The Table is Prepared

A sermon for Sunday, October 11, 2020, based on Psalm 23.

Would you pray with me?

God our shepherd, thank you for bringing us to this time and place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Maybe you, like me, were surprised when you opened up your social media and found that yesterday was World Mental Health Day. Haven’t we already celebrated something like that this year? But no, it turns out, yesterday was a day dedicated to thinking about mental health in general, not just those who deal with chronic mental illnesses. World Mental Health day reminds us that you don’t have to have an anxiety disorder in order to experience anxiety. You don’t have to have clinical depression in order to be depressed. For people without chronic mental illness, anxiety and depression can be as short as the common cold, only instead of catching a bug, your brain and body are dealing with stressful and difficult events. We all have mental health and it’s sometimes good and sometimes bad, and the more we learn about it, the more we figure out how to cope with it when it’s bad and how to celebrate it when it’s good.

Now, I don’t know about y’all, but it took me a long time to understand this about mental health, but in truth, it needn’t have. We have, throughout scripture, the witness of people who struggled with bouts of poor mental health, or, at least, it seems that way from the way the stories are told. It’s impossible to truly diagnose anyone from the past, but we do see King Saul, for example, struggling with something that looks like depression. We hear in Paul’s letters about his ups and downs. And we have the psalms, which run the gambit of emotions, from extravagant, joyous praise to the depths of despair and grief, from outraged anger to peaceful contemplation. The psalms truly are a gift when it comes to thinking about our mental health, especially our psalm for this morning.

If the Bible was a cookbook, Psalm 23 would be the first recipe in the “Comfort Food” section, wouldn’t it? It’s a text that many of us know by heart and one that brings peace and renewal to us when our souls are weary. We can imagine ourselves being led by still waters, guided by God. We can picture ourselves walking surefooted even in times of darkness because God is by our side. We know in our heart of hearts what it is like to experience goodness and mercy and to dwell in the house of the Lord. The words of this psalm comfort us.

More than that, I think the words of this psalm hold wisdom for us as we all navigate our mental health, especially when we go through periods of stress. I know we like to think of ourselves as more educated than our ancestors, and that may be true some of the time, but I also know that we as humans have been dealing with our mental health before we knew to call it that, and that our ancestors do have hard-won wisdom to share with us, if only we look for it.

So, let’s turn to the psalm. The first thing I notice when I look at it is the structure of Psalm 23. It’s like a valley. You start at the top of a hill in verse 1 with “the LORD is my shepherd,” you dip down into the valley in verses 4 and 5 with talk of death and enemies, and you come back up in verse 6 with “surely goodness and mercy shall follow me.” Before we even get into the words of the psalm, we find our first lesson: being in the valley is temporary.

And that’s a doozy of a lesson out of the gate. That’s what can be so hard to remember when we’re going through difficult times or when we’re not in the best of mental health. When you are down in the valley, when stress and anxiety are high and it feels like the world is crashing down around you, it can feel like the valley goes on forever. In fact, it can feel like the valley is all there ever was and all there ever will be. When you’re in the middle of a fight with someone you care about or in the middle of a conflict at work, it can be hard to remember what it was like before things got this bad.

But stress, conflict, worry, anxiety, depression, grief, none of them go on forever. The valley is temporary. What does the psalm tell us? Goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives. We will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Darkness isn’t what lasts. Goodness is, even if it doesn’t feel like that when you’re in the valley.

Our second lesson from the psalm comes from the valley itself. Some translations call it “the darkest valley.” The Message calls it “Death Valley,” which gives us a different picture. But the King James gives us the “the valley of the shadow of death,” which has found its way out of the Bible and into common use. This valley is not a simple dark patch in our lives. It’s not a fleeting frustration. This is a valley of depths, of sadness and anger and pain that we didn’t even know we could feel. We walk this valley when we are living in death’s shadow, when hope is gone and peace is far from our souls. Some people know it as rock bottom when they hit it. Some people only realize afterwards how bad it was.

I want to linger in the valley for a minute, before we climb back out, because I think it’s helpful to get to know the lay of the land down here. Walk with me for just a moment. I promise I won’t leave us down here.

Regardless of exactly when the psalmist was writing, life could be dark in his day. It was at least as common, if not more likely, to lose a child than to see a child grow to adulthood. If a bear or a lion or a boar came for you, you might not survive. Injuries that we can patch up today or sicknesses that we’ve discovered cures for, they could quickly take your life. If there was a bad crop or a well ran dry, starvation or death by dehydration could kill your entire family. And if a war came through, you had to hope that your king could take care of you, because no matter who you were, your safety was not guaranteed.

But hear me: the valley of the shadow of death is dark for us all, regardless of when and where we live. Life might have been shorter and harder in general a few thousand years ago, but someone else’s pain doesn’t invalidate yours. We don’t have to ignore our hurts because they’re not as bad as someone else’s. More than likely in this world, we will all spend some time down in the valley of the shadow of death, and you can’t compare pain. All you can do is to be honest with yourself about the pain and fear you’re feeling.

Because if you can’t admit that you’re in the valley, how are you going to know to reach out to God your shepherd for comfort?

Now, there are of course those of us whose life, for whatever reason, has dipped more often than most into the valley of the shadow of death. They know the caves and boulders, the ditches and holes down here. They know the valley doesn’t go on forever and they know how to get out. If you are one of those people, know that you are blessed and we are blessed to have you, because you can be a light in the darkness to others who are walking this road for the first time. You can come alongside those who would otherwise be left stumbling in the dark. Practically, you can point us to resources that might help us along, be they books or practices or therapy or music or prayer or something else entirely. God can work through your experiences to bring grace to another.

But whether we’ve been there before or not, no matter what we may in encounter in the valley of the shadow of death, no matter how real or powerful our pain feels to us, no matter how deep the depression, how debilitating the grief or anxiety, how confusing and tormenting our mental health is, we know that we are not alone. We are never alone. We have those who have gone on before us, but best of all, God is with us. God’s rod and staff protect and comfort us. In this life, even in the darkest times in our life, God is with us. We are not alone. That’s our second lesson. Though it may feel like it and though we may believe it from time to time, we are never alone.

And our God is even more gracious than that. Our God is abundant. The psalm is bracketed by these verses: “I shall not want” and “my cup runneth over.” We are given rest not on rocky hills but in green pastures. We are not told to drink from rushing water but led to water that slowly flows. We are restored not only in body but also in spirit. We are led along the paths that God knows we need to follow. And even in times of trial, even when we’re surrounded with enemies, be they people or circumstances, we are not only supported by God, we’re anointed. In the middle of a struggle, a banquet is thrown in our honor. No matter what we’re going through, no matter what we’ve done or left undone, no matter what life throws our way, goodness and mercy follow us all the days of our lives. God’s love and grace is abundant in our lives.

That’s our last but maybe hardest lesson from Psalm 23. God is abundant. God gives us abundant life. Even when we can’t see it, even when the world feels like it’s crashing down around us, even when our brain can’t understand it, God is with us, pouring out goodness and mercy and life in abundance.

On a practical level, we can pull three lessons from our psalm: the valley doesn’t last forever; we aren’t alone, even in the valley; and goodness is abundant, always. When we know these things, when we take them to heart, we can be patient and kind with ourselves, even hopeful, in the middle of mental health struggles, because we know the valley doesn’t last forever. We can take courage and endure, because we know that we aren’t alone. And we can eat and drink and rest and do our best to delight in this world, even when our mind and spirit might not want to, because we know that our God is abundant. We can teach ourselves to look for goodness and to be thankful for it, because God assures us that goodness will always be there.

Friends, I hope you take some of this with you as you go into your week, because we all need to be reminded of it from time to time. We all need the comfort food of this psalm sometimes, yes, but we also need the wisdom sometimes, maybe even in this time. Every storm runs out of rain, as the song goes, and even the darkest valleys come back to the light. When we walk with God, we never walk alone. And goodness is all around us, abundantly, if only we look for it. No matter what is going on in the world or in our minds, we are wrapped up in God’s goodness, mercy, and grace. Nothing can change that. Nothing can ever change that.

Amen.