05/12/2024: How to Want and Stay on the Path of Justice (Mother's Day)

How to Want and Stay on the Path of Justice

Psalm 23

Holmdel Community United Church of Christ

Rev. Loren McGrail

Mothering Sunday, May 12,2024

 

Psalm 23. It’s perhaps the most popular and memorized passage in the Bible. It is often heard at funerals. You have heard it a million times, but have you taken the time to really think about its meaning? Before I dig in, I would like to invite you to turn to your neighbor, best if it is not someone you know well, and simply share which part or parts do you like the best or which ones are calling for your attention today? Each person take about 2 minutes then switch.

How many of you chose the second part of the first line, “I shall not want?” How many of you chose “He leads me on paths of righteousness? I would like to explore these two lines in greater depth from perspectives that you might not have thought about before, or which will open up the Psalm for you in a new ways.

Let me begin with a story from Rabbi Kushner’s book on Psalm 23.  Some of you will know Rabbi Kushner as the author of the popular book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People:

    

Of course, she wants. She wants to be healthy again, to live long enough to see her grandchildren grow up. She wants to be there when they ask about what kind of child their mother was when she was a little girl. She wants. Is the psalmist really saying that she should not want? Is the psalmist saying that God will extinguish all desire and we will be content with what we have and long for nothing more?

The poet Joanne Starks in her Meditation on Psalm 23 interprets the line this way:

                        “Fashioned in you

Rabbi Kushner says the problem with understanding this line is one of translation. The four-hundred-year-old King James translation uses words that mean something different in the 21st century English. In Elizabethan English “to want” means not to desire but to lack, to be without something as in the phrase “to be found wanting.” The promise is that God, our faithful shepherd, will see to it that each member of his flock has enough food and water and a warm place to sleep. He goes on to say that the intent of the Hebrew is more accurately captured in words like “I shall lack nothing” or “The Lord is my shepherd, what more do I need.”  For Jews this phrase reminds them of those 40 years in the desert with a God who provided for their needs providing food, shelter, clothing, water and of course manna. They did indeed lack nothing.

The message seems to be that if you don’t have something, no matter how much you desire it, you don’t really need it. If you needed it, God would have provided it. I appreciate the importance of this message to be grateful for what you have, “Love the one you are with” but at the same time there is something that bothers me here. I find it hard to believe that we should not long for certain things. It doesn’t make sense to me to say to someone facing an incurable illness you should not want more, more life, more time. Furthermore, what if the more we long for is wisdom, or courage, or to be a more generous person? What if what we long for is a dream of the promised land shared by all people? There is a part of me that wants to always want, to never be satisfied with who I am and what I have achieved, that yearns to reach higher, to understand more, to never be satisfied with the world as it is.

Like Rabbi Kushner I believe that God has planted in everyone a desire for more, a reluctance to settle for what we have and what we are. He says our challenge is to want more of the right things…Hear his translation:

                        The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall often want.

                        I shall yearn. I shall long. I shall aspire.

                        I shall continue to miss people

                        and the abilities that are taken from my life

                        as loved ones die and skills diminish.

                        I shall probe the empty spaces in my life

                        like a tongue probing a missing tooth.

                        But I will never feel deprived or diminished

                        if I don’t get what I yearn for,

                        because I know how blessed I am by what I have.

Ah, to yearn and feel blessed. I find his explanation more plausible, and it fits more with a God who calls us to be co-creators, repairers, and menders of the world, working toward God’s Beloved Community on earth as it is in heaven.

Now let’s turn to the familiar line, “He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.” Hear how it is interpreted by Zephania from the World Council of Churches: “He lets me see a country of justice and peace and directs my steps towards his land.” Dear Ones, the Hebrew word for righteousness is justice. This beloved Psalm is also an anthem for seeking and staying on the pathway of justice. Which brings us full circle back to why I chose this sacred text for Mothering Sunday.

As some of you may know Mother’s Day was originally a call for mothers to rise up and refuse to kill each other’s children. This Proclamation was written in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe, suffragette, abolitionist, and writer.  She is also the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Hear these stirring words from the Proclamation:

Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.

“Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

Therefore, Dear Ones, I invite you then this Mothering Sunday to not only reflect on all the many ways we are called to mother each other but also how do we find and stay on the pathways of justice. How do we say no more killing of each other’s children?

Dear Ones, may we all find love, protection, and shelter in God’s motherhood or our Lord, the Good Shepherd, and may we stay on those pathways of justice so we may extend her motherhood to all people for God’s “liberating love” is our shared home.