Building New

To the leader. A Psalm of David, 
when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. 
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me. 
Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment. 
Indeed, I was born guilty,
a sinner when my mother conceived me.  
You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart. 
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 
Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice. 
Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.  
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me. 
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, 
and sustain in me a willing spirit.

Psalm 51:1-12, lectionary psalter for March 21, 2021; from Psalm 51

This is how spring comes in the neighborhood. Birdsong backed by notes of yard work and home improvement projects. The rustle of a rake pulling last season’s leaves from the garden, then scraping across a paving stone. A new fence going in: the buzz of saws cutting wood, and the sw’thuk of the power hammer fixing pickets to the rail. We walk past a house being renovated. For weeks this winter, that house had trash set for bulk pick-up (old furniture, luggage, board games, stuffed animals that looked at the sky from atop the pile). I’d mourned the dismantling of a family home and prayed at the passing of people I did not know. Now the for-sale signs have been replaced with a home design board. A dumpster sits by the curb. The battered metal awnings are gone; windows replaced; bricks fresh painted. A new porch is being put on. The smell of sawdust hangs in the air. We wonder if the interior is being totally gutted. We wonder when it will be done.

I’ve been in Psalm 51 since Ash Wednesday. I wonder when it will be done.

‘Have mercy on me, O God … blot out my transgressions.’ Wash, cleanse, blot, purge. A litany of demands, starting from that first: ‘Grace me, as is your faithfulness, as is your compassion,’ your rechem, or womb-love. The psalmist’s ‘I’ pleads with the ‘you’ of God. As if these two (we two?) are the only two in the world. ‘Against you, you alone, have I sinned,’ the psalmist proclaims, yet the proclamation of exclusivity rings false to me because the ancient superscription connects this psalm with a context. The psalmist’s sin against the LORD was suffered in the bodies of a woman taken and her husband killed. The superscription opens up the psalm, resists sin’s spiritualization. Sin, transgression, iniquity: these are more than imperfect ideation. The suffering we cause our neighbors is the suffering we cause our LORD, the offense from which we need to be cleansed, the brokenness which needs restoration. However ardent the plea, it is a sham unless the reconciliation between self and God is broadened to include reconciliation with the other.

The litany proceeds from wiping away the old iniquity to creating a clean heart. It’s not a steady progress. The first series pertains to erasing what was: wash, cleanse, purge. Verse 8, then, is Janus-faced: bones already crushed naming the hope for joy bone-deep. But not joy yet: ‘Hide your face from my sins.’ Are God’s eyes covered? Maybe God’s gaze is not averted so much as intensified: looking past and through all the evil that has been, back to the goodness of creation’s original intent and future hope. Rebuilding the psalmist in that sight.

‘A clean heart create in me, God, and a firm spirit renew within me.’ William Ross** argues that the psalm’s verbs evoke damaged structures reconstructed by God: ‘do not scrap me … refurbish the joy of your salvation for me, reinforce me with a willing spirit.…’ Crushed bones as broken walls, self as built city. ‘In sin I was birthed’ [v.5] describes the sin of the broken world into which I was born, in which I live, the structures from which I suffer and the structures from which I benefit. The bones that need to be broken, the spirit re-founded and firmed and renewed, are not just mine alone but those of the community. Yet the psalm makes plain that I am not absolved from my responsibility. Suddenly its ardent individuality seems not fraud but summons: I am involved in the world. I myself need to repent. I myself need to ask for — and to work for — holy joy, renewed and firm and amid — leavening? — the whole.

I’ve been in Psalm 51 for weeks. I’ve read it, resisted it, returned to it. I wonder when it will be done. So much needs to be ripped out. Some was good for a time but not good for all time. That too must be given over. Torn out, broken, crushed. The metaphors are so violent! Dust clouds over the dumpster as pieces of an old life are hauled out and thrown away. It hurts. Who wants to have part of your heart torn away? Maybe the only way it can be borne is in community. All of us needing to repent. Each of us saying to God, ‘Against you, you only, have I sinned.’ I can speak only in the midst of others also confessing in the voice of the psalm’s ‘I’; all of us together trusting that the tearing out of the old will result in a newer-firmer, wider whole.

I can’t make myself new in this same-old life. The psalm reminds me that I’m not expected to. The newness is God’s work. Mine is study and prayer and proclamation in community.

This is how spring comes. The first green of the daffodils spears through the ground. We look daily to see the spires grown higher. One morning the green is topped with yellow. It is as if the daffs had waited for us to look away so to surprise us with the flowers’ arrival. Oh. Spring.

‘A clean heart create in me, God, and a firm spirit renew within me.’

** William Ross, ‘David’s spiritual walls and conceptual blending in Psalm 51.’ JSOT 43(4) p. 607-29, 622-223 (2019).

Psalm Upside Down

You who fear the LORD, praise him!
All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him;
stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! 
For he did not despise or abhor
the affliction of the afflicted;
he did not hide his face from me,
but heard when I cried to him.  
From you comes my praise in the great congregation;
my vows I will pay before those who fear him. 
The poor shall eat and be satisfied;
those who seek him shall praise the LORD.
May your hearts live forever!
All the ends of the earth shall remember
and turn to the LORD;
and all the families of the nations
shall worship before him. 
For dominion belongs to the LORD,
and he rules over the nations.  
To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down;
before him shall bow all who go down to the dust,
and I shall live for him. 
Posterity will serve him;
future generations will be told about the Lord, 
and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn,
saying that he has done it.

Psalm 22:23-31, lectionary psalter for Feb. 28, 2021

The light has had a peculiar intensity these past days. It’s not brightness, exactly, at least not the sort that gilds the tree trunks or glows on the house bricks. It is clarity. In the afternoon the sun shines strong through the back windows and fills the kitchen. It’s not just that light shows more clearly the kitchen contents — cupboards and countertops, cups and crumbs — but that the kitchen has become a container for this other thing, for light itself.

We’ve had so many grey days, so many days of snow and rain. I have grown accustomed to the dull light, welcomed it as restful. It does not occur to me that I need not just rest but reviving until the ‘rains are over and gone,’ and a gusty wind has blown the sky clear. This happens every spring. I do not look for the turn of the year. I settle into a holding pattern of wool sweaters and shawls and mugs of hot tea and do not feel how deeply the long dark has settled into me with its own holding weight. Then comes this light so clear and strong, and I realize I have missed it. I put on rubber boots and walk the neighborhood. Yards that were snow dusted are now purple-carpeted with blooming crocus. Birdsong is piercing sweet. In the muck and gravel beside the road, there is a shape of shining light, a puddle showing sky and treetops upside down.

I had read this psalm one of the grey mornings. Snow fell and smoothed the untidy ground into a certain unity of shape and shade. I sat at my desk, and milk-pale light lay across the page, and cold radiated from the window glass, and I wondered that we should read just the ending praise from this psalm that starts with a cry of God-forsakeness. How can the exultant proclamation that ‘future generations will be told’ of God’s salvation make sense without the recitation of the abyss from which the tellers were delivered?

But maybe — sometimes — that pit itself is not known until one is plucked out of it. The fall is not always so precipitous as to call attention to itself. It may be a creeping dullness, a subtle descent, its nadir not recognized until a outstretched hand has brought you out to a broad place.

Notice the parallel in the lines of verse 26: ‘They shall eat, the afflicted, and they will be sated; they shall praise the LORD, those who seek him.’ Satiation is the answer to affliction. Praise is the result of seeking. Hunger — for food, for the LORD — is implied but not stated, nor is finding listed as the necessary precondition of praise. Seeking is.

And, as seeking leads to praise, so praise may be the start of seeking. Glimpse the sky in the puddle and let yourself be tipped with delight to lift your eyes and look at the sky. There’s not a leaf nor a cloud hiding its brilliance. Realize together both the light and your hunger.

Dine on praise. Pray your seeking be sated by God.

Sifting Shifting Witness

photo (c) Katherine Brown (color enhanced)

The mighty one, God the LORD,
 speaks and summons the earth
 from the rising of the sun to its setting. 
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
 God shines forth.  
Our God comes and does not keep silence,
 before him is a devouring fire,
 and a mighty tempest all around him. 
He calls to the heavens above
 and to the earth, that he may judge his people: 
“Gather to me my faithful ones,
 who made a covenant with me by sacrifice!” 
The heavens declare his righteousness,
 for God himself is judge. Selah  
Psalm 50:1-6, from Psalm 50, psalter for Transfiguration Sunday

Have mercy on me, O God,
 according to your steadfast love;
 according to your abundant mercy
 blot out my transgressions. 
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
 and cleanse me from my sin. … 
Create in me a clean heart, O God,
 and put a new and right spirit within me. 
Do not cast me away from your presence,
 and do not take your holy spirit from me. 
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
 and sustain in me a willing spirit.
Psalm 51:1-2, 10-12; from Psalm 51 for Ash Wednesday

‘The LORD speaks and summons the earth.’ The LORD calls the earth, cries out the earth, from the sun’s rise till its going in. I read the line, and the LORD calls the earth to be, summons it to unfold itself, as if creation does not exist but for God’s daily re-call. In my mind God’s speech unfurls rainbow banners across the heavens. I look out the window and see pink glowing from sky to snow-ground.

This summons, though, is not to being but to judgment. The LORD who flames from perfect-beauty Zion in fire and storm consuming, whose righteousness the heavens declare, calls a gathering ‘that he may judge his people.’ ‘For God himself is judge.’

This is where the lectionary selection for Transfiguration ends. As if it is safe to summon the shining-bright LORD as judge and not recount the judgment. As if it is honest or true to not read on to God’s arraignment of God’s own people. As if the mountaintop was itself the end and not the transition (literarily, liturgically) into a next phase of relationship. Lent.

Where am I in this psalm? Who is God speaking to? Who is the LORD speaking of?

Having called the earth as if to be, the LORD calls to heavens above and earth below to witness the charges. I am not called as witness, however. As I count myself among God’s own, numbered among God’s ‘faithful,’ I must count myself among those arraigned, against whom God testifies. We are not invited to overhear God’s speech to others but to be addressed by God. We are summoned to ‘Hear!’

What we hear is both censure and assurance. God’s people — we, I — are arraigned not for our failures of worship but for something else. Sacrifice as we practice it is not an inherent offense. Nor is it needed by God. All is already the LORD’s. Who are we to set aside some portion only? As if it all — as if we — are not already God’s own. As if God has a hunger that can be slaked only by our burnt offerings. The LORD rejects our offerings as necessary for God’s sake, yet the psalm continues on into exhortation: sacrifice thanks; pay your promises; ‘call on me in the day of trouble.’ The LORD does not reject us or our offerings. If there is rejection, it is of our ordering. We are the ones who need this discipline taken on, that distraction given up. The LORD, of grace, accepts our need as offering, and God promises to deliver.

But the psalm does not end there any more than it ended after that initial summons to judgment. The LORD castigates the wicked. How comforting it would be to think this address, at least, is against ‘others,’ and this is the part I can overhear. These harsh words against those who ‘hate discipline’ and ‘cast my words behind you,’ who befriend thieves and adulterers, who speak evil and deceit and slander against their own kin — I would rather witness these words than take them to myself.

Except that these words, too, are addressed to those who carry God’s covenant on their lips. These words, too, are addressed to those counted as kin, which is why their falsity is such an offense. If I draw that line between, am I not risking the same slander? It is the LORD who is not like us, not we who are not like each other. I must see that if I am to see at all.

I need re-creation as much as anyone else. To be ‘washed of my iniquity, cleansed from my sin,’ ‘restored to joy and sustained in willing spirit.’

I need not just to listen but to hear to bear God’s promise truly on my lips and know God’s word present in my heart, so that I may bear God’s name in the world.

Let me not forget you, LORD.

Let me learn to see myself with your eyes that I may see you with my own.

Psalm as Snow Day

‘

‘Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them….

‘The works of his hands are faithful and just; all his precepts are trustworthy.’

Psalm 111:2, 7, from Psalm 111, lectionary psalm for Jan. 31, 2021

Every week, I read the text — whichever text it is — a first time. I will read it again and I will do research and I will read it yet again, seeking the spark that arcs across from the ancient word to my own world. Sometimes flame flares so swift and strong and bright that words flow without much effort. Sometimes the spark catches but smolders; there is something there, but I struggle to know it. Sometimes there seems no spark at all, and I think I’ve chosen the wrong text of the lectionary four. I worry at the words like a dog worrying at a bone, working that a spark might fly, worrying that this time none will.

Every week — or two — I read the text a first time. Looking to see a light to see by.

The week I read Psalm 111, I immediately knew v.7 was the intended spark: ‘The works of his hands are faithful and just.’ The works of God’s hand. This is a phrase I’ve studied much and know well. Humans are God’s handiwork. This is where I would spend the week: pondering my identity as a made-creature, my calling to be faithful and just. With a sigh of satisfaction, I read the rest of the psalm, turned out the light, and settled to sleep, secure that verse 7 would spark. I would gather the tinder — translations and lexicons and what commentaries I have — strike the text, watch it flare, tend the flame, and write the fire.

The tinder didn’t catch. Because the text did not spark. Because in the Hebrew, the predicate in v.7 is a pair of nouns: ’The works of his hands truth and justice.’ The meaning shifted in my mind. Not that God’s handiwork — otherwise unnamed — has the quality of being faithful or just but that God makes truth, God makes justice. Truth. Justice. These themselves are the works of the LORD. The lexical study surprised. I checked multiple translations hoping one would give me back the adjectives of the NRSV. None did. I felt bereft. I had thought myself spoken of, or to, reminded of being God-made; reminded to be faithful and just. ‘The works of his hands truth and justice.’ I felt as if a door had closed and shut me out of the psalm entirely. I circled the psalm again. Noting the way ‘works’ ties it together: ‘works’ are great, are studied and delighted in; ‘works’ have power, are shown; ‘works’ are truth and justice; God’s instructions are ‘worked’ in truth; those who ‘work’ them gain understanding. ‘Works’ are a definite thread; but do they connect to me?

Sunday snow came. Monday snow came. The ground was covered over. The air moved with the falling of the flakes. The world was transformed. I had a snow day — entirely unexpected. Entirely unexpected as well was the way the snow drew me out and into it. Crunching across the ice-glazed, snow-covered grass. Wanting to see and hold in my mind’s eye a picture of just snow and sky and trees. Shades of gray, white to near-black. Wanting to go deeply in. Apart. No houses, no cars, no wires, none of the messy interconnectedness that is human life in this close-in suburb. Wanting to see the world that is not-us — deep green holly, dark cool evergreen, bare tree branches stretched out and up — all overlaid by this grace of snow — its shape and shading at once stark and soft, striking and subtle. Other.

Snow day as Sabbath unexpectedly imposed, unexpectedly allowed. Snow shifting the quality of the light. I’d been reading for a spark to summon me to examination of self and world, to whatever next-work is needed (and so much next-work is needed). I’d been following the thread in search of a knot to keep it from pulling loose. Snow shifted my sight to show psalm and snow day were the same gift. Stop tugging at the thread, stop worrying for a word of exhortation. Stop. Experience a word of wonder. This psalm is about the LORD. It is a summons to sit and study honor and majesty and greatness and power and mercy and grace and truth and justice. Stand. Snow cold underfoot. Snow coming down. Listen. Snowfall has a sound of its own even as it makes all the other sounds different. Look with open eyes, soft gaze. Snow light changes sight.

Look to see the LORD whose work I am. Only then can I see the work I am made to be.

This is wisdom; this is delight: wonder in the LORD.

Perfect hate; perfect love

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!
If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:
when I awake, I am still with thee.
Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men.
For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee?
and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?
I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts:
And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Psalm 139:17-24, excerpt from Psalm 139, lectionary text for Jan. 17, 2021

(King James Version because that’s what I’d memorized way back when.)

I memorized this psalm when I was in college. I wandered campus reciting it, gestured with my hands to show ‘beset behind and before,’ quickened my speech to pull the darkness over me, then slowed my cadence to count thoughts more numerous than sand. With dramatic passion, I rejected the wicked, then with a hastening urgency addressed the LORD directly, alibiing my firmness. ‘Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? And am I not grieved with those that rise up against thee?’ See me, God? I have ranged myself with you against all those ‘bloody men.’ I am on your side. So you are on my side. Yes? My tone implied the question; hinted at uncertainty; perhaps accounted for the difficulty I had in memorizing the last verses. ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts….’ I chanted them formally, as if to distance the risk of such a prayer.

Psalm 139 has felt so privately mine that I am surprised to find it in the lectionary cycle. It expresses a relationship too intimate to recite in community — ‘You have searched me and known me ….’ The lectionary portion reinforces that sense as it includes only the verses that dwell on the relationship of psalmist and LORD — omitting any reference to the wicked, to enemies, to any other that would complicate or contradict the connection so intense and pure and personal. As if this is the only axis of relationship that is. Yet for two weeks, now, of all the psalm’s poetry, the lines that have lingered are those omitted from the lectionary. I find myself pondering ‘perfect hatred.’ The phrase catches and sticks in a mind still disturbed by the violence at the Capitol as a symptom of anger and fear and hate that is not new only newly fomented. The inauguration was at most a pause in the storm. Division persists.

This practice of writing words is personal. This is a devotion, not a manifesto. I write for my own need and faith relationship; theology (if that), not politics. The presenting offense that day was against the Constitution, not the Bible. It pertains to the way we relate to each other in and as this nation, regardless of how any of us relates to God. Except, except … I am commanded not just to love the LORD but my neighbor. I cannot ponder my own personal escape into the ‘uttermost parts of the sea’ and ignore the violent tearing of our national fabric. Yes, it was a a fabric flawed in its original weaving, but the pattern of its dreamed ideal has a beauty worth furthering. This leaky vessel should be rewoven not ripped apart. We are all in the same sea and so far away from shore.

A day or two after the insurrection, The Washington Post quoted a demonstrator still crowing over the battle for the Capitol, justifying the violence by distinguishing opponents from neighbors: “These police are protecting the villains inside that building. Somebody back in a small town, that’s my neighbor,” [the interviewee] said. Maybe it was happenstance that the man quoted defined the ‘villains’ of Congress in opposition to those whose identity he construed in terms of literal proximity. To me, though, ‘my neighbor’ connected immediately with Jesus’ command to love neighbor as self, and the man’s definition was at odds with Jesus’ teaching how to love as neighbor, stretching ‘self’ across a striking line of division. Love of neighbor is God’s ‘royal law.’ The law goes farther still: Love the stranger among you as yourself. Love your enemy.

That one quote — of the entire article — went deep and twisted. It evoked words I love and claim and am claimed by, yet its undermining revision passed unremarked. Either it was overlooked or was seen as more of the same from one among a crowd which had perpetrated violence under — literally — the banner of Christ. I was angry. I hurt. These words that to me are treasure were mistreated, made to be of little account. Into this miasma of exhausting emotion came Psalm 139. Its proud proclamation of ‘perfect hatred’ complicated my pondering of neighbor-love. What is ‘perfect hatred’? How does it fit in a faith that is lived not just as a private intimacy between me and the LORD but in relationship with the national neighborhood?

Some commentaries assert that these verses are ‘unpleasant,’ ‘ugly,’ yet justified as an example of honesty before the LORD. The honesty — not the hate — is what we are to emulate: name the hate so that God can transform it to love. I am not convinced. The flow of the psalm itself does not suggest that the hate is meant to be a transitory state, set aside as perfection in love is reached. The hate described is perfect, complete, full. How can the proclamation of perfect hate be a part of the process of being perfected in love?

Perhaps the answer begins in following the flow of the psalm. Say it aloud. Allow the cadences to pull me in and pattern my thoughts. Begin with the declaration of God’s presence, close as breath. Recite the impossibility of escaping from God — and then the truth that enemies make it difficult to experience God’s presence. ‘Depart from me therefore!’ Then pause. Remember. Neither I nor the wicked can depart from God’s presence. All those prior verses made that plain. We are bound together in this world, its morning wings and sea surrounding, its light and its dark, its already-written, still-imperfect, yet coming-to-be. Take a fresh breath and pray those last two verses. Claim perfect hatred not as passionate emotion against the other but as passionate commitment to the LORD. That commitment requires the risk of the prayer to be divinely searched, divinely tried, that I may learn to oppose in myself that which opposes the LORD, that I may oppose it as well in any other. The end of the psalm takes me back to its beginning, the declaration that, bidden or unbidden, God has searched, God has known. God will do so whether we ask or not. Bidding God’s knowledge of me, I bid my own of God. This is the axis of relationship that makes the others possible.

‘Lead me in the way everlasting.’

Lead me in the way of love. Lead me to long and work and live for love’s perfection. Love of God, love of neighbor, love of stranger, love of enemy, love of myself. Love of this fragile vessel that is our national neighborhood.

Cup my palm as if God’s right hand, holding us afloat on this wide sea that is not our own.

The word that breaks in.

Ascribe to the LORD the glory of his name; worship the LORD in holy splendor.
The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over mighty waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars; the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness; the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the LORD causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple all say, "Glory!"
The LORD sits enthroned over the flood; the LORD sits enthroned as king forever.
May the LORD give strength to his people! May the LORD bless his people with peace!

Psalm 29; psalm for Sunday, January 10, 2021

Newness is not to be grabbed. It is gift to be received, to be grasped-by. So I sit upstairs at my desk to read and write and look and listen. I am given the particular text; I am given the particular time. I work to connect the two, and I pray for newness to come.

It is a grey day. The light is low. The sky is soft, folds of greys, ranging from creamy-pale to a subtle violet. The trees are black against its ground. Their bare branches stretch tall, seem to reach, bend and sway as the wind blows.

An aptness at the outset connects text and days, liturgical and political. Psalm 29 is the text given for Sunday. The day I sit to it is Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, the celebration of the arrival of the Magi — ‘three kings’ in tradition’s claim — who follow a star and ask King Herod where to find the child born king. The focus of Epiphany is usually on the Magi, and their miracle star. At stake is a clash of kingships, and of kingdoms. And on this very day, Congress meets to ceremoniously process the tally of Electoral College votes so to effect the ideal of peaceful transfer of power according to the people’s will.

I read Psalm 29. The cedared height of Lebanon skips like a calf in my mind’s eye as the trees outside my window dance in the wind. I imagine a forest flinging itself around in some mad jig. At first there’s a playfulness to the picture. Then I re-read and realize: the forest is flung. The trees don’t dance of their own accord but as the wind takes them. As the voice of the LORD thunders and breaks and flings and flashes, convulses the wilderness, whirls oaks and strips the forest bare.

As the voice of the LORD makes be.

Give glory to the LORD, O heavenly beings, the psalm begins. Give to the LORD ‘the glory of his name’ — a definite glory, peculiarly God’s own, not to be confused or conflated with the glory or strength of any other being. Give glory to the LORD whose voice sounds with terrible power through the rest of the psalm — over the waters, through the forests, upon the mountains, within the wilderness, until all who see and hear and feel God’s power cry out ‘Glory!’

‘The LORD sits enthroned as king forever.’

At stake in the psalm — as in the day, liturgical and political — is the clash of kingships. Heavenly beings are not to set themselves above the LORD, nor is anything on earth. The imagery is violent. Creation itself is overwhelmed. The voice of the LORD has a destructive power. Its end, though, is not chaos but the conquering of chaos. The voice of the LORD does not destroy for destruction’s sake but for the sake of life, for shalom — that is peace, and more than peace, wholeness.

‘The LORD sits enthroned as king forever.’

I hear helicopters passing over. I wonder if they are headed downtown, if they carry news crews or the National Guard. The morning’s planned ‘protest’ of Congress’s ceremonial attestation has morphed into a mob action. I leave my desk for updates. I see photos and videos of the crowd streaming onto the Capital grounds, surging up the steps, smashing doors and windows, swarming through the hallways. They bear American flags and Confederate flags. They bear massive banners emblazoned with Trump’s name. They bear banners that say ‘Jesus Saves’ and ‘God Wins.’ The relative sizes suggest that Trump is the senior member of this trinity. I text friends. I turn on the television to flip through the news updates. The aptness of the psalm is unnerving — its claims of God’s sovereignty are literally contradicted on the streets, Trump and God conflated in the signage borne. The psalm reminds of what’s at stake: ‘The LORD sits enthroned as king forever.’ Kingships clash.

Day turns toward dusk, and flash-bangs light up the Capitol. Dusk turns to dark, and events continue to unfold. Congress is back in session. Senators speechify and commentators opine. I talk back to the television, in fervent response to the violence itself and to the sanctimony of the belated disavowal of such mayhem. I am angry with those whose dismay seems self-serving. I am angry with those whose words seem sincere yet dangerously mistaken. ‘This is not the America I know,’ they say, as if their experience is the sum of national identity. ‘This is not who we are,’ they offer, as if history effectively contradicted the claim.

This is us. Conflating the unholy with the holy. Confusing the dominion delegated to us with our own will. Shrinking our conception of neighbor to the one near us. Excluding the other. Grabbing after power. Trying to save ourselves alone. We articulate other ideals, even strive to live them. But this is who we live. This is who we are. Name it truly. This is not who we want to be; this is not who we are called to be. Tell the truth; make space for transformation.

I want to write flames and thunder and trumpets. I want words that blaze high enough to light the dark, brass that rings clear amid the din. I am shocked at my own urgency. It is not my anger alone that takes me aback but my intense desire to word it. Why bother? Why add more words to the myriad already spoken and texted and posted and published? Where are such words to be found? What difference do they make?

‘The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over mighty waters. … The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire. The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness.’

Words do things. Words divide. Words incite.

‘The voice of the LORD causes the oaks to whirl, and strips the forest bare; and in his temple all say, “Glory!”’

Words strengthen and words bless. Words have power to make things be.

I am given these words — already aflame — that acclaim as king the LORD, God who will not suffer any other to share the glory of his name or throne. Feel their force stripping away false claims. Let myself be grasped and moved by their power. Add my voice to the throng saying ‘Glory!’ The chorus praying peace that is healing and wholeness for all lives, not some, that words and voice together may further that end.

Birth breaks the world open. We are broken of our own doing. Pray birth, now, of God’s own in-breaking.

Cast the Line

Hear my cry, O God;
listen to my prayer.
From the end of the earth I call to you,
when my heart is faint.

Lead me to the rock
that is higher than I;
for you are my refuge,
a strong tower against the enemy.

vv. 1-3, from Psalm 61

Psalm 61 is a call uttered from a place of loneliness, a cry sent from the end of the earth, the

‘Just a cloud?’ photo (c) Katherine Brown

Psalm 61 is a call uttered from a place of loneliness, a cry sent from the end of the earth, the space where the psalmist sits solitary. This is her faint heart’s final plea. She centers herself for one last desperate cast, doubles the force of the imperative by its repetition – Hear me, Listen to me – throws the line with all the strength she can muster in this place of bitter pain.

And the line catches. This line – thrown from the ends of the earth with whatever force a faint heart can rally – catches hold, grows taut, pulls the psalmist past the force of her own throwing, and up to the rock that is higher. The plea for ascent becomes the means of ascent. The psalmist’s prayer draws her out of her own overwhelmed heart in its feeling of small and solitary insufficiency to the recollection that there is a rock above, a strong tower, a pair of sheltering wings. This high refuge rock reorients the psalmist’s vision. She sees that her plight is not solitary, not hers alone, nor the sum of all that is.

She is drawn beyond the earlier, enmeshing fear to recall past mercies, reclaim promised loyalty, re-member herself among all those who fear God’s name. Her practice of prayer pulls her from the particularity of her own pleading and reweaves her into the web of the faithful. Her cry reconnects her to the whole of the community, even to the king.

The needs and joys of all the congregation are offered up by this yet-single but no longer solitary “I”, as she commits to keep casting her line in the glad joy of knowing that that God’s steadfast love and faithfulness thrum through its taut-held length, vibrating with praise her heart now sings.

Cast the line. Feel it catch. Hold tight. The pull will come.

In a Broad Place

Out of my distress I called on the LORD; the LORD answered me and set me in a broad place.

Psalm 118:5; from Psalm 118

Psalm 118. This is the psalm that welcomes Jesus into Jerusalem, Christians into Holy Week. I preached with this text just a month ago. A lifetime ago. Before the virus was named pandemic and lock-downs were ordered and people lost jobs and tallies of illness and death took over the news. I cannot re-cut that week’s word for this week’s need. Can there be a new word?

Psalm 118. I read it, and I reread it. As if just reading will make the text grab like an insistent kitten — the text taking hold with tiny claws, pricking through the miasma of news and worry wrapped so thick around me, calling me to new attention and new hope. I read the psalm, and it feels disjointed. Too many themes and remembrances. Snatches and pieces arranged in a crazy-quilt jumble, no coherence apparent. Individual patches stand out, if only for familiarity’s sake: ‘The LORD is my strength and my might, he has become my salvation’ (v. 14); ‘This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it’ (v. 24). These verses are more familiar in stand-alone form. They seem strange set together and surrounded by the rest of the psalm. Maybe the solution is not to seek meaning in a pattern but instead to go back to the start. Turn to the first first-person recitation that follows the communal litany. The opening imperative is plural: ‘Praise!’ But then comes this verse, a recollection of when ‘I called’ and when the LORD ‘answered me.’

‘From distress, I cried out — LORD! The LORD answered me in breadth.’

The Hebrew gets its hooks into me. My translation is so rough as to seem literally meaningless. God’s answer seems a non sequitur: I cry ‘from distress’ and LORD answers ‘in breadth’? As if God is not really harkening to my cry but humming along some other route, which scenic openness has no connection to the place of my pain. No. Go more deeply in. The answer parallels the cry, and the parallel resonates in a way that catches me up short, pricks my attention, draws itself to my need. My surprise at its rightness itself is almost delight.

‘From distress, I cried out.’ The word ‘distress’ is more literally a narrow place, a straits where one is cramped, restricted, hampered, constricted,* where one is hemmed in or bound up by enemies, circumstance, a virus. From social distancing, I cried out. From home-quartering, I cried out. From limitation, I cried out. The LORD’s answer, then, is perfectly responsive:

‘From constriction, I cried out — LORD! The LORD answered me with breadth.’

The Jewish Publication Society translation preserves the parallel — ‘distress’ and ‘relief’ — while obscuring the spatial aspects of the cry and response. The NRSV maintains the spatial aspect of the response but translates it as action, ‘the LORD answered and set me in a broad place.’ But is it that? Is it that the LORD removes the psalmist from one place to another? Or is it that the LORD renames the place, so that the psalmist reviews his own sight?

From the straits of pandemic-precautions and restricted outings and limited in-person interaction, I cried out. And the LORD answered with breadth, open space. The LORD said Lift your eyes and look out the window. The day is fine and bright. The wind blows white clouds across the deep blue sky, and the treetops that yesterday were all tan, a twiggy fringe against the sky, today are beginning to be hazed with green. The LORD said, Listen! The wind! It rises and rushes and roars through the trees, sways the branches back and forth against the blue.

Part of life is narrowed now. That narrowness is necessity — sensible precautions take for self and for others. The necessity does not obviate the grief and stress. Perhaps, instead, it makes plainer the grief and stress of the whole world, caught in the throes of this virus, the havoc it is wreaking on bodies individual and social. It does, indeed, cramp my heart. The psalm does not say otherwise. The constriction is distress, is pain. The LORD’s answer lays another truth alongside; the LORD’s answer comes with a broad space. As if this breadth is equally true. The breadth of a blue sky, the beauty of green leaves so sharp-shaped and yellow-new that it seems the tree branches are lined with tiny candle-flames.

‘From distress, I cried out — LORD! The LORD answered me in breadth’ — bringing me not out but deeper in, and on through, until the narrow strait opens into a broad place.

Look. Listen. Breathe. There is light and life and wind rising high. For now it is enough.

*The range of possibilities comes from The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament.

The right use of fear

Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me; 
your rod and your staff -- 
they comfort me.

Psalm 23:4; from Psalm 23, lectionary text for Sunday, March 22, 2020

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, 
and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.

Proverbs 9:10

Thinking much about fear this past week, particularly the relationship between fear and faith. I’m not the only one. The Washington Post reports that in a certain Bible app, ‘searches for “fear” went up by 167 percent last week, and “fear not” by 299 percent.’*

Institutions throughout my area — including the university where I teach — closed and moved work online. Churches closed too. More accurately, church buildings closed. ‘Church’ remained open, with the community’s worship and prayer and study moved online. News stories and social media feeds started covering this aspect of the coronavirus as a distinct thread within the larger tapestry of the new social pattern COVID is creating. Of the various slants relative to the closing of churches, one that continued to recur was the tension claimed between fear and faith. Most negatively, the relationship between fear and faith was presented as an intrinsic opposition, so that failure to gather physically for worship was failure of faith in God, elevating the power of the virus over the power of God. In a more benign form, fear was admitted as natural, a human condition that we could offer to the LORD in trust of God’s comfort and cure.

‘Fear not,’ God repeatedly instructs, from Genesis (15:1) through Revelation (1:17). ‘I will fear no evil,’ the psalmist sings, in laud and thanks of the LORD’s presence and comfort.

But: ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.’ The proverb offers fear in parallel with knowledge, not as something to be avoided.

Fear does not oppose fidelity. Rightly ordered, it is part of it.

Fear may be irresponsible or destructive — panic that destabilizes and debilitates individuals and communities. Yet I wonder whether our fear of fear, so rooted in our national ethos (‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ FDR famously said) is depriving us of an important learning about ourselves as creatures and our place in creation. Fear reminds us that we are not in control. The Bible reminds us that we were never meant to be in control. Made in the image and likeness of God, yes; given ‘dominion’ over creation, yes. Just ‘a little lower than God,’ yes. But ‘like’ and ‘lower than’ God. Not God. We were never meant to be God. Fear reminds us that we are limited. Fear may allow us to recognize and admit, again as if for the first time, the power that is outside of us, the power that is other, the power that is beyond.

Perhaps this is the value in the practice of fear. Perhaps this is the lesson of a time such as this. The scope of the risk is unknown, at this point unknowable. We are required to acknowledge our ignorance and to admit our finitude. Even — effectively — forced to admit the fear that is the shadow side of so much of our bright life, the worry both quotidian and ultimate that we hide under the thrum of busy-ness, the hectic pace of work or play, the anxiety that comes out only sometimes, in the wee hours of the night when the surrounding dark seems vast and terrible. Daybreak comes, we push the night terrors down and away, and we spend the hours of light — again — acting as if we are in control, which pretense has as its implicit corollary, that we are God, or at least that we know God already so perfectly as to be able anticipate and respond to every circumstance.

The current pandemic proves the power of this virus. Fear of it is not faithlessness. Fear may be, instead, the beginning of the beginning of wisdom. As we acknowledge the fear of what is finite, as learn to revise our own actions in response to its power — a power as impersonal as a wave — we may begin to realize how to practice the fear of what is ultimate and infinite. Of Who is ultimate and infinite.

Fear does not oppose fidelity. Rightly ordered, it is part of it. It has the potential to teach. As we learn, may we be drawn further on and in to deeper and dearer relationship with God.

‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight’

*The Washington Post, ‘Worship goes virtual in age of social distancing,’ print 3/21/20

Homecoming

I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go to the house of the LORD!"
Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.
Jerusalem built as a city that is bound firmly together.
To it the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, as was decreed for Israel,
to give thanks to the name of the LORD.
For there the thrones for judgment were set up, the thrones of the house of David.
Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: "May they prosper who love you.
Peace be within your walls, and security within your towers."
For the sake of my relatives and friends I will say, "Peace be within you."
For the sake of the house of the LORD our God, I will seek your good.

Psalm 122; lectionary text for Sunday December 1, 2019, Advent 1

The first Sunday of Advent. Thanksgiving cooked and eaten and cleared away (and several packets of turkey in the freezer, hurrah). The Advent wreath set round with fresh candles, bright cranberry red. Not the liturgically correct purple or blue, but my husband found the box of tall, unburned candles in the thrift store, the price was right, and their color is festive and pleasing. We lit the first candle last night. Again, not liturgically correct, being the Saturday before rather than the first Sunday of Advent, but the girls (this the collective noun applied to the two young women who are our daughters) were home then, and not now, so we lit that first candle together.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

The girls were home by Tuesday dinner. Tuesday night I lay in bed and rehearsed that verse in my mind — silently reciting each word in turn — and heard as I did the voices of the girls earlier in the evening. It was a mental polyphony: the voice of the text with the voices of my grown daughters together looking at a toy catalog which for some reason still arrives in our mail. Why did those voices weave together? Something about homecoming? About being glad in it? To whose gladness is the counterpoint keyed? Is it the gladness of coming home (being welcomed and even, a little, cosseted)? Is it the gladness of welcoming (me in the kitchen so enjoying the sound of their voices rising and falling in conversation that I delay calling them to do dinner chores)? Or is it all these gladnesses themselves coming together as welcomed and welcomer sit down to eat together at the table?

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

Psalm 122 is a ‘psalm of ascents’ according to the superscription. It is a pilgrimage psalm, evoking the gathering of God’s people, all of them together going up to Jerusalem, ascending the city’s heights, entering the house of the LORD. The first verb of the psalm is singular — I was glad, I rejoiced — but the trigger for this personal joy is plural — ‘when they said’ — and its experience is communal — ‘let us go.’ Was the psalmist’s gladness unique or did the whole ascending body share it? Did the gladness rise with the group’s ascent or was it something that they claimed in rote until they reached their goal and stood there, within the gates of Jerusalem, and recognized that the complex of physical sensations — bodies tired, legs aching, feet firmly planted within the gates — included the wild, rising, unreasoning conviction of joy. Pilgrims and city bound firmly together in this intention, in this arrival, in this jubilee.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

Whose gladness is evoked? Whose welcome is anticipated?

What has this psalm to do with Advent?

The psalmic summons is closely paralleled in the prophetic text: ‘Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD’’ (Isa 2:3). The suggestion of David’s ‘thrones’ (why plural?) and of judgment connects with the other texts assigned for this day (Isa 2:1-4; Matt 24:36-44), echoing the theme of God’s purpose for all God’s creation approaching its intended end of peace and security. ‘I will seek your good,’ the psalmist promises — this promise the culmination of the earlier declaration, ‘Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.’ The city as a person, an other with whom speech may be had, an addressee not just an object. The city as a conversation partner. The city and the LORD? God does not speak in this psalm; the psalmist prays but does not explicitly address the prayer to God. Yet God is present throughout: it is the prospect of going up to God’s own home, the singular, unique space in which the LORD condescended to dwell — where God’s name and eyes and heart are forever (1 Kings 9:3) — the occasions that opening profession of joy. Can the psalmist’s delight be any less than the LORD’s?

Tuesday night I wondered at the possible connection of my gladness and God’s. I imagined the LORD working in the kitchen to prepare a table for all the sons and daughters coming home, God’s own heart warmed by the presence and voices of God’s adult children in God’s own house. Then I shied away from my own audacity — it cannot be that. The psalmist sings joy at the anticipation of ascending to the LORD’s house, the joy of entering in, not the joy of inviting in. Now, though, I wonder if the joys are not intertwined after all. The gladness of being welcomed finds an equal measure in the gladness of the welcome given. Hearts reunite in mutual affection, the desire for peace, the intention for each other’s well-being. The Advent promise of arrival is expressed in this anticipation of mutual joy, this the ultimate aim of the judgment referenced in the texts: God’s joy in God’s people; our joy in our LORD.

We extinguish the first Advent candle at the end of dinner. ‘Now the light which was in one place at one time can be in all places and all times,’ one of the girls intones with joking seriousness. The joke is that this is a line from the Godly Play** lessons, and neither girl has been in a Godly Play classroom for years and years, and this is our dinner table and not Sunday School. The seriousness is that ritual embeds itself as deeply as that. And that the words recited are true.

‘I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD!’

I was glad when I realized again that the LORD is coming to be born anew on this God’s own earth. I was glad when I realized again the joy of inviting God to make a home in me and of me, and not just me alone. And — when I feel it entire or when I recite it by rote — I am glad when I realize that through the climb in the company of others, there will come the wild, rising, unreasoning joy of God’s own welcome table, set for all places, and all times, until time ends, and begins again, in the house of the LORD.I was glad when I realized again that the LORD is coming to be born anew on this God’s own earth. I was glad when I realized again the joy of inviting God to make a home of me and not me alone.

** Godly Play: An Imaginative Approach to Religious Education, by Jerome Berryman