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The Rev. Frank Logue
The Path of Life During an 1867 visit to Savannah, naturalist John Muir visited Bonaventure cemetery. It was necessity that brought him to what he called a “weird and beautiful abode of the dead.” He was on a thousand mile walk from Louisville, Kentucky to Cedar Key, Florida. Along the way, his brother was sending him money to keep him solvent on the journey, without having to keep large sums of money on his person. The plan worked well until Savannah when his money was all but run out six days before the money arrived. In the intervening nights, he slept among the tombs at Bonaventure as a safe sanctuary for one camping out in a strange town. He wrote of the cemetery, “You come to beds of purple liatris and living wild-wood trees. You hear the songs of birds, cross a small stream, and are with nature in the grand old forest graveyard, so beautiful that almost any sensible person would choose to dwell here with the dead rather than with the lazy, disorderly living.” I read those words as a college sophomore and being just over an hour a way in Statesboro, Georgia, I got in my car and found my way to Bonaventure. I wondered how the cemetery Muir had found in 1867 looked in 1981. I found that while the number of graves had increased, they had not changed the essential nature of John Muir’s experience. He wrote this as well during his stay, I gazed awe-stricken as one new-arrived from another world. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, a town of the dead, but the few graves are powerless in such depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, mark this place of graves as one of the Lord’s most favored abodes of life and light… I took some photos on that first trip to Bonaventure and have returned from time to time in the intervening 27 years to take more photos. Victoria and Griffin have also added to our collection of pictures of the grand cemetery. Victoria even has some family members buried there. Along with Muir we three consider “this place of graves as one of the Lord’s most favored abodes of life and light.”
Walking around a cemetery in Easter Week is interesting. The grave markers are full of words of the hope of the resurrection, but in many cases, the arrangements for the markers were made by people in the midst of grief and loss. So it is an Easter place, decorated by people still living in the shock of Good Friday. It is a place of hopeful anguish mixed with anguished hope—Good Friday lived with the awareness that Easter Sunday will surely come. This is exactly the tone of our psalm for today. The 16th Psalm begins with the words “Protect me O God.” It starts in a place of uncertainty, calling out to God for refuge. It begins in anguished hope that is less evident in the Psalm itself than in its context. We usually read the Psalms as stand alone poems. But their context within the book of Psalms is not unintentional. For example the 22nd Psalm cries “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” and continues with words so reminiscent for us of Jesus’ crucifixion, though they were written centuries before. This is followed by the hope of the 23rd Psalm which says though “I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me.” The Psalms are set alongside one another with a larger purpose in mind. In that same way, our Psalm today follows in a series that have begun with verses like “Help me Lord for there I no godly one left” in Psalm 12 and “How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?” in Psalm 13. In Psalm 14, this despair is worse. It begins, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God. All are corrupt and commit abominable acts; there is none who does any good.” Then there is a turn in Psalm 15 to speaking of those who lead a blameless life and do what is right. Now in Psalm 16, we get a song of trust in God, so in verse 8 of our Psalm for today, the Psalmist says, “I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand I shall not fall.” And in the next verse he goes on to write, “My heart, therefore is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body shall also rest in hope.” This gets us back to Bonaventure. Yes, it is a place of light and life because of the towering, cathedral-like Live Oaks and the profusion of flowers and the songs of birds. But Bonaventure is also a place of light and life because of the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.
And so walking around Bonaventure, you see not abandoned people, but the lives of those who died celebrated in stone. It’s a lively convocation. The writer Conrad Aiken has a bench at which you are supposed to enjoy a drink and pour some out for him. Conrad’s grave is alongside that of the Rt. Rev. John Beckwith, a Confederate chaplain in the Civil War who became the second bishop of our Episcopal Diocese of Georgia. And they are just a stone’s through from the Mercer family plot with the grave of singer and song writer Johnny Mercer. It is something of a view of the communion of saints etched out in stone and scattered among the trees. Yet in the end, Psalm 16 is not about neither cemeteries nor grief. At least not that alone. The Psalmist ends singing out, “You will show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy, and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.” The path of life is the goal. Psalm 16 is telling us what earthly good it is to have a heavenly hope. That heavenly hope is not about fire insurance—believe in God so that you don’t go to Hell. The hope of heaven is about living on the path of life in the here and now. The idea, mentioned back in verse 8 is, “I have set the Lord always before me.” This is what makes it possible to say, “My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices; my body shall rest in hope.” Being aware that the Lord is always with us is what leads the Psalmist to say, “In your presence there is fullness of joy.” Having God with you through all the twists and turns of life is what brings hope to anguish, light to darkness, and peace to despair. Having God with you in times both good and bad is what sets one on the path of life. We see this most fully when we read Psalm 16 alongside the psalms which precede it. The earlier psalms are dealing very this world despair and they are resolved through trust in God that we see most fully in Psalm 16. I want to pause for a moment to let you know one of my overall goals in my ministry, then I can wrap this sermon up. The goal bears on where this sermon is going. But first I need you to decide for yourself if you fit into one of two groups. The first group is those of you for whom life is going pretty well or even very well. Most everything is under control and it is easier to count blessings than problems. That’s the first group. The second group is those of you who knew right away you were not part of that first group. You are wondering how you are going to make it through the week, or even the day. This doesn’t necessarily apply to those who are wondering if you are going to make it through this sermon. That’s another problem. But for those who are feeling knocked down, kicked I the gut, or however you care to look at it, you are in the second group. OK. Here is one of my goals. I want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comforted. So if you are in group two, you are in anguish or despair and I need to bring hope and love. That’s what Jesus did all the time. He reached out to those in need with love and compassion. He comforted the afflicted. And I am to show you the path of life and how you can have fullness of joy even in a life where not everything is going right, or everything seems to have gone wrong. To you I need to share with you Jesus’ promise that he is with you always. That also means that for those of you in the first group, I need to afflict you. Jesus afflicted the comforted all the time and tried to knock them slap out of their comfort zones with some pretty tough words, language directed at getting the comforted up and moving to help those in need. Because for those of us on the path of life—who already have the hope of the resurrection—we should have our happiness tinged with the sadness of knowing that not everyone yet fills that fullness of joy. You may sit alongside someone at work or even here in worship who is still back in Psalm 13, calling out, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?” I’m not so much trying to diminish your joy as hoping to encourage you and challenge you to share your joy with the person in sorrow. It is the Sunday after Easter. How did you comforted use that joy of Easter this past week? Was it more like a personal pocket warmer to make you feel good or like a beacon to someone else? There. End of guilt trip. Now that you are feeling a little afflicted, I can go back to comforting you too. Amen.
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