Sermon November 17 2024 Psalm 16                                                  Rev. Betsy Hogan 

What do you think of, when you think of famous Canadian inventions?

For most of us, the first answer is probably insulin. As it absolutely should be. Banting and Best’s Nobel Prize winning life-saving treatment for diabetes. Almost certainly our most famous Canadian invention, and certainly the most significant for the most people around the globe since its discovery.

But I looked up famous Canadian inventions this week, and I found a few more surprises. The electric wheelchair, for example. The pacemaker. The walkie-talkie – which, for anyone under the age of thirty, was kind of a big deal at the time. Because for the first time people could actually walk around talking to each other… through a little machine.

But what I was looking for was confirmation, which I found, that yet another great Canadian invention from days of yore was pablum. That powdery infant cereal that comes in a box – just shake out a bit and add some milk and voila: baby’s first sort-of solid food.

It was invented at roughly the height of the Great Depression at Sick Kids hospital in Toronto, in 1931. And I can only assume that by 1932 or so, it had become the key go-to Canadian metaphor for anything soft and squishy and pleasantly banal, that’d go down easy and stop your crying.

Good old pablum. Soothing and unchallenging and down it goes and subside into calm.

The literal cereal embodiment of “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, everything will be fine, everything’s fine”.

Or… for the churchy among us, in the days following the US election last week, those famous words of the mystic Julian of Norwich, one of the great Christian theologians of the medieval church, whose work Revelations of Divine Love is still considered a cornerstone of Christian mysticism. 

"All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well."

I can’t tell you how many times I saw that quote last week. And I was very much not in the mood for it. My most polite mental reaction, to put it mildly, was wanting to type “check your privilege” really loudly every time I saw it. Because all I could see was pablum. Soothing and unchallenging and down it goes. Subside into calm. All shall be well.

But here's the thing. Julian of Norwich may have been a mystic but she very much did NOT have her head in the clouds. And for all we sometimes imagine that never before has anyone experienced the kind of trials or tribulations or turmoils that WE have, it's simply not true.

Because Julian of Norwich wrote those words – "all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well" – she wrote those words at the height of the Black Plague that was decimating Europe, and in the midst of the Hundred Years' war that was essentially a feudal war of attrition and the Peasants' Revolt that arose in response to that same feudal system that was trapping people in desperate poverty. 

And mystic notwithstanding, she served in urban Norwich in that context of horrendous poverty and fear of disease, and in the constant shadow of permanent war. 

So her words – they weren't pablum. They weren't patronizing. They weren't ivory tower nonsense from a comfortable check-your-privilege pew. They were hard-earned and hard-won and THAT'S where their import came from. THAT'S what lent them authority and made them remembered.

Because they're fierce. To look around and see what's what and STILL at the end of the day come back to "all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well" – that's fierce. Whether it's articulated with absolute conviction or repeated desperately as essentially a prayer, as she surely must sometimes have found herself repeating it, it's fierce.

And it's biblical. Because we have its precursor in Psalm 16, that Margaret read for us this morning. And to no small degree also in Psalm 23. But Psalm 23 is so confident, it's already so secure. In Psalm 23 all IS well, beside the still waters with our souls restored. 

Whereas Psalm 16? It's not quite there yet. But it's fierce. Which can be easy to miss. Because just as the famous words of Julian of Norwich can too easily get dismissed as mere pablum or even patronizing, if we don't take seriously the reality of what she was actually experiencing in her world at that time –

The words of Psalm 16 can come off as trivializing. Totally out of touch with actual fear and actual worry and an actual need for protection and hope. Apparently confident by virtue of privilege that obviously the writer of the Psalm rests secure. 

But that's not quite the case. Psalm 16 emerges out of a time in Ancient Israelite history when the fear was very real. The people have been conquered, decimated, the remnant dragged into exile and enslaved. But it wasn't just a sort of ancient-times version of the medieval experience of the constant threat of war or uprising or plague – 

What's important for us to remember in ALL these past times, whether medieval or ancient or the First World War or the Second, or the upheavals of the 1970s, when we think about them NOW, is that what's reflected in the writings of these various ages can't be dismissed as a sort of temporal fear, a transient fear, a specific fear of a specific threat.

In all these cases, what's being experienced is deeper. It's inarticulate. It's existential.  

For the writer of Psalm 16, just as surely as for Julian of Norwich, these words that get lifted up – "you are at my right hand, O God, and therefore I shall not be moved" – they're arising as a response not to war or to poverty or to plague or to a particular fear or a reason for uncertainty –

They're arising as a response to ALL of it. To just an overwhelming sense that it's all going wrong and there's not enough right, and everything's falling apart, and what'll be left? Anything we've thought was precious? Anything we tried to build?

For the writer of Psalm 16, just as surely as for Julian of Norwich, it absolutely feels like the end times. So what emerges isn't pablum. It isn't patronizing, it isn't trivializing. It's a fierce faithfulness that's been hard-earned and hard-won, and I think we need to hear it as the gift it absolutely is. 

Because this is the writer of Psalm 16 regrounding themselves – fiercely regrounding themselves – in Godness and goodness for strength and for courage. This is the writer of Psalm 16 fiercely reminding themself whose they are.... so they can rest. 

All will be well and all will be well and all manner of thing will be well. It's not trivializing. It's survival. The Psalms didn't arise as one book fully formed – 150 Psalms for your pleasure and delight. The Psalms got collected over time – this prayer, that song, this old favourite, that instant classic.

And the ones that shook down through oral tradition into the Book of Psalms we now have are the ones that got remembered. They're the ones that turned out to be useful, to individual people and to the community, because whatever it was that they said... it was needed.

It mattered. What we call Psalm 16 got remembered because it mattered to people. "With you at my right hand," the Psalmist wrote, "I cannot be moved. So my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, and my body too can rest. Secure."

I have a feeling that at least part of the reason why Psalm 16 got remembered was because it probably had to be repeated night after night after night. 

But that's not pablum. That's survival. Ours is a faith tradition that locates itself firmly in historical context – our stories of faith don't hover outside of time on a spiritual plane or even in the time-transcending plane of the natural world around us.

Our stories of faith happen in the actual world at actual times when actual people and nations and leaders and armies were doing actual things that created actual chaos. And because of that, our stories of faith include prayers and words and poetry that are JUST about survival.

That are just how someone stayed grounded, made it through, got some rest, when everything really was fearsome. And wrongness did seem to be taking over. And it did feel like the end times. And that's a gift.

Because none of those feelings are new. They've always been part of the human story, it always felt real, and people have always had to get fierce with their faith to get through them. And they have. "In you, Oh Lord, I take refuge; in your presence is fullness of joy. And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

The great irony of pablum, really, is that it’s always going to lose out on the fame-o-meter to the epic invention of insulin. But the point of pablum was that it was fortified. Particularly with Vitamin D. It was an easy, reliable, inexpensive way to get the basic building blocks of nutrition into every Canadian infant.

Nothing fancy. Just the solid foundation for basic healthy survival. That’s what pablum provides. The deep enough, strong enough solid foundation for healthy survival to maybe some day, if it’s necessary, benefit from insulin. 

Thanks be to God, in whom we lay down that foundation, and rest secure. Amen.