Psalm Meditation 583
Tenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
August 21, 2011

Psalm 41
1 Happy are those who consider the poor; the LORD delivers them in the day of trouble.
2 The LORD protects them and keeps them alive; they are called happy in the land. You do not give them up to the will of their enemies.
3 The LORD sustains them on their sickbed; in their illness you heal all their infirmities.
4 As for me, I said, "O LORD, be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you."
5 My enemies wonder in malice when I will die, and my name perish.
6 And when they come to see me, they utter empty words, while their hearts gather mischief; when they go out, they tell it abroad.
7 All who hate me whisper together about me; they imagine the worst for me.
8 They think that a deadly thing has fastened on me, that I will not rise again from where I lie.
9 Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted the heel against me.
10 But you, O LORD, be gracious to me, and raise me up, that I may repay them.
11 By this I know that you are pleased with me; because my enemy has not triumphed over me.
12 But you have upheld me because of my integrity, and set me in your presence forever.
13 Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and Amen.
(NRSV)

According to the psalmist, integrity does not keep us from sinning so much as it gives us the wherewithal to confess when we do sin. We confess our sin to God and put ourselves in a position to accept the mercy God offers to us. When the sins we commit are against others we find ourselves willing and able to confess our sin to those we have wronged as well. In one sense it may even be the sense of integrity that has made the psalmist sick in the first place. Sometimes we let ourselves get eaten up with guilt first and then we realize that it is due to some sin of omission or commission that we have made ourselves sick. Our own integrity can eat at us as a reminder of our desire to be our best possible selves.

At the same time integrity does not make us immune from gossip, it almost makes us a target. There are those who get joy out of watching as others are taken down a peg. They seem to resent anyone who might be seen as a saint or hero. They hunt for ways to prove that this person or that is not as pure and worthy of adulation as everyone else would like them to be. In some cases they may even befriend these good people in order to get close enough to gather damning information against them. Interestingly, people of integrity do not make any claim to sainthood or hero status. These folks live so that all the pieces of their lives fit together as well as possible. The rest of us look at these folks with either a sense of admiration or with a desire to see them fall off the pedestal on which they have been placed.

A person of integrity can weather all sorts of storms, especially those brought about by relationships with other people. It is not so much that God takes special care of people of integrity so much as these folks are more in tune with what it means to be a person of God. We are a mix of purity and sin, of acting on the things we say are important and of giving lip-service to things we wish were important to us. Our lives are a constant battle between integrity and disintegration. As we move away from some of our disjointed attitudes and actions we find ourselves more deeply integrated, more in tune with God and the people of God. We find ourselves more comfortable in our own skin.

August 15, 2011