Tag: Psalms

…Opening To…

For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear,—believe the aged friend,—
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love. (Robert Browning, “A Death in the Desert”)

…Listening In…

And yes, you want truth in the most hidden places; you teach me wisdom in the most secret space… Create a clean heart for me, God; put a new, faithful spirit deep inside me. (Psalm 51:6, 10; context)

…Filling Up…

When we step out of the fuzzy background of our existence and embrace the eternal life of knowing God, we discover that there’s an internal switch that has been set in the wrong position. Each of us has within us a switch that controls the autopilot. Now, I’m not talking about the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates the parts of the body that we’re not fully aware of. We should probably leave that switch on. I’m talking about the autopilot that offers us the comfortable ability to sit back and read a magazine when we should be living.

When the autopilot is engaged, we travel day to day in the generally correct direction. The wings stay parallel to the ground. We don’t deviate course. We go about our daily lives because daily life is what happens when we wake up in the morning. (This might sound familiar because I talked about something similar on Tuesday.) But when you turn off the autopilot, you have to pay attention. You have to grip the yoke to keep the plane steady. You have to check course to make sure you going in the right direction. Disengaging the autopilot makes you engage life – both the life you are living as you go about your day and the life you are living within yourself. This interior life happens with equal parts mind, heart, soul, and spirit. It is in this internal space that you can check yourself to make sure you are living the kind of life God desires for you to live. When the autopilot is on, we don’t even realize we should make such checks.

Look to your internal fuselage: in what position is the autopilot switch. If it’s on, why not try flipping it and seeing what happens next?

…Praying For…

Dear God, the life that you offer elevates us from simple existence. Help me to take an active role in my own life, both the life that other people see and the life within that only you and I can see. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, ready to step into the spotlight of my life and shine in the brilliance of your presence.

…Opening To…

If you look at a window, you see flyspecks, dust, the crack where junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves. (Frederick Buechner)

…Listening In…

Listen, my people, to my teaching; tilt your ears toward the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth with a proverb. I’ll declare riddles from days long gone—ones that we’ve heard and learned about, ones that our ancestors told us. We won’t hide them from their descendants; we’ll tell the next generation all about the praise due the Lord and his strength—the wondrous works God has done. (Psalm 78:1-4; context)

…Filling Up…

The fifth word that we say quite often when we talk about the Bible is “Scripture.” We call it Holy Scripture or Holy Writ. Each of these words carries the connotation of “something written down.” And, of course, the Bible is written down. There’s very little chance it would have survived as long as it has if it weren’t written down somewhere.

That being said, large chunks of what became the written Bible did exist for quite a long time without being written down. People passed the oral tradition from parent to child. The dinner table, the campfire, the farmer’s field – these were the places the story of God and God’s people was told. Because of this type of transmission, the story went through a kind of survival of the fittest type of evolution: the most important parts remained, while the less important parts faded away.

Writing the Bible down on paper (well, the ancient equivalents of paper, at least) followed a common pattern: things aren’t written down until people start realizing that the folks who know the story best are dying off. In the years following Jesus’ death and resurrection, his story followed the same pattern as those older parts of the Bible, except in a much shorter span. The Gospel was not written down until a few decades after the events because the people who lived through the events began dying off. There was a scramble to preserve the story from the perspectives of eyewitnesses.

So, just because we think of “Script-ure” as something written down, know that the Bible didn’t always exist in that way. It was passed through word of mouth. And you know what: that’s still the best way to pass it along.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are the presence standing behind the words of your people found in the Bible. Help me to be a part of the great story of your movement in the lives of the people of this world. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, endeavoring to learn more about you, learn more from you, and learn the best ways to be your child in this world.

…Opening To…

If you look at a window, you see flyspecks, dust, the crack where junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond. Something like this is the difference between those who see the Bible as a Holy Bore and those who see it as the Word of God, which speaks out of the depths of an almost unimaginable past into the depths of ourselves. (Frederick Buechner)

…Listening In…

Save me, God, because the waters have reached my neck! I have sunk into deep mud. My feet can’t touch the bottom! I have entered deep water; the flood has swept me up. I am tired of crying. My throat is hoarse. My eyes are done with waiting for my God. (Psalm 69:1-3; context)

…Filling Up…

The fourth word that we say quite often when we talk about the Bible is “Psalm.” The 150 psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures account for some truly exquisite, gritty, jubilant, despairing, and whimsical poetry. The whole gamut of human emotion runs throughout the psalms. The “psalter” (book of psalms) is one of the greatest human achievements of all times, not to mention being the most complete compendium of human encounter with God in one compiled source.

All that being said, you can’t really take the book of Psalms all at once. It’s too big. (Unless you’re a medieval monk who recited the whole thing everyday. The whole thing. Every day. Wow.) Whoever compiled the Psalms must have known this because the book breaks down into five large sections, each ending with special verses praising God.

You can further break the psalms into two main categories: praise and lament. Just by the numbers, there are more verses of lament than praise in the book of Psalms, but in church we read more of the verses of praise. You can explain this with the simple assertion that we’d rather be happy than sad. The problem here is this: when we censor a book like the Psalms, we remove from it the example it gives us of how to grieve or to be angry in the midst of prayer to God. We sweep under the rug the scriptural instances in which people made themselves vulnerable to God, accused God of negligence, wept in God’s presence, and disclosed their inability to praise God in the current moment. I’d be willing to bet each of us has felt this way at some point. Reading the lament psalms can help us cope in these times.

So the next time you are so joyful you can’t contain it, go read the psalms and find a reflection of your joy. And the next time you are so sad that you don’t think you’ll ever recover, go read the psalms and find a reflection of your grief. Lift up both your joy and sadness to God, who encompasses all in all.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you are with me even when I’m not with you. Help me to remain in relationship with you even when things aren’t going so well. Help me stick with you when I want to run away. Be my constant in a changing world. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, endeavoring to learn more about you, learn more from you, and learn the best ways to be your child in this world.

…Opening To…

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. (George Bernard Shaw)

…Listening In…

The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing. He lets me rest in grassy meadows; he leads me to restful waters; he keeps me alive. He guides me in proper paths for the sake of his good name. (Psalm 23:1-3; context)

…Filling Up…

The fifth thing not to do when you read the Bible is to skip over things you’ve read before. You may know a passage backward and forward. You may have heard the nativity story every year for fifty years. You may have read Psalm 23 a hundred times. The next time you come upon it, don’t pass it by. Read it again.

You can probably get away with reading the latest bestseller a single time. You might want to read through Harry Potter twice. But when it comes to the Bible, multiple readings is always the best way to go. Back when the accounts of the Gospel were newly written, some scholars tell us, a reader performed the text every Sunday. The entire Gospel. Every week. In certain prayerful Bible study methods, you might read the same passage three times in a half hour period. These multiple readings help us to savor the words we find in the Bible. They help us to place ourselves inside the text, and they help us to place the text inside ourselves. They make us familiar, like old friends who pick up right where they left off even after years with no contact.

You see, the Bible will be the same every time you read it. But you will be different. And therefore, your encounter with God, even in the same familiar text, will be different and new, as well.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you make yourself known to me in the pages of the Bible. Help me to seek you whenever I read it and to bring my whole self to the reading of scripture. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, trusting that you will grant me the patience to study the Bible slowly and keep my eyes and heart open for your presence in my life.

…Opening To…

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. (George Bernard Shaw)

…Listening In…

Daughter Babylon, you destroyer, a blessing on the one who pays you back the very deed you did to us! A blessing on the one who seizes your children and smashes them against the rock! (Psalm 137:8-9; context)

…Filling Up…

The third thing not to do when you read the Bible is to read only the “good parts.” The practice of selecting only certain parts of the Bible is so widespread that we regularly do it in our churches when we read passages aloud. Sometimes, we edit parts out for brevity, but in many cases, we edit parts out to censor the “bad” stuff in the Bible. Take Psalm 137 for instance, the final two verses of which are quoted above. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard them because they always get edited out in church.

These verses and other difficult passages in the Psalms and elsewhere (the slaughter at Jericho in the book of Joshua comes to mind) make my stomach turn. How can we keep ourselves from excising these parts from our Bibles? How can we integrate even these hard parts into our lives of faith?

Let’s keep Psalm 137 as our example. This psalm is written from a place of desolation and utter grief as the writer remembers the captivity in Babylon. In 586 bce, God’s people in the land of Judah were taken into captivity in Babylon, victims of conquest and expansion; they lost homes and lives and loved ones. The captivity lasted for decades. The writer remembers the sorrow and hopelessness of those years, in which the captors mocked the people, commanding them to sing their old songs. The writer grieves the loss of Zion, vows never to forget Jerusalem, and then rages at the Babylonian captors.

But the writer expresses rage in the context of a prayer to God. The writer gives the grief and rage to God because they are unbearable. If we remove this passage from our Bibles because it is difficult, we may never discover that God is available, able, and willing to bear our grief and rage. We may never realize that those feelings are natural. If the passage remains, however, we will know that we may not be able to move past these natural feelings right away. We may not be able to forgive or hope just yet. But God will forgive and hope in our stead until we are ready to move past those feelings. This is just one example why editing the Bible to just the “good parts” is a bad idea.

…Praying For…

Dear God, I pray that I can trust you enough to know that you will be with me as I struggle with the difficult parts of the Bible and will hold them in trust until I am ready to integrate them into my life of faith. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, trusting that you will grant me the patience to study the Bible slowly and keep my eyes and heart open for your presence in my life.

…Opening To…

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer… I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me… Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. (Frank Herbert, Dune)

…Listening In…

Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no danger because you are with me. Your rod and your staff—they protect me. (Psalm 23:4; context)

…Filling Up…

Perhaps you were afraid of the dark as a small child like we mentioned yesterday. Or perhaps you were afraid of the monsters under your bed. There they were: always lurking, rumbling, slurping, ready to pounce – until you summoned up enough courage to dangle your head over the side of the bed and chase the monsters away. You faced your fear, and you overcame it.

We look back on these fears of our childhoods and chuckle at how intangible worries grew into monstrous fears. The shadow of your own feet under the covers cast a winged creature on the wall, and the creature moved the more you shook. Under your bed, a pair of shoes and a couple of tennis balls made the ears and eyes of a monster peering up through the floorboards. The fears were nothing really. Our imaginations ran away with us, that’s all.

At least, this is how we dismiss those childhood fears now that we are older. We dismiss them as fanciful or as attention-seeking or as the fruits of overactive imaginations. But hidden within this easy dismissal is also a tacit dismissal of our parents’ advice. “Face your fear,” they said, and we did, and everything got better.

But those were our intangible, childhood fears. That advice couldn’t possibly work on our concrete, grown-up fears, the kind of fears that start to nag us around the beginning of high school and only grow larger as we get older. These fears are too immediate, too relentless, too real. Of course, we forget that this is exactly how our childhood fears felt, as well. Perhaps our parents’ advice, the same advice that I learned reading science fiction, really might work in our lives today. Do you know who gave us this advice, as well? That’s right – Jesus did. But we’ll get to that tomorrow.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you were with me as child, lightening my darkness; you are with me now calming my fears. Help me to remember your presence in my childhood as I look for your presence now. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you God, ready to face my fears with the knowledge that you are with me.

…Opening To…

Sometimes the Lord rides out the storm with us and other times He calms the restless sea around us. Most of all, He calms the storm inside us in our deepest inner soul. (Lloyd John Ogilvie)

…Listening In…

God, listen to my prayer; don’t avoid my request! Pay attention! Answer me! I can’t sit still while complaining. I say to myself, I wish I had wings like a dove! I’d fly away and rest.  I’d hurry to my hideout, far from the rushing wind and storm. (Psalm 55:1-2; 6, 8; context)

…Filling Up…

One of the side effects of our storms is that they tend to lessen our ability to be aware of God’s presence. The most important thing to remember when faced with a storm – to cling to, really, with all of your might – is that God’s presence is not dependent on our awareness of God’s presence. In other words, we are with God whether we realize it or not.

While this is a comforting thought, when we are in the midst of a storm, I think most of us would agree that it would be better if God’s presence were easier to find than harder. But that’s not how it seems to work. Is that God’s fault? Is there a flaw in God’s plan here?

Or is it the natural outcome of calamity? When we fall into distress, the amount of stimuli that bombards us goes way up. With so much more clamoring for our attention, it’s no wonder that being aware of God’s presence gets harder. If the fullness of God’s presence is always with us, then it’s impossible for that presence to get bigger or fuller. God’s presence abides – always strong, always steadfast. But because it is always with us, we have a tendency to push it into the background when calamity strikes.

So when the storm vies for airtime, it is incumbent on us to remember that God’s presence does not reduce itself just because the storm seems to be growing out of control. Rather than deciding that God has gone on holiday, the most faithful response we can give is to heighten our awareness, to hold onto the little things that remind us that God is with us. At first these little things – the hug your mother gave you when you were crying, the encouraging text from a friend – will seem woefully insignificant in the midst of the storm. But they add up, and they remind us that God is there – always.

…Praying For…

Dear God, help me to remember that your presence is constant and abiding even during the storms of my life. Help me to rely on you even when I have trouble knowing you are there. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, praying for the faith to sustain me through all of life’s storms.

…Opening To…

Sometimes the Lord rides out the storm with us and other times He calms the restless sea around us. Most of all, He calms the storm inside us in our deepest inner soul. (Lloyd John Ogilvie)

…Listening In…

So they cried out to the LORD in their distress, and God brought them out safe from their desperate circumstances. God quieted the storm to a whisper; the sea’s waves were hushed. (Psalm 107:28-29; context)

…Filling Up…

As I write this, a hurricane is bearing down on the east coast of the United States. Since I live outside of Boston, there’s a better than good chance that I’ll be seeing quite a bit of rain over the next few days. High winds, too. Maybe some power outages and isolated flooding. Hopefully no fatalities.

The utility companies are scrambling to cut down tree limbs that could potentially fall on power lines. The governor has already declared a state of emergency. My wife and I took our patio furniture off the porch. And when I passed by the grocery store on my way home today, there wasn’t a single empty parking space (and I doubt there was any bottled water or batteries inside either).

All of this preparation for the storm has gotten me thinking about how we as followers of Jesus Christ prepare for the storms that happen in our lives – not necessarily the actual weather events (though sometimes, maybe), but the tragedies and the calamities and the disappointments, which inevitably happen in our lives.

You might be wondering: if God loves us and wants the best for us, how could God let us experience such storms? We’ll look briefly at this question (though it would take a lot longer than a week to examine it). You might be wondering what we can do when we are facing disaster or what God does when we are facing it. We’ll look at these too.

So pile up the sandbags and batten down the hatches. We’ll ride out this storm together.

…Praying For…

Dear God, you never abandon me, even when we are in the eye of the storm. Thank you for sticking with me through thick and thin. In Jesus Christ’s name I pray. Amen.

…Sending Out…

I leave this moment with you, God, praying for the faith to sustain me through all of life’s storms.