One of the Psalms that we hear this morning, Psalm 91, is my favorite Psalm.  In fact it was inscribed in icing on the cake served at the installation service back in March.  And I don’t read it that often because the best part of it I have memorized: “For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways, they will lift you up in their hands so you will not strike your foot against a stone.”

But since I’m preaching on that text this morning, I thought it might be a good idea for me to go back over that Psalm for good measure.  After all, we who boast that “God is still speaking” need to stand by that faith and return to the Living Word—the still-speaking Scriptures—again and again.

So, as I was reading Psalm 91 this week, I perceived it through a new lens.  Last Sunday I was fortunate enough to sit in with the Bible Study class in the Peace Corner (they meet at 9 am each week by the way—good stuff).  We were reading some texts out of the book of Job, which is a tough book of the Bible to unravel; and one of the participants said, “How would this story sound to an immature Christian?”  It was a great question, and that was somewhat of my lens for today’s Scriptures.

Not to refute my classmate in the slightest, but perhaps we are all immature Christians.  If we’re all on a journey of faith, then we are spiritually immature, constantly seeking the next level toward maturity with God.  As it’s been said before, the human soul is restless until it finds rest with God.  That could well be the case with our immature Christianity.

Still, if there are levels of one’s Christianity in terms of maturity, then I was at a beginner’s level when I first encountered Psalm 91.  When I was much younger I read that text and loved the message about God sending angels to watch over us in all our ways.  That’s probably why I memorized only that portion of the Psalm instead of all of its 16 verses.  Psalm 91 was a literal God send for the immature Christian me.  And here’s how I understood it then: If I made God my top priority, then nothing bad would ever happen to me.  That’s what the text clearly says, right?

There’s a story in here for all of us, not just the immature Christian me.  We all hear a profound prayer at some point in our young life.  We come across certain life changing Scriptures.  We hear a passionate sermon that pulls the wool from over our eyes.  We’re approached by a fiery evangelist in a shopping mall or on a street corner preaching the simple Good News of Jesus’ salvation, and we receive a brochure that bullets the way to achieve that salvation (a tract it’s called).  Or we might have been part of a grand altar call that left us more vulnerable, yet empowered, than we had been to date.

I’m not listing these examples to discredit them or any example like them.  I share those examples to say that the journey doesn’t stop there.  But we walk away from those experiences, those moments in our lives, and we stub our toes.  We skin our knees on the inescapable, inevitable bad news of life, and it shatters all that good stuff that we’d embraced.  Somewhere between our hearing the hymn, “Jesus Loves Me,” and today, life happened.  And life is a tough cookie.

So in our own ways, we might have strayed from practicing our faith.  We stopped coming to church.  The Bible left our coffee table and found a proud perch on a high bookshelf.  Using any kind of language that had to do with religion in social circles was a “no no.”  We got angry.  We got frustrated.  We felt let down by those angels who were supposed to be watching us in all our ways.  We felt scared.

And now here we are, friends.  We’ve come together to worship God today because somewhere between there and here we learned something.  No, we’re learning something—always learning.  That’s what our faith is about.

I first read Psalm 91 in much the same way as James and John are talking to Jesus in today’s Gospel reading from Mark.  The way that story from Mark even starts just cracks me up.  James and John came to Jesus, “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”  Sound familiar?  God, I’ll make you my top priority on the condition that you throw some angels my way and keep all that bad stuff from happening to me!  Jesus, we want you to do for us whatever we ask!  I used to do that.  I used to sound like that.

Funny thing is, though, I still do that.  I still sound like that.  Just like I craved safety when I was younger, I desire that same safety in my prayers for my family, our congregation…me!  Just like James and John wanted Jesus to do whatever they asked, I plead with God for specifics in my prayers.  I try not to be so specific, but I can’t help it.

On most Sunday mornings I take a moment to plead with God, “God, please bring your children to church this morning.  Let us all gather together in great numbers today so that we can all hear the Good News of Christ.  And, God, let our Sunday School classes have a good turnout and even better discussions.  In short, God, let’s have a good day today.  Hands in.  OK, God is good on three.  One-two-three…God is good!  Amen.”

A few things about today’s texts: If God is sending God’s angels concerning us in all our ways to protect us from hitting our feet against stones, what are those stones?  And when the Psalm says God will reveal to us God’s salvation, just what is that salvation?

Friends, the text just got more complicated.  It’s not as easy as the immature Christian me first perceived it.  And that’s exactly what Jesus told James and John.  James and John wanted places in heaven right next to Jesus, sitting on either side of him.  But Jesus said, “That’s not for me to grant you.  That’s for God to grant you.  And the ongoing requirement to assure one of those places being prepared for you is that you follow my lead and be a servant to all.”

Friends, we think that those stones that could hurt us out there are things like disease, unemployment, not achieving our goals or being betrayed by our friends (Jesus knows something about that).

But maybe those stones that God assures us protection from are in us.  Maybe those stones are things like jealousy, how we do or do not respond to life’s many forms of temptation, our hypocrisy, our indifference toward our neighbor, our feelings of superiority, our feelings of “the world revolves around me,” or our guilt.  Perhaps those are the stones from which God assures us protection.  And perhaps that is God’s idea of salvation: not protecting us from people and places that would do us physical or emotional harm, but keeping us from the cryptic tendencies of our very selves that would keep us away from our God, and that would keep us away from one another.

And perhaps the message we can embrace from today’s Scriptures is as simple as this: to strive for a prepared place in God’s kingdom, we need to do two things: 1) Make the Lord most high our dwelling place, and 2) become servants to all.  In other words, we’ve got to make God our top priority and prove that priority by serving others.

So, what are our priorities?  What are your priorities?  If Jesus came into this place right now and sat down next to you and began to speak to you in a whisper that only you could hear, and Jesus said, “My friend, what is important to you?” what would you say?

If Jesus asked that of our world right now, the answer might be territory.  Territory is our top priority.  Or maybe it’s wealth; making as much money as we possibly can before retirement and then some.  Could be safety: protection from everyone who is not like us.  That seems to be a priority in our world these days.

Or what about issues.  We’re days away from another election.  What issues are most important to people?  Shockingly enough, the polls say it isn’t healthcare.  The most important things are war and scandal.  In a nutshell, on the surface it seems that our top priority is me!  Me, me, me, me, me.

But do you hear that?  Our top priority is me!  Jesus is saying it can’t be that way.  Not only does Jesus remind us in today’s message that we are an interconnected and mutual humanity, we are called to serve each other.  Our priority can never be me.  That can never work.  Our priority has to be us.

And that’s the message that the church can send out to the world whether it’s an election year, Christmas time, Hurricane season or just a mundane, hot month of July in College Station, Texas.  Deitrich Bonhoeffer says that the church has to be radically different from the culture that surrounds it or the world will never take the church seriously.  The world will never be changed.  So, let’s get radical.  Let’s unpack what it means for us to make the Lord most high our dwelling place at Friends.  And let’s start by asking that question again: “What are your priorities?”

Well, we all have a pretty deep affection with this building.  Wednesday night during choir practice when the rain starting leaking into the narthex area, we started grabbing trash cans to catch the drops of water.  And there’s no question about the fact that we like coffee, communion, barbeque and babies.  That last one, though, is perhaps what we cherish the most.  Let’s say for the sake of argument that we cherish our children, all of our children at Friends, more than anything else.  Our children are our top priority.

Today is a Living Wage Sunday.  On a day like today, we’re reminded that when one of us in the Body of Christ hurts, we all hurt.  We’re reminded of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  We’re reminded that the gap between the rich and poor in our country is growing wider every day.  And we’re reminded that the Holy Spirit was upon Jesus, because he was bringing good news to whom?  The poor.

Did you know that 16.5 percent of Texans live in poverty, and 16.4 percent are hungry or at risk of hunger—one paycheck away from not being able to afford groceries?  Did you know that in order for a worker who earns the minimum wage in Texas to be able to afford a two-bedroom apartment, that worker has to work 103 hours a week?

With gas prices soaring well-past $2 dollars a gallon, a minimum wage worker has to spend 16.2 percent of their weekly salary just to fill a tank.  In Texas, 44 percent of low-income workers lack health insurance.  That totals 69 percent of the total uninsured population in Texas.  And that brings us back to our kids.  A year of childcare in Texas costs an average of $5,613 dollars for an infant and $4,709 dollars for a pre-schooler.  For a minimum wage worker, infant childcare represents 52 percent and pre-school childcare represents 44 percent of their annual salary.

I know I just used the term ‘minimum wage,’ and that term and ‘living wage’ are not to be confused with one another.  Raising the minimum wage is an issue of dollars and cents, but a living wage is something that speaks to the resources and well-being of everyone—everyone to whom we are called to be servants.

In this church, we cherish our kids, so we have childcare workers available to them who do an incredible job on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, not to mention special events like yesterday’s meeting of the Brazos Association.  OK, we pay each of our childcare workers $7 dollars an hour.  That’s not a living wage.  And it could be said, “Well, they’re high school and college students.  They don’t need it that much and so on and so forth.”  But it’s not about the person filling the position, it’s about the position that’s offered to the person—the position offered to our neighbor.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that there is no such thing as a menial job.  There is only menial pay, and we decide how much or how little to pay our workers.  If that amount is menial, then it sends the message, both to the worker and the world, that their job is menial.  That is a myth we in the church are called to strike down as our friend Dr. King proclaimed.

There are teachers, custodians, sales clerks, warehouse stockers, cooks, and childcare workers who do some of the most crucial, life-permitting work out there for our society, and their jobs are not menial jobs.  They’re just getting menial pay.  They’re not making a living wage: a wage that grants them the same opportunities as a dentist or an accountant or a secretary or a computer programmer working a fourth the amount of hours that they do.

If we make the Lord most high our dwelling place at Friends, then our commitment is to health and progress, and maybe those will lead to growth.  If we prioritize our children, then we must prioritize those in their care, those who teach them and those who love them.  It’s basically putting the horse before the cart and not the other way around.

When I worked at a church in Austin, our numbers went through a sharp decline because of a number of factors happening at once: a minister resigning, a divisive issue and random maintenance on the building.  So the deacons of the church were all called into a meeting and the deacon chair stood before them and all of us on the ministerial staff, and he said, “In the next three months, everyone in this room needs to get three people to join this church.  Let them know about how great a place this can be for them and get them to join!”

But right there was the problem.  Getting more people in the pews wasn’t going to make the church a great place for everyone.  Getting more people to join the church wouldn’t solve our money problems and lead to a revival of some sort.  That was putting the cart before the horse.  We wanted to grow and thereby become healthy, but we needed to get healthy and consequently grow.

That’s called making the Lord most high your dwelling place, and God will send God’s angels concerning you in all your ways, they will lift you up in their hands and you will not dash your foot against a stone.  And God will reveal God’s salvation to you—God’s, not yours.

The world is now too small for anything but truth and too dangerous for anything but love, and change starts here.  From inside this church off Harvey Mitchell Parkway, let us make the Lord most high our dwelling place and one another, including our children, our top priority.  And in that service, let’s do whatever it takes to assure our health, our mutual care and our love for one another—whatever it takes in the name of Christ.  Amen.