2020.03.22 | When Life Is Scary
Hi everyone, it’s Pastor Pepper
I’m walking my dog at East Avenue Park in Hayward, one of the few things we can safely do while we are sheltering in place during this pandemic.
I wanted to show you a part of the park that reminds me of Psalm 23, especially verse 5 when the psalmist says to God: Even though I walk through the valley of darkness, You are with me.
To get to this part of the park, you have to walk about a half-mile down a steep trail into a valley of oaks and eucalyptus trees, following the switchbacks until you reach a collapsed bridge.
No matter what time of year it is or what the weather is, it’s almost always darker down there than it is at the top of the park. It’s also very isolated down there. Not many people go down there, especially in the winter.
Sometimes I stand at the top of the trail and decide if it doesn’t feel safe enough to come down here. Other days, I feel the fear and say to the dog: Okay, here we go into the valley of darkness.
We often read Psalm 23 as if the writer was supremely confident that God will provide and protect him just as a shepherd provides for and protects his sheep. But yet, both the writer and I guess just about everyone else walks into the valley of darkness at one time or another, even if their insides tell them not to.
In this time of COVID-19, I can’t help wondering if there wasn’t a lot more fear and uncertainty in Psalmist’s mind and life when he wrote Psalm 23. Maybe Psalm 23 wasn’t or isn’t a firm statement of faith but a mantra or a prayer.
LIke, in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Tinman, and the Scarecrow kept saying “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” maybe the Psalmist is saying, over and over as he walks through a valley of darkness: “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want....” not because he believes it 100 percent but because he needs to believe it to overcome his fear and the sense of danger that would otherwise freeze him in his tracks, unable to make a decision.
The scholar Robert Alter, put it this way: “Life is a scary proposition as most of us who get a few decades into it are aware. What the speaker of Psalm 23 is saying is despite all these scary things, I have trust in God who is leading me by the hand....” [1]
In other words, feeling fear, being scared, whether it’s of a dark downward path or a fast-spreading virus, is one of the most natural and automatic responses we humans have. The question, especially in times of crises, will always be: So, what do we do with that fear?
Since I was blessed with an extra dose of fearfulness from childhood on, I’ve had to ask myself this many times. Some of the answers I’ve been given are classics but they have served me well:
First, describe your fear to someone reliable — sometimes hearing yourself say exactly what you fear out loud helps you think more concretely about what to do.
Second, complete the story your fear is telling you — and when you get to the very last, scariest end result, brainstorm how you would cope.
Third, take a break from the endless speculation on tv and social media — what’s real is what’s today and sometimes that’s a good time to read a book or watch a movie.
Fourth, it is never too late to cultivate a support network of friends and colleagues — sometimes fears, like needing food or medicine, losing a job or getting sick, are very real problems and you’ll need to know how to ask for help. Pastors Arlene, Marvin, and I hope you’ll consider Eden Church and your Eden Church friends here to help you sort out fears from very real problems.
And last, like the psalmist, practice trusting that God will help with some of the scary things. In truth, I’m impressed with what God’s already done with COVID-19, changing minds, changing hearts, changing deeply in-grained patterns of behavior — shepherding us as a community, as a country, as a global community onto the right path, God will put in our hearts: the capacity to fear no evil. Thanks for listening and may God bless and protect you. Amen.
Footnotes:
[1] Robert Alter, “The Hebrew Bible Has No Soul,” Poetry Off the Shelf Audio, Poetry Foundation, March 2009