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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
July 15, 2024
Reading: Psalm 25:1-3, 16-21
To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
O my God, in you I trust;
do not let me be put to shame;
do not let my enemies exult over me.
Do not let those who wait for you be put to shame;
let them be ashamed who are wantonly treacherous.
Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart,
and bring me out of my distress.
Consider my affliction and my trouble,
and forgive all my sins.
Consider how many are my foes
and with what violent hatred they hate me.
O guard my life and deliver me;
do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you.
May integrity and uprightness preserve me,
for I wait for you.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
I have a hard time reading the psalms. To be honest, within a verse or two my eyes usually begin to slide down the page, scanning for something that will capture my interest. I’m not sure why this is so. Sometimes the voice of the psalmist seems too familiar in the rhythm of his stated fears, complaints, and eventual exclamation of trust in God. More often, however, I feel that I simply don’t share the piety that is expressed. It is so singularly focused and so passionately maintained. I don’t know how to capture all the events of just one day – or any day – within the dynamic of either faithfulness or treachery. With perhaps a few periods of rare exception, I generally don’t fret under the suspicion that I’m surrounded by enemies and on the verge of suffering deep affliction. So much of what I think and do and desire seems nicely outside these strict constraints. I like to start my day with a cup of coffee and a few minutes reviewing what happened in the Tour de France.
But it’s a strange conceit that one’s interest should be determined by how much one’s own life seems to be reflected in a text. The Biblical scholar Andreas Schüle offered this lovely warning: “Whoever loves another only on the basis of one’s own self-understanding, one’s own status and prestige, can only begin with oneself and in an empty self-referential loop end with oneself. In so doing [one] will lose sight of… accommodating others in ways that are welcoming and conducive of life: in the words of the Old Testament, ‘Love your neighbor.’”
This is for me a ready reminder that the hard-won value of the psalms is not that they offer some pithy wisdom for how to better enjoy the day. By means of a very foreign voice they invite us into a perspective on life that is admittedly in extremis; but, by stripping away so much that simply puts us at ease, they reveal a goodness at the heart of our existence that cannot be removed. And sometimes we need to escape the confines of ourselves in order to find respite in the fact that, while we are in no way like God, God considers us the neighbors to be loved.
Prayer
Keep our eyes open, O God, to the beauty that is always present, and blind us not to the ugliness which always threatens to spoil it. May we be continually prepared to see the goodness in humanity, and at the same time not be unmindful of the evil into which we so easily slip. We ask these things in remembrance of him who had the eyes to see both the goodness and the meanness in us.
Theodore Parker Ferris: Give Us Grace
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