“A Shield and Defense”
Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 28, 2025
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
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Because as timeless as the text of our biblical witness is, we have to—absolutely have to—remember that it emerged from within a particular cultural context in a particular place in a particular time.
And those particularities matter, right? I mean, two phrases can, literally, mean the same exact thing, but actually mean two very different things. Pity the future historians studying twenty-first century American culture who have to parse the difference between a “butt dial” and a “booty call”.
Animals pose the same problem, because different cultures look at the exact same animals in very different ways. Case in point, when I was in middle school, my brother and I got two cats at my mom’s house not too long after my parents divorced. A few years later, my dad married a woman from Venezuela, and I’ll never forget her coming to my mom’s house to visit for this reason or that and always being very uncomfortable whenever the two cats walked into the room.
In Venezuela, cats are feral and dirty and absolutely not kept as pets. And so Lulu did not want to be anywhere near our cats. And of course, our one cat, Persistence, had this way of knowing when people didn’t like cats and she would always seek them out, trying to give them all the love and affection, almost as if to prove you don’t have to worry about me, I’m not like those other cats.
And yet, precisely because they are chock-full of cultural meaning, animals are used time and time again to enhance the more poetic parts of our bible through the power of metaphor and simile. We see it time and time again throughout the Psalms, including our passage from this morning, Our psalmist doesn’t just compare God to any bird, but to one who spreads wings wide enough to cover us in the shadow of refuge.
He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.
Now, there are a number of different birds that God is likened to throughout the scriptures. Christ speaks of his desire to gather the inhabitants Jerusalem into him as a hen gathers her chicks. The Holy Spirit descends like a dove. But when I see a passage like our Psalm, I’m immediately drawn to the imagery from Isaiah 40:31—those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles—or Exodus 19:4—You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.
Time and time throughout the Hebrew Bible, we see the biblical authors comparing God to an eagle.
Or are they?
We’ll get back to these birds, I promise, but this morning, we’re going to be wrestling this question: when we talk about being saved by faith, whose faith are we really talking about?
Salvation by faith is a core tenet of Protestant theology.
The righteousness of God has been disclosed through faith in Jesus Christ. Romans 3.
We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ. Galatians 2.
As inheritors of the Protestant tradition ourselves, passages like these should sound familiar or at least resonate within ourselves.
We’re not saved by our works or the things that we do—we’re saved by our faith.
Over and over again, the New Testament returns to this same phrase.
But here’s the thing. That phrase we so often see translated as faith in Christ is actually more open-ended in the original Greek. In Greek, it’s just two words: pistis Christou—literally, “faith Christ”.
Now, for those of us who don’t spend our time thinking about the distinctions between Subjective and Objective Genitive Cases, what that means is that there’s no way to tell whether Paul meant faith in Christ or Christ’s faith.
Put another way, is salvation about our faith in Christ—a faith that can be imperfect in the best of times? Or is it about Christ’s faithfulness to us—a faith that never fails? That small difference makes all the difference in how we understand salvation and justification. And, I’d contend that when we measure it up against the rest of our scriptural witness, we find that the answer lies in the latter interpretation.
And this is where our psalm for today gives us such a powerful picture. Did you notice how much of Psalm 91 is about what God does?
God will deliver you from the snare of the fowler.
God will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.
God’s faithfulness is a shield and defense.
God will deliver.
God will protect.
God will answer.
God will be with us in trouble.
God will rescue and honor.
God will show God’s salvation.
Over and over again, the subject of the sentence is not you or me. It’s not your faith or my works. The subject is always God. God delivers. God protects. God rescues. God saves.
Which is exactly what that little phrase pistis Christou points us toward: salvation doesn’t depend on us. It depends on Christ’s steady, unshakable faithfulness to God and to us.
And here’s why that’s good news: when your faith feels weak, when you struggle to believe, when you wonder if you have enough trust to hold on — salvation doesn’t depend on the strength of your grip. Salvation depends on the God who promises never to let go.
I’m reminded of a key episode in the life of John Wesley. He had just returned to England after a disastrously unsuccessful mission in the colony of Georgia. He felt like a fraud and sought the counsel of Peter Bohler, a Moravian preacher who he had come to admire, and this is what Bohler told Wesley. Preach faith until you have faith; and then, when you have faith, you will preach faith.
In other words, fake it until you make it.
We can do the same thing, because let’s be honest friends, in our day and age it’s really tempting to harden our hearts and retreat inward into ourselves. At the end of the day, I am the only one who can keep me and the ones I love safe. If I have to depend on others, I’ll only be disappointed. So I’m going to amass all the power and resources that I can to protect myself.
But the sad fact is that we can never know what a day is going to bring.
No matter how tall or how strong our walls are, we cannot weather the storms of life alone. We need each other. We were made for each other.
And that’s where the birds come back in.
When we hear passages like Isaiah 40—they shall mount up with wings like eagles—we can’t escape our own cultural baggage that comes with our perception of eagles. At least as far back as Rome, the eagle has been associated with empire. Eagles are noble and strong and, for our purposes this morning, solitary.
English translators chose eagle because they were familiar animals to northern Europeans and they remain familiar to us. But, in actuality, eagles weren’t all that common in the ancient middle east.
That is to say that word that’s used in those passages that we read as eagles, נֶשֶׁר (Nesher), in all likelihood weren’t eagles at all. More likely than not, the biblical authors were evoking the image of vultures.
Admittedly, vultures don’t have the best reputation for us. They’re scavengers, circling over roadkill. Every animal is heavy laden with cultural baggage and perception.
But Fred Cannon, an engineer at Penn State, recently published an article in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament where he makes a pretty convincing case that the biblical nesher more closely describes the Eurasian griffon vulture than it does an eagle.
They have enormous wingspans—up to nine feet across. They ride the warm air currents for hours, hardly flapping, just letting the wind carry them. And most importantly, they are fiercly communal. Cannon says they’re gregarious—what a fun word. They nest in large colonies, raising their young together, protecting one another, and never flying alone.
I think that’s the image of God the psalmist wants us to have. Not the solitary eagle but the sheltering vulture with wings so wide they cover the whole community. A bird that doesn’t survive by itself but by sticking together.
Because time and time again throughout the bible, we see that God doesn’t abandon us to go through life alone. God’s wings are wide enough to carry us together, to shield us in the storm, and to hold us close when our faith falters.
Friends, we are saved through faith, but the faith that saves us is not ours; it’s God’s. Does God’s faith invite or even compel a response in us when we come to fully understand it? Yes, absolutely. But we don’t have to keep trying to rely on our own strength, our own cunning, or our own efforts to earn our salvation. God has already done that work for us.
And when we feel like Wesley did—unsure, weak, maybe even a little like frauds—we can still live as though God’s faithfulness holds us, because it does. We can live in faith until we have faith; and then, when we have faith, we will live in faith.
That’s the promise that Psalm 91 makes clear. The faithfulness of God is our shield and defense in a world plagued with chaos and uncertainty. The love that birthed us into existence will not abandon us in the storm. Instead, it will raise us up on its broad, strong wings and carry us through.
So may the one who began a good work be faithful to complete it in us.
The work continues. Amen.
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