Psalm Meditation 713
Sixth Sunday After Epiphany
February 16, 2014

Psalm 95
1 O come, let us sing to the LORD; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;  let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it, and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
6 O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker!
7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice!
8 Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.”
11 Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”
(NRSV)

We learn how to live and behave from those who have gone before us. Sometimes we learn what to do and other times we learn what we would rather not do. This psalm is coaching us in what not to do in our relationship with God. At Meribah and Massah the people asked for more than they needed. They didn’t just want water, they wanted proof that the water came from God. They could have stumbled on water accidently so they wanted to know that they had received this water directly from God. It didn’t dawn on them that even found water would be a gift from God.

It is one thing to put our faith to the test, it is pushing things farther yet to put God to the test. When we test our faith, we look for the presence of God in a difficult situation. The presence of God may not be immediately discernible in every situation, so we have to look more deeply with the eyes of faith. God may be calling us to something more pleasant or to something more difficult yet. It is up to us to find the call of God in the situation. When we are putting God to the test our question is not, ‘how is God present?’ so much as, ‘Is God present?’ We ask God for some kind of proof of divine existence or presence.

Do we want to live as the psalmist calls us to live in the first several verses or do we want to live as the folks at Meribah and Massah? It may not seem like much of a choice. What makes sense in theory is not always the way things come out in practice. It is so much easier to see God at work when all is going well for us. When things get rough we find ourselves questioning everything, including the presence and existence of God. Still the psalmist invites and encourages us to see the handiwork of God as a reminder that God was and is at work in the world and in our lives.

February 10, 2014