Psalm 36:5-10 (NRSV)
Your steadfast love, O God,
extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O God.
How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
All people may take refuge
in the shadow of your wings.
They feast on the abundance of your house,
and you give them drink
from the river of your delights.
For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.
O continue your steadfast love
to those who know you,
and your salvation to the upright of heart!
Our reading today is a hymn of praise. The speaker is extolling the immensity of God’s love and all God’s amazing care for us – for us – and yet, I’m been in churches when this Psalm was read and the reader managed to make it sound like reading the stock market report.
This illustrates one of my major gripes about calling the Bible “the Word of God” and deifying it as the one, true source of God’s communication with us. Endless repetition can strip even the most impassioned words of any true meaning. Imagine the person you love most in this world. Now, imagine saying to them -- everyday of your life – “you are the one I love” - with no variation - ever - exactly those words in that order. Every day, “you are the one I love.” Even though the intention might remain entirely – even deeply – sincere, wouldn’t it eventually become just a rote recitation – without passion, without depth? If you were never allowed to deviate from those exact words - no adding, no subtraction, no “saying it in a different way” -- wouldn’t it eventually tend to lose the very feeling you are trying to express?
I’m sure, if you cared deeply enough, you could get around this but I suspect that for most of us it would become just a boring ritual – spoken and heard so often that it long ago lost its reality for us. That, unfortunately, is what church has become for many people around the globe. A ritual they attend with their bodies while their minds wander everywhere but where they should be. I read a quote this week from Sören Kierkegaard, who was a 19th century theologian, in which he said "Christ turned water into wine, but the church has succeeded in doing something even more difficult: it has turned wine into water." Reading the Bible often suffers the same fate. We have taken the extraordinary and locked into into an "ordinary" box.
While I don’t for a moment believe that God dictated the words of scripture to some bemused scribe, I do believe that God speaks to us in these words. Of course, I also believe God speaks to us in the lyrics of Broadway tunes, and in scraps of overheard conversations between total strangers on the street, and in our dreams, and the way my cat pats my face softly while she looks at me adoringly, and in clouds in a sunset sky – and yet we never say, “There - that cloud formation, that particular shade of pink - God’s Word always has to look just like that one cloud formation.”
Last week we spoke here about reading scripture in different translations, just to see them from a different angle, to hear them with different ears – to recognize them as “new” instead just boring repetition.
Let’s try reading some of our Psalm again: Your steadfast love, O God, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep, O God; you save humans and animals alike.... That’s pretty good stuff – it sounds like good churchy stuff – but now listen to those same verses from The Message: God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, his purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost....
If we parse it down, those two sets of words say the same thing, but they cetainly feel different. For me it works out that I understand the first set differently after I have also heard the 2nd translation. I somehow hear them “bigger.” You may not "like" the second version -- I do -- that doesn't really matter. What matters is that you cannot go back to the first one without your hearing of the words somehow being changed.
I have some different translations of this same Psalm for you. We won’t read them right now - they’re for you to take home if you want and read them when you have some time to notice them and really see the differences among them – time to see what you find in the different versions. How are they similar? How do they differ? What do you "feel" when you read them?
God quite often steps up and “nudges” me in a certain direction for these messages. I was still musing about this idea yesterday and trying to decide if this was really what I’m supposed to offer for today when I stopped to take a minute and just change my focus and cruise through facebook.
Carrie Newcomer, the singer-songwriter I often quote here had just posted a brief reflection there. She began by quoting Rachel Naomi Remen, who is a medical doctor and a wonderful writer: "Often, finding meaning is not about doing things differently. Its about seeing familiar things in a different way." Newcomer then went on with her own thought: It is easy to become lost in our own patterns and habits. We are the moon circling the planet, intent upon the planet, moving in one direction. But when we stop, and look around we can see that there are other planets, many more moons and a shining star at the center. Our daily journey continues, but because we've changed our perspective we move through our experiences with a lovely feeling of belonging, a sense of connection, an awareness at there is always something illuminating it all.
God created a world for us with infinite variety. Do we really think about what we are saying when we use that word “infinite”? No edges, no limits, no ending – just more and more and more, forever and ever. God does not need – or, I’m convinced – want limits. I suspect that it delights God when we open our awareness and, quoting Remen again, “see familiar things in a different way.”
God is not contained in one version of one book. The more we open ourselves to see and hear, to touch and taste, the closer we come to God – God, who speaks and sings to us in so very many ways – God, whose love and faithfulness extend to the clouds, to the heavens – and beyond. The God whose love for us is meteoric – even astronomic.
This illustrates one of my major gripes about calling the Bible “the Word of God” and deifying it as the one, true source of God’s communication with us. Endless repetition can strip even the most impassioned words of any true meaning. Imagine the person you love most in this world. Now, imagine saying to them -- everyday of your life – “you are the one I love” - with no variation - ever - exactly those words in that order. Every day, “you are the one I love.” Even though the intention might remain entirely – even deeply – sincere, wouldn’t it eventually become just a rote recitation – without passion, without depth? If you were never allowed to deviate from those exact words - no adding, no subtraction, no “saying it in a different way” -- wouldn’t it eventually tend to lose the very feeling you are trying to express?
I’m sure, if you cared deeply enough, you could get around this but I suspect that for most of us it would become just a boring ritual – spoken and heard so often that it long ago lost its reality for us. That, unfortunately, is what church has become for many people around the globe. A ritual they attend with their bodies while their minds wander everywhere but where they should be. I read a quote this week from Sören Kierkegaard, who was a 19th century theologian, in which he said "Christ turned water into wine, but the church has succeeded in doing something even more difficult: it has turned wine into water." Reading the Bible often suffers the same fate. We have taken the extraordinary and locked into into an "ordinary" box.
While I don’t for a moment believe that God dictated the words of scripture to some bemused scribe, I do believe that God speaks to us in these words. Of course, I also believe God speaks to us in the lyrics of Broadway tunes, and in scraps of overheard conversations between total strangers on the street, and in our dreams, and the way my cat pats my face softly while she looks at me adoringly, and in clouds in a sunset sky – and yet we never say, “There - that cloud formation, that particular shade of pink - God’s Word always has to look just like that one cloud formation.”
Last week we spoke here about reading scripture in different translations, just to see them from a different angle, to hear them with different ears – to recognize them as “new” instead just boring repetition.
Let’s try reading some of our Psalm again: Your steadfast love, O God, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep, O God; you save humans and animals alike.... That’s pretty good stuff – it sounds like good churchy stuff – but now listen to those same verses from The Message: God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, his purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost....
If we parse it down, those two sets of words say the same thing, but they cetainly feel different. For me it works out that I understand the first set differently after I have also heard the 2nd translation. I somehow hear them “bigger.” You may not "like" the second version -- I do -- that doesn't really matter. What matters is that you cannot go back to the first one without your hearing of the words somehow being changed.
I have some different translations of this same Psalm for you. We won’t read them right now - they’re for you to take home if you want and read them when you have some time to notice them and really see the differences among them – time to see what you find in the different versions. How are they similar? How do they differ? What do you "feel" when you read them?
God quite often steps up and “nudges” me in a certain direction for these messages. I was still musing about this idea yesterday and trying to decide if this was really what I’m supposed to offer for today when I stopped to take a minute and just change my focus and cruise through facebook.
Carrie Newcomer, the singer-songwriter I often quote here had just posted a brief reflection there. She began by quoting Rachel Naomi Remen, who is a medical doctor and a wonderful writer: "Often, finding meaning is not about doing things differently. Its about seeing familiar things in a different way." Newcomer then went on with her own thought: It is easy to become lost in our own patterns and habits. We are the moon circling the planet, intent upon the planet, moving in one direction. But when we stop, and look around we can see that there are other planets, many more moons and a shining star at the center. Our daily journey continues, but because we've changed our perspective we move through our experiences with a lovely feeling of belonging, a sense of connection, an awareness at there is always something illuminating it all.
God created a world for us with infinite variety. Do we really think about what we are saying when we use that word “infinite”? No edges, no limits, no ending – just more and more and more, forever and ever. God does not need – or, I’m convinced – want limits. I suspect that it delights God when we open our awareness and, quoting Remen again, “see familiar things in a different way.”
God is not contained in one version of one book. The more we open ourselves to see and hear, to touch and taste, the closer we come to God – God, who speaks and sings to us in so very many ways – God, whose love and faithfulness extend to the clouds, to the heavens – and beyond. The God whose love for us is meteoric – even astronomic.
RSS Feed