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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
October 9, 2024
Robert Grosseteste 1253 CE
Reading: Psalm 90:13-17
Return, O Lord; how long will you tarry? *
be gracious to your servants.
Satisfy us by your loving-kindness in the morning; *
so shall we rejoice and be glad all the days of our life.
Make us glad by the measure of the days that you afflicted us *
and the years in which we suffered adversity.
Show your servants your works *
and your splendor to their children.
May the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; *
prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
What does God owe you? Think about this.
If this question were asked about anyone else, someone not of divine pedigree, you’d probably be able to provide a reasonable, satisfactory, and relatively quick answer. Most of our relationships are navigated according to the expectations we have of them – assessing who owes what to whom. We have an inner sense of this and usually act in line with it.
But what of God?
I would have liked it if the psalmist had excluded the middle lines in the psalm above. I’d be more comfortable if there were no appeal to reconciling the past as an expectation for the future, the suggestion that God’s benefits must match what has been suffered. It seems to me, rather, that God owes us nothing. Or, more to the point, to have life at all is already an enormous grace; we are always already dependent on the vast plenitude of the creation, things provided more than we can fathom. Holding God, then, to some further measure of accountability within this providence, calculated by ourselves for ourselves, seems woefully presumptuous.
Then again, this one sentence shows us the singular concern that obliterates our sense of gift. We are quick to mark any perceived imbalance or, more strongly, any residual debt. And God is given no exception. If the psalmist’s desire doesn’t quite rise to the level of a demand, it is still the interjection of the bar the psalmist hopes that God will meet. Failing that, God is open to complaint, which, as every election cycle proves again, is one of our chief occupations.
Preserved in the Eucharistic Prayer is Thomas Cranmer’s statement that the only thing we owe to God is our “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.” I love this line because it keeps us in the mode of being those who are continually being gifted by God; and it breaks our reflex of judging everything and everyone by some standard of what is deserved. At the center of faith is a very different joy.
Prayer
Our Father, who is there, wherever it may be – who is really there,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
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