Psalm 91 "Confidence in a Cynical Age" Scott Hoezee

It is likely a sign of our times that a recent Gallup poll showed that 85% of teenaged girls and 71% of teenaged boys expressed a "very strong need" to feel safe and secure where they live and go to school. The composite of that results in 77% of all teenagers, just more than three-quarters, who say that security concerns are near the top of their minds as many days as not. I don't know whether that is a significantly larger percentage than some years ago, but if it were, that would hardly be a surprise. Likely all of us have recently found an increase in how often we ponder issues of health, safety, and security.

Ours is a precarious age. We live in a time when a single line scrawled onto a bathroom wall at Christian High is enough to shut the school down for a day and then turn it into a locked-down campus once you students did return. We live in a time when a new cabinet position was recently created: Homeland Security. We live in a time when the threat of a virus is enough to make millions of people don surgical masks from Beijing to Toronto. We have just recently come through a war, and the dust had scarcely settled when some of our leaders hinted that we're likely not finished fighting yet. And we none of us can forget the sight of those Twin Towers thundering to the ground in New York even as we cannot help but wonder when and where the next such horror will occur.

It is an unhappy fact that with very little effort, we could update the language of Psalm 91 to fit our present age. Talk of a "fowler's snare" sounds suspiciously like the kind of traps terrorists like to spring on the unsuspecting. Talk of a "deadly pestilence" reminds us of things like SARS and AIDS. Talk of terrors in the night sounds like a description of burglaries, rapes, and murders. When you hear language that refers to thousands falling to their deaths, you are reminded of Ground Zero.

These days there is fear aplenty for all of us. But there is also a fair amount of cynicism fueled by uncertainty. Can we really be secure? People clearly have doubts. Indeed, nothing in the last eighteen months has been lampooned and caricatured more often by late-night comedians and Saturday Night Live than Tom Ridge's color-coded "Terror Alert" system. But behind just about every joke there lurks the cynical suspicion that this is unlikely to help us much anyway so why not poke fun of it? Today people poke fun of almost everything.

Do you know what the hottest item on the market has been the last four weeks? It's that deck of 52 playing cards featuring the faces of Iraq's "Most Wanted." The Internet retailers hawking these cards say they cannot keep up with demand. Some of the websites promise you that not only is this a marvelous collectible from "Operation Iraqi Freedom," these are real cards that you can use. Not surprisingly, a few new games have cropped up, too, including "Baghdad Rummy" and other cheeky card games. But there is something very troubling, and ultimately quite cynical, about reducing matters of international justice and deadly warfare to something as trivial as a deck of playing cards. Can you imagine after World War II someone's making a deck of cards out of the faces of Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and other Nazis and then casually playing a game with these killers? Such a phenomenon seems unlikely to have happened in 1945 but in 2003, things are different.

A few moments ago I said that Psalm 91 can easily be retrofitted to describe the times in which we live. But a description of the times is not the core of this ancient psalm. The main message of Psalm 91 is not "Times are bad" but instead "Times are bad but for that very reason your confidence in God needs to be stronger than ever!" The threats around us make people nervous, uncertain, afraid, and cynical. Psalm 91 conveys a counter-message: the poet who composed these words wants to tell us that instead of letting the wider world determine how we feel, we need to let our ultimate confidence in God become the lens through which we view the wider world. God, not current events, is what shapes our viewpoints, informs our hopes, and brings us a confidence that avoids cynicism.

Throughout this psalm God is presented in several ways but all of them deliver the same message: security. The God of Israel is said to be like a fortress, a refuge, a high tower in whose shadow you can be concealed from those who are out to get you. God is compared to a mother bird who will cover you with the feathers of her wings. The faithfulness of God is compared to a shield, a fortified rampart or wall. God is a kind of "safe house" where angels are at work to keep evil at bay and to catch you even if somehow you do still fall.

To put it mildly, the language of Psalm 91 is unstintingly confident. There is no hesitation here. There is not even the hint of a proviso, caveat, or conditional phrase. Nowhere does the psalmist say, "Well, OK, maybe you will get killed but then God will whisk you to heaven." The rhetoric here is far more crisp than that. Listen: he will save you; you will not fear; a thousand may fall but it will not come near you; no harm will befall you, no disaster will come near you; you will not strike your foot upon a stone.

If you were to take all of this straightforwardly, it sounds like an iron-clad guarantee. It makes it sound as though being a faithful follower of God will give you an automatic pass in all of life. If someone shoots a sub-machine gun into a crowd, the bullets will always miss you. If someone with SARS sneezes on you, the microbes will always die before you get infected. The plane you are flying in will never be highjacked, if you get drafted to fight a war, the Lord himself will be your flak jacket--you will come home in one piece.

That's what this seems to be saying and yet I would guess that most of us here this morning, young and old alike, are already thinking, "But we know things don't always work out this way." Any number of you here today could come up with a counter-example of a Christian person who did get sick and died, who was not spared when a plane crashed, who went to war and came home in a body bag. If becoming a believer provided insulation from every danger in the world, millions would flock to churches first thing tomorrow morning.

But most of us have already known enough grief, suffering, sickness, and sorrow to know that we would never dare make such open-ended promises to people. In fact, I would feel dishonest if I were to tell you young people that I can guarantee your safety and health for the rest of your days if only you can generate enough faith in your hearts.

But now I have backed myself into a theological corner. A little while ago you heard the Word of God read in this service as we do every week. Yet now it appears as though I am calling that very Word into doubt (which is not exactly what a minister is supposed to do in a sermon!). Clearly we need to do some work to understand Psalm 91.

Maybe a good place to begin is to remember that Psalm 91 is not the only psalm in the Bible. There are 149 other psalms and to understand any one of them, it's a good idea to keep in mind what you can learn from the others. As most of us already know, there are lots of psalms that admit and lament that many times, even for followers of God, life is difficult and we are not spared every harm and injury and sickness that may come our way.

All you have to do is back up three poems to Psalm 88 and you can read there the darkest and most dreary psalm in the Bible. Psalm 88 is almost exactly as long as Psalm 91 but there is not one happy verse in the whole thing. It looks like the mirror opposite of Psalm 91. Psalm 88 goes on and on about how bad life is, how much the psalmist is suffering, how far away God seems to be. Psalm 91 says, "No harm will come near to you." Psalm 88 says, "From my youth I have been afflicted and close to death . . . I am filled with despair." Psalm 91 concludes with "He will call upon me and I will answer." Psalm 88's last line is "You have taken my loved ones from me; the darkness is my best friend."

So even within the Book of Psalms there is reason to conclude that despite all its grandsweeping promises, Psalm 91 must not make us forget that even faithful believers suffer. We also know that if we look at the rest of the Bible there are many examples of God's servants suffering. Jeremiah and most of the other prophets did not have an easy time of it. The last great Old Testament prophet, and the first great New Testament character, is John the Baptist, who had his head lopped off by Herod. Jesus promised his disciples that they would suffer for his sake, and from the murder of Stephen onward, we know that most of the apostles were arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and finally executed.

But if all of that is true, what do we make of Psalm 91? Where is this high-flung rhetoric supposed to lead us? Maybe we can start to figure that out by recalling the most famous time that Psalm 91 was ever quoted. Ironically, the single most well-known recital of this psalm came from the lips of the devil himself. Satan led Jesus up to a very high place and tempted Jesus to step right off the edge because, after all, didn't God promise in Psalm 91, "He will give his angels charge over you so that you will not dash your foot upon a stone"? The devil knows the Bible. He knows the parts that look like blank check promises just waiting to get cashed. "Give it a whirl, Jesus," the devil sneered.

But Jesus refused. Jesus knew what we also need to remember: the promises we find in the Bible are not supposed to become fodder for some divine "fear factor"-like dare. We are not supposed to base our faith on whether or not we can force God to come through for us. If we insist on testing and proving every article of faith, there will be no end to it. Jesus knew that is the wrong way to read and use the Bible.

Psalm 91 is not something you are supposed to go out and try to prove. Psalm 91 is not supposed to be a type of litmus test as though you are supposed to think that if your life does not already look exactly this safe, secure, and completely snug, then there is something wrong with your faith.

What Psalm 91 does say to you young people and to all of us in these precarious and cynical times is that no matter what happens, if God is your bottom line, your refuge, the place you most want to be, then there are several wonderful things that can never change. First, God loves you and wants you to flourish. God does not wish harm on any of his children. We can ponder where God is when bad things happen in our lives. We can argue back and forth for a long time whether or not God ever "permits" bad things to come our way. And we can affirm that God is able to use unhappy events to make us stronger so that we can in turn help others. That may be so, but based on the witness of the Bible we need to know that God does not desire us to be hurt. Whatever else Psalm 91 says, it lets you know that if you make God your refuge, you can be assured that God will receive you. When you run to embrace God, he is going to hug you back, not slap you in the face!

Psalm 91 is a call to confidence in God and so is a call away from the cynicism of our age. At a time when many people seem to live only for the moment (because beyond that, who knows what will happen); at a time when many people are cynical as to whether you can really count on anything or anybody; at a time when some people make a game out of war as part of a wider trivialization of almost everything--at a time like this Psalm 91 is a call to you young people to be different in your generation. It is a call to confidence in a God who, if you make him your resting place, will never leave you. Nothing will separate you from this God because it is the very power of God that fuels his determination to be with you always, even if the worst somehow comes, even when one day you die as we all must. Psalm 91 shouts a loud "No" to the cynics who say that you cannot rely on anybody. You can rely on God! You can have confidence that he wants the best for you.

And understand that this is a source of comfort and certainty right now. Please don't walk away from this sermon thinking that the only time Psalm 91 will come true will be in heaven such that in the meantime everything is up for grabs. God is with you now! True, not every prayer for healing will lead to a miraculous cure, prayers for safety will not mean there will never again be a traffic accident, pleas for security will not mean that tomorrow morning every terrorist in the world will shun violence and take up botany instead. But remember: we don't pray to test God but we pray to show our trust in the ardent belief that God hears us when we pray, he cares for us always, and because he desires our flourishing, he will work constantly and consistently to protect us, prosper us, heal us, and lavish his grace on us already now.

Lewis Smedes once wrote that we should avoid being fake or hypocritical and just admit that deep down what each one of us wants is some enjoyment in life. Deep down we hope that the day may come when people will stand up and cheer over something we did. We want the bells to ring and the Hallelujah Chorus to sound for us, too. Smedes even said that anyone who claims otherwise, anyone who says he could care less about whether or not anything good ever happened to him, such a person is not only being dishonest but is probably a bit of a nasty person, too! Most of the people I've met who claim they don't care about being happy have tended to be pretty good at spreading their unhappiness around!

Our great God created us for joy and one day, as C.S. Lewis predicted, joy itself will be the serious business of what heaven is all about. So as Psalm 91 reminds us, already now we can be confident that our God wants us to feel joy. God wants us to make him our very home, the place we want to be more than anywhere else. And young people, especially in a cynical and flippant age when some have so little confidence in anything or anybody, let me urge you to let confidence swell in your hearts--confidence that God loves you, that in Christ Jesus God understands any pain you have, and above all confidence that this strong and good and gracious God will never leave you, will never turn you out into the streets, will never say "No" when you ask, "O God, can I stay with you?"

I wish that the world in which you have to grow up were not so dangerous. I wish I could wrap every one of you up in an invisible security blanket that would protect you from all harm. We at Calvin Church love you beyond the telling of it. But there is much that we cannot do for you or promise you. But what I can tell you for sure, what I can promise you will be true forever, is that you are loved, you are accepted, you've got a home in Jesus. Be confident in that. Be sure of that. And if you are, you may find joy filling up your heart forever. Amen.