Psalm Meditation 710
Third Sunday After Epiphany
January 26, 2014

Psalm 55
1 Give ear to my prayer, O God; do not hide yourself from my supplication.
2 Attend to me, and answer me; I am troubled in my complaint. I am distraught
3 by the noise of the enemy, because of the clamor of the wicked. For they bring trouble upon me, and in anger they cherish enmity against me.
4 My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me.
5 Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.
6 And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest;
7 truly, I would flee far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; Selah
8 I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind and tempest.”
9 Confuse, O Lord, confound their speech; for I see violence and strife in the city.
10 Day and night they go around it on its walls, and iniquity and trouble are within it;
11 ruin is in its midst; oppression and fraud do not depart from its marketplace.
12 It is not enemies who taunt me—I could bear that; it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me—I could hide from them.
13 But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend,
14 with whom I kept pleasant company; we walked in the house of God with the throng.
15 Let death come upon them; let them go down alive to Sheol; for evil is in their homes and in their hearts.
16 But I call upon God, and the LORD will save me.
17 Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he will hear my voice.
18 He will redeem me unharmed from the battle that I wage, for many are arrayed against me.
19 God, who is enthroned from of old, Selah  will hear, and will humble them—because they do not change, and do not fear God.
20 My companion laid hands on a friend and violated a covenant with me
21 with speech smoother than butter, but with a heart set on war; with words that were softer than oil, but in fact were drawn swords.
22 Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.
23 But you, O God, will cast them down into the lowest pit; the bloodthirsty and treacherous shall not live out half their days. But I will trust in you.
(NRSV)

More than once I have listened to friends as they carried on conversations like this psalm. The person jumped back and forth between talking to me and praying. It sounds a lot like the conversations that often go on in our heads as we skip from one subject to another attempting to come to grips with a difficult matter. The psalmist is being worn down by the whole scope of evil in and around the city. It is often the case that when one is deeply troubled by one thing, everything else also wears at nerves. Senses are heightened and the slightest noise seems to cut through from both sides and explode in the middle of one’s head. A touch feels as if a hammer blow has fallen. A slight feels the same as betrayal. The best intentions of those who offer comfort are received as anything but comforting.

In all that calamity, folks find themselves turning to God as a source of comfort and constancy. Since God is not bound by the constraints of the physical, emotional, psychological limits of the people around us, we can rattle and ramble on with the assurance that God can pick out the parts of our conversation that apply to various groups and people. With the help of God’s listening ear we can begin to sort out the various conversations, we can quiet the inner noises so the external noises are no longer as grating, we can put our helpful defenses back in place and begin to rejoin the rest of the world.

And through it all, God is both intimately present in our lives, letting us know that we are heard and loved, and God is powerfully arching over all of creation, keeping watch over all that is. We are given the dual comforts that God is deeply involved in the smallest details of my current situation and that God is big enough and broad enough to deal with those tiny details as well as the whole of the universe, all at the same time. We may feel overwhelmed by the weight of our particular world, however God is present with us to help us as we carry that load.

January 20, 2014