I Shall Not Want

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Well, good morning everybody. My name's Maggie, I work in communications and community life here at The Table and today represents a transition as you can see. You know, maybe this week you had a meal with some loved ones, maybe you even went around the table and said what you were grateful for. And all this month we've been talking about stewardship and giving and generosity and today we make the turn into Advent. This is that season of joyful anticipation.

Did you actually know that the church calendar starts over today? So in terms of the church world, today is a new beginning and you are all invited into that together. I wonder if we have any third to fifth graders in this room who can tell me about anticipatory joy. Does anyone know how many days we have left till Christmas? Tommy? Close, 26. 26 days till Christmas. I know that you know what anticipatory joy feels like and so for a lot of us, this season of Christmas preparation is going to involve some gift buying, some gift giving to those that we love and the gift giving at Christmas is supposed to remind us of the gifts that we have received from God and so we are going to talk today about what it looks like and what it means to be a recipient of God's provision.

But before we get there, I have a question for the children in the room. Kids, how would you describe this glass of water? Go ahead, you can just shout it out. Okay, clear? I like that. How about the volume of the water in the glass? What you got? Shout it out. Aaron? Half full, I like that. Adults, how about you? How would you describe? Half full, thanks, Hurley. All right, well, here's the deal. I am, cards on the table, I am a glass-half-full kind of person, right? That is my natural disposition. I am not typically anxious. Even when my husband Jon has like work stress, I don't take that on and I am sure that is really annoying to all of the people around me, right? I think I have always been this way and I have learned that it is pretty unhelpful to say to someone who is going through something, “don't worry, it will all be okay.” That is not very helpful and even though that is typically my view on life. God has always been faithful to me. It is all going to be okay in the end. If it is not okay, then it is not the end, right? That is spoken from a real place of privilege, right? I own that. I recognize that.

I don't know about you, but this year, 2025, has really challenged me in a lot of new ways. I don't have to describe for you what this year has held. It is heavy, right? There has been war and turmoil and suspicion and distrust of each other, of neighbors, of people in our community, the broader world. It is a hard time to be a human. It is a hard time to raise humans.

The day of the Annunciation school shooting, we gathered in this space and we had a time of grief and mourning and then we all went out to Lynnhurst Park and we gathered with thousands of others and we listened to our local politicians promise change, promise that we were going to work together so this never happens again. I found myself standing there thinking, "I don't believe you.” For the first time ever, I thought “I feel hopeless that this is ever going to change."

Then the text for today is from Psalm 23 and the words go like this:

"The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters."

So when Justin asked me to kick off this advent series with these verses on hope, I thought, "Man, that Spirit's got a sense of humor because for the first time I have been struggling to feel hopeful this year.” How am I supposed to preach on “I shall not want” when two weeks ago 9,000 Minnesota immigrants lost their SNAP benefits? How am I supposed to preach on hope when in the last two years 50,000 kids in Gaza have either been injured or killed? How can I preach on green pastures and still waters to our trans siblings when just a couple of weeks ago, North Dakota voted to ban gender affirming care and states around us are following suit? How am I supposed to preach this sermon? I live a very, a life of wealth and privilege. How am I supposed to do this? I don't really have any difficult stories of grief or loss or hardship.

So I did a lot of reading this week. In the absence of feeling like I could be an expert, I went to the experts. And one of the commentaries that I read this week said that one approach to preaching this text is to not preach it at all. The commentator said, "Read it. Read it slowly and in the King James Version and then just sit down. The middle schoolers will love you," the commentator said. And as a parent of two middle schoolers, I know my children would love it if I would just read the passage and sit down. I'm going to talk a little bit more than that, sorry.

But first, let's look at the text a little bit more closely. So you are probably familiar with these words at the beginning of Psalm 23. Some of the translations read, "The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing." Or, "I have everything I need." And I wonder what kind of images that calls to your mind. Are you thinking about green rolling hills? Or maybe are you picturing sheep by a tree? That's where my mind went. That's what I put into the search engine.

The reality is that grazing sheep in Palestine looks a little bit more like this. I don't know if you can see it, but those sheep are picking out individual tufts of grass from in between the rocks. Remember, this is an area that gets very little rainfall throughout the year. And so shepherds have to lead their sheep to the food they need for that day, just for the day. That's all there is. And then water that is safe to drink from. If the water source has a current, then the sheep are likely to fall in and be swept away. And so it needs to be still waters.

And you know that phrase, "He makes me lie down in green pastures?" When I read that, I think about a cool summer evening laying in really great green grass, just relaxing. But animals don't lay back like that. They sprawl forward. But they only sprawl when they feel safe. And that's why it's, "He makes me lie down in green pastures." The shepherd is bringing his sheep to a place of safety, a place with food and water and no threats and no enemies. And think about it, if we're sheep, then food, water, and safety, that really is everything that we need.

And so who's the "I" that is speaking? Kids, anybody want to take a guess? Who do you think wrote this psalm? You can just shout it out. Oh, not everybody all at once. Okay, adults, you too. Who do you think wrote this psalm? David, that's right. Do you know when he wrote this psalm? Okay, so David had been appointed by God to be king of Israel. I think that's a pretty cushy job. I think that's pretty cool. Actually, do you know what I'm most jealous about is that God told David exactly what he was supposed to do with his life. I am so jealous of that kind of just vocational clarity. I love that.

So David became king and he had a son named Absalom who, as he grew up, had just a wicked sense of ambition and decided he wanted to take the throne from his father David. And he rallied a group of about 200 people and David's people came to him and said, "The hearts of the people of Jerusalem are with Absalom." And David said, "We've got to go." And so he took all of his people and they fled Jerusalem and they crossed the Kidron Valley and they went up the Mount of Olives, barefoot and running for their lives. The text says that David was weeping and barefoot as he climbed the Mount of Olives. That is the setting of Psalm 23 when David wrote it. So listen to these words again, this time spoken by a man who thought he was doing what God wanted him to do and yet somehow found himself being hunted like an animal. "The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters."

One commentator I read said that the fundamental idea, the statement in Psalm 23, is that to be a sheep of the shepherd Lord is to have everything that you need. Not because you've acquired it, not because you've earned it, but because God is the one who's provided it. So what language would you use to speak of God's provision in your life? What's it looked like? Where has God led you to find rest or refreshment or restoration?

So I want to tell you a couple of the ways that the shepherd has provided for me and my hope is that in doing so you'll have eyes to see what provision has looked like in your life. It was actually a great spiritual practice this week writing down all of the ways that the Lord is my shepherd and has provided for me. I encourage you to do it sometime because I came up with just a laundry list. Big things, little things, everything in between. And as I did that I realized that this is where I can find my hope. This is where I'm finding hope in the midst of a world that is threatening to steal my hope from me.

So I want to give us a few buckets to think about the way God's provision looks in our lives. And so here's the first bucket. The first bucket is through God's people. You know this, right? I know this too. Through gifts of time, through gifts of money, through gifts of meals. If you have been around this community long enough, you know that we have a great care ministry in our church headed up by Sam Manning and Andrea Johnson. And I know this because the Kellers have been recipients on more than one occasion. This community is great about showing you the love of God in a casserole. Like if you have experienced loss or illness or surgery, this community will show up in those really practical ways. I have had bags of groceries left on my front steps by people who just like came and then left. And it was such a practical way to be loved. Another example is just this whole fall really. My husband Jon's been traveling these week-long trips for work and last week, Becca Good said, "I will drive Jack home from youth group. You don't have to come back to church to get him. I'll bring him home." And that was so hopeful to me because I didn't have to pack everybody up and drive to church and get Jack and drive home. That was practical love of God through people.

The second bucket that I would suggest to all of us for the ways that God provides is through wrong turns. Have you ever found yourself in circumstances that you did not choose? Where you feel like you've lost your agency? My kids call these, in video games they call it an NPC, a non-playable character, a non-player character. It's sort of like you're no longer the main character in your story. You're being acted on instead of doing the action.

So eight years ago, I had two part-time jobs, neither one of them here at the table. One of those part-time jobs I was trying to build into a full-time public speaking career. And within about a week, I lost both of those part-time jobs. And that sort of sent me into this tailspin of, you know, "God, why? Where are you? What are you doing and what am I supposed to be doing?" And that was a really hard season. But that season gave me the space then to say yes to a very part-time job here at the table. And that job ultimately gave me the opportunity to ask questions like, "What do I want to be when I grow up?” I'm not sure. I need some space to figure that out. And that led me to seminary.

And even though right now, eight years later, I'm still not a hundred percent sure what I want to be when I grow up, God has provided. God provided people to walk alongside me, people like my husband Jon and Debbie Manning and Nancy Hirschfeld, to kind of ask me some guiding questions. God provided a scholarship so that I can attend seminary. And God also granted me flexibility so that I can, you know, I have a really flexible seminary program and a really flexible job here at The Table so I can keep doing both. That is provision. This unexpected, unwanted, sort of unprompted pivot has really, you know, it's enabled me to see it as provision. Hindsight really is 20/20. And so my invitation to you is, as you look back in your life, at these times of, you know, of great transition, can you see them with eyes that are looking for provision?

The third bucket that I want to suggest to us today is what I'm calling rest(oration). Restoration. God provides us rest or restoration, and that is provision. And I look across this room, and I do have the privilege of knowing some of your stories. And I know that this community has been a respite for some of you, a place of rest. Many of you arrived to this community with some version of this story: You had a church community, a faith community that you belonged to, that you felt at home in. Some of you had your careers, your livelihoods tied up in that group of people. And then for a series of events, some of them not of your own doing, you couldn't stay, or you were forced out, or they closed the doors, right? Some of you limped through the big blue doors of The Table, and you had wounds, and you were carrying burdens. And you have shown up here in honesty and in vulnerability, and you are such a gift to our community. It is a privilege, first of all, to hear your stories and to hold that with you, and second, to be in community with you. Some of you in this room have decades of ministry experience. Some of you could probably preach this sermon for me. You probably have preached a sermon just like this. And I am grateful. I'm grateful to sit shoulder to shoulder with you, to roll up our sleeves and to get to work together, and to know you and be known by you. Sometimes [provision] looks like the restoration of what was hard or what was hurtful. And some of you are here today, you are bravely reentering a church space again to give it another try. And my prayer is that this community can continue to be that place of rest and restoration for those who need a soft place to land.

The last bucket of God's provision to us is what I call God's "withness" or God's presence. This one I did steal straight from Lynn Giovannelli. Lynn was a core member of our community. She passed away from ALS two years and two days ago. And she had a word of the year every year, and in her last year her word was "with." And she shared with us Joshua 1:9 which goes, "Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will go with you wherever you go." These are Lynn's words:

God promises us his presence in disease, divorce, depression, addiction, loneliness, incarceration, you name it, he's got you. That's good news. So whatever your hole, whatever the ache is, whatever the knocking your head against the brick wall is, Jesus came to show us how to love, how to suffer, how to be with us.

I saved that one for last because this is the true meaning of Advent. That Jesus our Emmanuel, which means God with us, put on flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. Jesus came to be with us. This Advent series that begins today, it carries us all the way through Christmas Eve, and it's actually based on a book called Advent and Christmas Wisdom from Henri Nouwen. Nouwen writes:

"When I have no eyes for the small signs of God's presence, the smile of a baby, the carefree play of children, the words of encouragement and gestures of love offered by friends, I will always remain tempted to despair."

Hope is possible because God is with us, and God's presence is visible if we have eyes to see. We can say, "The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing." Because as King David knows, trusting in a shepherd doesn't mean you won't have problems. It means the shepherd is going to be with you when you do. It means that God promises to be with us when we're hunted. God's promise of God's presence is what makes us able to say, "I have everything I need," and mean it even when the world is on fire. I want to train my eyes for the small signs of God's presence.

Nouwen also writes, "When God's way becomes known to us and practiced by us, hope emerges." I love that idea, but what does that look like in practice? Maybe you're here today and you're in a season where hope feels hard to find. In just a few moments during communion, Debbie will be in the back to pray with you, and you can seek out that prayer if you need it. If you are struggling with food insecurity or job loss, you can request help by going to our website right there, thetablempls.com/care, or you can send an email to care@thetablempls.com.

But maybe, just maybe, maybe like me, you're in a season where you have some hope to spare. You've received provision from God, and if that is the case, maybe when the service is over and we all go get coffee and donuts over in the gathering space, maybe you share a story of what provision has looked like in your life. If you do that, you will be sharing hope with someone else, maybe somebody who really needs it. And maybe this idea moves you to be a source of provision for someone else. Brad Herman talked about this in the video last week. Brad said, "I want to be a river, not a pond," right? We receive provision from God and we want to let that flow to other people.

So when you came in today, you probably noticed that giant red grocery cart in the back. We are continuing to support our local food shelves because our neighbors are hungry. And so if you would like to bring non-perishables, you absolutely can. We'll be collecting them in the back. But my main invitation to you today is to be a source of provision for our neighbors from the Park Place. The Park Place is an organization that we have partnered with. They accompany Latine families from the Powderhorn neighborhood. They focus on leadership and education and also parent support. If you were here in August, we collected backpacks for the Park Place kids. And typically, oh, I should say Tuesday and Thursday nights, the spaces that currently are filled with Table kids have about 70 kids from the Park Place and they're here for a program that builds literacy.

And so this week, Debbie met with their co-director Clara Mendoza to see how we could support their families during the Christmas season. And typically, Park Place has this lovely Christmas store where they have organizations like The Table, donate toys, and then the Park Place families get to come and shop for their kids. But this year, due to circumstances really outside of their control, they're not able to do the Christmas store. And so this year, instead, Clara had the kids write their letters to Santa. And we have those letters here today. And so we have the opportunity to kind of play Santa to their kids. This is their request. This is what they're asking. And they're only asking our community. And so the ask is to go and receive those letters to Santa, to purchase those gifts, and to bring them to church by December 14th. That's two weeks, friends. You've got two weeks to play Santa. Park Place is going to have a Christmas party on December 18th. And that's when they will give those gifts to their kids.

So after the service, you can go into this gathering space. There will be a lovely festive table. And you can see Debbie and some others and look into picking up some of those Christmas wish lists. Some ideas: maybe your family could sponsor another family. Maybe your small group comes together and works on buying gifts for a family. If finances are tight for you this year, but you want to get in on this opportunity, you can go to the table and tell them your budget, and they'll match you up with a gift that you can bring in the next two weeks. We encourage you to get creative.

Telling stories of God's provision. Prayer with and for each other. Tangible acts of care, feeding the hungry, and radical generosity. These are some of the ways of Jesus. May we practice them together, and as Nouwen says, may hope emerge. Amen.