Psalm 46
“Refuge”
August 30, 2020
In the midst of the storm, “Someone had to watch the babies.”(Christina Zdanowicz, CNN, 8/28/20) As Hurricane Laura pummeled the Lake Charles Memorial Hospital this week with 130 mile per hour wind gusts, a team made up of 1 doctor, 14 nurses, 2 nurse practitioners and 3 respiratory therapists stayed with their 19 tiny patients, some weighing only 1 or 2 poundsand 4 of them on ventilators, in the just moved Neonatal Intensive Care Unit or NICU. As the winds pounded the building, they’d been moved to from across town only hours before to what was considered a safer building, they ended up having to hurry every baby and their life-saving equipment out into the hallways where the staff slept beside their infant patients. When the calm returned, it was with huge celebrationthat all of the babies, were safely moved to hospitals throughoutLouisiana in the last couple of days that were better equipped, after the storm, to provide for their on-going care.
Refuge – in the midst of the storms of life – takes so many forms. During the almost 6 months that we have been staying away from events that resemble group gatherings, wearing masks and keeping our distance along with much of the world, home has been our refuge. It is the one location we can control and where most of us have the greatest potential to stay healthyand keep others healthy. But we also have had to venture out – for food and medicine, doctor’s appointments, soon school, andjobs that can’t be done from home. For many, these risks weigh heavy on them every time they venture out from the refuge of home.
Here the Psalmist leans into earth-shifting change, floods, and quaking mountains as conditions that we can’t control. We question where is God in the midst of famine, war, natural disasters and pandemics? Maybe it’s how we are looking for answers.
We desperately want assurances of safety, protection, and asense of security in the awfulness that engulfs so much of our planet. When we are tempted to rage against God when someone we love is taken from us, the Psalmist is saying this God is not a refuge from the world, keeping all the bad stuff away from us with a magical protective bubble so we can’t be hurt. But this God is a refuge in the world. The writer of this beloved Psalm is confident that the worst calamities cannot drive God away or stop God’s presence.
Perhaps such knowledge of God as ever-present refuge will lead us instead to a place of courage in the face of fear. Those nurses and medical professionals in Lake Charles this week knew that they had to persevere through the hard stuff, including their worry for their own homes which there was a good chance may not be there after the storm, because they clung to the hope that through their care and attention those babies, some of God’s most vulnerable creations, would survive.
The worst the world has to offer, and some days we know that seems to be getting piled on higher and higher, cannot drive God away or stop God from being present. It was St Augustine, whenthinking about how God was described in Psalm 46, who hovered over those calming words, “Be still, and know that I am God!” He felt our only hope in the face of disaster and devastation is to acknowledge God’s power and “to not argue with God, as though to take up arms against him…Be still,” he went on, “because you no longer have anything to fight with.”
Just like shaking a fist at hurricanes doesn’t do any good so, too, engaging in a battle with God will not make anything better. The occasional argument with God might help us work through our feelings but going to war with God will not change God. And that is to be our comfort.
It could be that the whole reason for this Psalm is to lead us to a place of courage in the face of fear, letting us know that no matter what, terror doesn’t have the last word. This psalm, in describing our loving, powerful, abiding God, could have been written just for those hardest of times when something gives way and hope breaks through – a hope more powerful than our fear.
Let us lean then into the refuge that is God with this prayer from the Rev. Michelle Henrichs:
Faithful and present God, you are not blind to the storms that rage in this world, the illness that threatens. Some are visible to the eye, but others are hidden in our heart. Lord, bring your refuge and healing strength. Make me still in your safety.
When what seems permanent begins to crumble, when devastation ravages the earth, when powers that be claim your authority – let us remember the joy you have set before us. Lord, help us to let go of fear and doubt. Make us still in your waters of gladness.
God, Creator of time, we hurry from task to task, from crisis to crisis, carrying the weight of the world. Or in this (new) season of quarantine, we let time pass without meaning. But the world is yours, and everything in it. Let us lay down both what keeps us too busy to be still and stillness that is void before you so that we may lift our eyes to your glory. Lord, we come into your presence. Make us still in you. Amen. (www.lifeinthelabyrinth.com)