Psalm Meditation 1196 ¶Seventh Sunday of Easter ¶May 21, 2023 ¶Psalm 74 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+74&version=NRSVUE (NRSV) ¶We like to believe that we want what God wants, or more accurately, that God wants what we want. When we feel oppressed, or even slightly put upon by others, we want to know that God is there to deliver us from that pressure. God has to be on our side, because that is how this is supposed to work. If we do all the right things God does what we want. If we mess up sometimes, God forgives us and still does what we want. Maybe sometimes we deserve to be punished for crossing the line too far, but after a suitable time of punishment God forgives us and goes back to doing what we want. ¶So what if, instead of God doing what we want, we discover that God wants us to be more like God? What if God wants us to love even the people who hate us, or worse, are totally indifferent to us? Our resistance to violence becomes non-violence, our desire for justice goes beyond a concern for ourselves and those like us, our wants and desires take the wants and desires of others into consideration. If we were to strive to be in the constant process of making and remaking ourselves in the image of God, we could and would change the world. ¶It is tempting to see these psalms as permission to expect God to meet human violence with even greater and far more destructive violence. We relish the idea of those who have hurt us being more deeply and permanently scarred by God in retaliation for our injuries. It may be that the people we call our enemies also await the punishment that God will inflict on us for our years of hatred or indifference toward them. Sometimes psalms and other Scriptures can teach how not to behave. We can use these psalms to gauge how far we have come and how much farther we need to go to be the people God calls us to be. ¶May 15, 2023 ¶LCM