If the Lord himself had not been on our side,
now may Israel say:
If the Lord himself had not been on our side,
when men rose up against us;
then they had swallowed us up alive,
when their wrath was kindled against us.
Then the waters had overwhelmed us,
the stream had gone over our soul:
Then the proud waters had gone even over our soul.

Blessed be the Lord,
who hath not given us
as a prey unto their teeth.
Our soul is escaped even as a bird
from the snare of the fowlers;
the snare is broken,
and we are delivered.

Our help is in the name of the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.[1]

Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church, Houston, Texas
The Reverend Neil Alan Willard, M.Div.
Proper 21, September 30, 2018

Lord, we pray for the one who preaches. For you know his sins are many. Amen.

As of Friday, the historic port town of Georgetown, which is located about 25 miles south of where I used to live in what’s called the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, was still waiting . . . still waiting for the worst flooding to arrive from the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. That town sits on Winyah Bay, where the Waccamaw River, the Pee Dee River, the Sampit River, and the Black River converge. Georgetown Mayor Brendon Barber has called this slow-moving disaster a “silent assassin.”[2]

Further north in the town of Conway, which is the first town inland from Myrtle Beach, the Waccamaw River has already crested at nearly 10 feet above flood stage and was expected to taper off through today. Drone footage of one neighborhood near Conway appeared to show knee-high water in every house. As of 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, there had been 137 road closures and 11 dam breaches in the Pee Dee region.[3] Of course, there’s major damage in my home state of North Carolina too.

One meteorologist has calculated that Hurricane Florence was “forecast to dump about 18 trillion gallons of rain over a week over the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland.” That’s as much water as there is in the entire Chesapeake Bay or “enough to cover the entire state of Texas with nearly 4 inches . . . of water.” Believe it or not, that’s still far less water than the 25 trillion gallons of rain that fell over Texas and Louisiana last year during Hurricane Harvey because that storm “stalled longer and stayed [close] to the Gulf of Mexico.”[4]

Most of the floods that we experience, however, are metaphorical, not literal. But that doesn’t make them any less real. This past week, with respect to the national news, has been good example of that. Last weekend on Twitter, someone wrote,

Next week has been exhausting.[5]

I laughed at that, too, not because the things that people were reading, pondering, debating, and arguing about were funny, but because it was an accurate description of the world-weariness that many of us were feeling long before the political drama of the last several days. And setting aside everything that’s been taking place in Washington, D.C., painful stories from the survivors of sexual assault, too numerous to count, have overflowed into our personal and public conversations as Americans.

Many of those stories remain unspoken among the women and men of this church and within the circles of relationships that we have in our families and friendships. Just know those stories are often silent companions in the room with us. People we love, not only survivors of sexual assault but also children in our extended families and in this congregation, are listening to the language we use.[6] We don’t have to change our political affiliation or political philosophy to be careful with our words and to pray for those we love and, yes, for all the politicians too. As I’ve said before about praying the words of our mouths will be acceptable in the sight of the Lord:

Christians have a particular obligation to use words carefully, regardless of how others might choose to use them recklessly.

Some of the people for whom we pray face other kinds of raging waters that threaten to overwhelm them. Maybe you’ve felt like that in the past because of something you kept closely guarded in your heart. You might feel like that today, overwhelmed, as though a flood has overtaken your life and everything around you. It could be about all sorts of worries — the erosion of a marriage or a friendship, a child or a relative who struggles with mental health issues, the physical decline of a parent, the harsh reality of unfulfilled dreams, or an inability to forgive or even to receive forgiveness.

So where do we turn when the winds blow and the waters rise around us?

By 1999, I had moved from South Carolina’s northern most coastal county to its southern most coastal county. So I was living on Hilton Head Island when the entire coastline of South Carolina was evacuated ahead of Hurricane Floyd’s arrival. Trying to avoid the traffic jams that had clogged the interstates, I decided to leave the island at the very last minute. No one else was around in the complex where I rented a condominium, and I could hear the eerie sound of wind howling through rigging and ringing bells on boats in the intracoastal marina near my screened-in porch.

It was scary to be a lone car driving away as the sky darkened and rain poured down while two state troopers stood outside their cruisers on the mainland side of the bridge. You’d better believe I prayed for them, as rain baptized their plastic-covered Smokey Bear hats. And you’d better believe I prayed for myself because it’s terrifying to drive into the darkness on a stormy night, knowing it will only get worse.

Whenever that happens, whenever we feel alone like that, we come here to be in the company of others, to take a moment to get our bearings, and to discover where we are in the world. We come here to be reoriented toward the love of God in the face of Jesus Christ, to be reminded of the fact that God has been faithful to us, and not in an abstract way but in a very real way, in the journey of God’s people throughout the history of the human race. From the spoken words of the psalms to the unspoken words written on our hearts and read only by God, the people of God have brought these prayers into communities like Palmer from one generation to another.

This is where we are fed by God and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, become bread for others — the Body of Christ — blessed and broken for the world, perhaps for the world incarnated in the person who is sitting next to you right now. This is where all of us, from the youngest to the oldest, can find shelter when the rains come and the waters around us are rising. As the words of Psalm 124 have reminded us:

If the Lord had not been on our side,
let Israel now say . . .

Then would the waters have overwhelmed us
and the torrent gone over us;

Then would the raging waters
have gone right over us.[7]

One of the things I love about this psalm is the way it describes things not as we wish them to be but as they really are. It doesn’t promise that there will be no storms or that the storms will not harm us if our faith is just strong enough. To the contrary, it reminds us that in the end strength is found neither in the flood nor even in our faithfulness. No, the final strength is the faithfulness of God, who “has not given us over to” the power of death.[8] That means when death comes, and it will come, the last word nevertheless belongs to God. As author Frederick Buechner once wrote,

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don’t be afraid. I am with you.[9]

Although I do like those words, which describe the world as it is, I really like what another author, Anne Lamott, said several years ago in response to them:

But it is hard not to be afraid, isn’t it? Some wisdom traditions say that you can’t have love and fear at the same time, but I beg to differ. You can be a passionate believer in God . . . and still be afraid. I’m Exhibit A.

The temptation is to say . . . it will all make sense someday. Great blessings will arise from the tragedy, seeds of new life sown. And I absolutely believe those things, but if it minimizes the terror, it’s . . .

Well, she continues that thought about minimizing the terror with some language that I’ll not use from the pulpit. So I’ll just quote from the Lego Movie instead: It’s “a bunch of hippy, dippy, baloney.” Lamott goes on to say this:

My understanding is that we have to admit the nightmare, and not pretend that it wasn’t heinous and agonizing . . .

For the time being, I am not going to pretend to be spiritually more evolved than I am. I’m keeping things very simple: right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe; telling my stories, and reading yours. I keep thinking about Barry Lopez’s wonderful line, “Everyone is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together; stories and compassion.”[10]

Now I think this is one of the most important places where those stories are shared, either within these walls or walking together to and from this church. That means it needs to be here when we need to share our stories. It also means that we need to be here when others need to tell their stories. God, of course, is always listening. That’s true. But people long to see in a real community, in the faces of children and women and men, the divine love that surrounds the telling and hearing of their stories.

Psalm 124 is one of 15 “Psalms of Ascents” in the Bible. These songs accompanied pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Their walk upward into the city and then onto the temple mount was both a literal ascent and a metaphorical one. It represented a life that over and over reached toward the presence of God. And that’s what we do here at Palmer. What we come to realize, eventually, is that God has been reaching out to us, holding us in the grip of grace and raising us above mighty floodwaters.

Today’s psalm concludes with words that can be our own prayer in the midst of the storm, whatever that might be today, in this moment, for you or someone you love:

Our help is in the Name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.[11]

This I believe.

AMEN

1 BACK TO POST Our traditional worship at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, usually includes the singing of the psalm appointed for a particular Sunday either in plainchant or in Anglican chant. This past Sunday, in addition to that, the choir sang this anthem version of Psalm 124, which was not planned ahead of time to link to the sermon text. So I’ll chalk that up to the work of the Holy Spirit.

2 BACK TO POST Brendon Barber, quoted by Ray Sanchez in “Georgetown, South Carolina, braces for flooding seen as Florence’s ‘silent assassin’,” CNN, September 26, 2018.

3 BACK TO POST Michael Majchrowicz, “Ahead of Georgetown flooding, here’s how the rest of the Pee Dee is faring,” September 27, 2018.

4 BACK TO POST Seth Borenstein, “Florence could dump enough rain to fill the Chesapeake Bay,” AP, September 14, 2018.

5 BACK TO POST Jordon Nardino, who tweeted this @jnardino, September 23, 2018.

6 BACK TO POST Tricia Taylor is a licensed professional counselor in the State of Texas and has also been a guest workshop leader at Palmer Memorial Episcopal Church. Because of her professional experience, she made this point much better than I’m able to make it in a public Facebook post on September 22, 2018:

Friends, this is not political. I have no interest in debating current events. But I want to give you a window into my daily work: it is normal for people who have experienced a painful or traumatic event to remember parts of it in graphic detail and to forget other parts, especially those that turn out to be unimportant. And it is normal for girls and boys to keep those experiences to themselves and not tell anyone, especially authority figures. When you say otherwise — when you say that women lie, when you say that because a survivor can’t remember details or didn’t report the event, it didn’t happen, you signal to the women and girls in your life that they can’t trust you with their trauma. So when they are suicidal or falling apart in my office and I beg them to share their story with their family or friends and they tell me, “They won’t believe me; They will blame me,” I know they’re not just making that up. You have told them that a thousand times without meaning to. I’m not asking you to change your mind; I’m just asking you to think about what you say. People you love are listening.

7 BACK TO POST Psalm 124:1, 4-5.

8 BACK TO POST Psalm 124:6.

9 BACK TO POST Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, revised and expanded (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1993). This is part of a larger quote about grace that, like the shorter version, makes a point similar to the one that Psalm 124 makes, namely, that God is with us, even when terrible things happen:

Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.

10 BACK TO POST Anne Lamott, Facebook post on her author page, April 17, 2013.

11 BACK TO POST Psalm 124:8.