Psalms for Today

 

Read Psalms 58-60

 

Snakes.  Snarling dogs.  Lions.  Slugs.  Howling.  Singing out with gusto.  There is a technicolor vividness to the Psalms.  Creation is part of the holy hymn (we heard this last Sunday with Psalms 100 and 150), which is why I think reading the Psalms outside and aloud helps us embody and internalize what is being sung here.  I love the sacred imagination of the hymnwriter.  I love how order, disorder, and reorder are all being thrown and tossed together, in an almost stream of consciousness way.  I love how the Psalmist gives you permission to feel all the feels, don’t hold back.  Yell about the enemies, sing loudly to God with tears of hurt and hope streaming down your face, and remember God is God, which means you are not.  As Richard Rohr says, “When we pray, ‘Thy kingdom come’, it means, ‘My kingdom go.’”  But we live in a world that declares and demands that I have it my way right now.  I want to worship my way.  I want to go where I want, get what I want, how I want, and be told I am awesome for wanting it.  When we worship at the altar of self-fulfillment, there is a cost that the Psalmist is trying to point out at a time long before capitalism was even imagined or implemented.  Perhaps today, reading these Psalms, you think, “Who wrote this?  Oscar the Grouch and Eeyore and Grumpy Dwarf (which I think would be a fabulous trio!)?”  There is a raw honesty to the Psalmist which sometimes can be too much.  We may think, “Whoa, let’s dial it back”.  Or you may think, “That’s right!  The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and I have the headlines to prove it.”  Or you may think, “I think I am going back to bed to worship God at the Church of the Holy Comforter.”  Whatever your response and reaction today to these three Psalms, I invite you to pray it.  Pray to God about how we don’t like to admit or accept that we are not in control.  Pray to God our frustration that we are not consulted on all the ways the universe unfolds, much of which goes against our plotting and planning.  Pray to God about how cycles of cynicism and criticism take hold of our lives.  Pray to God that we need that sheltering refuge just as much as humans have from the beginning of time.  Pray to God your indifference, inability, ineptitude and your inspiration to let the Infinite infuse you again and again.  Pray the words you need to pray this day knowing that the Psalmist has paved the way for such raw, technicolor vividness for you.  Amen.