One little phrase of Psalm 5:4 caught my attention and I can’t let it go. Speaking of God, the psalmist says:

“evil will not sojourn with you.”

A sojourn is a temporary stay, like taking a road trip and camping out on a friend’s couch for a few days until you move on further west. Evil will not sojourn with God. No welcoming couch, no open arms, no table set for evil itself.

Or, perhaps, there is a welcoming couch, open arms and a set table, but evil can’t sojourn because if it rested in God, evil itself would become saved and no longer be evil. Evil can’t visit with God because evil is the opposite of good (and in scripture we read that only God is good). In one of my favorite books, A Wind in the Door, written for teenagers by Madeline L’engle, Meg has learned that she is a Namer. It is up to her to save her younger brother’s life. He is dying, infected by Ecthroi. Meg is desperate, not understanding her calling to Name things, until the moment when all she has left to fight the evil Ecthroi is to Name them. To Name means to affirm them, to acknowledge existence, to call them into their fullest being. In other words, to Name is to love. In a moving passage she does just this: she calls them Ecthroi, addresses them by name, calls them into being.

And they disappear. So in this story, when evil beings are loved, they become nothing. If evil is against all that is good and true and beautiful, then to be good and true and beautiful means evil disappears and no longer exists.

So evil will not sojourn with God.

I used to try and make people comfortable around me when they found out that I was a pastor and they got all nervous. Some folks immediately apologize for language, especially. My habit was always to say “oh, no problem at all,” and truthfully it wasn’t and isn’t. But I have come to realize over the past years that being a pastor marks off a certain space where some things – good things, we hope – have a safe space and other things don’t. This is why corrupt religious leaders are a blight: they have allowed evil to sojourn with them. Evil is on a road trip and stops by for a few days or for quite a few years.

My point here is not to play the blame game, or to accuse others as though I myself am blameless and evil has not sojourned with me, for like everyone else, I too have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But there is a sense in which to be the people of God means that by the help of God we become people that evil passes by. As congregations I suppose we never reach perfection on this. But here I sit, realizing that this particular congregation has shown me how to live in such a way that certain evils don’t sojourn. In the body of Christ we help each other become better people because we are growing into the body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Evil will not sojourn with God. If we sojourn with one another and God – that is, if we love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves – then evil doesn’t have a home. In 1 John we read that perfect love casts out fear. We can be like Meg this week, perhaps: casting out the fears in our lives, the evils that might try to sojourn with us, by returning always and again to love.

Blessings to you all,

Michelle

~ by admin on May 24, 2010.

Posted in Books, Literature, and Poetry, Monday Morning Meditation