12/12/2023 0 Comments Psalm 124 sung responsively![]() ![]() The God who is of considerable help is the one who made heaven and earth. The help we need is right on the edge of life and death, not a little bit of help to make life fifteen percent better, but the help that is the difference between making it and not making it, the difference between life and death, the difference between faith and hope, and despair and isolation. Psalm 124 winds down with an echo of Psalm 121, another “Psalm of Ascent,” and one we read often at funerals: “I lift up my eyes … from whom does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Indeed. Jesus’ own name is (in Hebrew) yeshua, “Lord help!” We cry out for the help we know we need and cannot find or secure for ourselves. Anne Lamott quite rightly wrote about the three (and only three) moods of prayer: “Help, Thanks, Wow.” The first mood of prayer is the desperate, painfully obvious plea for help. Birds have wings, and were meant to fly free, to glorify God by having plumage and by taking to the air! A bird should not be entrapped, and even a child knows it. Psalm 124 imagines a bird escaping, wings flapping, perhaps with a screech. In this realm of God’s descent/ascent, up is down and down is up, humility is glory, royalty is subservience, nobility is peasantry, shepherds hear the angels sing, and the Scripture scholars miss the coming of Messiah, but petty astrologers find their way directly to the manger. As Socrates argued in his conversation with Gorgias, “The life of us mortals must be turned upside down, and we are everywhere doing the opposite of what we ought.” Indeed. This is, paradoxically, God’s true ascent … coming down, subverting up from down. Perhaps it makes good theological sense that a Psalm of Ascents happens on the Sunday we celebrate the God who descended. How strange! And yet, God made both of us, God won’t settle for less than all of us, God is committed to the holiness and wholeness of me, and him, and her and them and those other guys. God not only can be God is on your, and his side. ![]() God can be on your side, and on the side also of your most implacable enemy. ![]() The Psalm asks, “If the Lord had not been on our side … ” Does God really take sides? Some of the thinnest, most atrocious theology we overhear in our culture is about God being on the side of - well, of the white people, or the pious people, or the people of a certain religious inclination, or those who are straight, or think the Bible is literally true. ![]() “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). There should be “songs of descent,” for Advent/Christmas is about a God come down, a God flatly incapable of hovering aloof in some Olympian heaven, a God who cannot help but descend, coming down to be with us, to be among us, to be … us, Emmanuel, God with us. But “ascent” isn’t the mood of the divine during these days. Psalm 124, in ancient Israel, was one of the “songs of ascents,” one of the Psalms sung on the steps leading up to the temple at the great festivals. But a National Thanksgiving? The only Thanksgiving we seem to know is … Thanksgiving, which - as Reinhold Niebuhr wisely suggested - is nothing but a day of national self-congratulation. We might be able to picture a national prayer for help, much as we experienced in the day or two after 9/11 in 2001. The Psalms of December’s lectionary: three National Laments - and now, the Sunday after Christmas? A National Thanksgiving! How fitting.Ĭorporate prayers of confession, pleading for mercy for the people, issue in the dawning of salvation, and thus a National Thanksgiving. ![]()
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