One of the many gifts of the psalms is how they expand our imagination of who God is and can be for us. None does this more powerfully and beautifully than our psalm for this morning, Psalm 121, a beloved meditation that describes God as our keeper.
He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps you will not slumber.
He who keeps Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper,
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all evil;
he will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time on and forevermore.
And the word here for “keep,” that is repeated over and over, is an important one in scripture, maybe one of the most important. The Hebrew word is shamar, meaning “to shield or protect,” or “to guard,” but with a certain depth. You could argue that it really means to love, in an active sense.
I.
It’s the same word that’s used in the book of Deuteronomy when Moses tells the people to “keep these words that I’m commanding you today on your heart”—remember them, live by them, teach them to your children. Not just hold on to them, but keep them. Love them.
As we touched on last week, in the opening chapters of Genesis, the first humans, formed by God’s own hands from the soil of the garden, are given the vocation to “till” and to “keep” the garden. We’re to work the soil, to bring life from it, and we’re to take care of it. To love God is to love the things that God loves, and as Jesus says in John, “God loves the world.”
This charge “to keep” is our first calling as the bearers of God’s image. Which is the irony and the tragedy two chapters later, when Cain kills his brother Abel, and when God asks him where his brother is, Cain responds cynically, Am I my brother’s keeper?, The answer, of course, is Yes. Yes, we are each other’s keepers.
II.
And we come by it naturally, I think, keeping things. Treasuring things. It may be one of those marks of God’s image upon us.
Have you seen how children are always collecting things? Treasuring things? Our friends’ son, years ago, kept a shoebox full of what he called his treasures. A rock or pebble that caught the light just right. A lost button. Sea shells. It was, for him, literally a box of wonders, small items that to most of us would be unnoticeable, but to him unlocked the wonder that he knew was inherent to the world. Children know this wonder intuitively. I remember years ago, when we took the boys in for their check-ups, on the developmental checklist, one of the questions was: “Has your child started a collection of some kind?” This is part of becoming human, this urge, this need to value and to keep.
Our boys used to keep their collections on the window sills of our home, behind the blinds when they were down, so they stayed hidden. I remember we had some friends from out of town visiting with their little girl. Mac, who was maybe five or six at the time, was showing her around the house and took her over to see and admire his collection. She came back over to the table where the grown-ups sat, holding a full banana, without its peel, that apparently, in the sunlight through the window, had hardened like a fossil. We don’t know how long it had been there or what biological process turned it hard as a rock and not mushy like a slug, but it was indeed a treasure he had kept… that we then put in the compost.
III.
One of my very favorite images of God comes from Alfred North Whitehead, a theologian and mathematician from the early 20th century, who imagined God as something like a Great Preserver. God, he said, with perfect memory, is able to remember and recall and thus preserve everything that has ever happened and everyone who has ever lived. And not just cataloging all of this information like some kind of cosmic database, but feeling it, savoring it, treasuring it, loving it. Following the New Testament, when it tells us that God is love, Whitehead homed in on what this love looks like. He said God’s love, and thus God, is the “tender care that nothing be lost.”
God, he said, is that loving urge to save or hold onto what is special or of value—or even more, the kind of loving vision that would see as special or of value what others would discard, and hold it and love it and keep it. And so from this, what we would call God’s “judgment” is less a severe reckoning, but instead is born, he said, “of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved.” It’s “the judgment of wisdom which uses what in [this] world is [seen as] mere wreckage,” he wrote.1
I imagine a parent pouring over a box of childhood creations: drawings, finger-paints, crafts with beads and glue and popsicle sticks, and so, so much glitter, and wanting to save everything, knowing that there is something in everything that is wonderful and worth saving. But knowing that’s not feasible—there’s only so much room on the fridge or the kitchen counters. And more than just saving the things themselves, wanting to remember everything they represent—all the moments, all the days, all the stages, all of it.
Or going through your parents’ house, rummaging through all the boxes in the attic. Trying to decide what to keep and what to let go of. Trying to discern what they would want, wrestling with what they would want you to want, and wanting to remember all of them throughout it.
Who among us has not looked ahead and wondered how we will be remembered when we’re gone, and even wondered if we will be remembered? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, sitting in a Nazi prison camp and knowing his end was coming near, wrote that he grieved not the loss of his future that he would never know, but the loss of his past, all that he had done, that in time it would fade from memory and be forgotten.2
How important is memory, and how tragic when we reckon with how it fades? What if, for God, nothing is lost? All is remembered and held and loved—all is kept in tender care.
Whitehead even said, provocatively, this power of God to save, to preserve, isn’t even limited to things that have actually happened, but extends even to that which never came to be: the road we did not take, the choice we did not make, the dream that was never fulfilled, the aching in our heart for what we or time or fate could not bring ourselves to do or be. All of the possibilities that were lost when we went one way instead of another, or the world turned this way instead of that, all the versions of ourselves and those whom we love that might have been, or those parts of ourselves we never brought to life—God knows and saves and keeps them, too.
IV.
Is it a comfort to think that being “saved” isn’t about being “rescued,” as much as it’s about being “remembered,” being held onto, as one would a child’s treasure? To imagine God as a kind of “holy scavenger,” as a friend of mine likes to say, showcasing the beauty we would overlook—in ourselves, in others, in the world—lifting up the goodness we would undervalue, revealing the light we would not see?
Is it a comfort to know that for all our brokenness, all the fragments of our lives we struggle to hold together, that God stands ready to gather them, to gather us, all of us, so that nothing may be lost? That all of us—all who we are and all who we could have been and all we could be still—are kept in God’s tender care?
And what should it mean for us in this season in which we so often are asked to give things up or let things go, to remember that our first calling as bearers of God’s own image is to keep? To keep this creation we have been given. To keep each other, with whom we cannot help but live.
To see it all for the wonder it is, the treasure beneath the scuffs and the soil? To consider if this is what it means, after all, to love?
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1 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346. Cited in Anna Case-Winters, Matthew, in the Belief commentary series, 49.
2 I cannot pin down this exact citation.