Psalm Meditation 1067 First Sunday of Advent November 29, 2020 Psalm 15 1 O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? 2 Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; 3 who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors; 4 in whose eyes the wicked are despised, but who honor those who fear the Lord; who stand by their oath even to their hurt; 5 who do not lend money at interest, and do not take a bribe against the innocent. Those who do these things shall never be moved. (NRSV) We like to know the rules and expectations when we are involved in an activity or game. We are especially intent on the rules when our lives are on the line, so this is one of the psalms we should each have memorized. My guess is that we have paid little attention to this psalm because these rules are hard. Each of three verses has three rules, with two rules in the last verse. In each verse there is at least one difficult rule. Chances are that the difficult rule is different from person to person. Most of us have found a way to justify our actions when we enforce the rules for everyone, except ourselves. We are perfectly content to have one set of rules for our people and a different set for ‘those’ people. In a lot of cases we may not even realize that we make things more difficult for those who are not like us. When we get called out on our inconsistencies we deny that we look at one group differently than another. And if we can point out ‘their’ inconsistencies easily, we are probably guilty of some of our own. If we have to keep all of these rules all the time in order to be welcomed into God’s tent on God’s holy hill, I imagine that it will be a small tent with very few people, if any, in it. We are left to hope that we have some way of paying for our infractions of these rules: a penalty box, a foul, a do-over of some kind that makes us responsible for our actions without having to toss us out of the game. Something like God’s steadfast love and forgiveness. November 23, 2020 LCM lcrsmanifold@att.net http://psalmmeditations.blogspot.com/