Psalm Meditation 1258 ¶Proper 12 ¶July 28, 2024 ¶Psalm 112 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+112&version=NRSVUE (NRSVUE) ¶Living a life of faith in God is hard work. It means standing firm in ebb and flow of the world’s tides. It means being gracious and merciful to everyone, without determining ahead of time whether or not they deserve it. It means being generous with others from the personal to the international levels. It means risking abuse at the hands of those whose faith is determined by politicians whose goal is power and control. It means recognizing and confronting evil and injustice rather than ignoring it, in hopes that God will deal with it. ¶It is so much easier to buy into the projections of the fear mongers, who love to let us know that anyone who is not one of us is out to do us harm in some way. By pounding us with the propaganda that ‘those people’ are pagans who worship gods with no power but great influence, or they are godless heathens who want to destroy people of faith in order to run roughshod over the rest of the world, they convince us that the only way to stay safe is to stand behind them as they protect us from all the evil people and activity in the world. ¶The psalmist tells us that the way of God is the hard way, the one that challenges us to be just, gentle, merciful and generous because it is the right way to live. It may or may not give us fame and fortune, however we will find ourselves on the firm footing of the path to God. We may live, we may die, we may prosper, we may falter, in the end we will stand in the presence of God. We may think, with the psalmist, that we will ‘look in triumph on [our] foes,’ though I imagine we will, in the end, see them as our brothers and sisters in the family of God. ¶July 22, 2024 ¶LCM