The scriptural stories and prayers offer no spectators’ vista, no safe seats in the back from which we can quietly slip out just before the show wraps up. Instead, they immerse us in the drama of salvation, improvising with God and our neighbors the plot twists of being human. Our obsession with ourselves, in our modern western world, has sought to subdue story, to make it subservient to self—to self-help and self-actualization. But herein lies the genius of the library of the scriptures, stories that are true, resist our domesticating and dominating impulses. The individual psalms are not ahistorical prayers, each “applicable” or “relevant’ to every experience or feeling. Rather, are a call to receive the gift of salvation, renewal of our selves through recognizing and relinquishing our selves—that which the scriptures call repentance.

Because the stories in the Bible refuse to serve us, they refuse to valorize us as the hero and so we have to assume other roles—we play the villain, the victim, those who don’t see the whole picture. Psalm 41 is a good exercise in reading the Bible well. There will be times that call for us to read it at face value, to read it from the vantage point of the narrator, to echo his prayers, and to receive his word as witness. And there will be times, likely more frequent, that call for us to soberly acknowledge that we are the one’s who have done harm. We have looked on others in malice wishing ill upon them (v. 5). We have hearts that gather slander (v. 6) soaking it in so that we can gleefully spread gossip (v. 6, 8). We have hated those who have placed feasts before us (v. 9).

David ends with a plea for mercy so that he can enact vengeance (v. 10). But God is far too merciful for that. Instead of giving into our demands for retribution, God will send revelation. Jesus reveals both God and humanity fully. Jesus unveils God brimming with beauty and grace and how to be human in a light so fierce. And at the same time how readily we lift up our heels against the one who handed us the bread of his body, broken for us.

Jesus’ integrity upholds him in the crossfire of our treacheries because he draws from the everlasting well of God’s good pleasure (v. 11)—this is my son with whom I am well-pleased (Matthew 3v17). Jesus’ enemies cannot triumph over him (v.11) because he refuses to hate them—forgive them father for they know not what they do (Luke 23v34). Jesus will be kept in the presence of God forever (v. 12) because he is the eternal word of doxology—it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him (Acts 2v24).

To read the story well is to be honest about our part in it. Jesus assumes our role of brokenness and blasphemy so that we can assume his role of blessedness and blessing. This story will not serve us but it will set us free.

Psalm 36 is an exercise in contrast. David lays out two paths, when set side by side, it is clear which one is so much more appealing but we need the light of the more beautiful way to see the utter darkness of the lesser path. He starts with a simple observation, which may strike our modern sensibilities as hopelessly judgmental. He even claims divine origin for the “message in” his “heart” (v. 1). His conclusion, these “wicked” people are so lovestruck by gazing at their own reflections that they cannot see the wasting sickness that is their own sin, their mouths are so full of hatred and slander that they are its as if they are speaking with a mouth full of food, that which flows from their lives is neither wise or good, and on their beds, even their imaginative faculties are spent on self-serving courses of hedonism and idolatry. (vv. 2-4). David offers a thorough, scathing review of the “wicked.” 

Who are the wicked? Well, you have to remember, David doesn’t live in a cosmopolitan society, he’s not a 21st century New Yorker living at the intersection of every culture, ethnicity, and perspective in the world. He lives among a nation with a common ancestry and heritage. His neighbors are supposed to have one solitary devotion: faithfulness to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

What all this means is that David is not looking with judgmental disdain at the ignorant and uninitiated. He is talking about people that should know better. He then moves to a contemplation of the beauty of God. As thorough as the brokenness of his neighbors and compatriots who have rejected the God who formed them as a people, so much more is God brimming with life, love, justice. The human ingenuity towards sinfulness, destructive as it is, is nothing compared with the beauty of God:

 5 Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
 your faithfulness to the skies.
6  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your justice like the great deep.
You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
7  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

And while the bed of the wicked is a place for a cartography of selfishness, the table of the Lord is a refuge and feast for all, a river of abundance flowing to every nation:

7b People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house;
 you give them drink from your river of delights.

And this picture of the Lord is not a glimpse of heaven, a snapshot of the transcendent that we long to immerse ourselves in fully. This gospel that God is beautiful on a scale that dwarfs the depths of of the deep, and the heights of Everest is an invitation to a life animated by God’s vision and vitality. David writes:

9 For with you is the fountain of life;
 in your light we see light.

His love is a fountain, a never-ending artesian spring cultivating an oasis of Eden in the midst of the foolish, the proud, and the wicked. His light illuminates the good, true, and the beautiful that stubbornly breaks the concrete of sin-hardened world. The deep life of God calls to the deep in us, let your fountains be found in him.

Psalm 33 is like turning your eyes to look at the sun. There is just so much radiance that it overwhelms us. The psalmist reflects on the power and majesty of God:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle;
he put the deep in storehouses.

This same word that brought the world to life continues as his relation to the world. He did not just speak forth creation, he communicates his presence and his word is true and powerful to accomplish his will as he “works in faithfulness” (v. 4). As the voice of God comes into focus we hear his character communicated, the Lord “loves righteousness and justice” (v. 5a). And he pours himself into the world, filling the earth to the brim with “steadfast love” (v. 5b).

Two responses are enjoined to the faithful congregation. The first is participation—pick up an instrument, lift your voices, make a joyful noise (v.1, 3). The native tongue of the Kingdom of God is praise and thanksgiving (v. 2). The second response, is not contradictory but is like a rest placed into the clef of music. The psalmist tells us to “stand in awe” (v. 8) and to feel the otherworldly magnitude of his presence. This God spoke the world into existence so all of our words should start with a mouth agape, in awesome wonder of his beauty.

He is the Lord’s true king, all the governments and the nations make their plans, they draw their battle lines, but they are puppet states (vv.10-11). They act as if they will remain forever, that they are the architects of the future with their political slogans and their empty promises of greatness but they cannot deliver (v 11b). The only nation that remains forever is the eternal kingdom of God, the people called out by him (v. 12).

The psalmist then paints the Lord, seated on the vast heights, overlooking the world. The author writes that he sees all mankind (vv. 13-14) and it can feel like his vision is like our own when we look at a large crowd. Yes, we can “see” the people in totality but we cannot possibly know the stories of each individual person. And again, considering the scale of this majestic God, it almost makes sense. How could a God so endowed with power, majesty, and so responsible for the managing of the world get caught up in the minutiae of mundane human existence?

But this psalm will not leave us to our illusions of an aloof sovereign, distant and seated on high, removed from the pain and moments of our everyday lives. The psalmist tells us that God knows every human heart because he has made each one of them (v. 15) and he sees each individual (v. 18). Apparently, part of the greatness of this God is the ability to concern himself with the smallness of our world. Psalm 33 tosses us into the current of God’s raging strength and then shows us the deep spring that feeds this river: the steadfast love of God that delivers our souls from death and provides for our daily needs (vv.18-19).

The last stanza of the prayer paints our current reality:

Our soul waits for the Lord;
he is our help and shield.
Our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you. (vv. 20-22)

We cannot long stare at greatness of this magnitude without being blinded. But what we find is that the glory of this God is not just great, not just awesome, or strong; it is good, kind, compassionate. Our world is awash in the warm sunlight of God’s love and—to channel Lewis—by its light we see everything else.

Psalm 28 is not a psalm that was written in one sitting. It is a psalm that slowly took its form like the way the sunrise defeats the darkness—there is a spark of hope that pierces the dark, irrevocably breaking its hold, but it takes time for the light to diffuse, permeating the starry dome, finger painting with the clouds. David begins, bearing witness to his own pleas. He is essentially saying, “I am doing it all right, I am trusting in you, I am bringing my needs before you, don’t ignore me.” 

David then turns his attention to those who ignore God’s ways. He describes those with long careers in rebellion against God. Eugene Peterson calls them “full-time employees of evil.” It seems kind of out of place at this point in the psalm. But sometimes, if we’re honest even with our less flattering emotions before God, we compare ourselves to others. We go on detours to the rough side of town, driving through with the windows up and the doors locked, harboring a sense of superiority. Is David’s judgmental attitude right, is it just? He would think so but but the answer is “probably not.” But that’s not really the question is it? The question that the psalms are asking is will you live your whole life before God? Will you bring every ounce of action, emotion, circumstance, fear, and triumph before the Lord? Will we open the inner sanctum of our lives to the holy of holies where God resides?

The psalm finishes with a joyful flourish. Time has elapsed, the ordeal has turned a corner. David rejoices:

Blessed be God—
He proved he’s on my side;
 he heard me praying.
I’ve thrown my lot in with him.
Now I’m jumping for joy,
 and shouting and singing my thanks to him.

David now speaks from the other side of the chasm, God hears, he is faithful. David responds in exuberant praise. He’s been proven to have chosen the winning team. He now holds both ends of the ordeal in his hands and can tie them into a bow, mark them down as another chapter in the story of God’s faithfulness. 

Perhaps the message of this psalm is the brief glimpse we get into the in-between, the point between the petition and the praise. In that time, David doesn’t lose his head, he doesn’t become somebody he’s not. David doesn’t become one of those who “moonlights for the Devil.” For the time being, he maintains his identity and thus holds onto the promises of God. This is reinforced by David’s ending praise.

Pain has a way of teaching us who God is and who we are. The hard-won fruit of this suffering is that David sees his identity clearly and he sees even more clearly who God is— David is the leader of God’s people and God is the salvation and refuge for all, leader and layperson alike. David’s task as a leader, in leading them to godliness, blessing, and safety then becomes clear: follow God, the shepherd and stay true to his own God-given identity.

Photo by Serrah Galos.

Fearless Trust

Psalm 27 invites us to a glimpse of a well-worn, mature faith. These words are not those of one freshly afoot on the road of life with God. These words are the embodiment of the image of the tree in Psalm 1, a life firmly rooted in God, watered by past experiences of God’s salvation, by the promises and hope of what the Lord has said. David writes as one well-schooled in the art of trusting God.

Perhaps most striking about David’s assurance is that chaos seems to be the vantage point from which he prays. He describes his circumstances with images of vandal hordes descending and all hell breaking loose (vv.2-3). David’s increased depth of trust and hope in God has not resulted in a diminishing of the very real threats that plague him. But David’s trust has reframed everything. In the midst of this anarchy, David is “calm as a baby, collected and cool” (vv.2-3). 

There is something so radically this-worldly about the shape the hope Psalm 27 invites us into. The pain and the danger are real but so is the reality that God is inviting us into counter-rhythms that syncopate the cadences of chaos with order and beauty. Two important practices stand out within the context of the psalm. He writes in vv.4-5:

I’m asking God for one thing,
only one thing:
To live with him in his house
my whole life long.
I’ll contemplate his beauty;
I’ll study at his feet.

1. Contemplative Prayer

First, David invites us to the disciplines of contemplative prayer, silence and solitude. David’s world much, much like our own, moves at a frenzied pace. We are constantly being discipled by the antichrist rhythms of noise, notifications, news, and the normalization of violence. David knows that the only response is to retreat. A retreat not away from this world but a retreat into the refuge of God’s presence. Thomas Merton writes that when Christians forsake contemplation they substitute the “truth of life” for “fiction and mythology” bringing about the “alienation of the believer, so that his [sic] religious zeal becomes political fanaticism.”  David instead of leaning into the madness, embraces silence and solitude. He writes of the presence of God:

 That’s the only quiet, secure place
in a noisy world,
The perfect getaway,
far from the buzz of traffic.

2. Immersive Worship

Second, David immerses himself in worship both private and communal. Even on the way to church, he’s already singing his own songs:

I’m headed for his place to offer anthems
that will raise the roof!
Already I’m singing God-songs;
I’m making music to God.

Worship is the eruption of joy and gratitude, not a response fueled by emotivism, but a quiet resolve to contemplate what God has done and to voice heartfelt thanksgiving for it. Worship is the antidote to our own poisonous obsession with self, our propensity to live at the mercy of our circumstances and our ever-changing whims. Worship in the face of great trial is not a denial of our situation. Rather it is God’s invitation to to view the world from his own vantage point, to be with God and find that in all things he is drawing near to us.

This Exuberant Earth

David expresses one final plea, “You’ve always been right there for me; don’t turn your back on me now. Don’t throw me out, don’t abandon me; you’ve always kept the door open” (vv. 9-10). He asks for guidance, he needs God to show him the way. He writes:

Point me down your highway, God;
direct me along a well-lighted street;

And he ends his prayer in one final, resolved, steadfast, radically hopeful expression of trust. Again, what’s remarkable about this ending stanza is that this resolution is not reserved for another life. He finds hope right here in the midst of the confines of this world, this place, amongst these people and these circumstances. He knows that God won’t quit on him and so, grizzled veteran of faith and trust in God that he is, he won’t quit on God. He holds fast to the hope that God’s goodness will reveal itself again, right here in this “exuberant earth.” Don’t quit. God is faithful. In the beautiful translation of Eugene Peterson:

I’m sure now I’ll see God’s goodness
in the exuberant earth.
Stay with God!
Take heart. Don’t quit.
I’ll say it again:
Stay with God.

In honor of the life and legacy of Eugene Peterson, I will be using the Message version of the psalms as our text. Psalm 26 sounds, on its face, like the self-righteous protestations of a deluded legalist. Is David really placing wagers on his own integrity (v. 1) in the presence of a holy, all-seeing God? He even invites God to perform open-heart surgery on him, examining the hidden caverns of his life (v. 2). So what are we to do with a psalm that most of us would never claim is true of our own experience? How do we pray this along with David with a straight face?

What David expresses here is a visceral, unflinching trust. It may sound as though he is unwilling to confess his own sinfulness but that misses the point. This psalm is not about who David is, this psalm is about who God is. The steadfast love of God is the branch that David clings to, holding fast in the rushing currents of falsehood and idolatry. Left to his own devices, David would be swept along with the sinners, the devious, the frauds. But David’s life is not defined merely by his own actions, his life flows from a deep river of confession, worship, and prayer.

I scrub my hands with purest soap,
then join hands with the others in the great circle,
dancing around your altar, God,
Singing God-songs at the top of my lungs,
telling God-stories.
God, I love living with you;
your house glows with your glory. 

The Message, vv.6-8

He expresses his trust in the means that God has provided for purification. He recalls rapturous times of worship in the presence of God and the community. His life is shaped by story and song both of what God has done and his own experience with God. Everything for him starts from a deep and personal encounter with God.

David invites us to a faith that is embraced in momentary acts of faithfulness, where the words of our mouths and the state of our hearts are constantly presented to God for examination. God’s presence is a fire, engulfing and purifying every corner of his life. We can trust that God’s presence will not simply rubber stamp our agendas, or provide us with good feelings to get us through the day, but it will provide a way forward, a way of openness, of integrity, of transformation.

David beautifully conveys the meaning of life: God, I love living with you. David’s life before God expresses the poles of this life: exuberant displays of abandon in the congregation where everything is in its right place and a life of contemplative nearness in the midst of ambiguity and brokenness, a life lived up close to God. Openness, vulnerability, this is the life that is oriented to God’s presence. Trust is the foundation of this life, a trust that says God is exactly who he has shown himself to be, abundant steadfast love and thus, I can trust that I am exactly who he says I am: beloved.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.” -Eugene Peterson

Read Psalm 25

Psalm 25 is an exercise in contrast. David is struggling, burdened by the consequences of his sin. The gravity of his guilt is like a millstone around his neck. He cries out :

Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.^[1]vv. 16-18

The consequences of his decisions have laid a heavy burden upon him. Crushed under the weight of his guilt, unable to move, David remembers another way. He considers the ways of the Lord:

Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old.  Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O LORD!  Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way.  He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way.  All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.^[2]vv.6-10

Maybe you have been here. Stuck, heavy-laden by the accumulation of your own sin. It’s an impossible place to be in. Walking through the world feels like you are walking on the ocean floor with intense pressure compressing your very soul. And its here at the moment when our soul feels the heaviest that its actually the lightest. David says:

To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.

Lifting our souls to God from the depths is not like Atlas lifting the world. In lifting our souls to God we find that the Lord is not a pallbearer struggling to hoist our unwieldy, oaken casket.  Rather, his mercy makes our struggles as light as a feather. He does not downplay our rebellions or make them out to be somehow less than they are. Rather, he exhausts them by taking the weight upon his shoulders, thus emptying sin of all its weight. We can lift our souls to the Lord when we can’t even lift one foot in front of the other because he has made known to us his ways, and his way is easy and his burden is light.

Lift Your Soul

Are you weary? Are you heavy laden? Does each day feel like you carry the weight of the world? Lift your soul to the God of your salvation. Wait on him.

If you were to turn on the news, there is very little in the way of observable data that would suggest that an all-powerful, all-loving God currently presides over the world as its one true sovereign.  Leave the events that the news details aside, would a loving God really suffer the inanity that floods the airwaves of the 24/7 news programs?    If we were to accept the notion that there was some integrating force to the disparate, chaotic nonsense that saturates the front pages of every news website, it would seem any thoughtful person would conclude that this ruler is quite terrible at the business of actually governing the world.  And yet, in the biblical narrative, almost hidden between the astounding resurrection of Christ at the end of each gospel account and the birth of the church in Acts 2 is an event that gives clarity and shape to both events, an event largely ignored by the western Church:  the ascension of Jesus.

Yes, the biblical claim is that Jesus sits at the right hand of God almighty, enthroned as the world’s true Lord reigning right now.  So what on earth is he doing up there?  What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord in the here and now?  First, let’s examine some distortions of this claim.  The Epicureans were the descendants of the philosopher Epicurus.  Although this perspective later came to be associated with wanton pleasure-seeking, Epicurus did not promote this sort of behavior.  Epicurus merely taught that the gods, whomever they are, exist in eternal bliss and are unaffected and disinterested in the affairs of mortals.  His legacy found its most influential expression in the Enlightenment in what was referred to as deism, essentially that God was an eternal watchmaker that built the timepiece, put the battery in it and left it to function however it would.  Thomas Jefferson famously claimed to be an Epicurean.   In a letter written late in his life to William Short, he wrote:

Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. – Thomas Jefferson, October, 1819

Notice, for Jefferson it is Epicurus who tells us how to govern ourselves, Jesus is just a nice add-on.  Separation of church and state, if you will.  As NT Wright often points out this is the fundamental assumption of the Enlightenment that God is the ruler of heaven and he stays up there and leaves the governance of the earth to humans.  Jesus is Lord thus implies the dualism that Jesus is Lord of the heavenly realm but can hardly be bothered with intervention in the earthly sphere.

The second distortion of the claim Jesus is Lord touches less upon politics and more upon theodicy and providence.  The Stoics, a philosophical school which gained prominence in the early centuries of the common era Roman Empire, share a lot of similar convictions to Christians.  There are even apocryphal letters, fabrications of later history, between Seneca and Paul. For the Stoics, for women and men to allow their emotions and impulses to govern their behavior is the height of vice and results not in freedom but the debasement of what it means to be human.  The stoics believed that the world was initially constructed out of divine matter (Gk. pneuma meaning “spirit”) and that eventually the world would be dissolved by the deity into primeval fire.  For the stoics, all of existence was an expression of the divine will, they were pantheists for whom the divine operated in every occurrence of nature and human interaction, and thus everything truly happened “for a reason.”

For Jesus to be “Lord” in the biblical sense did not entail either of these trajectories.  He was neither the Lord of heaven alone and subsequent absent landlord of earth nor the micromanager of the cosmos.  Jesus’ lordship like, it seems, all of the most hallowed and beautiful Christian claims is a paradox.  A paradox of distance and nearness.  In the distortions of Epicureanism and Stoicism we see an overemphasis upon one element of the truth but the Gospel continually shows itself capable of holding seemingly disparate parts in concert together.  Jesus’ lordship is one of distance, transcendence.  His resurrection has affirmed him as the world’s true Lord, the king of kings to which all earthly authorities will give accounting for their stewardship over their peoples and resources.  Paul describes this present reality in Ephesians 1:

20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Jesus is enthroned, he is the one to whom all owe allegiance.  But he is not simply ruling elsewhere.  I think the temptation here is to think of Jesus’ reign in terms of some of our cultural stories like Tolkien’s Return of the King where the deposed sovereign works to reoccupy their rightful throne that is currently subsumed by dark forces.  For the biblical timeline, Jesus has already done the work of deposing evil on the cross, by absorbing the full weight of sin and death and exhausting their powers.  The ascension is Jesus’ sabbath rest after recreating the world, he sits down at the right hand of the Father and beckons the whole world to enter into his rest.  Jesus is risen and reigning, resting in the completion of his fulfillment of all righteousness.  Right now.

His Lordship means transcendence, but to be truly transcendent is to transcend every distance.  He is near.  He is God with us, the one who will never leave us or forsake us, in the heights of heaven or the depths of sheol, he is there.  There is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from his gracious presence.  Jesus’ reign is not that of an  austere demagogue signing executive orders from heaven but the loving shepherd leading and walking alongside his people, even in the valley of the shadow of death, even to the end of the age.

Distance and nearness.  Power and pathos.  As Christians we are called to live out this paradox, as witnesses to the Lordship of Christ, in the worlds that we walk in.  Jesus’ has exercised his sovereignty in emptying himself fully entrusting his life in the hands of the Father.  He has given us his divine Spirit to do the same.  It may seem a tautology but we can live out the Lordship of Jesus because Jesus is Lord.  We enact and embody his power whenever we, together as church communities, embody the alternative Kingdom, when we refuse the pragmatics of party politics and instead bear unique prophetic witness even at great cost to self.  We embody his power when our we receive the grace of his rule and our lives and words announce the resurrection and reign of King Jesus.   We incarnate the nearness of our God when we suffer on behalf of the world.  We find strength, hope, joy, and yes, even resurrection in those places because our God, King Jesus, is with us always.

The rest of Acts bears witness to the Lordship of Jesus.  The mysterious Spirit of God descends upon the people enabling them to live out this Lordship.  They respond not by grasping for power but rather by bearing witness:  praising God, delighting in the words of Scripture and the surprising and beautiful story they tell about Jesus, sharing their stuff, taking care of widows, healing the sick, proclaiming the reality of the resurrection, and bearing prophetic witness to the emissaries of the Roman governor that Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.

Envision the route that you travel to church each week. Maybe you drive past suburban strip malls and dozens of other churches. Perhaps you navigate the subways, hoping not to see a rat playing on the tracks and hurrying past homeless people who somehow managed to survive another night. Now think about the space you meet in to worship. Perhaps you meet in a sleek, refurbished warehouse, maybe you meet in a school cafeteria or someone’s home. Maybe you even meet in a building that was designed for the sole purpose of being a church. Whether you travel by foot, car, or train and whether you meet in a comedy club or a traditional church building there is a striking dissonance that confronts us all as we enter the doors to worship.

The earth is the Lord’s and and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it.

This is the claim of Psalm 24. The worshipper, upon entering the temple of Solomon, hears this big opening chord resounding, inviting her to worship. But then she thinks about her journey, even to arrive at the temple. How could all of it, all of the things she has seen, all of the places she traversed, all of the people she crossed paths with—how could it all of it be the Lord’s? It doesn’t add up. Some of it seemed so mundane, some of it so painfully commercial, some of it just plain evil. And then the people. So many people going about their days, so many of them with no thought of God or existence. They belong to the Lord?

The world that we live in and the world of worship seem like two completely different worlds altogether. But there it is right there, the earth is the Lord’s, not some other place, not heaven, this place, this town, this neighborhood, these people.

So how do we begin to reconcile these two worlds? Psalm 24 presents us with a radical reorienting of our imagination and a subsequent way of walking in the world. First, we have to allow our imaginations to be recalibrated. The questions, presented in call-and-response fashion at the end of the psalm are not questions seeking an answer but rhetorical questions inviting remembrance. “Who is the King of glory?” Who is the king that can hold under his reign the world that we just walked through and the world of worship? Who is the king that doesn’t further separate them into secular and sacred but harmonizes them? The answer given is the same answer given to Moses when he asks the blazing bush, who should I say has sent me? The divine name—the Lord. To declare that the Lord is Lord of all of existence is not to exercise blind faith but to shape our imaginations to the mold of the kingdom. Worship is a discipline of seeing that changes the way we view everything.

Second, how do we live in a world such as this? When we walk out of the doors, squinting in the bright sunlight with our minds freshly challenged to see in a new way,does it change anything about how we actually live? The psalmist tell us that the ones who will stand in his holy place are those who “have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.” Many have thought clean hands and pure hearts required avoidance, like Pilate constantly washing his hands of the world. But Jesus shows us that the path towards purity of heart and hand is not avoidance, rather it is incarnation. Clean hands and pure hearts are not the product of avoiding stain from the world. They are hands that bear the scars of Jesus, the one who ascended the hill of the Lord, on behalf of the world. When we as Christians walk the world as he did, in love and in service, we live out of the overflow of the new imaginations shaped in corporate worship. We live out the declaration that the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it when we see every corner of our lives “charged with the grandeur of the glory of God.”^[1]Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur. We live out that every person is beckoned by the freedom and love of God when we lift Jesus up and he draws all people to himself.^[2]John 12v32

The psalm invites us, lift up your head, that the King of Glory may come in. In worship we hear the call afresh, lift up your head, see the world as it really is. Stand in the holy place of God’s presence so that you might see all the world is infused with the glory of his Spirit.

The 23rd psalm is so simple in its beauty, so evocative in its imagery. For generations, it has inspired artists and comforted mourners. I want to connect this psalm with my reflections on Psalm 21 and Psalm 22. Psalm 21 is triumphant, God will demonstrate his power. Psalm 22 is apoplectic, “My God why have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22 screams the questions that Psalm 21 should rightfully raise, “Is God’s victory and hope certain even in the darkest moments of life?” In Psalm 23, the psalmist no longer has a voice to shout his objections in the assembly, rather he whispers them in sobs all alone in the dark. Psalm 23 takes the question, “How?”, to its fullest extent and in doing so gives us a glimpse into the heart of the Gospel of Jesus: “How does God keep his promises in the valley of the shadow of death?”

You see, the promises of God always run the risk of disintegrating into platitudes. Quasi-spiritual assurances like, “everything happens for a reason” or “God works everything for the good of those who love him” are nice and all but don’t do us a lot of good when we are lost in the abyss, traversing treacherous terrain, surrounded by predators, exhausted from walking and fear. Ideas are nice, they are content of faith, but in the face of certain death, I need more.

Enter Psalm 23. The psalmist proclaims, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” He proclaims the tender care of the Lord in sustaining and guiding him. David expresses the innocent bliss of trusting in God to provide. But then, almost on a dime, he turns from the sunlight to the shadow. “Even though I walk through the darkest valley ^[1]I still like the feel of the  traditional translation “valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

Did you catch that? The question of God-forsakenness in Psalm 22 is given its free expression to deconstruct any notions of simplistic faith. What about the valley of the shadow death? Am I forsaken there? How are you going to keep your promises there? According to Psalm 23, God will not merely decree his will from far off in Heaven, he will not leave us to rest on cliches while we wallow in the darkness, he won’t even miraculously light up that darkness in a demonstration of sheer power. No, none of this will do. How will God keep his promises? He himself will come to us. He is right there, walking in he valley of the shadow of death as he walked in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening.

Psalm 23 doesn’t just tell us we are not abandoned, that we will not be forgotten or forsaken. It shows us. The Lord is our shepherd, we don’t have to be afraid not simply because he is powerful, good, full of justice and mercy. He of course is all of those things and more. We don’t have to be afraid because he is here. His rod, his staff, his table. Even in the darkest hour, he comes to us.