Psalm Meditation 994
Proper 9
July 7, 2019

Psalm 78:1-11,40-57,72
1 Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
2 I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,
3 things that we have heard and known, that our ancestors have told us.
4 We will not hide them from their children; we will tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.
5 He established a decree in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our ancestors to teach to their children;
6 that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and rise up and tell them to their children,
7 so that they should set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments;
8 and that they should not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.
9 The Ephraimites, armed with the bow, turned back on the day of battle.
10 They did not keep God’s covenant, but refused to walk according to his law.
11 They forgot what he had done, and the miracles that he had shown them.
40 How often they rebelled against him in the wilderness and grieved him in the desert!
41 They tested God again and again, and provoked the Holy One of Israel.
42 They did not keep in mind his power, or the day when he redeemed them from the foe;
43 when he displayed his signs in Egypt, and his miracles in the fields of Zoan.
44 He turned their rivers to blood, so that they could not drink of their streams.
45 He sent among them swarms of flies, which devoured them, and frogs, which destroyed them.
46 He gave their crops to the caterpillar, and the fruit of their labor to the locust.
47 He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycamores with frost.
48 He gave over their cattle to the hail, and their flocks to thunderbolts.
49 He let loose on them his fierce anger, wrath, indignation, and distress, a company of destroying angels.
50 He made a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death, but gave their lives over to the plague.
51 He struck all the firstborn in Egypt, the first issue of their strength in the tents of Ham.
52 Then he led out his people like sheep, and guided them in the wilderness like a flock.
53 He led them in safety, so that they were not afraid; but the sea overwhelmed their enemies.
54 And he brought them to his holy hill, to the mountain that his right hand had won.
55 He drove out nations before them; he apportioned them for a possession and settled the tribes of Israel in their tents.
56 Yet they tested the Most High God, and rebelled against him. They did not observe his decrees,
57 but turned away and were faithless like their ancestors; they twisted like a treacherous bow.
72 With upright heart he tended them, and guided them with skillful hand.
(NRSV)

When your teenagers tell you, “I hate you.” experts advise accepting their words without judgment, and showing them how loved they are in return. It is tempting to make it a competition, however the intent is to let them know that their hateful words do not determine your reaction and do not define your relationship. It is not up to a person in the midst of a developmental rush of hormones and independence to make the rules of parent / child interactions.

The psalmist reminds the nation that they have a long history of having God interact with them in a way that lets them know that they are loved and cared for in a special way, only to wander away from God. The selected verses tell of the plagues visited on the Egyptians in order to convince them to let the people of God go on their way to their homeland. After all of the plagues, and the release of the people from bondage, they go out into the wilderness and complain that God does not care about them. With gobs of evidence to the contrary, the people believe that God does not love them. They become convinced that God is out to get them, because they are hungry and thirsty for a moment. The people of God want to know, not that God loves them, but that God will cater to their every whim.

When we begin to wonder if God loves us, if God has abandoned us because of a set of trials we are experiencing, we can look to this psalm as a reminder. Not only does God love and care for us, God loves and cares for us even when we have wandered off on our own path. We may wonder why God has not followed us down the path we have chosen. This psalm reminds us to turn around, to see if God is motioning for us to come back before we get to the danger we did not see, or if God is standing back letting us make our choices so that we learn that there are consequences to what we do and where we go. In either case, it is important to look back so that we know, no matter what, we are loved.

July 1, 2019
LCM