Psalm 33—An Invitation
Psalm 33 sounds the call to worship, inviting righteous people to praise the Lord, busting out the lyres and harps, creating new songs and shouting of the Lord’s character. And then the psalmist offers the warrant for such a praise summons:
For the Word of the Yahweh is upright,all his work is in faithfulness;loving justice and righteousness,the love of Yahweh fills the whole earth.Psalm 33:4-5
That last line filled my imagination this morning—what does it mean to say that creation is full of the love of God? Everything God does evidences God’s faithfulness to the love-soaked creation. The love is everywhere, laid open. Mary Oliver’s poem, “I Wake Close to Morning”, captures the sentiment:
Why do people keep asking to seeGod’s identity paperswhen the darkness opening into morningis more than enough.1
The psalm adds some color by invoking images of creation, and then invites humanity to stand in awe of a God who “spoke, and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm.” When God speaks the word, creation comes into order, obeying the Lord’s voice.Then the contrast: this isn’t like the people in charge of the nations. rather, their plans end up being frustrated, and their armies don’t have the power to save them. Their war horses [read: technological innovations] are “vain hopes for victory”, unable to save them [read: sustain their dominance].And yet, those who are attentive to the Lord, who fear Yahweh and who hope in God’s love, are delivered from death, and rescued from famine. They can survive scarcity and violence, in other words.The whole Psalm plays on the contrast of world leaders who seek their own good and scheme to sustain their own power, but ultimately fail to do so, and the Lord who fills the earth with gifts, signs of love, and whose rule is marked by righteousness and justice: those great Biblical words signaling care for vulnerable, marginalized people.Ultimately, this is what the Psalm calls us towards. Not simply praise for God’s righteousness, but for imitation of it. It calls us to recognize the difference of God, who has true power but uses it generously, and enthroned people who use their incomplete power to inflict harm on others. The psalmist invites us to see such fools from the divine perspective—to watch God watch them—and to see what God sees. Those powers may inflict real harm, but ultimately they turn out to be pretenders, unable to master even their own inner lives, much less order the world.God sees it all, and invites us to wipe the sleep from our eyes, and see too. Seeing is believing, after all. And all good and true believing becomes doing—in this case, the humble doing of just and righteous people, attentive to the way of God.
- This is the opening poem in Oliver’s collection Devotions which is almost cover to cover a meditation on this theme. ↩
Psalm 55: A Poem of Betrayal
The scriptures in general often emphasize facets of the story outside our attention, drawing theological pictures that don't immediately appear to us when we come to them with a different set of theological questions. The phenomenon occurs in the gospels as well as the other parts of scripture, and perhaps it's particularly poignant in the story of Jesus's death. Our approach to the story has been so thoroughly conditioned that it's too easy for us to enter the passion narratives with heavy expectations of the kind of things we'll find there, and thus miss points that the story itself is giving us.One such undervalued facet of the story is Jesus's experience of betrayal and abandonment. The gospel narratives explore the theme thoroughly—I worked on Mark's depiction in the sermon on the video below, but the theme exists in the other three gospels as well.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNVlZyt7D9UThe custom in our church is to open each week's worship with a Psalm, and for me the choice for this week was simple: Psalm 55. The Psalms capture human experiences and emotions, and demonstrate what it means to lay those experiences before God. Psalm 55 captures beautifully the anguish of betrayal, which is a profoundly common (universal?) human experience.The poem opens with a cry to God, expressing the poet's distress over "the noise of the enemy", and the "clamor of the wicked", and then elaborates:
My heart is in anguish within me, the terrors of death have fallen upon me.Fear and trembling come upon me, and horror overwhelms me.And I say, “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest;truly, I would flee far away; I would lodge in the wilderness;I would hurry to find a shelter for myself from the raging wind and tempest.(Psalm 55:4-8, NRSV)
Having described the anguish in terms many other Psalms might use, this Psalm then plays its twist: the enemies are actually the poet's friends.
It is not enemies who taunt me— I could bear that;it is not adversaries who deal insolently with me— I could hide from them.But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend,with whom I kept pleasant company; we walked in the house of God with the throng.(Psalm 55:12-14, NRSV)
The psalmist begins to call for God's response before further describing the experience of betrayal:
My companion laid hands on a friend and violated a covenant with mewith speech smoother than butter, but with a heart set on war;with words that were softer than oil, but in fact were drawn swords.(Psalm 55:20-21, NRSV)
The cries for help and the poet's statements of trusting the Lord in the face of distress are similar to what we find in other laments throughout the Psalms. However, this one's way of evoking empathy from the reader (or worshipper) is by the dramatic unfolding of a painful reality—it is indeed our friends who can hurt us in the deepest way possible. This psalm hold that card and then slaps it down on the table with the authority of experience, and all those who hear it can only wince and grieve alongside of the one who has tasted bitter betrayal.How might we respond to such a psalm? With empathy for the betrayed for sure, but also I think a deeper commitment to be faithful friends who avoid dealing out this kind of bitterness to others. There is, after all a beautiful reality on display even in the bitter sadness—we experience betrayal only because friendship and faithfulness really do matter to us. The depth of our anguish and sorrow reveals our capacity to love and the role of companionship and community in a full human life. It is the shadow side of something we deeply value—even if we don't know how to do it right. So in its own way, a Psalm like this with its tragic experience of betrayal is leading us to a more careful, vibrant experience of community, full of the sort of friendship that marks a flourishing humanity.The Psalm also provides its own way forward, the laying of such a naked human experience before God. It is a raw prayer of pain, but also holding a latent hope that such wrongs will be made right. If the psalmist's prayers are a bit too vindictive for us, we can at least laud the poet's trust in the Lord to avenge the harm rather than taking vengeance personally.
Psalm 2 and Power
Now therefore, O kings, be wise;Be warned, O rulers of the earth.Serve the LORD with fear,with trembling kiss his feet,Or he will be angry, and you will perish in the way,for his wrath is quickly kindled.Happy are all who take refuge in him.
Psalm 2 is one of the royal psalms (2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 72, 89, 93, 110, 132, 144) and as such celebrates the partnership between God and the Davidic king. The king becomes an instrument of God's rule over the earth, not unlike the prototypical humans of Genesis 1, and is given the task of enforcing God's will among the nations, bending the rebellious forces to submission before the Lord. All of this is a reflection of the divine sanctioning of the king's power.And yet, being good poetry, the Psalms also carries a subversive note as well. It calls out to the kings of the other nations to "be warned" and to "be wise", calling them to serve the Lord in the realization of their subordination to God's own power.Indeed, this call, though posed to the nations, is also before the king who sits in Jerusalem as well. God's own king is only blessed (or "happy"), when he has taken refuge in the Lord. The form of the beatitude ("Blessed is the man who...") helps pair the Psalm with the one before it, and Psalm 1 marks out the road that leads to blessing as sharply forked between those who take the path of the "wicked" and those whose attention is given to God's instruction. the point of all this is that even the king of Judah, who has received power from God in partnership with God, must use that power in accordance with God's own wisdom. Any power that fails to do this is doomed to "perish" as both of these first two psalms attest (Psalm 1:6, 2:11).The second psalm, then, does indeed affirm the power of the king, but places that power in a theological context, one which will take on particular ethical flavors in others Psalms as it becomes clear what God expects the king in Jerusalem to do—preserve justice and righteousness. It is this sort of context that enriches the Psalm's messianic flavor—the Psalm was read by the early church as containing the seed idea of the messiah as a Son of God who will become the true king. We should not miss though, that it also contains a word about what kind of king that messiah would be—one who is not only empowered by God, but who is attentive to God's way as well.Those who see their lives as joined to such a messiah, receive here not just an affirmation, but a call to faithfulness as people following God's way in the world.