Looking Around to See Ahead – A Sermon based on Psalm 16
preached at First Presbyterian Church, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania on October 18, 2026
Walking around among the grave
markers in the cemetery one has a stunning view of the valley below. I had just
taken the picture that is on the bulletin cover this morning when Bill Carter
approached. I pointed to the stone walls
and the livestock below and quoted, “Psalm 16,
Psalm 16 is one of my
favorites. Here is another reason why.
In February of 1985 my father was scheduled to read one of the scripture
readings during the Sunday evening service where the Presbytery of Lackawanna
was to Install me as the pastor of First Presbyterian Church of West
Pittston. The night before we had a
lovely family dinner around my wife’s grandmother’s table in the dining room of
the manse that would become our home for thirty-four and a half years.
After dinner, my Dad took a seat in
an old oak rocking chair that he had reupholstered for us, and proceeded to have
what another generation would have called “a spell.” His eyes were open, but
there was a blank look on his face, and he did not respond to questions. My
sister-in-law, a nurse, checked him over and said, “Call an ambulance.”
The rescue crew from our new
hometown came and transported him to what was then called NPW hospital in
Plains, where he was admitted. He had regained his senses but had no
recollection of the incident. Long story short, he had experienced a TIA, a
Transient Ischemic Attack, spent a few days being evaluated before being
transferred to Geisinger in Danville. Eventually he was sent home to New Jersey
where he underwent surgeries to clear out blockages in his carotid arteries.
Needless to say he didn’t read scripture at my Installation.
During one of my first visits with
him he asked if I could bring him something to read. After promising to do so,
I pulled from my sport coat the pocket-sized Bible I usually carried and left
it with him.
Months later, when I opened that Bible to read some Psalms to a parishioner in another hospital or nursing home room, I was surprised to find that my father had used the little menu marking pencil to draw a line around verses five through eleven of Psalm 16 and write the date on which he had read them. In the words of that original sweat-soaked, coffee-stained Revised Standard Version the verses he enclosed began:
“The
Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
thou
holdest my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
Yeah, I have a goodly heritage."
By this point in the psalm, the author is looking back and looking around and reflecting on life. By the end he will speak confidently about trusting God to lead him in the future. The poet began his prayer with what one scholar labels as “a prayer for preservation,” adding “the Psalmist simply prays that God may also protect him in the future as he has done in the past.”[iii]
In the New Revised Standard Version the Psalm ends with words which speak of living
sur-rounded by the presence of God, not just in the distant future, but here
and now:
“You
show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures forevermore."
Getting
from the petition for preservation to that final statement of faith is not for
the faint of heart. It requires an
honest look at where one is now and how one got there. It means reviewing all
the twists and turns, the false starts and difficult slogs, as well as the
sunshine moments and mountaintop revelations.
Commentator James L. Mays helps us understand the picture at the heart of verses five and six. He writes: “When the psalmist calls the Lord his ‘portion and cup’ and speaks of lot and lines and heritage in describing the goodness of his destiny, he is using the vocabulary and concepts that are employed in the Book of Joshua to describe Israel’s occupation of the promised land as the outcome of God’s salvation of Israel.”[v]
Now I’m sure you remember the story
of Israel getting to the promised land was no cake walk! A look back on the
journey from Egypt through the wilderness and much, much later, crossing the
Jordan and settling the land, are not all remembrances of a dry seabed to
cross, manna from heaven and water from rocks. There are also stories of
rebellion, doubt, deception, and disbelief in the trustworthiness of leadership
and the goodness of God.
Yet, when the land was divided up,
by casting lots, like rolling dice, it would be possible for the tribes of
Israel to take the long view and reflect that despite all the ups and downs,
things had turned out pretty well. With God’s help, of course. So too, the Psalmist. Though we are given no
specifics of the poet’s journey, when he looks around, all things considered,
he’s in a pretty good place.
The same went for my Dad. Propped up in a hospital bed, he apparently
found the words of Psalm 16 spoke for him. No doubt he recalled the low points,
disappointments and challeng-ing moments of his life. The vocational dreams of
his youth and his college education had been left behind when he enlisted in
the Navy after Pearl Harbor. His service overseas took a toll on his health and
led to the first of many surgeries. A Palm Sunday heart attack, and few years
later, a dissecting aortic aneurism made for plenty of unpleasant places
visited along the way.
Yet when he reviewed his life as he
read Psalm 16 in his hospital bed there were plenty of things for which to be
thankful: A marriage of four plus decades, a paid off mortgage, two child-ren
in stable marriages, four healthy granddaughters, opportunities as teacher and
elder at church, and to mentor boys and men through the Boy Scouts. Adding it
up, come what may, the boun-dary lines were pleasant.
Franciscan Friar Richard Rohr says
“The amazing thing about the Hebrews (in their scriptures) is that they did not
repress their reality... In a certain way, Israel did not distance itself from
its own contradictions or the contradictions of life, from the horrors and abysses of human history.”[vi] Aware that the unpleasant experiences of life help shape our perception, Rohr also
wrote that “Pain
How we process the good and the bad
we see when we look back to the past and around in the present makes all the
difference. In her book Beaverland, Leila
Philip tells of a conver-sation she had with a trapper from whom she was
learning about the wily rodents she loved to watch in the pond near her
home. They were taking a break as she
viewed the process of pre-serving a beaver hide. In a mo-ment of vulnerability
made possible by months of getting to know one another while traipsing around
beaver ponds, Herb told her he had been abused as a child.
Shocked and not knowing how to
respond, she nodded, then the trapper filled the silence. She writes, “then
Herb continued, as always matter-of-fact. “I don’t need to talk about it any-more.
I did serious therapy.” Then he added
some words of wisdom: “I use the past as a guide-post, not a whipping
Years ago I listened to a Ted Talk
given by a woman who told of being widowed when her husband succumbed to brain
cancer at a young age. Out of the blue a
video of her talk popped up again last week on Facebook. She listed several
things never to say to someone grieving such a loss, phrases like “It is time
for you to move on with your life.” Or,
when she started dating again someone said: “I’m so glad you have moved
on.” That led her to reflect on the
difference between “moving on” and “moving forward.”
Moving on, she said, implied leaving
the love of her life behind. It was as if her friends were encouraging her to forget
about him, to lock what they had shared in three years of mar-riage away, to go
on with life as if that chapter had never happened.
She resisted moving on because those
years had been among the best of her life, even when he was sick from the chemo
endured so he could spend a little more time with her. She didn’t want to forget him or what they
shared. She said he and their life together would always be part of her. Their
child would be a constant reminder of the happiest of times. Though she
resisted the idea of “moving on,” she refused to stay still, or wallow in the
past.
She met another man. They married.
They have children together. “I’ve moved forward,” she said. What she and her
new husband and blended family have is different from what she had
previously. She doesn’t characterize one
chapter as being better or worse than the other. Moving forward is different
from moving on because it allows all her life experience to shape who she is
now.
Moving forward into two new futures,
with appreciation for all you have experienced together across 35 years, is
what this congregation and your pastor will be about between now and April and
beyond. As one who has “been there, done that, and got the T-shirt--” Mine
read: Retirement—The World’s Longest Coffee Break--I can assure you that you
will get through it.
On my last Sunday before retirement, I reminded my congregation of a simple lesson of life I had shared during a moment with the children earlier that year. It involved a comparison of the size of the rearview mirror and the windshield of a vehicle. The rearview mirror in my truck measures 2 by 10 inches. The windshield is 27 by 57 inches. The difference in size suggests how much time one ought to spend looking in or through either. The rearview mirror is important as an aid to help you back up or see who or what is about to pass you by, or to glance at where you have been. However, the rearview mirror is dwarfed by the windshield, which allows you to see where you are going.
In the coming months, as pastor and
people prepare to part company, the comparison between the rearview mirror and
the windshield will provide some guidance as we all move forward. Bill has already shared some rearview reflections
as well as some glimpses of what is awaiting him after retirement. With the
help of the Transition Team and the Presbytery liaison, you’ll have opportunity
to look back and around in order to view what is ahead.
Psalm 16 can be helpful too. It is a psalm with just enough rearview mirror action: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage.” It is also a psalm with plenty of looking around and looking ahead: “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel...I keep the Lord always before me...my heart is glad, my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”
Here
is some of what James L. Mays says about Psalm 16: “it is a prayer of unusual
proportions. It begins with a brief petition for the protection of God. The
petition is supported by a motive clause, a declaration that the life of the psalmist
has made the Lord his refuge. ‘In you I take refuge’ is a formula for trusting
one’s life to the care of God. The psalm teaches that trust is not merely a
warm feeling or a passing impulse in a time of trouble; it is a structure of
acts and experiences that open one’s
Thinking back on the months between
my retirement announcement and our last Sunday together, there were plenty of
rearview moments as I purged files in my study, or we sorted through three
decades of accumulated stuff from attic to basement and in all the closets in
be-tween.
Like
the psalmist and my father, there were some not so pleasant memories that
surfaced which we willingly left behind, (sort of), like the tantrum thrown by an eighty-year-old treasurer,
or the time we came home from directing a week at Camp Lackawanna to discover
someone had broken into the manse through a dining room window, or the time
vandals emptied fire extinguishers in the Sunday School Auditorium.
Memories like that were outweighed
by the recollection of boxes of potatoes, bags of fresh-picked corn, and mason jars
of maple syrup that mysteriously showed up in our first manse in the days when
my salary was a whopping four figures.
And then there were the countless ways our congregation had been led by
God across the years. Buying a truck for a pastor in Ghana, surviving the
through four years of discerning New Beginnings after the 2011 flood, stepping
into a new partnership with a neighboring congregation and launching new
ministries there.
On the day before our last Sunday in
West Pittston, there was a windshield moment which helped assure me the future
was bright. I watched our tall, white,
Clerk of Session kneeling low to tie the sneakers of a tiny little black child
who had just enjoyed the Bounce House at the community carnival hosted by the
congregation.
The windshield moments come after
one’s gaze backward leads heart, soul and body to place trust in God and
embrace the truth of the beloved hymn: “Our God, our help in ages past, our
hope for years to come!”
When I was in high school, our
pastor took his family to Ireland to trace their roots. When they came back, he
told us about the sign they saw as they were about to enter their ancestral
village. Its message is both timely and
timeless:
“We
don’t know what the future holds
but
we know who holds the future.”
To God be
the glory. Amen.
[i] Psalm 16. 6, The New Revised Standard Version, 1991
[ii] Psalm 16. 5-6, Revised Standard Version, 1952
[iii] Arthur Weiser, The Psalms – A Commentary, The Old Testament Library, (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, (c) 1962, p. 173
[iv] Psalm 16. 11, The New Revised Standard Version, 1991
[v] James L. Mays, Psalms – Interpretation- A Biblical Commentary for Teaching and Preaching, (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1994), p. 87
[vi] Richard Rohr, Things Hidden, (New York: Convergent, An Imprint of Random House, (c) 2008, 2022), p. 16
[vii] ibid., p. 22
[viii] Leila Philip, Beaverland, How One Rodent Made America, (New York: Twelve – Hachette Book Group, (c) 1922), p. 79
[ix] ibid., Mays, p. 86
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