Psalm 30
I will exalt you, LORD,
for you lifted me out of the depths
and did not let my enemies gloat over me.
LORD my God, I called to you for help,
and you healed me.
You, LORD, brought me up from the realm of the dead;
you spared me from going down to the pit.
Sing the praises of the LORD, you his faithful people;
praise his holy name.
For his anger lasts only a moment,
but his favor lasts a lifetime;
weeping may remain for a night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning.
When I felt secure, I said,
“I will never be shaken.”
LORD, when you favored me,
you made my royal mountain stand firm;
but when you hid your face,
I was dismayed.
To you, LORD, I called;
to the Lord I cried for mercy:
“What is gained if I am silenced,
if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it proclaim your faithfulness?
Hear, LORD, and be merciful to me;
LORD, be my help.”
You turned my wailing into dancing;
you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.
LORD my God, I will praise you forever.
I've prayed the Old Testament Psalms for a long time now. I pray them in groups and I pray them when I'm alone. I pray all of them, all 150 Psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures.
As you could probably predict when anyone has upheld the same practice over a long period of time, I am different now than I was when I first began. My relationship with God is different. My image of God has changed through the years. Some of that came from these very psalms, and some evolved in other ways.
At some point on the road I began asking some questions about the psalms I prayed. In the beginning I prayed them blindly, with a kind of rote obedience, accepting their language and attitudes at face value. Somewhere along the path I started asking questions about them. In particular, I asked questions about the view of God that underlies many of the Psalms in the Bible.
I won't go into all the questions right here. One concern, however, was the frequency with which the pray-er in the psalms offers to God what I would call "conditional praise."
"Conditional praise" sounds something like this:
"I will exalt you, Lord,
for you lifted me out of the depths . . ." (Ps. 30:1)
Do you see the "condition" in that prayer? "I will praise you, Lord, because you did something for me." Human praise in the Hebrew Psalms often is offered as a response to the rescue or deliverance of God. Humans exalt God because God has done something good in their lives.
It sounds somewhat like a deal the human person works out with God: "God, if you'll do this good thing for me, then I'll praise you." Perhaps it's holy-hostage-taking!
"God, if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." Frankly, it sounds pretty petty to me, like a very immature stage of spiritual development.
Over time as I prayed psalms, I became convinced that God is worthy of my praise whether I ever experience God's goodness and rescue in my life or not. I'm not doing God any favors by offering my praise. Praising God, on the other hand, is something I need to do in order to become fully human. I came to understand that at least in my own experience, my praise was not to be contingent on what God did or did not do in my life.
This struggle was part of the impetus for putting the psalms in my own words several years ago. Taking nothing away from the persons who wrote out the original psalms, who prayed with their best understanding of God, I asked myself how I could pray these ideas in my own words. Given my understanding of God and relationship with God, how might I try to say some of the same things? That led to my devotional practice of offering the psalms in my own voice.
So given the original words from Psalm 30 -- one of the texts suggested for today -- how would I pray this prayer? I've given it a go below.
PSALM 30 Psalm-Prayer
A psalm for times that stretch me beyond myself
You are worthy of my praise, God;
Indeed, Your name I will praise,
whether You pull me from this bind or not.
I don’t want my praise, God,
offered in contingency,
tossed at You with stipulations.
In truth, You have not
abandoned me to my own devices
nor left me as food for
the swirling vultures who cannot
wait for my collapse.
You have awakened my soul from slumber, Lord,
You have infused my real experience with Your Spirit-life.
I love You, Lord.
I chant my love-prayer.
I raise my hands in love-thanks.
I offer my life as a love-offering.
When You’ve allowed me to walk in the valley,
darkness my closest companion,
with no vision to see the next step,
I’ve felt the sharp edge of Your love,
giving shape to my life in that moment
as You move me
toward the God-dream for which I was created.
Often I cry out for a season,
the pain stretching me to the edge
as I try to stand under the weight of the moment,
desperate for relief and yearning to see
Your Potter’s hand in the midst of the blackness.
But when You pull the curtain back on the larger picture,
when I see a piece of Your grander design for me and our world,
I’m brought to peace and joy,
a profound thankfulness that You have invited me
to be a part of Your God-project.
Of course, I don’t always see so clearly.
In times when life feels well-ordered
I tend to think it will always be so,
that nothing can shake my well-being.
I forget the power of adversity to shape me into Your heart.
Then, something happens in my outer world
to shatter all my illusions of well-being;
The things and people to which I attach myself get shaken.
They break.
Moths eat.
Rust consumes.
Thieves break in and steal.
Parents get old and die.
Cancer grows.
I hide and weep and carry on as if I were the only one
ever to face adversity!
“How can this happen, God?
How can You stand idly by?
Can’t You do something?”
Of course You could,
but that’s not the point, is it?
You listen.
You extend Presence.
You embody compassion.
You give an inner strength more resilient
than any quick remedy.
You give me a song to sing in the night,
a dance to dance under the moon.
You transform my mourning
and give me peace.
Awake my soul, awake.
Sing psalms to God,
For unto You, my God, is everlasting thanks.
Amen.
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