Psalm 89

One key phrase of Advent is "already, but not yet." In Advent, we celebrate the fact that Jesus has come into the world, taking on human flesh and living among us with our struggles, hurts and everything that comes from an embodied life. On the other hand, I'm looking outside the Leelanau Coffee Roasting Company at the Prescription Shop, which reminds me that people are still sick. I spent the noon hour yesterday face-to-face with the same reality at Munson Hospital in Traverse City. My memory is flooded from time to time of my own failures and the ways I have hurt others. I am afraid. I read articles this morning about how Wikileaks has changed the face of diplomacy with its recent burst of documents exposing secrets and conversations. North and South Korea are marching toward the brink of war. Clearly, not everything is right yet.

This psalm captures the already/not yet reality of Advent. On the one hand, the Ezrahite is celebrating Israel's return from exile. They are back in Jerusalem with a Temple and everything. Priests are functioning, people are worshiping in the way they were meant to, everything is better. Except Cyrus (the king of Persia) is still the face on their money. Their governor, a descendant of David, is not king but rules under the guidelines of Persia. And so things aren't great yet. They aren't the way that the prophets described, when Israel would be greater than they were before. Where's the Messiah?

Life is a mixture of waiting and receiving, of acting and pausing. Indeed, as Job tells us, our worship is not based on circumstances but on God's unchanging character. So, although we are surrounded by reminders of the not-yet, Praise be the Lord forever! Amen, and amen.

Psalm 88

This psalm reads like a fairly standard lament... until the last verse. I am unsettled by it. I think I actually gasped a little when I read it- darkness is my closest friend. Who ends a psalm that way?

Clearly one who knows what that feels like. If you buy into the consumer attitude of spirituality today, you will believe that once you "acquire" God (or whatever you want in the spiritual realm), you will be set. You will have it made. You will love the verse "If God is for us, who can be against us?" because it will give you the comfort that your relationship with God is locked into the "awesome" setting and is static. As the people of Israel found out, a relationship with God is both steady and dynamic. Israelites, as well as Christians over the ages, discovered that we experience God differently at different times. This speaks against the consumer attitude.

Indeed, people of faith sometimes have a close friend in darkness. Perhaps you can point to a time when darkness was a good friend. Darkness hides, and sometimes we want only to hide. So we wear the darkness like a costume, immersing ourselves in the malaise in order to hide the mysterious (and possibly painful) healing process. Indeed, darkness hides. But darkness is a fickle friend. Darkness will hide you for only so long. Eventually, the darkness wants to hide things from you. Hope can be swallowed up in darkness. We can only be sustained for so long without hope- an imagined future better than our present and perceived reality. So may hope in the God who saves be breathed into your areas of darkness today.

Psalm 87

Where I grew up, the home was the center of my world. After all, I couldn't cross the busy streets a few blocks west, or two blocks south, or several blocks north, or just a bit to the east. Unless I went somewhere in a car, I was restrained to a few blocks, my home nearly in the middle of that region. Not that I had a problem with that; after all, most of my friends lived in the neighborhood, we had a candy store, a Burger King and a delicious doughnut shop all in that area. Thus, I was a happy kid. So when my friends and I would take off on our bikes, we would always know where home was. Or, at the very least, we knew which way to turn when we got to a busy road.

For ancient Israel, God's home was the center of the world. That chosen home was Mt. Zion in Jerusalem. Being close to that place was special to the ancient Israelites, creating a pining for home when they were carried away. This psalm has both a rooted centeredness about it as well as a driving move outward. Certainly, Zion is a special place. However, God is not only interested in the city of Zion- God is interested in the world. God's desire is that all the nations would look to and acknowledge God. Whether those nations be Philistia, Tyre, Spain, Saudi Arabia, China or the United States of America, God has an outward-focus from Zion to bless the world. Today, Paul says that we as followers of Jesus are the Temple of the Holy Spirit, so admittedly things are a little different now. However, the drive of God for the nations has not. May we be motivated further into mission by reading this Psalm.

Psalm 86

Just when we thought we had moved on from David to Asaph and Korah, the organizers of the book of Psalms sneak another Davidic prayer into the mix. And much like other Davidic psalms, it begins in the muck and mire of David's painful circumstances. Yet there is something different about this one.

Certainly, David calls upon God to act in justice to save him. And in this, David trusts God to do whatever is right. However, there is something else going on in this passage that is truly remarkable. David asks for a different way of living in the midst of his trials. Often, when we encounter rough times, we just focus on surviving the crisis and making it through the other side. And that can be valid, God designed us to operate that way to some extent.

Yet, we also find ourselves in crisis mode making some shady decisions in order to make it. And in those moments, we can take a cue from David and ask God for the wisdom and direction to make the right decisions, even when it's hard. I pray that we can each take those cues today.

Psalm 85

A psalm begins in utter confusion, and ends in sweetness. The Korahites composed this little number as a piece of hope. They begin in the chaotic, in the disastrous. But this is only a backdrop to the intense hope of a heaven-to-earth connection found in verses 10-13.

What would it look like to have love and faithfulness meet? Or to have righteousness and peace locked in embrace, kissing? If faithfulness burst forth from the earth and collided with righteousness in heaven, what would be the result? Jesus. Jesus Christ is the heaven-to-earth connection that people in the Old Testament waited for but never fully saw. In Jesus, love for God and neighbor was met with absolute faithfulness. Jesus exuded peace, even in His anger, and lived a righteous life. In Jesus, we see all of the things that the Korahites sang about. And so the hope we have is a little different than theirs. They hoped for something (or someone) to come, and we hope for the return of that same person. Both ideas may offend our modern sensibilities, yet still we wait. And we wait to see the poetry of Psalm 85 lived out. I hope you see a glimpse of it today.

Psalm 84

It would be a tragedy to write about this psalm and not mention that there is a pretty moving song that has been written as a modern day Psalm 84. Click here to give it a listen.

You know the feeling of being home. After a long time of travel, it is good to finally rest your head on your pillow and know that you are home. In the same way, there are few fears more tangible than when one's home is violated by disaster or the acts of people. Our homes contain our dreams, the people we love, the memories we cherish. To lose that, even walking away to something better, can be difficult.

The Korahites, the Old Testament worship team, put together this psalm to talk about God's house (the Temple) as home, God as home, and the pilgrimage home. As the pilgrims make their way to the Temple, they find healing in the journey. They go through the valley of Baka (meaning deep sorrow), and leave it as a thriving oasis. Healing indeed comes along on the journey.

Today, I am going to find my home in God. I pray that you will do the same.

Psalm 83

One difficult theological conundrum in the Christian life is failure. After all, if God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31) Yet, the Bible is full of failures. Despite overwhelming grace, the Israelites are carried into exile. Despite direct, face-to-face encounters with Jesus, disciples turn astray and fail. And sometimes, in the Christian walk, we are faced with failure. We get a strong sense that we believe is from God that we should go forward with something. We go forward, and it fails miserably. We are hurt, and we wonder if God set us up or if we weren't really hearing God's voice. Either way, our faith is rattled. The same is going for Asaph, who is wondering why armies are invading and succeeding in Israel. This could be the exile, it could be one of many other situations where armies actually begin to succeed in the wars against ancient Israel. Yet, God is God, who can defeat God?

Failure is a mystery that is often beyond our comprehension. We can set up theological framework to explain away failure, but our best explanations can still feel dry. Much like the explanations of Job's "friends" were of little use to Job, we can often sit in judgment on others and even ourselves when faced with the anxious, fear-inducing reality of failure. I wonder if we instead brought failure to God, like Asaph does, and in doing so remind us of the ultimate reality that God is Most High over all the earth. And in that reality, I can have some measure of peace today, despite my failures.

Psalm 82

This little psalm tucked away is not one you hear about very often, but it was brought to my attention first a couple years ago when I was in an Old Testament class talking about how the Hebrew people viewed the so-called "spiritual realm." The NIV translation adds the quotation marks around the word "gods" as an interpretive decision, but Hebrew has no quotation marks or anything that would denote that Asaph meant so-called or anything like it. And that little fact makes this passage fascinating. Is the psalm talking about some kind of spiritual being that has some kind of power in the world? Sometimes, the word for gods also denoted angels. God could be summoning the angels, including the fallen ones, in this passage. Some of these heavenly beings may have been worshiped as gods in different cultures. This passage could be talking about kings, since many theologies of kingship in the Old Testament held that the kings (and prophets and priests) had basically one foot into heaven already. All three of these options are possible. There is more mystery to the heavens than our theologies often give credit for.

However, the charge is the same if you are talking to royalty, Zeus or some kind of angel- God is Just. And the voices of power, whether or earth or of heaven, wish to drown out the voices of the oppressed, the hurting, the weak. And God, as a good friend of mine put it, is good at delegating. Certain responsibilities have been granted to creation. For example, we were given the responsibility by God to take care of creation and to make disciples of all nations. The responsibility to love our neighbors and to defend them also can fall to us in any situations where we have power. Ultimately, though, we can be glad that God holds the cause of the defenseless and is a rescuer.

Psalm 81

I heard an unknown voice say...

What an interesting shift in the psalm. It starts with a decree for worship, musical instruments and all, and all of a sudden a voice breaks in on the psalm and changes the whole direction. Of course, it doesn't take too long before the mysterious voice is revealed to be God, the same God of the Exodus. Yet Asaph is content to never announce that God's voice is breaking in.

I can appreciate how this psalm is written, because I am sometimes (if not often) surprised at how God shows up in both dramatic and subtle ways. I could tell of times even in the past few weeks where God showed up at a time that I would have expected (a quiet time of meditation) yet in a way that I would never have expected (unearthing a thought that was brutally honest). And as soon as that happened, it seemed like I went through a shift. Now, in that moment, I was waiting for God and God was faithful. But that does not need to be the case. What is great about God is that God does not need the conditions to be perfect in order to communicate with us. God can surprise us. I pray that your encounters with God are surprising and meaningful this weekend.

Psalm 80

I have often heard of revivals as a religious concept. People fear that the spiritual state of their community has descended into apathy, and so pray that God would "revive" the spiritual health of the community. This psalm is a prayer for a different kind of revival- one that takes place in a time of desperate rescue. The story of the transplanted tree is the story of Israel, a story that in the minds of the Hebrew people was to end in perpetual growth and prosperity. Imagine the complete shock to the system created by the exile! And so the people are left craving a holistic salvation.

I wonder if, in our appeals for revival, we miss out on the fact that salvation is a physical/mental/social/spiritual reality. The Kingdom of God means something to all areas of life, not just an emotional experience of life. So when I pray for revival today, I pray for those who are in need of rescue. Our rescue may be from depression, or drugs, or slavery, or injustice, or prejudice, or any form of human brokenness. May the Kingdom of God be present today. Restore us, O God; make your face shine upon us, that we may be saved.

Psalm 79

Asaph's clan is at it again with a psalm of lament regarding the exiled life. Jerusalem is so smashed up that there's no one left to bury the dead. Now, carrion birds are swooping into Jerusalem by the flock and are profaning the holy city. To the psalmist, this is a metaphor of the unclean nations (Babylon in particular) who have swooped in to plunder and feast on the goods of Israel. Naturally, watching something like this occur could be a detriment to one's faith. And for the worshiping community of Israel, it is coming to the point of inhibiting worship (see the end of the psalm). The worshipers ask in fairly brutal honesty, "Is this God worth worshiping?"

Somewhere in the back of their minds, they have a sneaky suspicion that God is still with them. After all, this is a piece for public worship, so they are at least showing up and talking to God. This implies some kind of relationship. But, just like us sometimes, they have a blockage to really letting loose with the praise. We have the same DNA they did, and the same brokenness. And sometimes, our places of brokenness (including, perhaps especially, the places where we have been further broken by someone else) can impair our ability to worship. Why did God allow this? Why me? What is God holding over me? are all questions that can lead to a fundamental breakdown in the with-God relationship. Psalms like these give us resources to say "I want to praise, I want to worship, please heal me in this area where I can't." May God bring wholeness to your areas of brokenness today.