¹      How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

²     How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

³     Consider and answer me, O Lord my God!

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

⁴     and my enemy will say, “I have prevailed”;

my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

⁵     But I trusted in your steadfast love;

my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

⁶     I will sing to the Lord,

because he has dealt bountifully with me.

I love the book of Psalms. I didn’t always love it. As a child, I found it confusing. I appreciated it, but I did not love it. My Sunday School teachers called it a hymmbook, but it didn’t seem much like the hymnals I was familiar with.

I have grown to love this book, because I learned that it is also a prayerbook. When I learned that I could borrow the words of the Psalmist and use them for my own prayers, I began to love the book of Psalms. I gleefully plagiarize its prayers and grow in the discipline of prayer as I do so.

Psalm 13 is one that is easy to borrow. For starters, I have gone through numerous periods in my life when I felt beleaguered by enemies. I have felt despair, because it seemed to me that God ought to do something about the situation, and I could not see any evidence of improvement.

I have observed of myself that, like everyone else, I view my experiences from within the limitations of time and space. It is hard for me to remember that God views them from the perspective of eternity and infinity. In that point of reference, every point in time is now and every point in space is here. The resolution and completion I yearn for is already working, even as I pray, but I am not able to see it. God does not disdain my fears, my suffering, or my inability to see the culmination that is everpresent with Him. Kohelet, the author of Ecclesiastes, observed that God  has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11b)

In Psalm 13, however, David summons up faith to assert, despite all appearances to the contrary, that he will “sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me.” (Psalm 13:6) By the time I reach verse 5 of this Psalm, David’s words of lament have worked like a drawing salve on my fear and frustration. They empty out all the things that make me need to cry out, “Help my unbelief!” I am finally able to step outside my time/space limitations and enter worshipfully into God’s throne room where my vision is expanded beyond the limits of my own worldview. David invites me to worship with the saints who see history from God’s point of view in that heavenly throne room. David’s faithful words nourish my own faith, and I am refreshed and encouraged.

I highly recommend plagiarizing David’s prayers and making them your own.

It doesn’t matter what the temptation is.

 The temptation could be adultery. Somewhere between sensing the attraction and making a move there is a moment when the decision hangs in the balance. The image of your spouse recedes as you tell yourself that this feeling isn’t what it purely is, and you tilt your head just so before you say, “Do you always sneak up on people that way?” For a moment, you see where the threads of your life are woven into the fabric of your marriage, but as you turn to examine them, something – light, darkness, glare, or sand in your eye – obscures the image and you turn away. Your momentum shifts, and the decision is no longer possible, because the first teasing word has already been already spoken.

The temptation could be a few potato chips with a sandwich. You know you don’t need potato chips. Your sandwich is fine without them. You promised yourself yesterday that you would take action to reduce unnecessary fat in order to maintain your weight after working so hard to lose ten pounds before your birthday. But the birthday was yesterday. Today the chips are right there on the counter, and there aren’t many left in the bag anyway and you just want a taste. As you lift the first one to your lips, you remember that “nobody can eat just one.” And then they are gone.

Satan lives and dwells in the interim between choosing and not choosing. Eve had a moment like that. Satan, that snake, whispered, “Did God say …?” She paused, stating the obvious. Then Satan said, “God lies.” Caught by the attractive prospect that she could dismiss God and judge his motives and do anything she darn well pleased, she contemplated the choice, and forgot to choose at all, and took a bite of the forbidden fruit.

That is the way it usually feels. Most of us don’t really recall the decision to do what we know we ought not to do. We remember our good intentions, but we simply cannot recall when we took the first step forward. We even comfort ourselves by saying that we do not recall making this choice. It just happened.

Nothing just happens. We do make choices, even when we refuse to watch ourselves doing it. Satan is so good at whispering the words we want to hear that we simply tune out the other words. It feels so good to say, “I deserve this one little taste.” In fact, Satan is pretty good at taking God’s own teachings and reshaping them to serve ourselves. He likes to quote the Golden Rule. He can whisssssper in your heart, “Remember, God said to love your neighbor AS YOURSELF. Don’t you deserve some of the good stuff?” SSsssoooon what was just a passing thought – “Nobody will ever know if I simply borrow $50 from petty cash” — becomes “What’s $50 to this rich tycoon? I’ll put it back on payday.” At first you are steering through the muddy swamp of regret, but soon you find the path of self-justification. There was a moment when you might have chosen otherwise, but you no longer remember that moment.

The apostle Paul documented this experience in Romans 7, when he wrote, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Romans 7:19) This is how we feel. Paul described his battle as something that happened over and over. He could never vanquish temptation and put it behind him.

I remember trying to do that very thing – stop sinning. I had a good reason for trying. I had heard a sermon in which the pastor said that there is no need to ask God for help in overcoming sin if you aren’t serious about it. In those days, I thought pastors did not make mistakes, so I was completely undone by that statement. I wanted to ask God for help with my problems, but since I continued to have more and more problems and to fail more and more miserably to overcome them, I felt that God would not want to hear from me. I had to improve my track record. Satan used that simple statement to completely steal the joy of my salvation from me.

Thank goodness the day came that I understood the truth. God wasn’t trying to put me through some marathon test. Jesus died so I could run to God for help every single time I needed it. And when I failed, because I forgot to notice the moment when I made the wrong choice, I could go to God and ask forgiveness, all because Jesus died for me. No conditions. No limit. No test. The memory of that moment is quite vivid in my mind. We were all holding hands during prayer. The pastor prayed, “Thank you, Lord, for forgiving us all our sins, not because we deserve forgiveness, but entirely for Jesus’ sake, because he died in our place.” I burst into tears as the truth came clear to me. I have never been the same since. Every time I get lost in the minefield of temptation, I know I have a safe haven to run to. God isn’t going to ask me for the final, final, final time to get my act straight. Instead, the Slaughtered Lamb will be standing beside the throne of my Heavenly Father, speaking my name and saying, “This is one of Mine.”

In politics, the issue arises most often around the Constitution.

In religion, it arises around the Bible.

Very often, I feel as if all the foundations of life as I know it have been shaken and shattered and moved the way an earthquake shattered San Francisco in 1906. People try to tell me that the language of the Constitution does not mean what the plain sense of the words mean. Pastors try to tell me that the Bible does not necessarily mean what the plain sense of the words mean, either. In this regard, political and religious leaders tell me that what they call “truth” is evolving. The Constitution is a “living” document the meaning of which must evolve with social change. The Bible is a “living” document, and in thirty years, things we think are “sin” today won’t be sin any more.

I won’t try to address the concept of biological evolution here, but I will point out that the idea of such a thing is so appealing that the word has taken over the discussion of ideas. Some day I will have nothing better to do than count how many times the word “evolution” and its variants appear in conversation and writing in a single day, but for now I will content myself with observing that I hear this word constantly. The idea that anything and everything evolves is quite handy.

In politics, an evolving Constitution solves two problems:

1. 1.      You need not struggle with the language of a new amendment, because an evolving Constitution allows you to appropriate any words you like and identify how their meanings have evolved as a result of cultural changes.
2. 2.      You need not wait for the process of approval and ratification to start reaping the benefits of rights and services and powers that don’t seem to be evident in the “old” language of the Constitution.

In the world of religion things work out in a very similar fashion. The Bible was written thousands of years ago in languages nobody speaks any more. (People speak descendant languages, but let’s face it, French is a descendant of Latin, which does not mean that French speakers are fluent in conversational Latin.) The Bible asserts rules and regulations that nobody obeys. Furthermore, churches are shrinking as people increasingly declare the Bible and everything related to it irrelevant to modern life. If God meant the Bible to be our holy book for all ages, many ask if it doesn’t make sense that its language be reinterpreted in the light of our evolved understanding. A lot of things called “sin” in the Bible don’t look like sin to us, so surely God meant the Bible to evolve right along with us. To say that allows us to invite people to come back and hear messages that won’t grate on their nerves as much as the one about putting God above everything else.

Don’t think that I equate the Bible and the US Constitution. I don’t. The Bible is inspired and preserved by God himself. The US Constitution is the work of human beings. Most of those individuals lived in relationship with God and felt that God guided their work, but nothing about the Constitution is God’s revelation. Nevertheless, the Constitution shapes our nation the way the Bible shapes my faith.

The best way to describe how I feel is to say that I feel homeless. If my personal dwelling had been razed by an earthquake, I couldn’t feel more thoroughly homeless. I don’t know about everyone else, but I need some certainties. For example, I like being able to rely on gravity. I like knowing that what goes up must come down. I like knowing that even if I travel to Mars or leave the solar system, gravity will still work the same way, and the changes I see in the behavior of things is mandated by the fact that gravity is still working the way it always did.

Some things really are absolute. Some truth should not be changed, just because it comes to seem inconvenient. History reveals that the issues in the Bible and the Constitution that people keep trying to declare changed by evolution are the same issues that were problems in ancient times and during the Constitutional Convention. There is one extremely certain absolute: people in all times are the same. The most ancient documents ever found record that people are people no matter when you encounter them.

One of the problems with evolving truth is its impact on never-changing human realities. For example, human beings have always had problems coping with life and death. Since the beginning of time, humans have tried to usurp God’s sovereignty over life and death, because they want to control life and death for their own benefit. In human eyes, some lives need to be extended, while others are inconvenient and not cost-effective. Likewise, every human wants to be king, and history from the beginning of time records all the ways that desire can be perverted. People like Napoleon Bonaparte or Fidel Castro put on the act of helping others, but unless some power prevents it, they become destructive autocrats. The Bible is a repository of absolute truth about the meaning of life and death. The US Constitution is a guide for one of the most successful methods of protecting every person’s liberty while assuring order in society. To tinker with the meaning of the words of either the Bible or the Constitution is like punching holes in the bottom of a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

If you doubt that, ask the captain of the Costa Concordia. I am pretty sure that he wishes that a certain rock had not been in its absolute location last week. He would, no doubt, have preferred to be able to redefine that rock after the collision and thereby undo what was personally undesirable about its location. The wreck of the Costa Concordia is an example of what happens when wishful thinking collides with absolute truth.

I began thinking about this prayer after a recent conversation with my brother. He was talking about a particularly miserable time in his life due to deep conflict with our parents. His story brought to mind any number of parallel issues in my own relationship with them. We both have some very painful memories about our upbringing. In fact, some of the fractures persisted and splintered into our adult lives. Yet both of us agreed that our parents never actually intended to hurt us at all. They devoutly wanted the best for us. Their idea of the best and our ideas simply did not mesh.

We would both be basket cases, I believe, but for a decision somewhere along the way. I don’t know the details of my brother’s thought processes, but I know mine. I made a decision to forgive them. For both of us forgiveness would have been impossible when we were teens. We could hardly do it in adulthood, because the issues continued. Because our parents moved to a very distant location in retirement, we seldom saw them in person during those years, but on my last visit with my mother, about 3 months before her death, she was still trying to instruct me to undo a decision she had opposed years before. It was extremely hard to learn how to forgive my parents for hurting me in so many ways, even though my mind knew that injury was not their purpose.

Even though I chewed over the problem for years, I might never have been motivated to put that issue at the top of my priorities but for a sermon on Ash Wednesday. Lent is a penitential season, and any Ash Wednesday sermon points us to self-examination. Most such sermons have led me to focus on personal disobedience. Most such sermons lean toward a legalistic interpretation of my need to repent. One was different. Reflecting on the ashes each of us had received as we entered the sanctuary, the pastor asked us to think about what things in our lives needed to be cast into a sacrificial fire.

It was hard to wrap my mind around that concept. But then he asked us what things in our lives stressed or broke our relationship with God. That hit home. Recognizing the pre-eminence of filial respect in God’s scheme of things, I saw for the first time how my anger and resentment of all the wounds my parents inflicted, intentional or not, kept me from growing in my relationship with God. My inability to properly honor my earthly parents threw a huge barrier in the way of my relationship with my heavenly father. As the pastor developed his point and led us to a deeper understanding of the things that necessitated Christ’s death on the cross, I finally realized that my need to cling to the memory of injustice and pain between me and my parents had destroyed that relationship. My unwillingness to let go of my need for people to sympathize with me at the expense of their respect for my parents was destroying me, it was destroying my memory of my parents, and it was poisoning my life of faith. I needed to forgive them in order to heal, because Christ had died in order that I might be healed.

It was hard to absorb the truth that Christ died because I could not learn to love my parents. I kept saying, “But look at what they did!” I kept reciting my litany of complaints. Over that Lenten season I committed myself to learn how to forgive them, and by Holy Week, I felt I was making progress. It is one of the great blessings of my life that our pastor scheduled a service of healing and reconciliation that week. After all my prayers and tears and prayers and gritted teeth, I needed healing and reconciliation.

I thought I had finally forgiven all the physical and spiritual injuries as I arrived at the service. It was a beautiful and worshipful experience. All who wished to do so were invited to the altar for prayer and anointing. Any who wished to stand in support of those being anointed were invited to stand behind and lay their hands on our shoulders. I knelt at the altar and it was no surprise that my husband came to stand behind me and lay his hand on my shoulder. It was a real surprise that two other women from the congregation, neither of whom could possibly have known my reason for being there, came forward and laid their hands on my shoulder as well. In my hour of deep need, three people touched me and shared themselves to give me courage. When the pastor came to me, he anointed my forehead, and then he prayed for me. I know that it was the power of the Holy Spirit using that setting,and in that moment the dam broke. I wept torrentially. I truly felt released from the grip of a lifetime of pain and anger and resentment. I saw clearly the faces of my parents and the love they intended to express in their own way. I knew that Christ’s death for me and for them was not in vain. I truly forgave them. The poison was finally withdrawn.

It would be wonderful to say that that was the end of it, but it wasn’t. It was only the beginning. A lifetime of pain and poison does not simply vanish like morning fog. The recovery after forgiveness of something so deep is like recovery from major surgery. You start feeling a lot better very quickly, but you don’t completely heal for a long time. Of course, my issues with my parents would never have been so deep and prolonged without the instigation and motivation of Satan who whispered constantly, “That is so unfair. You deserve better!” Satan’s whispering is not shut down by one intense spiritual moment. I find that I am not finished learning to forgive even now. Even now, Satan can still bring some old memory to mind in a weak moment, and once again I start to recite my anger. Fortunately, by the grace and transforming power of the Holy Spirit, I am getting better at donning the spiritual armor Paul wrote about in Ephesians. I am learning that the real problem with my parents was always Satan, not my parents.

But most of all, I am learning the blessing of forgiveness. By learning to forgive, I open up my memories. I can remember my childhood as a time of light, not darkness. I can remember all the wonderful things my parents did for me and with me, and those hateful, miserable moments can be put in their proper perspective.

In light of the kinds of things reported regularly in the news, I must hasten to assure you that my brother and I were neither sexually assaulted nor physically beaten as children. We were simply reared by two people whose idea of the right way to rear children was to keep them children until the magic moment,that never really came, when the parents declared them to be adults. The details of our upbringing are irrelevant except to say that we were reared more in the admonition than the nurture of the Lord. Their strict rules and punishments were the outgrowth of what I believe to be a horror that we might turn out bad.

When apartheid came to an end in South Africa, Bishop Tutu worked with a Truth Commission seeking to pull the poison of that horror by structuring opportunities for forgiveness. He documented his work in a book entitled, No Future Without Forgiveness. I think he is right. It is a cosmic truth that we need to forgive. Jesus tells us this truth and invites us to take it into our hearts in the Lord’s Prayer when we pray, “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Psalm 3 is tagged as a prayer David wrote during Absalom’s rebellion. The author’s lament that people think his situation is hopeless makes sense to anyone who has read how Absalom spent years building himself up in the eyes of David’s subjects, largely by implying that David was remote and impotent while Absalom was out among the people and ready to do what needed to be done. David had, indeed, avoided knowing what Absalom was doing and was totally unprepared to respond when Absalom moved to seize power. The Psalm is attributed to David, who would probably have tired of hearing people say, “It’s hopeless.”

No rescue for him through God. (Psalm 3:3)

Here is a prime example of the wisdom of ignoring gossip. David knew that people were muttering that God wasn’t going to pull David out of the fire this time. He knew that a lot of people thought it was good enough for him that Absalom had rebelled. Just as a voter might hear a political promise in an election campaign and hope that there would be some reward for his vote, many of David’s subjects likely hoped that Absalom’s fine words would mean good things for them in the future. God had dumped Saul and anointed David. Why think God wouldn’t dump David and enthrone handsome, virile, silver-tongued Absalom?

It comforts me to know that God did not abandon David just because David was not good at relationships. When I hear the teaching that God’s most important laws are, Love God above everything else, and Love your neighbor as yourself, I know that I am doomed. I am not good at relationships, either. If David had had any skill at building and healing relationships in his family, the tragedy of Absalom’s rebellion could have been avoided. If I were good at relationships, some tragedies in my life might have been avoided, too. I often give thanks that God didn’t dump me. I am reminded in David’s words that God didn’t dump him, either.

You, Lord, are a shield for me. (Psalm 3:4)

When I pray Psalm 3, I tend to paraphrase some lines. Verses 6 and 7 come out as, “Thank goodness, I can get some sleep, because I know God is with me. It feels as if everybody is against me, but I know I can let God take care of me.” I am inclined to skip over the lines about God breaking people’s teeth, because that isn’t the outcome I really hope for.

I am inspired and comforted and motivated by the final verse. In the NRSV, Psalm3:8a reads, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord.” Every time I read it, I remember that this was the cry of Jonah from the belly of the fish. Talk about dire straits! David’s rescue from Absalom’s rebellion was dramatic, but Jonah’s rescue after being thrown into the sea was 3-D drama. Of course, David’s cry in Psalm 3 is a statement of faith that we expect from David. When Jonah cried out those words, it was his moment of truth. In David’s story, Absalom was the rebel, but in Jonah’s story, the rebel was Jonah himself. When Jonah cried out those words, it was more of a confession that he had finally seen the light than a statement of his ongoing faith that God was with him. After all, Jonah arrived in the fish’s belly precisely because he had sought to escape God’s presence.

All of which is truly comforting. Whether my enemies gang up on me, or whether I gang up on myself by trying to run away from God, I can’t escape God’s presence. Even though God can’t count on me to love him or to love people, and even though God can’t count on me to be where I am supposed to be when I am supposed to be there, God never gives up on me. That is the deep truth that I pray when I pray Psalm 3 in the spiritual company of David and Jonah and all the saints. There is rescue for me, after all.

Not!

I don’t know anyone who has made peace with time. When I call people to visit, I ask how they are. Way too many answer, “I’m hangin’ in there.” That is no kind of answer for a human being. That is a horrible answer to hear from person after person. Maybe one person is under so much pressure that he rightly feels he is barely hanging on, but everyone? I don’t believe it.

What I believe is this: too many people feel obligated to accomplish too many goals set for them by other people or by some unreasoning expectation in their own psyches. This is not the way God meant for us to live. God did not create us for misery; he created us for joy. He created us to know him and to know one another in loving relationships. He created us to achieve fulfillment doing all sorts of wonderful things. He did not create us to keep 3-ring binders neatly annotated for the efficient use of every second.

The organizer is the ultimate weapon of the doctrine of scarcity. The organizer says that there is not nearly enough time for everything, and the only hope of a successful life is to be so well-organized that you can explain any failures by showing that you sincerely tried to make it all work. The organizer says it is okay for a person to be overwhelmed by all the obligations he must meet, and suggests that it is both possible and necessary for him live this way.

I was in high school when my mother announced one evening that that four people in our family had nine places to be, and we would not be going to any of them. She was normally a stickler for people’s commitments and obligations. This behavior was out of character for her. That says something for the level of frustration she experienced. I remember it precisely because it wasn’t the way we normally lived. In today’s language we would say that my mother needed, and took, a timeout.

Unfortunately, the timeout did not prove much. It didn’t really change our lives, except for that night. I actually found that the missed events simply piled up in the following days, which were already overloaded. In those days, and for many years thereafter, I bought into the notion that we are all obligated to do more things than the time allows, and we should shut up about it and quietly put up with it. I accepted the doctrine of scarcity of time.

I don’t accept that doctrine any more. I still need to improve my usage of time, but not because there isn’t enough. I need to learn what it is I am here for. Am I here to have a house that could be a museum of contemporary design, or am I here to help my child grow up knowing I love her? Am I called to wear myself out trying to do a job I hate in order to earn more money than I earn doing a job I love? Did God create me for a purpose, or am I a tool of other people’s definition of life?

Of course, you may reply that you have to take the job you can get, so maybe you don’t get to do a job you like? I have been there. I have done that. And that is why I can tell you that doing the job you took for the right reasons, even though it seemed like the wrong job can be a calling in itself. The job you took in order to meet your obligations to your family and your creditors can be God’s gateway to discovering things about yourself that you would never otherwise have learned. That sort of obligation is not set by someone else; you make that choice, because you have a commitment to principle, and God is with you through such an experience. It can still be the answer to the question, Did God create me for a purpose? Am I doing this for God’s reasons or for somebody else’s reasons?

That is the question we all need to ask ourselves about the way we use time. Unlike God’s other gifts to us, we cannot bank time. I always loved the song, “Time in a Bottle” just for its title. It was such a great image – the idea that time could be hoarded until we were able to use it the way we want. But time doesn’t work that way. Every minute we throw away in misery and frustration is a minute we will never use in fulfilling accomplishment. So we ought always to be asking ourselves, Am I doing what I am doing because God brought me to this place at this time, or did somebody else put me here?

Think about your dreams. Think about your vision of yourself. Where does your mind go when you let it go? Did you always want to write or teach or make people well? Are you doing something else instead? Why? Did God bring you to this place at this time, or did you follow somebody else’s path?

God is the God of abundance. He makes plenty of time for everything you were created to accomplish on this earth. Look at the way he made the universe. Stars in profusion. Flowers in thousands of variations. Children of all colors. He doesn’t do anything stingy. He isn’t stingy with you. You are created with gifts—talents, dreams, a calling. Do what you are created to do, and let everything else fall away. You will be a lot happier, and you will discover that you have all the time you need.

I have discovered that, like me, most writers feel that writing is an extension of their lives. To write is to engage in a conversation about the things that shape my life, or the actions that grow out of the shape of my life. Writing and living are tightly intertwined. Having grown up in rural communities and lived most of my life around people not considered sophisticated by urban dwellers, I found some of the life stories told on the writers’ site startling to say the least. I felt an inner warning to filter what I read before absorbing it as fact.

I soon discovered that many writers consider themselves to be spiritual. There are so many, in fact, that my well-loved writing site has a whole group of writers who gather together on the subject of spirituality. When I found the group, I was immediately attracted by its name. I clicked the “join” button and began to get acquainted.

It was a real shock. Not for the first time I was educated to understand that my perception of the definition of a term is not necessarily its actual meaning. Most importantly, my perception of the meaning of “spirituality” was completely different from the perceptions of 99% of the members of the group. I joined the group in the expectation that the other members shared my idea of growing in spirituality. I could not have been more wrong.

For most of my life, I have used the term “spiritual” to mean anything related to the Holy Spirit, or to my relationship with the Holy Spirit, or to my growth in the disciplines and practices of my faith in Christ. The writing group uses the term to mean whatever is not of the material world. Members belong to many different religions or to no religion at all, yet their common bond is a belief that the world we live in is not exclusively made up of physical matter. I share that understanding, but little else. Some members believe that “the universe” is a spiritual force they can relate to. Some believe in ancient gods I thought had been abandoned centuries ago. Some believe in something ephemeral and immaterial that they relate to in terms like hope and faith and luck. I encountered a couple of group members who were Christians, but like me, they felt no common bond with the majority of the members. I left the group after a few weeks, and I imagine they did, too.

This experience should not have shocked me that much. I should have been prepared for this. After I had made this mistake, I looked around and realized that the world is full of people teaching “spirituality” which is wrapped in more beautiful imagery than Halloween, but which is otherwise not a lot different from the masquerade of that October holiday. Spirituality is a popular theme on talk shows like “Oprah,” but it is nothing like what I mean when I talk about spirituality in the context of my Christian faith.

There are a lot of words floating around in our daily lives which are wrapped in spiritual imagery, and often those words delude us into believing that they are Christian words of inspiration, motivation and faith. Many, many of those words have nothing to do with Christianity, nothing to do with God, or Christ or the Holy Spirit. Many of the words and images lure us away from faith into behavior as pagan as Moloch or Baal ever was.

For example, you have no doubt received a “prayer” in your email inbox that concluded with a statement similar to this: “Forward this prayer to ten people, including me, and something magnificent will happen to you at 10PM this evening. Don’t break the chain, or you will be sorry.” The first time I received one of those prayers, I was upset. It reminded of chain letters I used to receive in snail mail, threatening me with being responsible for dire things happening to the person who sent it if I failed to forward it to ten more people. Those old letters made me angry, and these “chain” prayers make me angry, too. They are not prayers; a better word would be incantations. This kind of prayer is not so much a blessing as a curse. In fact, I feel that the sender has tried to enslave me as surely as he or she tried to enslave God, as if either or both of us might be a little genie in a bottle, compelled to do the bidding of the one who opened the lid.

Prayer to Almighty God in the name of Christ does not work the way those chain prayers allege to work. Prayer is not about compelling God to do anything, and it is not about calling down bad luck on people who do not participate.

There is a lot of “spirituality” in the world around us that could easily lure us away from the truth. We won’t find God’s truth in chain prayers on the internet. When we do get confused by chain prayers or any other “spiritual” words in the news or on television or in our inboxes, we must remember that we cannot listen to every spirit that competes for our attention. There is one who always speaks truth, and that One is the indwelling Holy Spirit. We need to study the Bible under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to know how to distinguish truth from lies.

Many people who claim to be spiritual but not Christian are good people by humanist standards. They are kind. They don’t steal. They help others and pay their taxes and would not hurt a fly, let alone a human being. We can enjoy them as neigbors and friends. However, people who do not know Christ cannot guide us into all truth; only the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth can do that. We need to be careful who we listen to.

My husband and I don’t wear big signs that say “Christian,” but we don’t keep it a secret, We believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives, and when we feel that He is guiding the conversation, we invite people to church. We get a lot of different reactions, but the most common is something like this: “I really like to go to a church if I get something out of it. I used to go to church a lot, but then I realized one day that I wasn’t getting anything out of it, so I quit.” I wouldn’t belittle this reaction to church attendance, but it is hard to know what to say. The problem is that we don’t think of church as something we do in order to get something. Our participation in church is much more about loving service and obedience to God’s call. When we attend, we are inspired, and we do learn things. But the real point of attending worship is to worship. In fact, the word “liturgy” is derived from Greek words, leit- people + ergon work, which is to say that liturgy is the work of the people. Worship derives from Old English roots that mean “to ascribe worth to.” It would be right to say that Handel’s “Worthy is the Lamb” is the apotheosis of liturgical worship.

The story of the arrival of the wilderness-weary Israelites in the Promised Land is a story that puts a fine point on the question of what we get out of knowing God. At the beginning of the passage listed above (Joshua 5:10-7:26), the Israelites eat the Passover in the new land, and that is the end of manna. For the first time in forty years, they eat fresh fruits and vegetables, the produce of the Promised Land. Manna had been a gift when they first began to eat it, but the Bible records that the Israelites wearied of it. The generation that entered the Promised Land behind Joshua had never eaten anything but manna. Can you imagine their delight the first time they bit into a peach? They probably thought this moment was evidence from God that there was something for them in following him.

These events took place at Gilgal, their staging point for the coming attack on Jericho. Joshua 5:13-15 describes something even more marvelous. Joshua had been out spying out the ground for the attack on Jericho. As he stood contemplating the battle, he saw a man who said, “The place where you stand is holy.” This explains a lot about the battle for the Promised Land. If you recall, this is the land God promised to Abraham generations before. This is the land from which Joseph was taken to Egypt, where Israelites lived for 400 years before Moses came to lead them back to the Promised Land. How could God promise this land to Abraham? How could he promise it to the Israelites? There were people living on the land before Abraham, and there were people living on the land when the Egyptian escapees arrived there. Where do they get off claiming that God can give them this land?

The man who spoke with Joshua gives us the answer: the land belongs to God. It always belonged to God. In fact, if you read the Bible carefully, you soon discover that in God’s economy, all the land belongs to him, as well as the cattle that graze upon it and the whales that swim in its oceans. When the man who met Joshua told him that the spot where he stood was holy, it could have been any place. There is a big lesson in this little story. James summed up this lesson beautifully when he wrote, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights.” (James 1:17, the eloquent and beautiful King James Version) The lesson is that all that we have and all that we are is the gift of our gracious God. We owe him thanksgiving and grateful stewardship of all that we receive.

This little story puts the big story of the conquest of Jericho in proper context. The marching, the trumpets, the wall that came tumbling down. The bloody destruction of men and women, children, animals, all living things within the walls except for Rahab and her family. The scruffy desert wanderers who had just arrived in Canaan defeated a powerful center of commerce surrounded by a high, thick wall, designed to repel real armies, not families marching around and singing praise to God. The people were full of excitement and delight. Everything looked good. God was working things out to their advantage. It appeared that they would get something out of all the misery they had endured since leaving Egypt after all.

One man wasn’t satisfied with the ego trip, however. He wanted something he could hold in his hands. I see that in dissatisfied church-goers, too. People come to my church, and they participate in a colorful and aesthetically pleasing liturgy, but they go away without “feeling” anything. They are not promised anything, but rather, they are urged to go forth and give service. There doesn’t seem to be anything in it for them. It isn’t at all like the churches where people are told that faithful Christian living will be rewarded with good jobs, comfortable houses and plenty of food for their children. It isn’t like the teleseminars that promise you that the universe wants you to have whatever you really want if you just get in synch and make your desires clear. They feel like Achan, who looked at all the “stuff” being gathered up for the Lord’s treasury and wondered where his share was. God could surely spare a little something for Achan. Didn’t God have enough already?

We are all tempted by this logic, and never more than in contemporary culture. The “Occupy” movement is all about a feeling that somebody else, be it God or man, has more than he “needs” and I have less than I “need.” It is all about my right to decide what is enough for someone else, even God. It is all about my right to judge what others have as if their possessions exist only because I have been shortchanged. Maybe Achan thought he actually needed the things he stashed out of sight of whoever was managing the Lord’s treasury that day. Or maybe he really thought God had no right to keep all the treasure for himself. Maybe Achan thought God was being profoundly unfair to everybody, so Achan said something like, he who helpeth not himself, the same he shall not be holpen.

The root of Achan’s problem is the root of most human discontent. Achan failed to recognize that all the wonderful things, all the land, all the animals, all the people, belonged to God already. The Israelites were conquering Jericho as God’s servants, and they were asked to demonstrate their stewardship of God’s gifts first. If you have read the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you have read the references to the “firstfruits.” The birth of an animal, the beginning of harvest, even the firstborn child, was all dedicated to God. The firstfruits were to be put in God’s treasury or else redeemed. God claimed Jericho as a firstfruit of the blessing of a homeland for the Israelites, and Achan ignored God’s righteous claim, because he wanted something for himself.

We are all guilty of the same thing. The people who put it into words are not worse than the rest of us; they are exactly like us. We all want rewards and privilege and possessions. The “Occupy” movement is just like the rest of us. When we are honest, we know that we all must grapple with envy, jealousy and covetous hearts. No matter how satisfied we are on most days, we all have our moments when we wonder why God didn’t give us the same benefits as somebody else. (I won’t say “everybody else” because we all know that the number of people in the world who have less than the 99% in the US is astronomical.)

I hear a lot of people say that the Old Testament is out of touch with reality, but I don’t believe it. The Old Testament is more real than most reality TV. Those folks were genuine scoundrels. They were just like the scoundrels in the news. Criminals, celebrities, politicians, scheming businessmen – they are all there, and much, much more. The story of Achan is quite real and down to earth. Any of us could be Achan, because any of us could be Eve. Satan was there, whispering in Achan’s ear, just as he whispered in Eve’s ear, “Did God say …?” The lesson of Achan is not implacable, ruthless justice in the name of God. The justice administered that day was simply the way justice was administered in that era. The truth of Achan is timeless, and we do well to listen to it. 

Every wild animal of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the air,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and all that is in it is mine.

Psalm 50:10-12

We are blessed with God’s grace and presence in our lives. We are gifted with God’s abundant generosity, and our responsibility is simply grateful stewardship of those gifts. God’s goodness is not focused on our personal gratification, but rather on the provision of all that we need according to his purposes. What’s in it for me? The presence and power of the Most High God in my everyday life. That’s what.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. Everybody hates waiting. When the line is long at the checkout, when the automated attendant repeats in my ear that “your call is important to us,” when I get a migraine and take the medicine and need to wait for it to take effect, I don’t like the waiting part. Children don’t like waiting for permission to open Christmas presents. We all feel both excited and frustrated by all the expectations of the season.

Advent is not about that kind of waiting. During this season we live out the admonition in Psalm 62 to “wait on the Lord.” Whether we focus on the Christ child in the manger or the victorious King of Kings, we are not simply passing time until the clock runs out. Advent waiting is work, in the same sense that the liturgy is the work of the people.

Waiting on the Lord is about paying attention, for one thing. Most of our waiting strategies involve finding a way not to pay attention to the passage of time. On the one hand, we are fervently focused on an image of the fulfillment of our wait, but on the other hand, we don’t even want to think about it. We hope to distract ourselves from the important moment until it actually happens. Otherwise the excitement gives way to frustration and maybe even boredom and discontent. Waiting to board a flight turns into waiting to board a delayed flight and graduates from annoyance to vexation to outrage. This is not Advent waiting. These are not the characteristics of Advent waiting.

To “wait on the Lord” invites contemplation of our God and his many promises, and during Advent we focus our attention on the way Christ the baby and Christ the King are the fulfillment of all those promises. The baby was fulfillment just as certainly as the King will be the fulfillment. Advent sets us squarely on the boundary between “already” and “not yet.” How do we keep our balance on this cosmic knife-edge?

The answer, I believe, is to ask what changes when Christ comes. What difference does it make that the baby was born? What difference will it make when Christ returns to reign over a new heaven and a new earth? The answer to those questions is the answer to what we do while we wait. Instead of simply trying not to fixate on our expectations and anticipation, we have work to do.

Because the Christ child was born, while waiting in a long line that never seems to move, we speak words of grace and love to those around us, pouring peace out in the midst of the chaos and frustration. Because the King is coming, we see Christ in the poor and the sick, and we give our time and money to serve them. Because the Christ child was born, we invite a lonely neighbor with no one coming for Christmas to join in our family feasting and celebration. Because the King is coming, we speak out at the neighborhood association meeting in defense of an elderly neighbor who can no longer keep up the landscaping standards and lead the group to find a way to help rather than harm this neighbor.

There is so much to do to get ready for the Christ child and the King that we should all find ourselves too busy to fret about waiting for anything. To “wait on the Lord” will keep us quite busy until the fulfillment of all our anticipation. At the right time, Christ will be born in Bethlehem. When the time is right, the King will stand with one foot on land and one foot on the sea and all eyes will turn to him in homage and praise. But right now, the question is, what are we waiting for? We shouldn’t be standing around looking down the road or up in the sky; we should be busy “waiting” on the Lord.

Advent waiting is waiting on the Lord. That is what we are waiting for.

In his book Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “The Psalms are given to us to this end, that we may learn to pray them in the name of Jesus Christ.”[1] The Psalms would have been the prayers Jesus learned as he was growing up Jewish in Nazareth, and Bonhoeffer writes that in praying the Psalms, we appropriate the language and prayer focus of Christ himself. He advocates that we learn to pray by praying as Christ prayed, saying, “The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”[2]

In that spirit, I prayed Psalm 11 today, and I share that experience with you.

I can trust God – Psalm 11:1a

The Psalmist opened this prayer with the words, “In the Lord I take refuge.”

These words assert faith in God in the face of trouble all around. I can identify with that situation. When I read or hear the daily news, I am overwhelmed with despair and dread. The events of each day are disturbing, and the consequences I foresee in the future are dispiriting. Yet, with the Psalmist, in words Christ himself would have prayed as he faced his ministry challenges, I can pray, “In the Lord I take refuge.”

People without faith counsel running away – Psalm 11:1b-3

It always seems easier to run away from challenges than to confront them. In fact, the strength of civil disobedience is always that their willingness to be confrontational is expected eventually to wear away the resistance of the general population to the change desired by the demonstrators.

Violent rebellions often triumph, as we see in the Middle East, just because people do not want to risk death to challenge them. Unlike a lot of commentators and political pundits, I do not see an outbreak of democracy in the Middle East as the guaranteed result of the violent ejection of some tyrants; there is no evidence so far that the rebels are any more supportive of freedom and democracy than the autocrats they have unseated.

People who see that nations around the world are in chaos will say, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” They accept that evil is winning, because it looks that way at the moment. I hear a lot of people blame God, saying things such as, “If God is so good, why is there war (or poverty, or hunger, or AIDS)?” Just like the people in the Psalmist’s day, they accuse God of weakness and indifference when things don’t go well. When Christ prayed these words, he knew the answer to the question, because he had come to be our defense against evil.

God knows what is going on – Psalm 11:4

The Psalmist sees beyond the world of time and space into the world of eternity and infinity. The Psalmist sees what John saw when he wrote in Revelation 4:2 – “There in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne!” The Psalmist wrote “[The Lord’s] eyes behold, his gaze examines humankind,” asserting his faith that God, indeed, sees what is happening.

The wicked suffer the consequences of their faithlessness – Psalm 11:5-6

To those who complain that God is doing nothing, the Psalmist responds that God is quite attentive and involved. Christ himself judged evil by his very presence. Religious and political leaders whose lives were evil behind pious facades felt that judgment when they were in his presence. The presence of God in the world fills evil people with guilt and shame which feel like coals of fire in the pit of their stomachs. In Revelation John wrote that the wicked feel so deeply anguished by the judgment that they run to the mountains and would prefer to be crushed under rockslides than endure the judgment of God’s presence, all because they refuse to receive his love and grace. They are not sent to the mountains; they run to the mountains, the very advice that faithless neighbors gave to the Psalmist.

Made righteous by Christ, I can trust God – Psalm 11:7

There is hope for me. When Christ prayed these words, he could stand in his own righteousness before the throne and say, “the upright shall behold his face.” I can never make myself righteous, but I am made righteous through the death and resurrection of Christ. I have no confidence in my own ability to withstand evil. On my own, to see God is to die, but clothed in the righteousness of Christ, I can stand upright and face God. No matter what is going on around me, I can trust God, because Christ has made me worthy.

The world of time and space looks hopeless. I fear that in this world, evil is so pervasive that I see no place to run where I could escape it. My own efforts to defend myself and lead others to reject evil seem completely useless. If I could not trust God, I would, indeed, be doomed. I have hope only in Christ who has redeemed me and rescued me from the evil of these days.