The name of the class is Liturgical Media Art: The Moving Word. One of our assignments is to lead Morning Prayer for the Drew Theological School community using media art.

Jeffrey Hayes is on my team. He is a pastor in the Church of God tradition. He directs a college distance learning program but serves as the media team director at the church he attends. This liturgical art piece begins with the simple instructions to observe an object for twenty minutes from all angles, then photograph it or sketch it. Jeff studies the branch of a tree, discovering that the dawning sun winks through the leaves. In Jeff’s artistic eye, that task blossoms into “Hail, Gladdening Light”, a celebration of creation and the summer solstice.

When I fly to Madison, New Jersey for my Doctor of Ministry studies at Drew University three weeks ago, it is late spring. The tomatoes in my garden are nursery transplants. Now, on the waning side of summer, my tomatoes look like trees.

I spend the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, in Madison. Legend says that all creation vibrates on this day because we have more light than any other day of the year. Of course, this year the residents of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Maryland experience more rain than any other day of the year. And, I believe the rain follows me home.

But torrents of water do not stop college students from a good summer solstice party! I don’t know how…but they manage to get a bonfire blazing. Like the ancient druids, they dance, they sing, they eat and make merry in honor of the gift of light on the longest day of the year. I enter the celebration at the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival’s presentation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

On the day of summer solstice, I take the time to ponder my own spiritual journey and my longing for light. Physically, I am wet and beginning to grow webs between my toes and fingers. I am hungry for the sun and its warmth. Spiritually, I know that light is God’s promise. It will overcome the darkness…of three critical book reviews, two projects, and a research paper, all due in the three weeks!

And then, in the midst of my reflection, it appears. Psalm 91.

Now you do not know that Psalm 91 is a mystical sign for me. It appears at times when God wants me to attend, to pay attention. God is speaking. God is shining light in a new place.

Today we welcome the Large Church Immersion team to our worship (at 9:30). Blaine Scott, who is the lead pastor at First United Methodist Church, s my associate in ministry for 6 years in Cheyenne. He remembers the un-nerving day when Psalm 91 is infused with power.

Just before the service begins one Sunday, an usher tells me that an elderly woman has come to church with a message from God for the congregation. At some point in the service, he says, the Spirit will lead her to stand up, come to the front of the church, and speak God’s message. (You know, sometimes you have to watch what you pray for. Come, Holy Spirit, come!)

Blaine and I consult and, to our credit and discernment, decide not to squelch the Spirit. We have plan A, plan B, and plan C in place, in case this woman is abusive and inappropriate.

So, with a light sweat upon our brows, we begin the worship service.

As we begin the call to worship, an elderly white woman on a walker begins to make her way down the aisle. She is beautiful and frail. I signal to the organist not to start the hymn. Mrs. Soderquist turns to the congregation and says, “God has told me to speak this message to God’s people.” I think the congregation holds its corporate breath.

Then, in a thick Scottish brogue, Mrs. Soderquist recites Psalm 91 for memory. It is a transcendent moment.

You who live in the shelter of the Most High,
who abide in the shadow of the Almighty,
will say to the Lord,
“My refuge and my fortress;
My God, in whom I trust.”

When she concludes the psalm, “With long life I will satisfy them, and show them my salvation,” the congregation rises in tearful applause and we begin the hymn, “Morning Has Broken”.

Since that time, Psalm 91 is a signpost. It says, “Pay attention, Janet. I am about to do a new thing. Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”

So I pay attention and trust its appearance, whether on the walls of a church in Guatemala or in a bedside prayer, or in a song, and on the stone arch at the entrance of Drew University. “My refuge and my fortress; My God in whom I trust.”

Reginald Mallett, British Methodist preacher, says he remembers his first grade teacher, Miss Broadman, and her “Monday Morning Penny Psalms.” Each Monday, she writes a psalm on the blackboard, and the first child who memorizes it gets a penny. He remembers memorizing Psalm 91. He remembers the comfort it brings to a small child. He writes: ‘Like most children, I was afraid of the dark. Every creak and groan of our old house brought a host of terrors. Every shadow seemed sinister, a lair for ghosts and scary animals.”

So, Mallett says, as a child he takes great comfort in the Psalmist’s promise: “You will not fear the terror of the night.” Even as Brits, Mallett says that children know about “arrows that fly by day” through stories of courage among our Native peoples.

But he says that is one phrase of Psalm which is totally lost on him: “The destruction that wastes at noonday.”

Later he writes, “I have come to see that life’s noonday is a most dangerous time. By then, the major decisions have been made. It is the point in our journey that we are tempted to sit back and let down our guard. At night we are vigilant, but at noonday we relax and say, ‘You can afford to eat, drink and be merry.’ We take a spiritual…siesta and we underestimate the destruction that can waste…at high noon. (Reginald Mallett, Sermons by the Lake, 26)

AT HIGH NOON we are, perhaps, at the height of our busyness with a deep investment in life, a multitude of demands and pressure to succeed, high expectations of our own and high expectations from those around us. And the temptation is to lose ourselves.

To be so caught up in the doing that we lose touch with being.

To be so lost in our busyness that we lose touch with our souls.

My friend, Greg Jones, Dean of Duke Divinity School, is a teacher, administrator, fund-raiser, author, scholar, preacher, parent and spouse. It amazes me what he is able to accomplish. In one of his recent books, Greg says:

Busy people may think that what we need is a few more open boxes on the pages of our day timers. But, in fact, that would only provide a flat short-lived remedy because those boxes would soon fill up like the others. What we really need is time of a different quality: God time in the midst of our time. (L. Gregory Jones, Everyday Matters, 112)

In the past three week, I realize that I am not distressed by busyness. I enjoy being busy. But I am disturbed by “hurry”, the frantic pace that lacks the quality of time that renews, refreshes, and redeems.

At high noon, in the midst of our busyness, the antidote to the destruction of noon day is to find God time: moments on park benches that refresh, breath prayers that renew, silence that redeems “hurry” and makes us whole.

It’s a good message for summer, a call to seek God times in the light of high noon.

High noon may be a dangerous time in our spiritual journey.

Reg Mallet tells the story of a little girl who, over breakfast, is having a theological discussion with her older, and much wiser, 10 year old brother about the presence of God in the world. He says that God was everywhere. She is puzzled. She asks:

Does that mean God is in this town?
Does that mean God is in this house?
Does that mean God is in this room?
Does that mean God is at this table?

Then she picks up the little egg cup used for holding a boiled egg and says, Does that mean God is in this egg cup? “Yes, I guess so.”

Immediately the child clasps her hand over the top of the cup. “Now, I’ve gotcha!” (Sermons by the Lake, 30)

In the early dawn of our spiritual walk we live in wonder, open to God’s leading, marveling at the immensity of possibility.

But as the day wears on, we come to think that we have God all figured out, all cut and dried, all saucered and bowled. Safe and secure with our hand on the egg cup, we become convinced we have a God we can handle.

It is, in fact, the destruction that can wastes our spiritual journey at the noonday.

If you drive east on Route 124 toward Newark Airport, you pass a barn which is painted with a large sign “God rules over Morris County. Welcome to New Jersey.” I don’t quite know what to make of that. Either it is quite an incredibly bold assertion or you have to ask if that isn’t it an awfully tiny territory for the God of the Universe.

At noon time, it is easy to think we have the boundaries in place that we know just where God lives and what the territory looks like. We are in danger of losing sight of the grandness, the incredible immenseness of God. We will lose ourselves in the light in the noon day light with our small notions of God's boundaries in our lives.

Let us pray: Oh, God, don’t let us settle for the narrow pathway in the light of mid-summer. Keep us growing and learning, ready to discover new wisdom, new breath and height and depth in your light.

 

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I am grateful to Dr. John E. Harnish, senior pastor of First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan, who is a member of the Gathering, for the image of “high noon” in Psalm 91, from his sermon on June 25, 2006. The Gathering is a group of 35 senior leaders in United Methodist churches across the country to share ideas and practice peer support and coaching.

I am also grateful for the leadership of Dr. Eileen Crowley, author of A Moving Word: Media Art in Worship. (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 2006), for her Drew 2006 summer class in the Doctor of Ministries program and to Jeffrey Hayes for his artistic gifts in media.