Sermon: "The Anxiety of Loss"

4th in the "What Keeps You Up At Night?" series.
Delivered November 1, 2009 by Rev. Laura Crihfield.
Sermon Text: Psalm 23

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That's a hard scene to watch. I don't know where it took you, but when I read it and as I watched it for the first time this morning at the 8:30 and now, it takes me immediately to the feelings and the tears and the sadness over my brother's death 12 years ago... all the emotions that went along with that. And that's not a place I like to go. That's not a place I choose to go if I can avoid it.

My "what if" is now. It's a scary, anxiety-producing thought. And while right now yours might not be as extreme or as dramatic as what we just saw, maybe it is, we all have our "what ifs," don't we? What if the thing I dread the most actually happens? What if? What if my loved one dies? What if my dream dies? What if my child walks away from what's best and loses his or her way? What if I lose my job, my house? What if I get sick? What if I don't get into my dream college, or any college? What if my mom or dad gets Alzheimer's and we lose that capacity to interact? What if I really blow it and lose a valuable friendship? What if I lose... ? What if?

"What ifs" run through our minds because loss is real and it's painful and it can be very scary. The mere thought of loss can bring on tremendous amounts of anxiety. So much so, that for all of us I would say, and for some of us especially, it can be paralyzing at times. Combine that with what I think is the unfortunate reality that modern Christianity doesn't leave much room for anxiety, and we begin to understand why we can often feel isolated and alone in our worry, afraid of naming our struggles. Because it's a taboo topic.

Scripture is full of the challenge to cast off anxiety and trust the Lord. And for those of us trying to follow Jesus, we want to take the challenge seriously. But then life gets hard. We face the "what ifs" and we hear words like the truth of passages like 1 Peter 5:7 that say, "Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." And we can wonder what to do with what we're experiencing. It's not as easy as it sounds, is it?

Even when our faith is firm and our confidence in the Lord is very real, it's not easy. We live in a broken world, a world full of sin and trouble and stress; a world most certainly full of loss. And as followers of Jesus who choose not to live with our heads in the sand, we can't deny it, and we certainly can't escape it. I wish we could escape it, don't you? But we can't. It's all around us.

So what are we supposed to do with the very real call, the very real idea that we are to live as people of hope? How do we live in the space between our reality and what we know will be reality? How do we live as those who see the world with all of its brokenness and all of its pain and all of its loss and know that God will have the final word? Ultimately believing the words of Revelation 21:3-4 which say:

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Look! God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.'"

That's what Scripture promises will be real when Christ comes again. It's the hope we have to hold onto and I believe it! I am confident that God will make that happen. I hope you believe it. But we're not there yet. We are not there yet. We are in that space between what is and what we know will be. Loss is still a very real part of our lives and no matter how deep our faith we can still find ourselves worrying, staying up at night, unable to sleep. Anxiety.

With that in mind, the goal of today's service is fairly simple. It's just to remind us of the reality of God's presence and to encourage a calm trust in the midst of all of the losses in our lives, all of the hardships, all of the "what ifs," so that hopefully we can all sleep a little better at night.

To do this today, we're looking at Psalm 23, and just like the first service I forgot to bring up one of the green cards, but they're all over the place. There are green cards, hopefully in the seats in front of you. If you're in the front row they're on the thing. Thanks, Mandi! They look just like the ones last week. That's intentional so that you'll remember that they go with the same sermon series, but they have a different content on them today.

You will notice that on both sides of them is Psalm 23. We've put the New King James on one side and the TNIV, which is the Bible in front of you, on the other side. Our hope with these cards is that you will take one home with you, that you will put it wherever you see it the most during your waking hours. Put it at work if that's where you live. Put it at home if that's where you'd like to live. Put it wherever you will see it the most and allow it to speak to you. Allow it to remind you of the truth of the message today.

And if you have not done so, we would encourage you to memorize this Psalm, whatever version you like. That's why we put a couple of different ones on here. Maybe you have a different one in another translation of the Bible that you really like. This is one of the top ten really great important passages of Scripture for us to have right here where we can go to it without having to go to it. Okay? So I would encourage you to do so. So we want to provide those.

So let's read it. I'm going to read from the TNIV so you can either look on page 504 in the Bible in front of you or you can just use the card today and follow along as I read. Let's pray before I do.

Lord God, Thank you for your Word. Thank you that it is alive. Thank you that it is relevant for our lives. Thank you that you speak to us through it. I pray that you would do that this day. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be acceptable to you. Come, Holy Spirit, come, in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Psalm 23 (TNIV)

"The Lord is my Shepherd, I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters,
He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil,
for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

Likely familiar words, often read at funerals. I think it's safe to say that there are few words in all of Scripture that bring the kind of immediate comfort that these do. One of the commentaries that I was reading this week, George Knight, says:

"Psalm 23 is the world's favorite psalm. It's the favorite of Jew, Eastern Orthodox, Western Protestant, and wistful Agnostic alike. It comes alive when used at a wedding and even more so when said or sung at a funeral. And it expresses more vividly than any other portion of Scripture, the individual's private experience of God's grace."

I love that. "The individual's private experience of God's grace."

Contrary to our sometimes narrow view of this psalm, it really is a psalm for the living and the hope that it offers is far more encompassing than just at times of death. It's a psalm for you and for me to apply every day to our lives. And I want to challenge us, if we haven't done so before to look at it in a new light, to look at it with a new perspective.

Like so much of Scripture, Psalm 23 portrays life as a journey to God and with God. And it really does hone in on the believer's private, personal, individual experience of the grace that God offers to us. It talks about the many emotional seasons of our lives and assures us that no matter what's happening, when life is a struggle and we cannot even see our way out of the pit, when we are in that darkest valley, or life is fantastic and we are floating on cloud nine, it couldn't be any better, God is with us. God is with us.

It assures us that God carries us across the whole landscape of our lives. And it ends with the reminder that we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever, in perfect fellowship with the God who walked with us through it all. That's the hope that we hold onto as believers, as followers of Jesus. The challenge is to make that hope define all that we do now, to live the hope that we have. Not just when we're in touch with our own mortality, or when we're grieving the death of a loved one, but always.

David wrote this psalm during some of the most anxious of his days. But he was confident that the Lord would care for him in an intensely personal way. And I love how he begins, "The Lord is my Shepherd. I lack nothing." That is a tremendous statement of faith. He could have started out, "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is our Shepherd." But he doesn't, does he? "The Lord is my Shepherd. I lack nothing." Reminding us that it's because God is with us as our Shepherd that we have everything we need. His very presence is sufficient. It's not just that he supplies all of our needs; he is what we need. It's a subtle difference that I hope we don't miss.

We may not have everything that we want. We may not even have everything we think we need or that the world thinks we need, but we have Him. And that is what we ultimately need. When all other comfort is gone, when all other hope seems lost, when all emotional happiness is so far away we can't even imagine how we're ever going to get it again, we can ultimately rest in the promise of God's presence and confidently say, "The Lord is my Shepherd. I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He refreshes my soul."

Like David, most of those who first read these words were far more than we are surrounded by pastures. They depended on streams. They depended on channels of water for life that they had to go to on far more daily basis than we do. For most of us these aren't images that are out of our every day experiences, but they're of times away, out in God's country, right?

For me they bring back memories of various vacations and they evoke feelings of nostalgia. They remind me of the peace and the relaxation I experience when I am away from it all. They are connected for me very clearly to those feelings of refreshment and renewal and relaxation and feeling like whatever that small little piece of the world is that I'm supposed to take on, maybe I can do it again.

I long for those feelings. I think we all do. Well, spiritually speaking, according to verse 3, that's exactly what God provides. David says, "He refreshes my soul."

Now when I was growing up, many of my most refreshing vacations happened every summer... my mom's here, so she's going to, I'm sure, agree because she still gets to go every summer... when we were fishing and hiking in the High Sierras of northern California, a place called Virginia Lakes. You can ask me afterwards why it's called Virginia Lakes in California.

It's up at about 9,000 feet, and early on when I was very young we all used to carry tin cups... I wish I had one. I should have thought to have you bring one... tin cups that had a handle on it. Because it was in the day when we could just... again we're up above 9,000 feet... we could dip our cup into the stream of moving water, flowing water, and just drink it in, without fear of what else we might be getting along with the water.

You can't do that anymore. We have bottled water, right? We all carry it around. When I would drink in that water that I can sort of still taste in my mouth, straight out of that tin cup... this sounds really corny... but it would refresh me to my toes. I mean I still remember it. You can't recreate that sensation. You can't recreate the taste of that. No matter how hard we try. No matter how hard the water companies try to make us believe they can bottle it up for us, it's just not true.

I think that's the feeling that we're encouraged to have when we think about God refreshing our soul. Amid the trials of life, especially when we're faced with the "what ifs," when they just plague us, they keep us up at night, God provides a refreshing that only he can offer. We cannot recreate it. We cannot bottle it up and try to convince ourselves that it's the real deal. We have to go to the source. He's the only one who can refresh us in that way. It's God's to provide and He does provide. Consistently, without fail or hesitation, he longs to refresh us in that way, to refresh our souls. And he does that through the care that we receive from him. It comes to us in so many ways.

Which makes me wonder... and I have to ask myself this as I ask all of you... are we letting him? Are we letting him refresh us with his presence in ways that only he can? Or are we looking everywhere other than him for that bottled up perspective or that bottled up idea of what it means to be refreshed by God, trying to look everywhere else, trying to recreate it, rather than going to the source.

"The Lord is my Shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me."

More assurance as we get further into this text of God's presence. Whether we're walking through green pastures, being led beside quiet waters, or are in the midst of life's darkest valleys, God is with us. In fact, David is clear that in the midst of it all, God's presence is the only constant.

Have you noticed that about this psalm? The psalm, like we said, is this journey through life, right? The ups and the downs, the mountains, the valleys, everything. And in the middle of all of that the only constant in this psalm, which is a reminder that it is true for our lives, is the presence of God. We may not see it. We may not feel it. We may not want to see it at times in our lives. I have been there. But whether we see it or not, whether we sense it or not, whether we want it to be real at any given moment God is there, comforting us, guiding us, loving us, restoring our joy.

As I was preparing, I began to think that, as in many great sermons that are preached from this pulpit, we make the shift from the theological and the kind of "up here" to the really practical, right? And we make the shift and we start talking about how is it that God, and I was wrestling with this, how is it that God provides for us in this way and reminds us of His presence? What ways does that come to us?

I thought it would be really helpful, and maybe it would, but I'm not going to go there. Sorry. Because when I was talking with a colleague about this sermon, he said, "You know, that's an important question and that's important for us to wrestle with, but I don't think that's the most pressing question. The most pressing question is, 'Are we in a place with our relationship with the Lord to even allow that to happen, to receive it.'" The light bulb kind of went on and I was like, "Wow! That really is the question." Because all of the practical ideas about how it happens are important... and we should be talking with each other about that... but unless we are at a place where we are really ready to receive it, it's going to fall on deaf ears.

Now I want to be really sensitive here and very careful. Please don't hear me passing any judgment on any who are not at the place where they are ready to receive it. That is not my intention, and I ask you not to hear that. Many of you are in extremely difficult, pain-filled circumstances right now and the anxiety level in your life about the "what ifs," which are either real for you for the first time... your "what if" is now... or you're fearing that "what if" in a very real way, is really high... the anxiety level that comes from that and the pain.

And to you, if you are in that place, hear us saying, "We are sorry that you are in that place. We are sorry that you are experiencing that pain." Our prayer is that you will hear this message in a very real way for you today. Even if you're not at a place where you want to believe it or are able to grasp it, God is with you. And our prayer is that God will bring you to a place. You don't have to get yourself there. God will bring you to a place where you're able to really believe that. All of us are challenged to believe that God wants to meet us right where we are and to encourage us to comfort us and to reassure us that he is with us.

There's a story that was often told during the 1800's of two ministers who would often hike the hills in Wales together. They would go on vacation and they would just hike. Kind of like the hills of northern California, the High Sierras, only very different, but mountains nonetheless.

One year they were hiking in the hills and they ran across a shepherd boy, a fairly young guy, and they started a conversation with him. He was pretty excited about the conversation because he didn't have a lot of interaction with many people throughout the course of his day. Sheep probably don't offer a lot of conversation. And as the conversation progressed, they discovered that this young man had never been to school, he had never been to church, and he didn't have any idea of what it meant to be a follower of Jesus or a Christian or a faithful follower of God in any way shape or form.

Well the conversation went on for some time and the boy was very intrigued and eventually the ministers decided that introducing him to Psalm 23 would be a really appropriate thing to do because of his profession and the fact that he was out there with the sheep. And they hoped that as they did so that he would maybe grab a hold of the truth of Psalm 23 and that he would find some level of personal faith in the God who loved him.

Well he was amazingly receptive and as the conversation went on they encouraged him to remember the words, "The Lord is my Shepherd," with the emphasis on "my." After some time the conversation ended and everyone went on their way.

Well, the next year, as was their custom, these two ministers were back in the hills and this time they ran across a cottage where, as you could do more readily in those days, they stopped for a glass of water and asked for something to drink. And the lady of the house let them in. And when she came back from getting their water, she noticed they were looking at a picture on her mantle. And she said, "Yeah, that was my son and he died last year in a storm in the winter, a snowstorm, when he was tending his sheep."

Well, the ministers appropriately responded pastorally and this conversation continued and this woman began to feel comfort and condolences were being sent her way, and she continued. She said, "You know, it was a really strange thing. When we found him, it was winter, and when we found him, his right hand was grasping the fourth finger on his left hand, just like this," She said, "It was the strangest thing. Nobody could understand it."

And they said, "Well, I think we can shed some light on that. You see we met your son last year, and he was very intrigued by what we do for a living and wanted to talk to us and we shared with him out of our Bible what we believe about from Psalm 23, that the Lord is my Shepherd. And we taught him that first line, and we encouraged him to memorize it and to remember it. And we encouraged him to repeat it to himself and that every time he repeated it to himself, he should remember the fourth word, 'The Lord is my Shepherd,' and think about the fact that it was meant for him."

Friends, Psalm 23 was meant for you and it was meant for me. It was meant for all of us. It's meant for exactly those times when the "what ifs" of our life smack us in the face and cause us to worry and keep us up at night. My encouragement to us today is to allow Psalm 23 to speak to us. Allow it to speak to you, to remind you that you are loved by the God who is sufficient, and who does walk with you through every part of your life, the good times and the struggles.

You see this psalm as we know ends with the reminder that even when we are at the end, it's not really the end, is it? We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever with the God who has walked with us every step of our journey as we know it now.

I want us to look one more time at this psalm, and I want us to read it together. I would encourage you to grab the green card or look up on the screen, and let us declare together what we know to be true.

"The Lord is my Shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

This verse, this passage, Psalm 23, gives us reason to believe 1 Peter 5:7.

"Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you."

In just a minute we're going to share together in the Lord's Supper, the ultimate example of what it means for God to prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies, to provide for us, to fill our cup until it overflows. It's also a very tangible reminder for us as New Testament believers, as those who have come after Christ, that it's Christ's death and Christ's resurrection that make it possible for us to hold onto the truth of Psalm 23, to hold onto the hope of eternal life, and to confidently declare that we are forgiven and that we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. What a gift that is! Will you pray with me?

Lord God, thank you for the gift of this table. Thank you that it is intended to be a reminder of your presence. Thank you that you prepare a table before us in the presence of our enemies, that you anoint our head with oil...the oil of protection, that our cup overflows because of who you are and what you mean in our lives. God, thank you. Help us to believe the truth of your Word for us today. We ask this in the name of Jesus, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. Laura Crihfield
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org