The Hebrew Hymnal

 

“Poets tell us what our eyes, blurred with too much gawking, and our ears, dulled with too much chatter, miss around and within us. Poets use words to drag us into the depth of reality itself.” And I really like this — “Poetry grabs us by the jugular.” “Far from being cosmetic language, it is intestinal.  Eugene Peterson

 

This week, we are going to dive into and dwell with the psalms.  This is the hymnal of the Hebrew people ~ these are poems of praise and pain that the people of God have prayed for centuries.  Peterson’s quote above reminds us that the poems of the Psalms are not just sappy sentimentalism to make us feel warm and fuzzy inside.  The Hebrew Hymnal will jar us and jolt us.  I invite you to read the words of Psalm 1 with me slowly, savoring each syllable. 

 

From the Voice Translation:

God’s blessings follow you and await you at every turn:
    when you don’t follow the advice of those who delight in wicked schemes,
When you avoid sin’s highway,
    when judgment and sarcasm beckon you, but you refuse.
For you, the Eternal’s Word is your happiness.
    It is your focus—from dusk to dawn.
You are like a tree,
    planted by flowing, cool streams of water that never run dry.
Your fruit ripens in its time;
    your leaves never fade or curl in the summer sun.
No matter what you do, you prosper.

For those who focus on sin, the story is different.
    They are like the fallen husk of wheat, tossed by an open wind, left deserted and alone.
In the end, the wicked will fall in judgment;
    the guilty will be separated from the innocent.
Their road suddenly will end in death,
    yet the journey of the righteous has been charted by the Eternal.

 

Where are you planted right now?  You can answer that physically with your location and then name what you see, smell, and sense around you.  You can answer that question emotionally ~ what is growing in you.  You can answer that spiritually ~ what is in the soil of your soul.  What is nourishing or nurturing you?  Note that sometimes what is nourishing me spiritually is about as healthy as going to Taco Bell or McDonald’s every day for every meal.  We can turn to doom scrolling of echo chambers where the algorithms keep sending us more the same, so we keep on clicking.  We can have the drone of the 24-hour news cycle where analysts argue with no conclusions or compromise or consensus is ever found.  We might find ourselves planted in a blur of busyness that becomes numbness.  What streams are you planted by?  And do you need to be uprooted ~ perhaps not physically ~ but emotionally to be planted in a new location?  How might this Hebrew hymn be the voice of God singing to you today?  I pray God, who is our composer and conductor will move through the words above with a sweet melody today. Amen. 

Friday Prayer

 

God, on the day after party, when the menu is leftovers of remnant potato salad and cold veggie burgers from the fridge.  On the day after the party, when our body is tired from staying up past our bedtime.  On the day after the party, when no one stops by and we rest, we pray for You to meet us here.  We continue to ask for Your guidance in the coming days, weeks, and months.  There is so much stirring within us today and we ask that You help us clear out the clutter and chaos that swirls within us. 

 

Help us name the delights of life.

Help us notice the demands of life that sit like an elephant on our souls.

Help us number the delays of life, when we are tired of waiting.

Help us nurture the aches that won’t subside.

Help us nourish the healing art of laughter.

Help us nod at the holiness of our whole lives that You hold fully.

 

You are our help in ages past and our hope for these days to come.  May this refrain of the song of our life continue to be sung from our souls, hearts, and fall from our lips every day.  Amen.  

A Prayer for Today

 

Gracious God, we pray today for our country and community and trying to be your people at such a time as this.  We confess that we have not always learned from the past.  We continue to build boundaries between “us” and “them” in our neighborhoods, in our faith, in our lives and even family.  And while we would love to delight as Ross Gay invited us on Monday and Tuesday’s morning meditation, that muscle in our bodies and souls is weak.  Our minds love to object with all kinds of evidence of why delight and joy are “rewards” for making it to a certain place.  Delight and joy are often seen as future oriented, like when our mom said we couldn’t have dessert until we ate our Lima Beans!  We make joy the reward rather than the fuel that helps us keep on keeping on.  We make joy contingent on some objective met, as if we are both the student and teacher trying to get an “A”.  Help us, O God.  We fumble and feel flummoxed by trying to navigate life with these other featherless bipeds.  Our communities feel too fragile to bear the weight of all that is within us.  Help us today to breathe.  Help us today to delight in the taste of cool watermelon and ice cream on these hot, humid July days.  Help us connect to another human.  Help us listen to the trees that are a conversation we have exchanging our carbon dioxide of an exhale with the trees’ life-giving oxygen offered to us.  Help us be open to You, O God.  You are the God of this place and people and of all places and people.  We join our voices in singing, praying and holding these words today:

 

This is my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;

But other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

 

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh, hear my song, O God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

 

A song of peace for this world and the world within me and the world between me and those who share this time and space.  Amen.

Poem Prayer for Today

 

Tomorrow you might be planning a picnic or to fire up the grill or to send fireworks up into the sky.  Tomorrow you might reflect on what it means to call this plot of land home, this rock called “earth” hurling through space.  Tomorrow you might lament the struggles we face, especially divisions and cynicism.  Tomorrow you might sing songs with people you’ve never met but realize are fellow citizens.  Tomorrow you might wonder about the election coming up.  Tomorrow you might think about how far we’ve come as people in the experiment of democracy and how far we must go.  And today, I offer you this beautiful poem and prayer from Langston Hughes

 

I, Too

 

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

 

My prayer is that we, as a country, find a place at the table for all; for at the center of our faith is Christ inviting all to the feast of God.  Amen.

The "We" of Me

 

Yesterday, I shared a few of my favorite quotes from Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights.  Here is one more:

 

“The point is that in almost every instance of our lives, our social lives, we are, if we pay attention, in the midst of an almost constant, if subtle, caretaking.”

 

That single sentence stops me in my tracks.  Who am I caretaking?  Who is caretaking me?  These tangled and twisted threads of our lives are like the back of a quilt.  We assume and preach an individualistic gospel, and yet we are more interconnected than we care to admit or accept.  When do I hold the mystery that there is no me without “we”?  The “we” of my past ~ the family and friends and formational moments that accompanied me to this place, this day.  The “we” of the present that I see in the smudges of fingerprints on our refrigerator door and dirty plate left for someone else to put in the dishwasher or the person at the meeting who seems to delight in saying the opposite of what I am trying to suggest.  The “we” of the future, people who I do not even know exist but will cross my path in the road ahead and the creatures I might encounter on the hiking trip out to New Mexico in September or see on the sidewalks as I make my way down the street.   The “we” who will become our new Director of Music at some point – we pray – in the future.

 

The “we” that gathers every Sunday.

The “we” that includes voices of saints woven into the woodwork and walls of the church.

The “we” of people who tentatively cross the threshold of the entry way door because they are unsure that the church of a warm welcome really means it, lives it.

The “we” of voices that rumble around my mind that might sound like my mother at one time and my professor at another and in those still small moments like my own authentic voice.

 

The “we” of me…and the me that is a “we”.  This committee work of life that you and I are about in our lives, our church, our community, our country, and with creation that is singing in the choir with us.  May caretaking be the vocation that I pour my energy and effort into this day.  Amen.

Summer Reflections

 

This week marks the midpoint of this year; we are halfway through 2024.  Insert confetti being thrown here.  This is also a good week to reflect on the past 182 days.  How is the art project of your life going?  What images, events, experiences, thoughts, emotions are settling into your soul?  What has filled the past 4,368 hours?  What is bringing you joy right now?  When has delight danced in your soul and caused goosebumps to race/run up and down your spine?  Too often, for me, it feels like the scriptwriters for my life are Eeyore and Grumpy Dwarf with a bit of the Incredible Hulk mixed in for fun.  How do we hold the tension that there is suffering and struggling without letting that be the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth?  How does joy, laughter, and song become teachers where we can sit in their classrooms too?  Ross Gay spent an entire year writing essays about what he saw in the world that delighted him.  I encourage you to look up some of Ross’ work.  Here is a quote from The Book of Delights:

 

“I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

 

Ponder what delights have you shared with others so far this year?  When?  Who shared that delight with you?  Who joined you in the chorus of laughter or singing or silent awe as you watched the sunset?  What moments strangely warmed your heart and stirred your soul?

 

Gay goes on to say in an interview with Krista Tippett: “Joy is the labor that will make the life that I want possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”

 

What stirs in response to this quote?

 

Finally, hear how Gay can hold the beautiful and broken together in this essay from The Book of Delights:

 

“Among the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be, she said: ‘What if we joined our wildernesses together?’ Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.  “And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

“Is sorrow the true wild?

“And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?

“For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

“What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.

“I’m saying: What if that is joy?”

 

May your sorrow in the swampy wilderness of the world today meet a companion that together you might discover joy for the remaining days of 2024.  Amen.

Friday Prayer

 

God, You are known by many names and in a multitude of ways.  You are Creator.  You are Composure and Conductor.  You are Editor and Evoker.  You are Provider and Provoker.   You are Love and Grace who continues to expand beyond the horizons of our souls.  Just as You are many, but One, so are we, each of us, made in Your image.  We wear different hats or masks or ways of showing up in the world.  If this is true about us, so may we also realize and recognize that it is true of others ~ both the people we love and the ones who are so creative in annoying us (I mean, they are always coming up with new ways to push our buttons ~ I marvel at the mastery some people have at getting a rise out of me).  As Paul once said, we look at the mirror of life dimly.  If we do not see ourselves clearly, how can we see another?  Get out the Windex on the mirrors of our life, O God.  Help us reflect on the stories we tell ourselves about our life and how that is impacting and influencing how we see/respond/say to others.  Storytelling, shaping, sharing God, call us back to the narrative of Your liberating love that is good news of great joy not just for us, but for all the world.  And may each of us love to tell and live that story this day and in the days to come.  Amen.