I preched this sermon on Sunday, May 2 at St. Lydia's. The text is Psalm 30; you can read it here.
This is a psalm of Thanksgiving: the kind of thanksgiving
that comes only after things have gotten really, really bad. It’s the kind of thanksgiving that
comes after staring right into the darkness, and realizing, with great and irreversible
finality, that you do not have control over your own life. There is nothing below you but God.
This kind of thanksgiving comes only after great fear, and
often, great risk. For the
psalmist, it’s staring into the face of death, staring into an illness that
threatens to steal the psalmists’ life.
It looks different for each of us, but the stark realization is the same: it’s
not up to us. We don’t get to
choose.
My first year in graduate school I ended a relationship with
a man who I loved, and who very much wanted to be with me. This man represented security in every
way. He was older, stable, wise,
and kind. He could take care of
me, he would be a good partner. I
was, in many ways, dependent on him.
And as I contemplated something that seemed next to impossible at the
time: ending our partnership, I felt as if I was about to jump over the edge of
something very, very high. And
into something very, very dark.
Not being with him meant being alone in the world. And being alone in the world was an
awfully scary thing.
Philippe Petit was 24 years old when he, with a number of
accomplices, strung a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and
stepped out into the void. This is
what he said later about that moment, 110 stories high:
I had to make a decision of shifting my weight from one
foot anchored to the building, to the foot anchored on the wire. This was probably the end of my life,
to step on that wire, and, on the other hand, something that I could not resist
called me upon that cable.
And death is very close.
There are these moments in our lives, moments of risk,
moments of illness, moments of suffering, when we discover, whether we like it
or not, that security, that safety, is an illusion. Our houses and incomes and jobs and routines are all part of
the trick, part of the magic that keeps us from seeing that in reality, we’re
balanced on a wire, with death very close.
And the wire is God.
The moments when it all gets stripped away, as we turn to
face death: these are full of terror and beauty, full of the grace and
impossibility of a man balanced on a wire 110 stories up.
Petit’s friend said this:
I saw his face changing. He was very tense, and all of a sudden there was something,
like a relief in him. And from
that time, I thought, that’s it, he’s secure.
And then he begins to weep.
I want to live my life on that wire.
I want to do everything I can to remember that security is
an illusion,
that in the end, it’s just me and a wire and the whistle of
the wind.
Like Petit, we start onto that wire tense, testing, longing
for the security of the building
We finish the sermon together, and so I invite you to share
a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my
words.
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