I love watching cooking competitions. I started watching them with my grandmother Diana and have continued the tradition with my daughter Diana Grace. One of the genre’s most iconic shows is Hell’s Kitchen. On the show, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey mentors teams of chefs through a series of challenges until there is one winner who then receives a job at one of his restaurants. The show is popular because Gordon Ramsey is a very peculiar person. He is a brilliant chef but watching him yell in his British accent at these contestants full of hope and aspiration is quite comical. It is truly a wonder that people still sign up for the show to be screamed at after so many seasons. One of the challenges that always makes me laugh is the blind taste test. Here they are, all these successful chefs being blindfolded and tasting food that they should definitely know by taste and texture alone, yet many of them goof it up. I’ve seen executive chefs with decades of cooking experience not be able to identify chicken, call carrots radishes, mangos strawberries, and even once in season 9 a chef thought that lobster was mushrooms! Here are people trained to identify food yet they couldn’t identify the foods only by taste. They needed to see. As Christians, we are trained to be able to identify God. We, like the contestants, have to identify something, in our case God, whom we can taste, or rather experience, but whom we cannot see. David exclaims in Psalm 34 to taste and see that the Lord is good. This might seem pretty basic but it is, indeed, a lofty task and one that was at times difficult for David and can certainly be difficult for us.
Our text today is Psalm 34.
Take my side, God – I’m getting kicked around,
stomped on every day.
Not a day goes by
but somebody beats me up;
They make it their duty
to beat me up.
When I get really afraid
I come to you in trust.
I’m proud to praise God;
fearless now, I trust in God.
What can mere mortals do?
They don’t let up –
they smear my reputation
and huddle to plot my collapse.
They gang up,
sneak together through the alleys
To take me by surprise,
wait for their chance to get me.
Pay them back in evil!
Get angry, God!
Down with these people!
You’ve kept track of my every toss and turn
through the sleepless nights,
Each tear entered in your ledger,
each ache written in your book.
If my enemies run away,
turn tail when I yell at them,
Then I’ll know
that God is on my side.
I’m proud to praise God,
proud to praise God.
Fearless now, I trust in God;
what can mere mortals do to me?
God, you did everything you promised,
and I’m thanking you with all my heart.
You pulled me from the brink of death,
my feet from the cliff-edge of doom.
Now I stroll at leisure with God
in the sunlit fields of life.
David faced darkness. And we, like David, face darkness.
A note: Before continuing, it’s important to mention the problematic nature of the light/dark dichotomy. As a Black person, I can tell you how pervasive, insidious, and damaging constantly having blackness – or darkness – associated with bad or negative things is. Perhaps this is something many in this congregation have never had to deal with. It’s probably gone unnoticed. In Star Wars, Darth Vader follows the Dark Side of the Force. In Harry Potter, Voldemort is called the Dark Lord. Black and white dualism is incredibly problematic. Especially in our current social climate, it must be said – emphatically – that whiteness isn’t good and blackness isn’t evil. Still, in some cases, I think the light/dark dichotomy can be useful. People are naturally afraid of the dark because it’s hard to see. Light, in that context, is comforting. I often say I’m holding persons or situations in the Light as a layover from my sojourning with Quakers. Christ’s Light is illuminating. When preaching in my home context, I often preface my sermons by asking God to cast our sin in revelatory brightness. May it be so – for our actions, our language, our prejudices, and the systems that oppress some of us. Today, we’ll still use light/dark dichotomy language. It’s imperative, though, that we can say we wrestled with it first.
We live in a season where we are facing difficult times as a church – both little c church and big C church. Some say the church is dead. Some say it’s dying. Others transitioning. We don’t have time to unpack them fully during this sermon, so ask me later if you want to talk more about them. I bring them up, though, because for many the so-called decline of the Church is extremely scary. For many, shrinking church sizes, fewer young families in the pews, a society that is growing increasingly secular, force them to face the darkness.
The Good News in today’s text, though, is that God delivers David i.e. he blessed David because David trusted him.
Verses 1-10 include David’s personal testimony along with invitations to join him in praising God. David asks, or rather calls, us to rejoice with him! In verse 1, David says that he will praise God at all times. David praises God, as the story I shared earlier explained, during extremely desperate circumstances. David is setting up a theological statement that will continue into the New Testament as Paul writes later that we are to “Give thanks whatever happens.” In verses 4-5 David explains his situation – “I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears.” And asserts to us that it can be our experience too –he says, “Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.” In verse 6 he explains, explicitly, that in his desperation he prayed and God listened. Not only did he listen, but God also saved David from his troubles. In verse 8, the most popular line from the passage, David exclaims: “Taste and see that the Lord is good. Oh, the joys of those who take refuge in him!” We are to have faith first and allow confirmation to follow. We must identify God, believe and trust in him, before we even truly taste and see. When Thomas doubted and demanded to put his hands in the holes in Jesus’s hands and side, Jesus corrected him by saying “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me.” Trust in God – then, taste and see that the Lord is good! In verses 9-10 David says that “those who fear him will have all they need.” The defense and supplies that David desperately needed in the story I shared from 1 Samuel 21 – the context for this psalm – did, later, come to him from God. David trusted in God and God blessed him. The second half of the psalm serves to reiterate the first half’s message and ends with the powerful words of verse 22: “But the Lord will redeem those who serve him. No one who takes refuge in him will be condemned.”David, long before Christ, shares words that are the heart of the Gospel.
God blesses those who trust him. I can’t change the past. I know I’ve done terrible things but I do not have to be a slave to or consumed by the darkness. I’m not where I want to be but I’m not who I used to be. And I do not need to be ashamed of my past because I am no longer going to face a guilty punishment for it, for Jesus has cast my sin as far as the east is from the west. Amen? Amen!
Even though the Church – here and across the country – is in a so-called decline, we know that the Church is not dead because the Church is the Body of Christ! Amen? Amen! In spite of startling statistics, God is still at work in the world. The Church is growing in places like South America, Africa, and Asia at unprecedented rates. In some places, the Church is growing even in the face of severe, and violent, persecution. Even here, in the United States, there are countless churches and ministries willing to step out in faith and try something new who have seen enormous success and explosive growth measured either in size, by numbers of attendees, or by the spiritual growth of their members. We’re here in the midst of one such community. Have y’all taken time to ponder this? To appreciate this? Is God actually doing something new here? Are we partnering with the very Spirit that spoke Creation into existence? Who raised Jesus from the dead? One of the most popular Bible verses is “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.” While this is true it is important for us to remember that we can only do all things through Christ because Christ – because God – can already do all things himself. Amen? Amen! God can take care of us as individuals, regardless of the darkness we face and he can take care of us as a congregation and as a Church universal. We just have to trust in him. God blesses those who trust him. So, taste and see that the Lord is good, for God is good all the time; and all the time he is good!
“Pastor Chibuzo…” I can hear you exclaiming. What does it mean to taste and see the Lord is good when you are sick and dying? What does it mean for God’s love to be boundless when you can’t legally visit your partner or other loved one in the hospital? Nigeria has the largest Brethren population in the world – my denomination. It also has one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates. What does God’s boundless love mean to them? What does it mean to the Chibok girls? Have you forgotten about them already? What is the boundless love of God when you are celebrating Advent while hiding in the bush? Nigeria is much closer to the Holy Land than Ohio. So, what is God’s boundless love to the Palestinians worshipping in Bethlehem? Hebron? Gaza? How do you experience God’s love at all – let alone God’s boundless love or what’s more Emmanuel/God with us – as you watch your home be bulldozed by an occupying army?
“Pastor Chibuzo…” I can hear you saying again. Your message was supposed to be about joy. What are you bringing us down for? Well, sisters, brothers, nonbinary siblings, what does verse 18 of today’s psalm teach us? The Lord is close to the brokenhearted! What better holiday message? I don’t know about you but I’m brokenhearted. My family, like many of yours, probably deal with physical health issues. Mental health ones, too. Financial troubles. Life is hard. We experience pain. Suffering. Death. Still, God is with us. Some of y’all might have been made to feel less than created in God’s image by people who claim to follow that same God. That’s tough, right? Some folks are just eager to exclude you. But, here’s the rub y’all. God. Is. With. Us. God’s love truly is boundless. God is with us even as we experience loss. Excruciating pain. Discrimination. God is with us when we face difficulties that others cause – that aren’t our fault. But, thank goodness, he is still with us when we’re the ones in the wrong. Amen? He was even with David! Spoiler alert in case they didn’t teach you this in Sunday School but David was a rapist and a murderer. Still, God calls David a man after God’s own heart… How is this possible? I don’t have all the answers. I know, though, that I’m taking solace in this reality. I’m comforted knowing that no matter what someone or some system does to me, God’s love will reach me. I’m comforted knowing that no matter what I do that might harm someone else, God’s love still reaches me. No. This doesn’t mean everything is relative. Of course not. It doesn’t mean we can just sin unrepentantly because grace abounds. Heaven forbid. But, as long as we trust and turn, God truly is Emmanuel. God’s love really is boundless.
Chibuzo N. Petty is a minister and writer whose work has been featured in InterVarsity Press, Brethren Press, Brethren Life & Thought, Quaker Life, and Anabaptist World (forthcoming), among others. Black, disabled, and queer, their interests lie at the intersection of cultural competency and pastoral care. In addition to their writing and editing ministry, they work as an interfaith chaplain for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs.