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Lift Up Your Eyes Together in Ministry by Rev. Jane Moschenrose Scripture Texts: Psalm 121, Acts 2:39-42 |
(As a young woman; stylish hat, no suit jacket)
Even as a young girl, I was always my grandmother’s child. The grand old lady lived to be 103, and every time I visited her she would take my hand and say, “Let’s read the scripture.” And she would sit comfortably in her rocking chair and pull her afghan over her knees – and pick up her big black leather KJV Bible and say, “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help…” Not until later, when her eye sight was dimmed by old age, did I realize Gramma wasn’t reading the text at all. She was reciting it from memory, word for word, comma for comma, pulling the ancient words out of her memory as easily as the recipes she had stored in her brain many years ago. No one ever knew what she did to create a pineapple upside down cake from scratch, and few ever understood how deeply the word of the Lord had been etched into her heart, either.
Oh, how young I was then! -- A little foolish and a whole lot self centered. She wanted me to read with her, and I did, at least through the first verse. But I never finished the psalm with her, because I had trouble believing that it could be true. I could not understand then why Gramma believed it, either. She had such a hard life to be saying things about the Lord keeping watch over us by day and night. She outlived 2 husbands and a third one died the same week as 2 of her children. She endured The Great Depression, which cost them the family farm, and 2 world wars which called her two surviving sons into far off places to fight a soldier’s fight. And yet she still said: “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, from whence comes my help? My help cometh from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; he who watches over you will not slumber. He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; he shall preserve your soul. The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore.”
She would lean back into her rocking chair and smile, as though she were resting in God’s peace, (unseen to me,) as if the real world we live in didn’t matter and the ultimate test for all of life was whatever the Lord had to say. The whole world, her whole world, might be crashing around her, but she was fine. Her faith was as solid as the rocking chair she sat in. She baffled me. I spent too much time worrying that her faith was bigger than her common sense. Maybe it was.
One August, Gramma and I went to the State Fair. The sun was beating down on us, like the devil himself, at over 90 degrees. Gramma laughed, because the temperature was high, but not quite as high as her age in years. None of us realized the impact of the heat. Gramma no longer wore sun bonnets, and she always thought that a lady would not slurp on a glass of water in public. The heat wore her down. She became dizzy, stumbled and broke her ankle.
Later on in the soft security of a hospital bed, with ice on her ankle and bruises on her arms, her mind a little confused, Gramma looked up to me and said, “let’s read the scripture, dear.” And she recited the same words, the same song of hope she had always said, and the irony of it all really hit me, harder than ever before. I wanted to yell at her: “Oh Gramma, don’t you get it? Today is the perfect day to see that your life is the opposite of what your favorite scripture claims to be true! There was no shade from the sun today, and there was no inexplicable, un-seeable force to prevent you from falling, or becoming confused from dehydration!”
But then, I am my grandmother’s child. I held my tongue and I kissed her wrinkled cheek. My own prayer that day, if I really prayed at all, went something like this: “Lord, if you are up there looking down on us, or down here helping us along, you are doing a really lousy job.”
(Middle-aged woman – suit, conservative scarf, key chain around wrist)
That was twenty years ago. Now that I have my own daughter, the world and everything in it has changed. One of the greatest and most blessed ironies of my life is that the many times I heard her recite the psalm, I accidentally memorized it myself, though I’ve worked to change the old language to more contemporary English in my head. And I’ve studied commentaries and such to try to figure out what this psalm really means.
The first people to know this psalm thousands of years ago sang it together as they traveled over the hills from villages to Jerusalem to worship the Lord at the Temple. They had good reasons to keep their eyes on the hills. There were many dangers and there was much to fear. Bandits and thieves hid in the shadows and wild animals lurked behind the bends. Sometimes there was no roadway at all, and the people took their chances, walking the road by faith and not by sight. Palestine was overrun by the popular pagan worship of their day. There was an altar to a pagan god or a shrine of the religion of the cults on every hilltop. All along the way, the faithful pilgrims were enticed to turn their feet away from the worship of the Lord. Like snake oil salesmen, the pagan preachers lured the travelers to their shrine, promising them what they could not offer -- cures for the body and healing for the soul, protection from the heat of the sun and the evil that awaited them under the light of the moon.
Our journey is not much different. We too are on a pilgrimage. We have trials. Life is complex; we have stress and contradictions and unresolved issues, too numerous to count. We have our pagan shrines today, too. We hear many voices calling out for our money and time and commitment. They make false promises and elicit hopes which they cannot fulfill. Some of the voices clamoring for our attention are religious voices, which only make discernment more difficult. Our church is divided by competing messages. One is the voice of separation for the sake of purity: we can only be what God wants for us and fulfill His purposes for us, when we hang onto traditional thinking and scriptural interpretation about right and wrong, rather than buying into the current culture’s understanding. The other is the voice of acceptance: We are here to do God’s mission together, and our diversity, even in moral matters, should not take our energy and attention away from doing God’s mission – we can accept those with whom we cannot agree in the interest of fulfilling God’s mission together.
How do we cope in such times? We each have to answer the question. I have chosen this way. The road is straight and narrow. The hillside is no doubt a slippery slope – there is much to fear. I insulate myself by acknowledging only one truth and not more than that. I pray that God will protect us, even when it often appears that God is absent from our daily grind.
We often like to sing, “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…” The 3rd verse is particularly relevant for us today: “Through many dangers, toils, and snares, I have already come. ‘Twas grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
(Elderly woman, red hat, purple scarf, sit in rocking chair)
Well, well. Now I am a Gramma, too. Times have changed over the years that separate me from her, but at the end of the day, I am still her child. I once was so sure of myself, so sure that my perception of things was right, and was the absolute truth. If anyone had any concern or question about the way we should live as people of faith, well, I was sure of the answer. I was sometimes wrong; I was never in doubt.
Then life happened. Two husbands later, along with more disappointments than I can count, and bumps and bruises and bangs along the road – well, the pain has tempered my perceptions. The aggravation in my soul has humbled me, as well. I’ve learned that which I am so sure of one day, at another juncture in my life journey, I will see entirely differently. My perceptions change with time. And when I finally realized my perceptions are not the full and total truth about a matter, I was more able to cope with ambiguity and paradox, and the fact that I see things through a mirror but dimly. Today, I would rather be in right relationship than to be right about something; I choose covenant over law and freedom over the liability of proof. My study of the scriptures shows me that Jesus did not exclude people, he welcomed all into relationship, even those who had little insight and understanding of themselves. I’ve learned that the hard work of remaining in dialogue with those I disagree with leads us all of us to greater growth and understanding, and, I believe, a clearer understanding of God’s truth.
My Gramma’s psalm is still mine: “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills…” However, my understanding has changed since I first knew this text, and I hope that I have matured and not just grown older. I now understand why Gramma could have inner peace and right relationship with God even in the midst of great chaos and trauma. Her sense of wellness did not depend on everyday life experience. Her favorite psalm taught her that no trip or fall or injury or illness or accident or any other kind of trauma – no kind of evil- will ever be able to separate us from God’s purposes for us. Nothing that happens to you has the power to dilute God’s grace in you or divert God’s will from you. That’s why my Gramma was always at peace, even though everything on her body and in her world might have been falling apart. Her spirit rested in God, and God protected her spirit from harm and any sort of separation from God. She trusted in the big picture, which she could not see, but knew God had in control. She trusted that God’s purposes for her would be fulfilled no matter what.
So she didn’t have to fear anybody or anything. She regularly reminded me that on the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit of God was most fully present, the believers stayed together and prayed and studied and learned from one another - not because they were in agreement about everything, but because the Spirit was among them, and they worshiped the same God.
And when the Spirit is most fully among us, we will be united in that Spirit, and have no fear. “I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Thanks be to God. Please pray with me.
Jane Moschenrose has had the privilege of serving Wellspring Church in Farmington Hills, Michigan as pastor for the past seven years, serves as chair of Denominational Relationships on the ABCUSA Ministers Council, and has been blessed in her marriage of 23 years to Phillip and with her
daughters Karen and Sharon.