Psalm Meditation 644
Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time
October 21, 2012

Psalm 83
1 O God, do not keep silence; do not hold your peace or be still, O God!
2 Even now your enemies are in tumult; those who hate you have raised their heads.
3 They lay crafty plans against your people; they consult together against those you protect.
4 They say, "Come, let us wipe them out as a nation; let the name of Israel be remembered no more."
5 They conspire with one accord; against you they make a covenant—
6 the tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites,
7 Gebal and Ammon and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre;
8 Assyria also has joined them; they are the strong arm of the children of Lot. (Selah)
9 Do to them as you did to Midian, as to Sisera and Jabin at the Wadi Kishon,
10 who were destroyed at En-dor, who became dung for the ground.
11 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna,
12 who said, "Let us take the pastures of God for our own possession."
13 O my God, make them like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind.
14 As fire consumes the forest, as the flame sets the mountains ablaze,
15 so pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your hurricane.
16 Fill their faces with shame, so that they may seek your name, O LORD.
17 Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever; let them perish in disgrace.
18 Let them know that you alone, whose name is the LORD, are the Most High over all the earth.
(NRSV)

While I believe that God answers prayer, I also believe that God has the sense not to answer every prayer by jumping up and doing what we have asked. There are times in which God uses our prayers to teach us about ourselves and to remind us how God works in peoples’ lives. We are very aware that God does not fix things, to make them the way we want them to be. God is more likely to be with us as we live into a situation than to make it the way we wish it were. God is more likely to suffer with us, through the way things are than to make things the way we want them to be. God is more likely to change our hearts than to change the folks around us.

This doesn’t alter the fact that we want our enemies destroyed and that we want God to do it for us. God is happy to hear the needs and wants of our hearts in our prayers. It gives God the opportunity to show us what it means to follow after God’s own heart. God may also open our minds to a new strategy for dealing with our enemies. We may discover ways to protect ourselves, find effective ways to apply the force we have against our enemies, or we may find that we have found a way to turn enemies into allies in some way.

God is not deaf to our prayers. God hears them with an ear toward wholeness, for us and for those around us. God wants us to experience and express the bitterness, rage and vindictiveness that are in our hearts against those we count as enemies. God wants us to trust and know that there is power beyond our own in every situation. God wants to redeem us from our suffering, not by taking it away but by showing us that we are not alone.

October 15, 2012