Soul Force

Blessings of Hard Times

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

May 3, 2009

A man goes to the rabbi at his wits end.

“Rabbi, I can’t take it any more~~any more~~. I have no peace in my home. I live in a shack so tiny that my wife and children drive me crazy. The noise, the commotion, it’s driving me ~~crazy~~insane! I don’t know what to do.”

“Do you have a chicken?” the rabbi asks.

“I do,” the man answers.

“Bring your chicken in the house and come back tomorrow.”

The next day the rabbi asks how things are going.

“Awful,” the man replies. “The chicken clucks all night. There are feathers and chicken poop everywhere.”

“Do you have a goat?” the rabbi asks.

“Yes, a Billy goat in a small pen.”

“Wonderful,” said the rabbi. “Bring your goat into the house.”

The man returns the next day. “The goat ate what little stuffing there was left in our one chair, he bleats all night and passes gas all day,” the man exclaims.

“Wonderful,” the rabbi says. “Do you have a cow?”

“I do.”

“You know what to do” says the rabbi.

The next day the man returns. “Rabbi, if you think a goat smells, you ought to try living with a cow!”

“One more thing,” ~~asks~~ says the rabbi. “Go home. Take the cow back to her pasture, the goat back to his pen and the chicken back to her coop.”

The next day the man appears in synagogue smiling. “So, how are things?” the rabbi asks.

“Wonderful,” the man exclaimed, “Never better. With only my wife and children around, the house is so quiet and clean. I can stretch out for a good night’s sleep drifting off to sound of chirping crickets and giggling children. What a blessed and fortunate man I am.”[1]

Sometimes it takes making things worse to for them to feel better. Sometimes hard times in retrospect feel like the best of times -- though while we're living through hard times we may experience nothing but misery. The 23rd Psalm comes to us in hard times because it reminds us that even when the worst has happened, there is hope -- even in the face of enemies, even in the shadow of death itself. It says that this is a good universe and that each and every one of us is loved.

We're living through some hard times right now in our world, in our nation, and in this congregation. Whole industries are at risk, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost across the nation. Some of us here have lost our jobs; many of us have lost money. There is another level of hard times in personal lives as well. Since I came to Second Parish a little over two and a half years ago, we've lost mothers and fathers, husbands and wives and children. We've had illnesses and we've had recoveries, and somehow we carry on. I suspect that sometimes we deaden our feelings too much, fail to share the depth of our ~~feelings~~ suffering with our friends, family members, with me as your minister. Often that process of allowing the grief to work its way through us ~~hastens our renewal~~ hastens our healing, enables us to come back to balance again. Sometimes letting go completely is the best way to carry on.

Often as we mourn or as we look fearfully ahead to the future in the face of illness or in the face of loss, it is this Psalm to which we turn for healing.

It's curious how the particular words of this psalm in its most familiar translation, the King James Version, resonates with us. Rabbi Kushner reflects on that particularity in his book about the 23rd Psalm:

I would guess that there is one, and only one, chapter of the Bible that most people in the English-speaking world know by heart... the ~~We may remember a lot of stories about Adam and Eve, Noah, Joseph, and Moses. We~~ ~~may be able to recite the Ten Commandments, parts of~~ ~~the Sermon on the Mount, and other passages that have~~ ~~entered into our literature. But when it comes to an entire~~ ~~chapter, I suspect that the only one we remember completely is chapter twenty-three of the Book of Psalms, the~~ Twenty-third Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . ."

Even if you cannot recite the entire psalm perfectly, you know it well enough to say it along with a congregation, the way many of us sing along with "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a baseball game. We are so familiar with the Twenty-third Psalm that when a new translation of the Bible comes along, using archaeological and linguistic evidence to help us understand more accurately what the original Hebrew and Greek meant to say, we are uncomfortable with the "improvements." We welcome the rewording of the stories, stripped of the Elizabethan vocabulary of the four-hundred-year-old King James translation (done in the time of Shakespeare). We don't miss the use of "begat" and "wouldst" and "thee" and "thou." But when it comes to our favorite psalm, we crave familiarity more than accuracy.[2]

I had an experience of the power of that ~~particular translation~~ attachment when I was helping to lead a memorial service for ~~the daughter of~~ my beloved Aunt Marion's daughter Lelia. It was about ten years ago, early on in my years in seminary, and I was quite pleased that I had learned ~~to know~~ that the New Revised Standard Version of the bible was the finest modern translation, accurate, gender ~~sensitive~~inclusive, the Bible of for all thinking readers. As it happened, the pulpit Bible at the church was that version, as is the one we use here, and I turned to it and began to read:

^NRSPsalm 23:1 <A Psalm of David.> The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. ² He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; ³ he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name's sake.

and I found I couldn't say "right paths" ~~in front of~~ to my aunt and my parents or to myself -- they just weren't the right words -- so I continued from memory with "paths of righteousness" and managed -- somehow -- to remember the "right" words all the way to the end. They aren't, of the course, the "right" words -- the right words are the original Hebrew -- but they have become for us the words, worn with care and sorrow and hope, that speak to us most deeply. Still, it is sometimes helpful to examine other ways of translating the words to awaken our brains from occasional over-familiarity, so I'm going to make some comments using the new translation by Robert Alter, which I read earlier.

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.

The meaning of "want" has changed sufficiently over the generations that we might be tempted to say something like "my needs will be met" instead of "I shall not want." When we say the Prayer of Jesus each week, we may lose track of the fact that we are asking for "daily bread" -- sustenance, not luxury. Times like these bring to mind a wonderful memoir of living through the Great Depression by a woman living on a farm: We Didn't Have Much, But We Sure Had Plenty. In a fit of inspiration recently, I came up with a brief koan:

Need little, want less,

Recipe for happiness.

Like the man in our story who came to his rabbi with complaints, hard times give us a chance to rebalance wants and needs, and to remember gratitude.

In grass meadows He makes me lie down, by quiet waters guides me. My life He brings back.

At a noisy party recently -- ~~actually~~come to think of it, many of you were there; actually, it was last night -- I had an opportunity to speak to someone who was curious about a number of theological issues about which we talked at some length. One of the reasons I suggested to him that regular participation in a church community is important is because it gives us an opportunity for quiet reflection, for standing back from our lives for a brief time to be restored to our own highest intentions. Our translator here has made an important correction to the time-worn translation of the last sentence of this phrase, "he restoreth my soul." He points out the following in his note:

My life He brings back. Though "He restoreth my soul" is time-honored, the Hebrew nefesh does not mean "soul" but "life breath" or "life." The image is of someone who has almost stopped breathing and is revived, brought back to life.[3]

I love the insight the translator brings us here: the Hebrew Bible has a more concrete and wholistic sense of what it is to be alive -- literally, to have breath. Our spirit, in this context, is quite literally "breath." It's important to remember that there's a layer of theology on top of the original words here, and that "soul" has all kinds of other implications; but when everything is going wrong, we want the old image: "He restoreth my soul." It seems to me that it's perfectly reasonable to move between these levels of understanding, and in the conversation last night we both came to realize that, yes, there are times we need our souls restored. That's part of the work we do here, together.

He leads me on pathways of justice for His name's sake.

We've come to a turning point in the psalm where the image of being a sheep--or a child--all of whose needs are in the hands of another, a shepherd, begins to fade and we begin to take responsibility for our own choices. The familiar translation speaks of "paths of righteousness" here; unfortunately, "righteousness" has come to have a bad odor of self-righteousness. Of course, we could do worse than to remind ourselves that "righteousness" is simply doing what is right, but I like the new translation for the insight it provides in what righteousness is about: acting justly as we walk the path of life. We may be led, but now we have an obligation to follow, to choose to act justly.

Though I walk in the vale of death's shadow, I fear no harm,

for You are with me.

Your rod and Your staff—it is they that console me.

The translator has attempted to simplify the more prolix English "valley of the shadow of death" in the King James Version here, returning to the simplicity of the Hebrew, which has less than half as many words overall as the traditional translation. Here at the heart of the psalm we are assured that even when death comes near us, we need not fear. Even in the face of the death of a loved one, we need not fear. I like to use another image in the face of death, one drawn from an old hymn my grandmother loved: Leaning on the Everlasting Arms. Here in the psalm we return to the image of the shepherd, the one who guides and corrects us and keeps us from falling even in the midst of the greatest possible sorrow, even in the midst of danger and loss.

You set out a table before me in the face of my foes.

You moisten my head with oil, my cup overflows.

Rabbi Kushner comments:

The psalm does not offer us the pious hope that, if we are good people, life will be easy, as some religious texts do. The author of the psalm has enemies. He has known failure. He has lost people he loved. In the process, he has learned that life is not easy. Life is a challenge, and he has grown stronger as, with God's help, he met the challenges of life. He is a better person, a wiser, stronger person than he would have been, had life not challenged him to grow.[4]

The Bible in Basic English uses the word "haters" instead of this translation's "foes" or the traditional "enemies." I'm uncomfortable with being hated; I don't like having enemies and I hope I do my best to avoid making enemies. But the reality is that life doesn't always go smoothly and that sometimes we have enemies; people who want what we have or want to prevent us from getting what we want. You may have heard of office politics or, perhaps worse, academic politics. There are real enemies out there, and it's important not to deny that fact. The psalm offers the reassurance that we can be calm even in the face of enmity, that we needn't be frightened or angry, that we are cared for even when we are being opposed.

Let but goodness and kindness pursue me all the days of my life.

And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD for many long days.

After the storm, the calm. We have come through the hard times, the valley of fear, opposition from enemies, and out the other side.

~~You may remember the old Rolling Stones~~

After the loss of a job, after a tragedy, a crisis, the loss of a loved one, a grave illness, we look back and find that we've been made stronger by the experience. Now, I want to be very careful here. I don't believe that God sends hard times to try us and make us better. No one should wish for hard times for the benefits they might bring. I don't believe in reassuring people when they're suffering and promising that things will get better. Each of us has to do this work ourselves. But after the chicken and the goat and the cow have been put out of the house again, after the storm has passed, we can return to gratitude. As Rabbi Kushner puts it:

Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly.[5]

As I said before, we are drawn back to the dear old words of the traditional version in moments of deep need, but it also helps to listen from other perspectives sometimes. Let me close with one more version, this the Sailor's paraphrase of the 23rd Psalm:

The Lord is my pilot, I shall not drift.

He lighteth me across the dark waters.

He steereth me in the deep channels.

He keepeth my log.

He guideth me beneath stars of his holiness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I sail 'mid the thunders and tempest of life,

I shall dread no anger, for thou art with me;

Thy love and thy care, they shelter me.

Thou preparest a harbour for me in the homeland of eternity.

Thou anointest the waves with oil

My ship rideth calmly.

Surely sunlight and starlight shall favour me on the voyage I take,

And I will rest in the port of God forever.[6]

Amen.