Peoples Church of Dover Sermon

Psalm 17:13-15 Whose Portion Is This Life

Sermon June 7, 2009: People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE: The Rev. Dan Griggs

One of the great American poets of our time was William Carlos Williams. He was a family physician in Rutherford, New Jersey; and he wrote some of the more insightful poetry of the mid-twentieth century. In an interview with the Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, Williams told a story that illuminates the change our culture has undergone—change from a sense of the sacred to a secular materialism. This is the story Williams told.[1]

"This is a here-and-now world, that's what I mean when I say 'secular'; and the

religious side of it, even the moral side of it—well, there's a lot up for grabs.

You want an example of what I mean? …. A grandmother, a young one, who

was born in Italy and came here when she was fifteen, and married and

brought up a family, and now is helping her daughter bring up another one,

told me a few weeks ago that it's become different going to church here than it

was when she was in Italy and when she first came here. She used to sit there

and talk to God, and try to figure out what He wanted, and try to please Him.

Now, she says, she mostly thinks about what's going on in her life, in her kids'

lives, and she asks God to make it better. You know what? She got … close

to being as smart as the big-shot social critics and philosophers—she

said to me: 'It used to be I prayed to God, that I would learn what He wanted

from me, and how He wanted me to behave…; but now I pray to God that He

help us with this problem, and the next one—to be a Big Pal of ours! It used

to be, when I prayed to God, I was talking to Him; now, it's me talking to

myself, and I'm only asking Him to help out with things.'"

It's easy in our time to pose the "secular" as the opposite of the "sacred." It occurs to me that it has always been that way, and that when you have these two elements together, the secular and the sacred, what you really have is an opportunity for incarnation—I mean, the opportunity to put what in your deepest heart you believe into the life you live every day. The secular and the sacred can stand together: or they can be at war.

The psalmist knew this and wrote about it, but not so often with words that cut as deep as this couplet in the 17^th Psalm that was read a moment ago:

O Lord, by your hand save me from such mortals,

from mortals whose portion in life is this world.

People "whose portion in life is this world." When I find my prayer life getting too thin and my sense of my spiritual awareness getting numb, I pick up the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and read through the Psalter: it's organized so that you can read several psalms morning and evening and complete the Book of Psalms in a month. That exercise usually refreshes me. Over the past several years, as I have read the Psalms, certain lines or half-lines have jumped off the page and shaken me. This summer my sermons are going to be about those lines in the Psalms, and today I'm at Psalm 17:14a: "mortals whose portion in life is this world." Wow! The war between the "sacred" and the "secular" has rarely been described so well.

What might this really mean? Don't we all have to live in the secular world, make a living so we can live now and retire? Even monasteries know this reality. One young man who wanted to be a Catholic monk was sent to a career development center for a three-day series of tests and interviews; and what the psychiatrist, the test director and the chaplain discovered was that this young man just wanted to crawl into a monastic hole and live there. He didn't want to preach, he didn't want to garden, he didn't want to provide counseling to others, he didn't want to run the monastery office—he just wanted to go pray… and eat, of course. They told him that not even a monk can live that way.[2] The world is real, and each one of us has to find a place in it; so every one of us is "secular" in that sense.

But in this half-line the psalmist sings about his anxiety that there are people in his life "whose portion is this world"—only. There's a fearsomeness in this phrase—to contemplate a man or a woman who has no soul to lose and is free to do anything it takes to win. Jesus' words come to mind:[3]

What will is profit a person to gain the whole world

and lose their soul?

But the people the Psalm refers to would answer Jesus: "What will it profit? It will profit exactly what I want in life—money, sex and power!"

We live in a time and culture that places humankind at the center of the universe, that focuses solely on what humans can know, can do, can build, can fix, can enjoy: a time and culture that still uses the word "god" but only in two ways—as an expletive, or to amplify patriotism. Such a materialism as this gives rise to that bumper sticker that says, "The one who dies with the most toys wins." Such a person believes (in their living if not in their speaking) that what can truly satisfy their life in the depths and for all their life is secular—only.

There was another culture that became predominantly secular with no sense of the holy: the ancient classical world between the time of Alexander the Great and the fall of Rome—about five hundred years.[4] That culture crumbled when the barbarians invaded. It crumbled not because there was no army, not because there was no leadership, not because everybody got stupid all of a sudden: it crumbled because even with the strongest army in the world, the most effective emperors ever known and the growth of great libraries and schools, nevertheless the people themselves had no content in their souls—"whose portion is this world."

Now you know I'm not advocating that we all walk around with Bibles tucked under our arms, or that we hold back in our work, our family life or our participation in the improvement of our country and its economy and social justice. We are secular: there's no escaping it: we are "human"—a word related to both "humor" and "humus"—a light heart and dark rich soil. To live too carefully in the world would be to mimic the one-talent servant who hid his master's money in a hole in the ground and returned it without profit.[5]

What I'm advocating is that we not live as people "whose portion is this world"—only. There's got to be something more—some content in our souls. And what is that content? Some connection with the Eternal. It may be your moral sense. It may be your devotional life. It may be a whole-hearted commitment to family in the name of Christ. It may be a silent listening for the whisper of the truth about self, the truth about us, the truth about the way the world is. It may be a call to act on a social issue that needs the application of some "salvation." But however you have been touched by the more, that's where your soul thrives. Don't lose it. Nurture it. Expand it.

The ancient legionnaires who followed Julius Caesar into "all Gaul divided into three parts"[6] were deeply frightened by the Celtic warriors they had to fight, because the Celts believed that there is another complete world where the spirit goes after death; so they weren't afraid to die—ten million Celts, and not a one of them afraid of the Roman legions. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are not afraid to strap ten pounds of high explosive to their waists and become a human bomb, because they believe there is another complete world where the spirit goes after death. This is content in their souls. Do we Americans still have any content left in our souls?

What if a Christian were to surrender her or his whole future to the grace and promise of God, let go of the restraint that makes people "nice" instead of honest, and in this way have nothing she or he can lose, so that he or she is free to act for God whatever it takes? Now there is some content for the soul. Will you live in this secular culture as one "whose portion is this world," or will you join the sacred to the secular and live here as an incarnation of divine blessing?

AMEN

PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER