Psalm Meditation 905
Proper 24
October 22, 2017

Psalm 125
1 Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the Lord surrounds his people,
from this time on and forevermore.
3 For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest
on the land allotted to the righteous,
so that the righteous might not stretch out
their hands to do wrong.
4 Do good, O Lord, to those who are good,
and to those who are upright in their hearts.
5 But those who turn aside to their own crooked ways the Lord will lead away with evildoers.
Peace be upon Israel!

There are things we know are wrong and we do them anyway. There are things that seem right as we do them and they turn out wrong somewhere along the line. There are things that are right and we do that right thing. Sometimes the wrong things are a momentary lapse in judgment and sometimes they are strokes of mean-spiritedness that we choose for some reason. The psalmist believes that evil is caused by a spirit/demon wielding power over us. I believe that we have been given freewill to choose good or evil and sometimes we make evil, painful choices.

Once we dwell in the presence of God we find ourselves less willing to make the evil choice and more compelled to make the evil choice right when we discover the damage done to any other precious child of God. Sometimes we miss the damage and sometimes we live with a mistaken definition of who are precious in God’s sight and who are not.

The definition of who God surrounds like the mountains of Jerusalem is tricky. We have a tendency to believe that God and we agree on who is held dear in God’s protective, loving arms. I can only hope that we are much too narrow in our scope and that God is much more broad than we can imagine or grasp. “Peace be upon Israel!”

LCM
October 17, 2017