Avoiding the Riff-Raff

Psalm 26
August 30, 2020
William G. Carter

Vindicate me, O Lord, for I have walked in my integrity,

and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.

Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and mind.

For your steadfast love is before my eyes, and I walk in faithfulness to you.

I do not sit with the worthless, nor do I consort with hypocrites;

I hate the company of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked.

I wash my hands in innocence, and go around your altar, O Lord,

singing aloud a song of thanksgiving, and telling all your wondrous deeds.

O Lord, I love the house in which you dwell, and the place where your glory abides.

Do not sweep me away with sinners, nor my life with the bloodthirsty,

those in whose hands are evil devices, and whose right hands are full of bribes.

But as for me, I walk in my integrity; redeem me, and be gracious to me.

My foot stands on level ground; in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.

 

The Psalms are found in the middle of Bible. They reside in a wisdom section that instruct us in how to live. Situated between the pondering of Job and the one-liners of the Proverbs, they speak for the wise life, the righteous life, the holy life. A psalm is a script for the relationship between humans like us and our maker.

 

So it is no surprise that they are grounded in reality, not fantasy. Life is beautiful, and life is also ugly. There are rewards to hard work, and blessings in diligent effort. And sometimes hard work and effort are blown up by evil. God invites us to keep living in faithfulness, no matter what comes. God promises we will flourish, even if that doesn’t seem obvious right now.

 

·         As Brent Eelman reminded us last week with Psalm 2, there is noise and nonsense among all the nations of earth. Above them, God laughs, for every ruler of this age is temporary.

 

·         As Jim Thyren reminded us a few weeks ago with Psalm 17, there are wicked enemies surrounding us like lions. They are ready to pounce and do us some harm. Yet we are the “apple of God’s eye,” defended by a stronger Savior.

 

Psalm 26 stands among these well-rooted trees. The poet of this psalm has led a consistent life. He has done all he can to fly straight and live right. So he calls upon the Lord to show some consistency in return:

 

Vindicate me, Lord, I have done everything right.

I trust you. In response to your steadfast love, I walk in faithfulness to you.

So vindicate me. Exonerate me. Clear my name.

 

And then he says something more: I stay away from the worthless, the hypocrite, the evildoer, and the wicked.

 

That is well-seasoned advice. One of the ways we guard our loved ones is by warning them to avoid dangerous people. “Birds of a feather flock together.” “You are known by the company you keep.”

 

When I was a teenager, Saturday night would come, and my mother would ask, “Where are you going tonight? What are you doing? Who is going with you?” There were a few of my associates that she did not regard very highly. If I blurted out the wrong name, she said, “I’m not sure that is a good idea.”

 

Or my sister, almost my age, traveled in many of the same circles as I. She would discover that I had designs to date somebody who wasn’t on her approved list. “What? Why are you going out with her? Don’t you know about her reputation?” What I never said out loud is that the bad reputation was exactly why I was interested.

 

I’m joking, mostly, but affirm their judgment was in line with the morality material of the Bible. You have to be careful with whom you associate. To summarize from one of the Proverbs, “Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm.” (Proverbs 13:20) Or as the apostle Paul warned with a wagging finger, “Bad company ruins good morals.” (1 Corinthians 15:33)

 

We know this to be true. One of the parlor games these days is to open the newspaper and ask, “Which politician will go to jail next?” The public trust unravels when those in authority take more than their share or demand what they have not earned. Every single day we hear about some flagrant neglect of the law, a blurring of right and wrong, a power grab rooted in arrogance. Should a journalist report the truth, they are accused by the guilty of manufacturing fake news. Then a big red, rubber ball is tossed to distract us to look somewhere else.

 

The Psalmist stands firmly within a moral tradition. There is a difference between the good and the bad, the pure and the sleazy, the noble and the reprobate, the virtuous and the greedy. “I have been careful of my associations,” says Psalm 26. “I do not hang out with the wrong people. I avoid the riff raff.” That’s good advice. Character matters.

 

It’s no wonder, then, there were serious concerns about Jesus. According to the record, he persisted in spending time with the wrong people. It didn’t look good. The religious leaders of his time wrinkled their brows and pursed their lips, as Jesus went into the homes of known sinners. He sat at their tables and broke bread with them. And for those who saw the world in dualistic terms – right or wrong, good or bad – this was disturbing.

 

On the one hand, there was no question that Jesus was good. He had the authority to heal the sick. His wisdom opened human hearts to God. He spoke truth and served those in need. He was a good man. Yet Jesus spent time with those whom the righteous dismissed as unclean and the religious dismissed as evil. They murmured among themselves, “You are known by the company you keep.”

 

In the brief story we heard today, Jesus calls a tax collector named Matthew to follow him and join his merry band. Right after that, Jesus hosts a dinner party that draws in the “tax collectors and sinners.” We have heard about the “tax collectors,” despised because they collaborated with Roman army which occupied the land. We can only guess who the “sinners” were.

 

Most likely these were people who lived in the shadows. Not easily traced. Enveloped in shame. Their business was suspicious. Their behavior was suspect. There was something shady about them. We had somebody like that on my street. Never seen outdoors, window shades always drawn, always had money but nobody knew the source. All the neighbors had their speculations.

 

Tax collectors and sinners: they flocked to Jesus. They gathered around him like flies to honey. Despised, excluded, Jews banned from entering their own Jewish temple. And here came Jesus, available, accessible, friendly, inclusive, welcoming, and always willing to eat a meal with the likes of them.  

 

Didn’t he know Psalm 26? I hate the company of evildoers. I will not sit with the wicked. I wash my hands in innocence. There is a tension here. We understand it quite clearly.

 

I took a professional interest in the recent account of Roger Stone. Remember him? Political operative, dirty trickster, long trail of suspicious activities. He was convicted in federal court of seven counts of witness tampering and lying to investigators. Now he says he found the Lord while he was in prison. I confess I swallowed pretty hard when I heard that one. Who does he think he is, the apostle Paul?

 

We will wait and see if the convert makes amends and lives the converted life. While we wait, we gain a clearer view of Jesus, as related to this psalm. As he defines his mission to the Pharisees and the other purebreds, “I have come to call not the righteous but sinners. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9:13)

 

In his complete goodness, Jesus does just that: he calls the sinners. He welcomes them to his side. He embodies mercy, which ultimately becomes his sacrifice. As we know, he pays dearly for it. He practices the love of God for all people, stepping over the dotted line between “righteous” and “sinner.” In no small part, that is what sends him to the cross. He suffers for doing the right thing, God’s right thing.

 

That open one more view into Psalm 26. The psalm begins with a cry for vindication. It is a prayer for God to exonerate a faithful life. Whoever prays this psalm has had a pack of trouble, not because of what they have done wrong, but precisely because they have tried to live right. This is a good man who is being attacked because he is a good man. He calls on God to reveal the truth about his life; that will be his vindication.

 

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once counseled, whenever we come across a psalm that sounds difficult, listen as if Jesus is praying it. This was his prayer book. Jesus knew the scriptures.

 

Those who condemned him might have thought the psalm applied to them. They took pride in their purity yet exposed themselves as hypocrites. That kind of hypocrisy is still going on. And as Pontius Pilate presided over the trial of Jesus, he washed his hand in innocence, as if he was not complicit in killing an innocent man. That kind of bloodthirstiness continues, whenever injustice is met with force and violence.

 

At the center of it all Jesus hangs on a cross. He has done nothing wrong and everything right. His goodness is condemned by those who can only be described as evildoers. They took great pride in separating themselves from those described as the riff-raff, and that has exposed them as something far worse.

 

Even so, the very deed of pushing Jesus onto a cross is the singular event that breaks down the wall between evil and holiness. The righteous and the powerful murder the Son of God, yet God does not retaliate or punish. God shows mercy, the same mercy Jesus has offered again and again and again. Forgiveness is announced. A new beginning is offered. Self-righteousness is demolished by the righteous love of God. Finally that’s what saves us all.

 

The word that shimmers in Psalm 26 is integrity. Integrity at the beginning, integrity at the end. The Hebrew dictionary says integrity is all about completeness. You are who you say you are. You do what you profess to do. There is clarity, not confusion.

 

The good news this morning comes not in this psalm but after it. Jesus has been exonerated. After the cross, his integrity has been affirmed. He is revealed in resurrection as the Innocent One, the Holy Redeemer who snatches us out of our darkness and brings us into God’s marvelous light. His invitation to us is to join him in praying the final words of Psalm 26.

 

As for me, I walk in my integrity; redeem me, and be gracious to me.

My foot stands on level ground; in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.

© William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

The Last Word

Psalm 9

August 16, 2020

Here is a question for you. Question: What do NCIS, Blue Bloods, mystery novels, and the book of Psalms have in common? Answer: Each one is devoted to the pursuit of justice.

Justice is a recurring human issue. There is trouble in the world, and we want it corrected. There is violence in the neighborhood, and we want it to stop. There are some who afflicted and oppressed by those who profit from the affliction and oppression. And so, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, Frank Reagan, Agatha Christie, and the Psalmist take their stand for what is right.

Now, admittedly, Psalm 9 rambles a bit and for good reason. Each verse begins with another letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It has been created as an acrostic meditation along with Psalm 10, which follows it. Yet the psalm holds together with a single gravitational theme. The world is a mess because the wicked have made it so. They have twisted public operations in their own favor. They have propped themselves up while putting others down. They have plundered the public good and lined their own pockets. They have maintained their position through force and violence. God won’t stand for it.

This kind of injustice is the recurring plot of popular TV shows, movies, books, and far too much of our public life. Every day it spreads across the headlines. Injustice is so pervasive that we begin to believe, “that’s just the way it is.” And if doesn’t touch us directly, if we aren’t the victims who suffer, we are tempted to keep our heads down and convince ourselves it’s not as bad as it is.

But the psalms consistently remind us: God won’t stand apart from a broken world. Psalm 9 declares God sits upon the throne forever, and from that throne, God judges the world with righteousness and equity.

Let’s wrap our brains around this for a bit. In the Bible, there is a throne, a single throne. There is only one Judge. All the smaller thrones and the lesser judges are called upon to exert the fairness of God. That’s why it is a scandal of biblical proportions for a judge to take a bribe or a public official to plunder the common good. And this is why one of the Ten Commandments is aimed toward anybody who distorts the truth and bears false witness.

God has set up the world so that everybody and everything can flourish. God’s table is level. All have equal access to it. The problem comes when someone wants to flourish at the expense of somebody else. They want more of the pie, even if that means others go hungry. The oppressor divides and excludes in order to gain more, and then established some ways to maintain the grab.

A number of folks in our congregation have been learning about good old American racism. The first slaves were imported in 1619 as a way of getting cheap labor and larger profits. Line your pockets at the expense of those who pick your cotton. When slavery was outlawed by Congress in the 1860’s, it simply bubbled up in other forms, by taking away the vote, segregating the schools, red-lining the suburbs, establishing stupid laws, and enacting every kind of brutality.

Just in the last week, I have learned there was a time not so long ago when real estate agents assured newcomers that no homes in Clarks Summit would ever be sold to African Americans. I don’t know if that’s true. At least it wasn’t officially true, or legally right, if ever openly stated. Yet let me remind us if there are communities that have so-called “bad neighborhoods,” we can be fairly certain they were created by exclusion, deprivation, and greed. And God won’t stand for any of this.

God sits on the throne. God established that throne for justice. In the words of our psalm, “The needy shall not be forgotten, nor the hope of the poor perish forever.” (9:18)  

A great deal of our Jewish and Christian scripture repeats this. If we haven’t noticed, we haven’t been paying attention. Or we have softened it up, as a way of avoiding the harsher truths about the human animal.

One of the other psalms, Psalm 98, is the basis of a favorite Christmas carol. Let’s see if you remember it: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare him room, and heaven and nature sing.” Ah, we love that one. We are required to sing it on Christmas Eve.

“And heaven and nature sing.” What are they singing about? Well, keep reading to the last verse of Psalm 98: “The Lord is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and the people with equity.”  Or as the Christmas carol puts, not in the future tense but the present tense, “He rules the world with truth and grace, and make the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.”

God’s justice always expresses the glories of God’s righteousness and the wonders of God’s love. It holds them together. What is righteousness but the love of neighbor, the fair treatment of neighbor, in the name of the love of God which is love for all of us? Righteousness is always expressed in love. Not gushy love, but active love, muscular love, that works for the benefit of all.

Now, this can be hard to keep untangled, if only because our own emotions get in the way. When we hear about justice, or regard God as the Judge, one of the first things that pops up in our mind is punishment. Television justice is often reduced to putting the bad guys in jail. Or shooting them. Or something worse.

I was in the supermarket checkout line this week, considering a pack of gum. Suddenly a headline jumped off the page: “Grim justice for murdered wife and unborn son.” It’s not every day that I find a sermon illustration on the cover of the National Enquirer. It’s been even longer since I’ve bought a copy, but that headline, and this sermon, prompted me to skip the chewing gum, toss the tabloid in the grocery bag with the apples, and take it home to read.

The story told of Scott Peterson, jailed for taking his pregnant wife’s life almost twenty years ago in California. These days he is in San Quentin, apparently dying of Covid-19. This is the “grim justice” of the headline. Peterson did something terrible and now he is receiving his just punishment. And then I read the rest of the story on page 15.

Turns out, there is no confirmation that Mr. Peterson actually has Covid-19, although a number of fellow inmates have tested positive. Another thing the author of this unsigned article points out is Mr. Peterson has filed an appeal on the 2002 case, claiming that he didn’t received a fair trial. The California Supreme Court will rule on that soon.

And then there was the last line of the article, sufficiently inflammatory that it would probably never appear in the Washington Post or the Scranton Times-Tribune: “Sources in (his wife’s) camp maintain he is guilty and said they feel justice will only truly be served when Peterson rots in hell.”[1] Apparently they have harbored a grudge for a very long time. It wasn’t enough to simply send him to jail. They themselves are emotionally locked in another kind of prison.

The problem with exterminating all the evildoers is that none of us would be left. What does the Bible say? “All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way” (Isaiah 53:6). That is how one of the prophets describes our shared human condition. In every courtroom there are those who are condemned and there are those relieved that they haven’t yet been caught. Sometimes the human justice system gets it right, and sometimes there are more cases than can ever be processed.

It’s complicated by the fact that human judgment can be just as tainted by self-interest as anything else. Maybe that’s why Jesus looks at his followers and says, “Don’t judge” (Matthew 7:1). He is not merely wagging his finger at all the self-righteous Christians who think they are better than everyone else. (For what it’s worth, Psalm 26 will address them in the sermon in two weeks.) Oh, more than judging the judgmental, Jesus tells the truth that none of us can see all things clearly. As he goes on to say, we see the speck in the neighbor’s eye and do not notice the log in our own eye. (Matthew 7:3)

This is why we need God as the judge, the ultimate judge. God sees all things clearly. No matter how tangled, no matter how twisted, God perceives our lives with absolute truth. In the language of Psalm 9, there are some who are afflicted and others who are oppressors. There are the needy and the greedy. The truth is that many of us stand somewhere in between, perhaps tainted, perhaps victimized. And God see it all – God sees through it all.

I must believe in a God like this even if I cannot see it yet. I have to believe there is an order to the universe even when I am surrounded by chaos. I must trust in an ultimate clarity and truth especially when I am confronted by my own self-deception.

How can it be otherwise? God's character is perfect goodness. God has no tolerance for anything less than goodness. What saves our life from extermination are two other divine qualities: (1) God’s long-suffering patience, which is an expression of love for us; and (2) God’s determination to make all things right, even if it takes a while. As someone has said, God is “committed to a rule of just law, as one who can be counted on to intervene on behalf of those who are treated unjustly or against what is regarded as inequitable treatment.”[2]

So this is Psalm 9. The psalm declares God will make everything right, that God is working even now to accomplish this righteousness. Given who we are or who we are prone to be, the psalm is God’s invitation for you and me to stand on the right side of history, to defend the weak and redress the exploited. It is hard work, long term work, costly work; but it is holy work.

In the justice of God our judge, poor folk won’t always be forgotten. For God is love - holy, righteous love. And God always has the last word.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved. 

 

[1] “Caged Scott Peterson’s Covid Nightmare,” National Enquirer, 17 August 2020, p. 15.

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012) 234.

In Mother's Arms

Psalm 131

August 9, 2020

William G. Carter

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother;

my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore.

Here is a truth about the spiritual life that nobody tells a rookie: it is possible to become cynical. If you stay at anything long enough, you might grow spiritually weary. But worse than that, you might become jaded. You can lose sight of the forest by bumping into the trees. The first bursts of enthusiasm are tempered by the realities of family and congregation.

It does not begin that way. The children might first discover the love of Jesus and then realize that mom and dad are not as excited as they are. At the end of a soul-stirring week of a youth work camp, the teenager is met by an impatient parent who holds the car keys. “Hurry up, get your things, it’s time to go.” Or a new member joins a congregation with enthusiasm and soon is gnawed upon by a few of the old crows. Somebody comes upon a season of revival, starts praying and reading the Bible, only to discover that the Bible is a very thick book and answers to prayer are not automatic. Or it has happened with some of the brand new ministers I've spent time with. Fresh from seminary, they go out to serve a real church; you know, one of the old-fashioned kind of churches, with the sinners still inside it.

As we live the Christian life, there are so many things that can temper our excitement. Sometimes we are frustrated with the people around us. Other times we are disappointed with ourselves and our own apparent lack of spiritual progress. The brief confession of Psalm 131 comes from a frustrated pilgrim. She has been at the journey for a while. In a psalm that may have been written late at night, the pilgrim surveys her soul and reports what she sees.

“O Lord, my heart is not lifted up.” The destination is Jerusalem and all that it represents. The journey is toward the temple, the festival, the celebration, the holy reunion. On the face of it, it is a noble pursuit. Yet here is the confession of somebody who knows of the detail and the hassles of travel. There are donkeys to be packed, lodging to be found, meals to be procured, and children to be consoled. Anybody on the road knows that travel is not an uplifting experience. A pilgrimage is both a holy journey and a pain in the neck.

If you and I had the opportunity, we could circle up our chairs and complain about the trips we have taken. Choose your topic: the price of fuel, cancelled reservations, charges for baggage, indifferent ticket agents, unusual food, phones that do not work, filthy accommodations, to say nothing of all those other obnoxious tourists. It is enough to make you think twice about ever leaving home. The heart is not lifted up by the details of travel.

And the Psalmist adds, “My eyes are not raised too high.” Not only are so many travel details mundane, but the excursion is not always a lofty occasion. If you journey to Bethlehem to see the birthplace of Jesus, you have to wade through the trinket sellers in Manger Square. As you approach the ruins of Corinth, the ancient city where the Apostle Paul preached the Gospel, the irreverent guide will mention it was a sailor’s town with brothels going all the way up the hill. What were you expecting – heaven on earth? There are so few glimpses of heaven, I’m afraid, just a lot of earth.

During a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, my father and I had the rare opportunity to travel to Nablus, a community in the West Bank. We were so excited about what we would see! Nablus is the location for the well of Jacob, the actual well from the fourth chapter of John where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman. The tour bus parked on a street full of broken glass. We traipsed through an unfinished chapel, long interrupted by Palestinian-Israeli skirmishes. Then we descended an uneven staircase through layers of accumulated gold and beeswax.

Circling the well, each in our group took a sip of fresh water, as a New Testament professor retold the story and drew out some insights. Just then, as we were beginning to imagine the Lord speaking at this well, a surly priest interrupted and said, “Enough of that, move along, another group is right behind you. Buy your postcards and candles over here.” Believe me when I say my eyes were not raised too high.

Then the Psalmist says, “I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” How did she know? How did she know that so many Christians expect to be brought into the presence of something great and marvelous and then what they discover is the same jumbled mess of humanity that exists everywhere else?

A man was telling me about his disappointment with his church. It was a tall pulpit in a major city. They had a wonderful preacher and they paid him extremely well. In addition to his hefty salary, he had a $90,000 annual expense account designated just for taking people out to dinner, with free prep school tuition for his children, among other benefits. There were a few rumors in the air about him, but they were dismissed as jealousy. Nobody paid much attention because whenever he preached it was great and marvelous and everybody was so impressed with the wonderful show.

Then one of his girlfriends posted his e-mails and text messages to her on a blog. His third wife got a little hot about it and left him rather publicly. Someone announced the minister had exhibited the same behavior at the other end of the state. Three prominent church leaders huddled together and agreed to pay him a half million dollars if he would slip away quietly. When his denomination got wind of this sorry business, they moved quickly to press charges – but The Reverend up and quit his membership, renounced their jurisdiction, so that nobody could touch him. Nobody, that is, except God.

That church leader told me this story with tears in his eyes. He said, “I will never go back to that church - or any church - ever again. I cannot believe what he did. I do not believe he got away with it.” He was shocked and dismayed to discover the Christian church has sinners in its pulpits and pews.  He was sufficiently dismayed that he no longer occupies himself with things too great and too marvelous for himself.

All who have put in their time living the faith are tempted to lower our eyes, reduce our expectations, and settle for what is trivial and ugly. There is something about the holiness of God that brings out the worst in people. The immense grace of God will expose the pettiness of the church. What’s the result? The faithful stop looking so high and settle for something far less than God.

There are hundreds of distractions from the spiritual journey. People will take all kinds of emotional detours that lead to dead ends. In my years as a pastor, I have known people to depart from churches over the color of the sanctuary paint, the choice to provide hospitality to a group of outsiders, the selection of curriculum, and the use of Folgers crystals during coffee hour. It is not that these folks switched congregations so they could get upset about something else somewhere else. What is troubling is that they simply stopped going anywhere at all – because of paint, strangers, curriculum, and instant coffee.

Just the other day, a friend told me why a family stopped attending her church. Ready for this? One of the church deacons noticed the family had been absent, so he phoned to say he missed them. They were so offended by the attention that they decided to stay away – which they were already doing.

I can understand the Psalmist’s confession, can’t you? “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” Depending on how you read it, it may sound like self-disgust. Some scholars say the nuance is actually one of humility, that the Psalmist admits, “I am really small-minded, O God. Save me from my pettiness.”

We do not know the circumstances. As with many of the psalms, the splinters of particularity have been sanded away. What we do have is the middle verse: “I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother.” It points us to one of the ultimate benefits of faith, namely consolation. We may hold the heart-felt knowledge that, even if there are cranky and cynical Christians all around you, at the heart of our faith is some real help. Forgiveness can really happen. Truth can be told. God's grace will cover our imperfections. Our imagination can be lifted out of the mud. God will give us quiet and calm.

This psalm sounds like it was written by a woman. I imagine her gazing down upon the nursing child on her chest. It prompts her to remember that faith provides the basic food of life. We are fed by hope, specifically the hope that the Lord of Israel is greater than all of our pettiness and short-sightedness. The very One who brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt will not allow us to be captive to our fears. “Like the child who is upon me,” she says, “so is my soul calmed by the Lord.”

One scholar suggests this poem is a lullaby, a mother’s song for a whimpering infant.[1] How appropriate! “Don’t let the small stuff upset you,” she prays. “Lean down and rest upon your Mother.” That is the call to consolation – to settle down and trust God. Let go of trouble, and fall asleep. Some of us can remember the experience, even if our mothers have been gone for a while.

In many ways, the psalm resembles another famous lullaby of the scriptures, the verse that somebody called the “now I lay me down to sleep” prayer of the ancient Jewish child. That's the verse from another psalm, Psalm 31:5, and you may remember the words:  “Into your hands, I commend my spirit.” Jesus quotes those words while he is on the cross.[2] Then he goes to sleep, confident that all is in his Parent’s care.

When we are tempted to count our troubles late at night, where do we get the consolation that allows us to fall sleep? When critiques and complaints threaten to drag us down, where do we really put our trust? Not merely with one another, but with the God who is pictured as attentive as a nursing Mother. The psalm says, “Cuddle in close to the One who loves you. Don’t worry. Stop fretting. Be still.” We never outrun this message.

Life can be difficult, long and hard enough to invite cynicism. With the Psalmist we might confess, “My heart is not lifted up. My eyes are not raised too high. I am preoccupied with things that are not as great and marvelous as God.” Go ahead – confess these things when you must, confess them so that you are free of them. We must never let our complaints enslave us.

After we get them off our chest, God's invitation is to cuddle down and offer these words from a hymn as our prayer: “O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never outlive my love to Thee.”

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] H. Stephen Shoemaker, “Psalm 131,” Review and Expositor, 85 (1988), 89-94.

[2] Luke 23:46