Psalm 16 "Always Before Me" Scott Hoezee

The last time I preached on Psalm 16 it was the summer of 1999. Looking back on what I said then (and I'll admit up front that I'm going to say a lot of the same things tonight!), it became clear to me that 1999, though a scant five years ago, was a rather different time than we find ourselves in during this particular summer. Mainly my words from that bygone year reflected the fact that we were still very much in the economic and cultural boom of the 1990s. I made several references in that sermon to how well many people had done in the stock market in recent years and I made some other comments that also reflected what I can describe only as a more carefree world--a world that had not yet attached any significance to a date now known in shorthand form as 9/11.

In the year 2000, author David Brooks wrote an uproariously funny, but finally also a highly adroit, summary of where the 1990s brought us. Bobos in Paradise detailed what Brooks described as the new upper class. The coined term "bobos" is short for "bourgeois bohemians," that strange class of folks in this country who exhibit both a 1960s-like social consciousness and a 1990s-like infatuation with pleasure and all the modern gizmos and gadgets needed to make life more pleasurable. Bobos are people who spend huge amounts of money on business-casual clothing precisely so they can look like they're not overly attached to the trappings of high fashion (even though they maybe spent more money on dressing down than they would have spent to dress up!). These are folks who shunned the Yuppie culture of the 1980s and its addiction to fine restaurants in favor of more home-cooked meals. Except that now Bobos have pantries at home featuring six different kinds of gourmet salts (and Bobos can hold long discourses on the differences among those salts, too). Bobos are Starbucks-swilling, Gap-wearing, Restoration Hardware-equipped, Nordic Trac-trained, PT Cruiser-driving consumers who will fight to the death to deny that they enjoy consuming in the first place.

Well, as I said, David Brooks's book on this cultural landscape is both insightful and also very funny. In fact, I was reading that very book, this sociological summary of the good life, and I was laughing out loud over it one morning when the phone rang. It was my wife telling me to turn the TV on--the World Trade Center had just been hit by two airplanes. And then it seemed like a long time before I laughed again. The age of optimism and naivete was over. The 1990s and its economic boom were over. Before that bad day was over, CNBC's main financial analyst, Ron Insana, would be live on television wearing his usual very expensive suit--standard Wall Street attire--but it was now a ruined suit, covered in the ash and dust from the crumbled Twin Towers. Mr. Insana's ruined suit was emblematic of 9/11 and all that it ruined for so many lives then and since.

Psalm 16 presents the words of a person whose life appears to be going swimmingly. This could almost be a pre-9/11 Bobo. Everything is working for this psalmist. These look to be the words of a winner, of a person who was born sunny-side up as a confirmed optimist and whose life also furthers this native optimism by containing one good turn after the next. I suspect we've all met people like this. I also suspect that at least some of us have come quietly to despise these same people!

We know the type. They are the parents of golden children--offspring who never gave their parents any trouble, who did well in school, made profession of faith as teenagers already, succeeded in college, married well, and now have their own golden children. We know the type. They've succeeded in everything to which they've turned their hands. Their businesses have bloomed, even during recessions. On a lark, they bought Microsoft stock when it was still in single digits. Their snazzy cars never break down, their bodies seem incapable of gaining weight, their skin is perennially tan, their golf came is shockingly good.

We know the type. Not only can they afford to take a Caribbean cruise, they also end up being the one-millionth passenger and so win another cruise free of charge. Oh yes, we know the type. Call them lucky, call them charmed, call them blessed. But if you are not such a person yourself--if you feel like you've had to struggle and scrape for what little you've got--if that's you, then life's winners drive you a little nuts.

So we don't really want to read these folks' autobiographies. We don't want to be subjected to a litany of how life's boundary lines have fallen in pleasant places, about how the one time they did get sick they were suddenly cured, about how full their cup is with expensive Cabernet. We don't want to hear about all the flashes of insight God keeps pouring into their hearts seeing as we feel like we've not heard from God in months. We don't want to hear the Bill Gates of this world say, as this psalmist says in verse 1, "Protect me, O God! Keep me safe!" "Yeah right," we are tempted to sneer. "Like the successful really need any more help! What do they have to worry about?!"

Then again, maybe we need to take another look at this psalm. Life is, after all, full of variety. There are some people whose lives have been charmed from the get-go. There are also some whose lives have seemed nearly cursed from the get-go. But in truth, most of us have experienced a little of both--most all of us have had some good times and also some bad times, and lots of average times in between, too.

The Book of Psalms, as we have noted in the past few weeks, is designed to help us through all those different times. Psalm 16 fits the happy times but, if we look more closely at Psalm 16, we may discover that it fits us in more ways than one. Because just maybe this psalm fits our post-9/11 situation better than it fit even our pre-9/11 lives. Because despite how the world changed three years ago, we still are so very blessed. But we now enjoy those blessings from the midst of a context that also forces us to say that even so, we need God as our refuge because God alone is the solid center of our lives on whom we depend even when so much else has lately grown more uncertain.

Because not a few of us can say with the psalmist that, all things considered, a lot of life's boundary lines have fallen in very pleasant, very convenient, very enriching places. Our cups are nicely full. Psalm 16 reminds us that life does have a lot of pleasures, benefits, and delights. That's true for some people all the time and it's true for most of us at least some of the time. But this psalmist is not arrogantly saying, "Hey, everybody! Look at me! Look how good I've got it!" This psalmist is not trying to show off. Instead the point of this psalm is to suggest that particularly in prosperous times, we need to work hard to keep God the bright center to everything.

And that's more difficult than you might think. After all, when are we more likely to forget God: when we are beaten up by life's heartaches or when we're fluffed up by life's joys? When do we find ourselves more prone to pray? When we're in trouble or when we're doing just fine? When did churches have the best attendance a few years back: September 9, 2001, or September 16, 2001? I think we know the answer. As much as anything, Psalm 16 reminds us of the dangers of prosperity.

Of course, if you are yourself in a wilderness period right now, you're not much moved to hear about how perilous it is to be rich. Sometime back I was visiting someone who is quite well-off financially (not from this congregation by the way!) and I noticed a book on his shelf titled The Agony of Affluence. And I thought, "Uh-huh, must be really rough to have so much money! You may as well write a book about The Heartache of Good Health or The Misery of a Meaningful Marriage!"

My cynicism aside, however, the fact is that the good times of life do present spiritual dangers. That's why we should not read the opening verse of Psalm 16 and snort at how we don't want to hear a well-off person pleading for safety. Because that opening verse sets the stage for the rest of the psalm. Verse 1 declares that the challenge of trusting God is to keep God at the center, as the supreme reality of our lives.

Samuel Johnson once said that a death sentence has a marvelous way of concentrating the mind. True enough. If you are waiting for some lab results and the doctor calls you up and says, "I think maybe you'd better come in to the office so we can talk," well, you can be assured that your thoughts will start getting very serious very fast. It's not hard to think about the ultimate things of life and of God when a sword is dangling by a thread right over your head! The "trick" is to have a well-concentrated mind when there is no death sentence but only a full life of blessings and abundance. That's why every single verse of this brief psalm drips with words of gratitude to God. Ten times in just eleven verses this psalmist uses the word "you" in addressing Yahweh. In every line of this psalm the psalmist is essentially declaring, "The Lord is everything to me."

No matter who you are or what your particular lot in life, keeping God always before your eyes is your proper vocation. For this psalmist, as for perhaps some of us, that means locating God in the midst of a life awash in blessings. Again, this psalmist is not bragging about his life but is instead taking proper stock in what he has and then locating God at every turn. God is the author of all this person's blessings.

Now we know full well that those sunny preachers who guarantee material success to anyone who has enough faith are patently wrong. There are no such guarantees in the Bible. All those psalms of lament, all Jesus' predictions of persecution for his followers, demonstrate that the simple equation "Faith = Success" represents nothing short of a heresy.

However, if your life has blessings in it, then you must assume the stance of Psalm 16 and attribute those blessings to God. Because the bottom line of this psalm is that God alone is the One who can show us the path of life. And when verse 11 talks about that path, the psalmist is not referring to the road that leads to Wall Street successes. No, this "path of life" is the road that leads to God's kingdom. It's the road home, to the place from which we came in God's good creation and the place to which we need to return.

But the heart of the gospel is precisely that the path leading to life winds its way first through death. When Jesus said, "I am the way," he said it not too long before Jesus' own way led him to a cross. Christians have ever since claimed that this sacrificial path that refuses to avoid death and suffering is the real source of life. The gospel life, not a strong economy, not a well-padded retirement account, not anything else of this earth, this gospel is the real source of our life. Like the psalmist, we are properly grateful to God for his every blessing. But we never, ever confuse the pleasantries of life with what is truly our Life.

A couple of weeks ago on the Fourth of July I preached a sermon that urged us to be who we are. We need to remember our true identity (and so the true source of our security in life) and we need to do this every day. This morning we similarly said that we remember what it means to be people of the ascension and that a key thing this means is that we live not for ourselves but for the sake of others. But one of the most perilous features to a life full of blessing is amnesia, a willingness to live in the moment, to live as though the whole world popped into existence fifteen minutes ago and so we now reinvent ourselves and we make up the meaning of our lives as we go along. It is no coincidence that Americans are both among the richest people who ever lived and are, at the same time, among the least historically aware people that has ever lived.

A major publisher recently put out an American history book for 5^th Graders that devoted more space to the baseball career of Cal Ripkin, Jr. than to the Great Depression. When someone pointed out this piece of idiocy, some folks merely shrugged, saying that, after all, Ripkin's career had lasted longer than the Depression. Most folks don't know history and are vastly uninterested if you point this deficit out to them.

But the same must not happen here. We come to church to rehearse the real meaning of our lives. We come here to be reminded, over and over (because that is what preaching and liturgy are as much as anything: reminders) so that when we leave here any given Sunday, we go home having a better sense once more for what's what in life. Like the psalmist, we should see God everywhere: in bank statements and at the gas pump, in the job we go back to tomorrow morning and in the dinner we enjoy that evening. He is the giver of all those gifts because he just is our very life. How could we miss seeing him?

As I said at the outset, the summer of 2004, awash in predictions of terrorism even as our troops continue to die in Iraq and elsewhere, this summer feels much different from the summer of 1999 when last we visited Psalm 16. We've got both bane and blessing, both great resources and great fears. We know how firmly we cling to our God because of those things in life that make us afraid and uncertain. Psalm 16 is here to remind us that if those are the only times we call out to God, then we are missing a big piece of what it means to live as God's children at all moments in our lives, starting with ordinary days and including extraordinarily good times and days.

If you have come here to God's house for a second time this day, I hope it is in part because you want to be rescued from the oblivion in which altogether too many other people tend to live. We need liturgy, songs, sermons, and prayers to make us fully alive, to open our eyes so that we are not oblivious to God's presence but so that we can instead say, with utter conviction, "I have set the Lord always before me." In the Name of Him who is the way, the truth, and the life, Amen.