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Sunday, August 23, 2009

My Cup Overflows
Tenth in the Psalm 23 Series

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Psalm 23

¹ 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. ⁴ Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me. ⁵ You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. ⁶ Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.

We have been looking this summer, verse by verse, through the most popular and most familiar of all the 150 psalms in the Bible, finding again, the comfort and strength and peace that this psalm has offered to millions of persons across the ages. We are almost at the end now as we look at the last couple of images of a cup of blessing that overflows and at the line about goodness and mercy following us all life long.

We have been referring to the little book on this Psalm by Rabbi Harold Kushner, and in his chapter on these verses he describes this verse as being rooted in a posture of life, a stance or perspective in life that is one of scarcity or abundance. Those are not the words he uses, but that is my paraphrase. Do I see my life as blessed by God as we talked about last week, or do I come to life feeling deprived and cheated and afraid?

Kushner says that this verse is mainly about gratitude for just being alive and for the gift of enjoying each day. He offers his own experience as someone in his late sixties of experiencing the threat of glaucoma and says that every night he puts drops in his eyes to fend off that threat of glaucoma that would rob him of the pleasure of reading. He says that every morning he takes a pill to control his blood pressure and every evening he takes another pill to control his cholesterol. And instead of lamenting those problems that come with growing older, he says a prayer of thanks, that medical resources, that were not available to people who lived a hundred years ago, and who did not live long enough to develop the complications of growing older, are available for us.

My cup overflows, and God’s goodness and mercy are following me and enveloping me each day. Perhaps this verse in the Psalm is about the basic posture of gratitude for every small gift of each day. The quote at the top of today’s bulletin from psychologist Abraham Maslow comes from this chapter. It says:

One of the character traits of the fully mature adult is “the ability to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy when others have taken those for granted.

Rabbi Kushner tells the story in this chapter that you heard a few weeks ago about the pilot whose small plane crash-landed at a California air strip and he was lucky enough to get right out of the plane before it was engulfed in flame. The reporter asked him what was going through his mind as the plane was about to crash, and he said, “I realized I had not thanked enough people in my life.”

We can live life from a posture of gratitude about where we are and what we have, or we can live life from a posture of scarcity and fear and complaint. It does not mean that we should not be ambitious and should not want to improve ourselves. It is about seeing, at the beginning, how blessed we are to be alive at all. Is your cup overflowing with love and gratitude, or is it half full, or even empty?

I had a brief interchange with one of our members last week who showed this posture of gratitude, a posture of living abundantly and gratefully. We greeted each other briefly in the hallway when we were each hurrying to our meetings. His greeting was this: “Hello Harvey, life is good.” It was a remarkable greeting because this family has experienced some significant health problems over the past few months, problems that are not yet solved but are ongoing, yet this father’s greeting and attitude showed what the psalmist inspires us toward and what Dr. Maslow tells us is a mark of mature adulthood. My cup is full and even overflows, and God’s goodness and kindness have surrounded me all the days of my life.

This outlook of faith is the opposite of the attitude in the story you may have heard of the grandmother who was walking with her five year old grandson on a lonely beach one evening and out in the distance she noticed a wave beginning to form and come toward them. She had never seen a wave like this, and she was so taken by its size and its majesty, she just stood to see it as the five year old’s curiosity got the best of him. Before she could think, the child ran toward the wave and it crashed over him and engulfed him and he disappeared, just washed back out to sea.

The grandmother was terror stricken and then she got angry and shook her fist at the sky berating God: “Look here, God, I have been a good woman all my life. I have been a faithful church member and have taught Sunday School and given to my church building program. I was the president of United Methodist Women and this was my only grandchild. How dare you let this wave take him away!!

She had some other words also, but she quieted a bit when she saw, 200 yards away, another huge wave beginning to form and move toward her. She backed up a little on the beach and just watched the power of this wave as it crashed loudly on the beach, and as it did, it deposited her grandson, covered by seaweed and soaked to the bone and sputtering to breathe, but happy and safe again.

The grandmother grabbed the child and cried for joy and hugged the child desperately and then looked closely at him and turned back to the sky to speak to God: WAIT A MINUTE. WAIT A MINUTE. HE HAD A HAT! WHERE IS HIS HAT?

We can live with gratitude and the belief that life is good, no matter our circumstances. We can believe that our cup is full or even overflowing, or we can live in scarcity and complaint.

This month we celebrated the lives of two gentlemen from our congregation who were at the end of their lives and they lived the posture of the Psalmist. One was Bob Meader whose grace and dignity and attitude of gratitude throughout his life, not only through his own battle with cancer over several years, but his walk with daughter Nancy Claire through her illness and death several years ago. Bob’s grace and faith and prayerfulness and gratitude were inspiration to so many of us. Bob’s example is what the Psalmist means in this verse, living with a posture of abundance and a posture of thanksgiving. My cup overflows.

John McKeever was our other example of life well lived. As Cindy and I met with John’s family before the service this week, one family member talked about John’s attitude, even through these last months as he dealt with cancer. That person said that no matter how bad the illness was, no matter that his ability to speak clearly was declining, no matter the time of day or night, when you asked John how he was doing, his reply was consistent: “So far, so good.”

It is the same attitude of faith that I heard when Judy and I spent a while in the choir rehearsal this week.  Our choir was meeting to rehearse for an inspiring
Hymn Sign evening this Thursday night at 7:30. We heard old, dear and familiar hymns that some of us have known for many years and don’t get enough time to sing in worship. One of those hymns expresses the faith and abundant posture of this verse from our psalm. Here are the words:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot thou has taught me to say
It is well, it is well with my soul.

You prepare a table for me in the midst of my enemies, you anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Sure, your goodness and mercy and kindness will follow me all my life long.

Let me give you a better translation of the Hebrew words here. God’s goodness and loving-kindness are not following us, they are pursuing us, surrounding us, bent on overtaking us and enfolding us. It is not just a matter of being followed by God’s kindness. God’s kindness and compassion and goodness are bent on engulfing us and caring for us.

What if this psalm was written by David? We used to think that all the Psalms were written by David, but scholars can tell us differently now because the time period of some of them was different from when David lived because David lived and ruled about a thousand years before Christ. But David can be credited with some of them. If this is one that he wrote, look at his life as a tragic hero. He was pursued by King Saul who suffered from some mental illness. Saul tried more than once to kill his future successor David but David did not take revenge.

When David became king, he united the twelve tribes into a kingdom and made Israel more powerful than at any other time in its history. He got carried away with his power and arrogance and thought he could do anything because he was king. He even thought he could take another man’s wife and had that man killed in battle. That was the beginning of his decline, a decline that led to his own son turning against him to fight him. That son was killed and David eventually died as a failed king.

David was pursued by enemies, but if he wrote these words, he also felt he was pursued, in the beginning at least, by God’s mercy and kindness and grace.

My cup runs over. Life is good, no matter what my specific challenges may be this day. Life is good and God is good and I will have what I need.

The six year old Sunday school student summarized it for us when she was memorizing Psalm 23 and got it slightly confused, but really perhaps said it best:

The lord is my shepherd. That’s all I want.