Solid Footing

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
01.20.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lessons: Psalm 40; John 1: 29-42

Life, some say, is like a rollercoaster. There are those moments when you soar upward, pressed back hard into your seat by a couple of Gs. There are those moments when you plummet downward, feeling the touch of near weightless free fall before you scream gleefully into a juddering, banking turn. It’s gleeful fun, a carefully tested state-approved measure of utterly safe adren-o-tainment.

But as much as we’ve heard that metaphor crushingly and relentlessly overused, life really isn’t anything like a rollercoaster. On a rollercoaster, you know pretty much exactly what’s going to happen. Right out there in front of you stretches a track, a perfect set of over-engineered rails which your car and the cars behind you will follow every single time. You know when you’re about to dive. You see that huge first near vertical plunge coming from your choice position in the very front seat. You raise your hands higher in the air than a sleep-deprived Pentecostal after three straight hours of really kickin’ praise music, and start your shrieking just a second before your stomach tries to push it’s way into your throat. You know exactly what’s coming.

Life isn’t like that. Those plunges come when we least expect them. Those rises suddenly snatch us up. We have no idea which way the track is going. Sometimes, as our downward acceleration increases, we’re not even sure if there’s a track there at all.

Any of you who’ve been following the stock market over the last few months will know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s up and down, it’s banking wildly, one day soaring, another day dipping even further downward. The market these days resembles nothing more than a flock of starlings who’ve eaten their fill of fermented blackberries, a great drunken cloud squawking and stumbling aimlessly through the sky. It’s not an easy time for those of us who have pension or retirement funds, or those of us who have investments, or those of us whose churches still rely on the returns from their endowments to keep their doors open. Who knows what will happen next?

The answer to that question, of course, is that none of us know. The market could come down in a blazing kamikaze death spiral, finally cratering in a depression that will leave us all living in the boxes of our 61 inch HDTV’s and once weekly treating ourselves to Micky D’s new McWatery Cabbage Soup. Or it could turn around. Or it could do...nothing. We just don’t know.

We human beings know nothing for certain about what lies ahead, and for many of us, that uncertainty is so terrifying that we can become paralyzed by cynicism, or become frightened and easily manipulated, or become angry and bitter. But if we want to live lives that are not defined by the chaos of the world, then we have to be rooted in something deeper.

At the very beginning of the service, we all read together from the 40th Psalm. It’s an interesting Psalm for a couple of reasons. First, it’s one of what I like to call the FrankenPsalms, which are made by stitching together two different songs of praise. Verses 13 through 17 of Psalm 40 are, in fact, nothing more than all of Psalm 70, which has been cut and pasted in.

Second and much more importantly, it’s a song of rejoicing at God’s deliverance, a deeply personal song of salvation and security in God’s embrace. What has God delivered the Psalmist from? In verse two, our New International Versions tell us it’s “the slimy pit.” My New Revised Standard Version says “the desolate pit.” But if you translate directly and literally from the original Hebrew, it’s “the pit of tumult” or “the pit of chaos.” God delivers us from that devouring quicksand place where everything is chaotic. That rock, that firm place on which God has us stand, is nothing less than God’s own self, God’s law written by the Holy Spirit into our hearts.

We also heard today from John’s Gospel about the gathering of Christ’s first disciples, about Andrew and Simon. Andrew brings Simon to Jesus, who promptly renames him. Naming is a powerful thing in the Bible, and it helps define a person’s role and what they are to become. Simon’s new name, as Jesus would have spoken it in Aramaic, is Kepha. In the Greek of John’s Gospel, that becomes the word Petra. Both of those words simply mean “Rock.” In these two passages, we’ve heard about both what we should seek from God and what God intends us to become as disciples of Christ Jesus.

First, no matter what the world throws at us, faith grounds us in something that goes well beyond the whirlwind craziness of this life. Whether it’s markets that go haywire or life just throwing you an unexpected curve, that connection our faith gives us to our Creator allows us to experience those things and be unshaken. Our feet are set on a rock, and the tumult can’t move us.

Second, Christ’s renaming of Simon tells us that as our faith calls us to discipleship, we’re not supposed to think of our journey as something that effects only us. Just as he was renamed, and his calling in life was redefined, our faith is not something that is for us alone. We’re called to be a rock for others, to share the strength we have been given with those who have been shaken or broken by the world.

In the face of the world’s uncertainty, in the face of so much chaos and confusion and doubt, it is that basis upon which we can stand with certainty. But it isn’t simply the rock on which we stand...there solid footing on that rock for all of us.