Psalm Meditation 1119 ¶First Sunday of Advent ¶November 28, 2021 ¶Psalm 73 1 Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart. 2 But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled; my steps had nearly slipped. 3 For I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked. 4 For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek. 5 They are not in trouble as others are; they are not plagued like other people. 6 Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them like a garment. 7 Their eyes swell out with fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. 8 They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. 9 They set their mouths against heaven, and their tongues range over the earth. 10 Therefore the people turn and praise them, and find no fault in them. 11 And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” 12 Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. 13 All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. 14 For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning. 15 If I had said, “I will talk on in this way,” I would have been untrue to the circle of your children. 16 But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, 17 until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. 18 Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. 19 How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! 20 They are like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms. 21 When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, 22 I was stupid and ignorant; I was like a brute beast toward you. 23 Nevertheless I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. 24 You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me with honor. 25 Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. 26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. 27 Indeed, those who are far from you will perish; you put an end to those who are false to you. 28 But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, to tell of all your works. (NRSV) ¶Most of us have looked with envy on rich people at some point in our lives. We are convinced that if we just had that much money we would have no problems in life. Being rich seems to be a life with no problems, no difficulties, no worries. It isn’t even about buying our way out of trouble, it is not having any trouble to speak of to begin with. Rich people seem to be better than folks who are not on that financial level. As a child I told my dad I wanted a million dollars, and he responded with a short list of worries that wealthy people have. The one I remember is, ‘who will take care of all that money for you, and can they be trusted?’ ¶In the biblical era it was thought that there was only so much wealth available in the world. That meant that the only way someone could have enough resources to be considered rich was to take the resources of another. A comfortable amount of assets was due to God’s blessing; too many assets was due to sinful greed and inattention to the needs of others. We have discovered that the limits of wealth and resources are not as limited as once thought, it is still true that to become noticeably wealthy takes the time and energy of countless others. Most of those others are not rewarded at the level of their contribution. ¶The psalmist leads us through the process of realizing that material resources are not as desirable and durable as a relationship with God. For the psalmist, it is better to be surrounded by those who will willingly share of their resources in a time of need, than to have gobs of resources that we have to guard to keep other people from taking them for themselves. The wealth that is relationships is worth so much more and is more long lasting than any amount of money. Material resources are good until they get in the way of relationships. “But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, to tell of all your works.” ¶November 22, 2021 ¶LCM lcrsmanifold@att.net http://psalmmeditations.blogspot.com/

Psalm Meditation 1118 ¶Reign of Christ ¶November 21, 2021 ¶Psalm 148 1 Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise him in the heights! 2 Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host! 3 Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars! 4 Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! 5 Let them praise the name of the Lord, for he commanded and they were created. 6 He established them forever and ever; he fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed. 7 Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps, 8 fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command! 9 Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! 10 Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds! 11 Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth! 12 Young men and women alike, old and young together! 13 Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven. 14 He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to him. Praise the Lord! (NRSV) ¶I was taught that the difference between thanks and praise is the difference between doing and being. Thanks is what we offer for all the things God does. The act of creation, the gifts that we receive, and the answers to prayer are a few of the reasons we thank God. Praise is for who God is. For being a loving God who enjoys being present among us, we offer our praise. In day to day usage praise is giving someone positive feedback for using skill and energy in an extra special way. ¶We praise our pets for learning and following a new command. Sometimes the praise is because we love how they love us; for being the goodest girl or the bestest boy. We praise our children for being on their best behavior in a stressful situation, for getting good grades for the full grading period, or for giving it their all no matter the outcome. We each other for making something difficult seem easy. The folks who use their gifts and skills in such a way that we think we could do what they just did, only to discover how hard it really is are offered high praise for their skill. ¶The psalmist runs through a list of objects and creatures who do well to offer praise to God. The psalmist does not confine the list to ‘nice’ and ‘pretty’ things. The psalmist calls on chaotic things like monsters and deeps to praise God, potentially destructive things like fire, hail, snow, frost, and wind, and crawly things that can give us the creeps. Everything that is gets the call to give praise to God, for no other reason than that God is. ¶November 17, 2021 ¶LCM

Psalm Meditation 1117 ¶ Proper 28 ¶November 14, 2021 ¶Psalm 48 1 Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, 2 beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. 3 Within its citadels God has shown himself a sure defense. 4 Then the kings assembled, they came on together. 5 As soon as they saw it, they were astounded; they were in panic, they took to flight; 6 trembling took hold of them there, pains as of a woman in labor, 7 as when an east wind shatters the ships of Tarshish. 8 As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God, which God establishes forever. Selah 9 We ponder your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple. 10 Your name, O God, like your praise, reaches to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is filled with victory. 11 Let Mount Zion be glad, let the towns of Judah rejoice because of your judgments. 12 Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, 13 consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels, that you may tell the next generation 14 that this is God, our God forever and ever. He will be our guide forever. (NRSV) ¶I tend to see my friends in the best possible light, and my enemies and adversaries in the worst possible light. All this without having any idea what is going on in the heads and hearts of either. When I talk to my friends I discover that they do not see themselves as having led the charmed and abundantly blessed lives that I see looking in from the outside. And when enemies have become friends and I am able to talk to them about the past, I discover that their motives were often not as evil as I believed them to be. ¶When I read the verses about the warlike approach of enemy rulers, it makes me wonder if they ran away in fear of the city of Zion or if they left for other reasons. If these enemies had no fear of God, however foolish that may be, they may have looked on the city of Zion as one not worth the time and energy to conquer. It is also possible that this group of rulers was on the way to a war council to which Zion was not invited and the group was passing by with no notice of Jerusalem at all. Since we don’t know anything about them, we are left to wonder if these rulers were afraid, unconcerned, or unimpressed. The view of the psalmist is all the information we have. ¶When we are quick to assume what is going on in the hearts and minds of those around us it will be good to take a moment to wonder how we could possibly know why a person acted the way they did. We do well to content ourselves with knowing our own thoughts and motives, our own likes and dislikes, our own definition of wins and losses. We can join the psalmist in the walk about of Zion, by whatever name we know our city, in order to find our own reasons to love and treasure the place we hold dear. ¶November 10, 2021 ¶LCM

Psalm Meditation 1116 ¶Proper 27 ¶November 7, 2021 ¶Psalm 123 1To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens! 2 As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us. 3 Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt. 4 Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud. (NRSV) ¶It has become normal to look down on those who are not like us. All of ‘those’ people are stupid and need to start walking in the same light in which we walk. Our contempt for ‘otherness’ seems to know no bounds or limits, except face to face contact. While we may think a group of people who believe differently than us are stupid and worthless, we may have friends who fit into that set. We grant them an exemption because we were friends before we knew they were among those ‘wrong-headed’ folk. ¶There are folks who stir the pot of our disagreements so that as we fight and argue they can continue to plunder the resources around them, including the human ones. We are encouraged to blame ‘those’ people for the state of the world, having been encouraged to a game of ‘Let’s you and them fight.’ While we are busy blaming each other for the state of the world, the power brokers are busy amassing more and more at our expense. ¶The psalmist encourages us to turn to God’s mercy as a way to step back and see that we are being treated with contempt, not by those we see as other, but by those who pointed us toward those others for their own gain. When someone points us to an enemy we had not previously noticed, we do well to look to what they have to gain if we turn toward this new enemy. Eventually, we will grow weary of the animosity toward each other and turn it in the direction it needs to go, “Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.” ¶November 2, 2021 ¶LCM