The Lord is my shepherd. [Therefore,] I shall not want." This confession acknowledges God as the source of our very being, as the lens through which all life must be seen. This confession acknowledges before God that, left to our own devices, we are blind and cannot see.

Trust - a difficult concept to understand, a more difficult thing to do in human relationships much less with God. Yes, it would be wonderful to know that kind of perfect trust expressed in the psalm, to be able to say I’m not going to worry because God will provide. It would be wonderful, perhaps, yet some of us may be thinking now, or at least have at times, trust is great and all that, but it isn’t going to put food on the table or a roof over our heads or tuition money in the bank.

Many of you have heard me mention the saying, "Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore." Trusting God isn’t a blank check for idleness. We aren’t meant to bury our gifts and talents the way the fearful slave in the parable in Matthew did. God expects us to use the gifts and talents God has given us. We are to invest these talents, as that parable tells us, in order to bring a return to God’s kingdom. As the saying goes, we are responsible for the effort, and God is responsible for the outcome. We need to be careful that our efforts don’t become gods to us. It’s important always to remember that the world and all that is in it belongs to God. That means our abilities, our opportunities, the food on our tables, the roof over our heads, the money in the bank, in fact, our very lives, are gifts from God. If we are too quick to pay tribute to our own worth and merit in the midst of our efforts, we are blind and remain in a sin unable to see the bountiful and generous love of God that surrounds us.

WaWalter Brueggemann says of the 23^rd Psalm:

. . . . It recounts . . . a life lived in trustful receptivity of God’s gifts. It is God’s companionship that transforms every situation. It does not mean that there are no deathly valleys, no enemies, but they are not capable of hurt. Psalm 23 knows that evil is present in the world, but it is not feared. Confidence in God is the source of a life of peace and joy.^[1]

Confidence in God, trust in God. We may say to ourselves, "I’m convinced. This is what it’s all about. I want that kind of trust in God, but it just doesn’t come naturally." Well, as I said, trust is hard to understand and even harder yet to do.

When we meet someone, we can’t just say, "I trust you;" and, boom it just happens. We can’t will ourselves to trust. We develop trust for another person as our relationship with that person grows over time. And, so it is with our trust of God. It is a gift of the relationship with God that grows and develops. And, that relationship grows the more time we spend with God, those times, as scripture says, when we gather in our communities of faith, when we pray in all forms and fashion, when we actively participate in worship and praise of God, when we immerse ourselves in scripture and when we reach out to help one another. We can spend time with God in these ways and countless others. We spend time with God each time we allow our hearts to be flooded with gratitude for life itself. Yet we also spend time with God in the shadows or dark places of life for it is in these places that perhaps the strongest relationships with God are forged.

In all these ways, we can spend time with God allowing our relationship with God to grow and so too our trust. Yet, unlike in human relationships, we are given a leg up in our relationship with God. In the last verse, Psalm 23 tells us something pretty remarkable – that God is actually searching us out so that this trust can grow. The King James translation, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me," really doesn’t do justice to the idea that God is active in this relationship with us. In the Hebrew Bible, the verb "follow" is translated as "pursue." I remember hearing this translation of the Hebrew for the first time in seminary and feeling so overwhelmed, so grateful to think that the God of all times and before time was pursuing me with his precious divine love.

God’s goodness and steadfast love is pursuing us, longing for us to acknowledge him as our provider and protector, asking us to rely on him as our shepherd in all things. The psalmist captures in words God’s pursuit of us. Jesus Christ embodies this pursuit. The ultimate statement of God’s pursuit is that he came to us in flesh as the good shepherd so that our eyes could see the truth and reality of God’s love for us.

As we are fed this morning from this table that God has prepared for us, let’s each pray that our relationship with God flourishes into a trust that allows us to confess, "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." Let us pray that our own self-reliance, our own arrogance, our own self-made gods don’t blind us to seeing and feeling and knowing the love of God that pursues us in our very midst through Christ’s Holy Spirit.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with these prayerful words from Isaac Watts’ hymn based on Psalm 23:

The sure provision of my God
Attend me all my days;
O may Your House be my abode,
And all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest,
While others go and come;
No more a stranger or a guest,
But like a child at home.^[2]

Amen.

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^[1] Walter Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1984, pages 154, 157.
^[2] J. Clinton McCann, Jr., "Psalms," The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IV, ed. Leander E. Keck, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996, pages 770-771.