Grant
us your peace, we pray, as justice and love pour down upon the yearning earth.
Amen.
During
our typical Sunday worship, there are usually four readings: one from
the Hebrew Bible, one from the book of Psalms, one from the Epistles, and one
from the Gospel.
The Gospel is, of course, the most important of the readings, and in our shortened
services in the summer, you will notice we drop the Epistle. This is because those
readings are usually echoes of the Gospel.
However, the psalms seem to get slightly brushed over. At
one time, the Psalms were the centre of worship services. They were sung,
recited, meditated, and made the centre of prayer. In fact, if you look at the evening
prayer liturgy it is made up almost entirely of psalms, but we don’t really do
evening prayer anymore. There are still parishes that will put their
psalm reading to music, but others, as we do, read them responsively as a group. The psalms can take on a completely differently
feel when they are put to music rather than spoken.
Even
us clergy don’t usually favour preaching on the psalms, focusing instead on one
of the other readings with the goal of linking them to the gospel – whether it
be the actual gospel reading or the overall Good News of Jesus Christ.
The Psalter,
written mostly by King David, is a collection of beautiful Hebrew poetry
written in the forms of prayer, meditation, and song that comes together to
create one book of praise, worship, prayer, and thanksgiving. For the season of
Pentecost, I want to challenge myself to lean more into the psalms and hopefully,
where we only hear pieces, encourage you to go read the full texts and to truly
hear the powerful words of the Psalter.
Why
do we only get pieces of the psalms, you ask? Well, one possible reason is because
they are too long to read at one time (check out the length of Psalm 119!), but
usually it’s because the creators of the lectionary have decided the verses
they’ve omitted were too hard for us to hear.
Today’s
psalm is an example of this – we only get to hear 2 of 4 parts. Part 2 is quite
lovely and talks about God being ever-present in our lives, no matter where we
find ourselves, however the last part is basically a plea from the writer to
kill wicked people and the people the writer hates. So, I guess leaving that
last part out is ok but we shouldn’t ignore that it is there.
Despite
the strange turn at the end, Psalm 139 is a love poem to God. It reminds me of
a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I’m sure some of you have heard it
before, even studying it in school:
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the
depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach,
when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being
and ideal grace.
I love thee to the
level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by
sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as
men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as
they turn from praise.
I love thee with the
passion put to use
In my old griefs, and
with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a
love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I
love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all
my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee
better after death.
Can
you count the ways you love God? Can you count the ways that God loves you? Is
it as the last line says, “I try to count them – they are more than the
sand”? If
you were to make a list of the ways that God loves you, or that you love God,
what would be on that list? Is it finite, or infinite?
The
writer of Psalm 139 is relaying to us their loving relationship with God, the
intimacy they have with the Creator, a relationship where God knows everything
about them. God knows everything that happens and sees into our inner most
depths. It is a relationship comparable to that of a parent and child. Is there
a love greater than that? When we hear this psalm, there is a power in its
words that lifts us up to God as like children into the arms of a parent.
God
the creator knows us better than we even know ourselves. As with a parent, in
God’s loving arms we have safety, we have belonging. Our needs are anticipated;
our desires are foreseen. Within the words of the psalm, we become aware of God’s
loving and constant care for us. As the one who created us, God has been with
us since before birth, knitting us in our mother’s womb. As the one who created
us, God will be with us at the end of our life, to take us by the hand and walk
us home. As the one who created us, God will be with us at every stage of our
lives – from the end of preschool to graduating from high school, with
university students moving out of home for the first time, with recent empty-nesters,
with the newly retired.
God
loves us in more ways than we can ask or imagine and that is what this psalm is
trying to say to us. To know that each of us were knit together in the womb,
fearfully and wonderfully made by God, is our reminder of the diversity of
creation, the diversity of humankind, and the diversity of our life experiences.
Psalm
139 invites us to be open to God’s presence in unimaginable ways and insists
that God will be with us wherever we go and in all that we do. What more can we
need or want than to know when we are at the end, when we’ve experienced all that
life give us, God is still with us – as he was in the beginning, is now, and forever
will be.
Amen.
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