Psalm Meditation 1116 ¶Proper 27 ¶November 7, 2021 ¶Psalm 123 1To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens! 2 As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until he has mercy upon us. 3 Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have had more than enough of contempt. 4 Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud. (NRSV) ¶It has become normal to look down on those who are not like us. All of ‘those’ people are stupid and need to start walking in the same light in which we walk. Our contempt for ‘otherness’ seems to know no bounds or limits, except face to face contact. While we may think a group of people who believe differently than us are stupid and worthless, we may have friends who fit into that set. We grant them an exemption because we were friends before we knew they were among those ‘wrong-headed’ folk. ¶There are folks who stir the pot of our disagreements so that as we fight and argue they can continue to plunder the resources around them, including the human ones. We are encouraged to blame ‘those’ people for the state of the world, having been encouraged to a game of ‘Let’s you and them fight.’ While we are busy blaming each other for the state of the world, the power brokers are busy amassing more and more at our expense. ¶The psalmist encourages us to turn to God’s mercy as a way to step back and see that we are being treated with contempt, not by those we see as other, but by those who pointed us toward those others for their own gain. When someone points us to an enemy we had not previously noticed, we do well to look to what they have to gain if we turn toward this new enemy. Eventually, we will grow weary of the animosity toward each other and turn it in the direction it needs to go, “Our soul has had more than its fill of the scorn of those who are at ease, of the contempt of the proud.” ¶November 2, 2021 ¶LCM