Psalm Meditation 698
All Saints Sunday
November 3, 2013

Psalm 53
1 Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they commit abominable acts; there is no one who does good.
2 God looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God.
3 They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.
4 Have they no knowledge, those evildoers, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call upon God?
5 There they shall be in great terror, in terror such as has not been. For God will scatter the bones of the ungodly; they will be put to shame, for God has rejected them.
6 O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion! When God restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.
(NRSV)

I know some very intelligent people who do not believe in God. They are convinced that if something cannot be proved by scientific method, it is not true. Ever since the Enlightenment folks have gone through the mental, philosophical, theological, scientific gymnastics to either prove or disprove the existence of God. The arguments have given us some interesting ‘proofs’ as to why and how God either does or does not exist. It was in response to the Enlightenment that folks came up with bibilical literalism; if the Bible is not 100% true and error free, then it is completely false. Sadly, this argument came from folks defending the existence of God.

I know this is not the kind of fool to whom the psalmist refers. The psalmist means the folks who act as if there is no God, no one to call them to account for their actions within the community. They act against both God and the community standards of behavior. For the psalmist there is no distinction between the standards of God and the standards of the community. The fools of the psalm are those who flaunt their bad behavior because they have the resources to ignore their upbringing in the community.

I do agree with the psalmist that those who do not believe in God are foolish. They refuse to see that there may actually be an entire broad sphere of existence that is beyond proof. They limit themselves to those things that can be proved and conjectured through scientific method and miss those things that are only available to those willing to take the leap of faith. The cool thing about faith is that it cannot be proved or independently tested in any way. People of faith offer the proof of their own lives and the difference their faith makes in how they face the events of a day.

October 28, 2013