When Labor Day is Every Day: Praying Psalm 18

In my distress I called upon the Lord; to my God I cried for help (Psalm 18:6).

For reasons that I don’t fully understand, the school my children attend doesn’t begin the year until well after everyone else around here. Yes, there are plenty of colleges that don’t begin the fall semester until sometime in mid-September, but if you’re not old enough to drive in the city of Atlanta you’re usually catching a bus or being dropped off at the carpool line before Labor Day. In many cases, long before Labor Day.

But not so for us. Class begins next week. All the summer activities that gave my kids something to do during the day are now a fading memory. No day camps, no VBS, no family trips. Here we are. Waiting. Marnie and I have both had to be in the office this week, so we’ve relied heavily on the good graces of Grandpam and Grandy, Mimi and Papa. Summer has indeed run its course. My kids are bored and ready to go back to school.

This is that time of the summer that finds me making jokes about desperately yearning for school to start, craving some structure and the freedom that comes with knowing my children are in a closely supervised environment from 8:00 to 3:00, occupied with something other than that demon-birthed cartoon network. I feign weariness in my remarks and laugh at the grind of a summer that won’t seem to end. Parents get it and commiserate with me, laughing at my lame jokes about it all.

It all seemed a little less funny this morning when I opened my email and found the monthly newsletter from World Vision. I opened the main page and saw a headline for one of the articles. The global food crisis means that children who should be going to school are instead going to work, often in dangerous conditions. Across the globe there are an estimated 218 million laborers between the ages of 5 and 17.

And I speak of back-to-school as if my own convenience is what really matters. I just assume that school is where kids will be once we’ve celebrated Labor by sleeping in and grilling burgers by the pool. It never occurs to me that there are children for whom labor day is every day. Western privilege makes rich man Divies of me and I don’t even know it.

I didn’t read the entire article right away. I have this nasty habit in the mornings of going to my email before going to my Bible. I closed the newsletter, the reality of children who work to eat sitting heavy in my brain, and tried to give my attention to Psalm 18, the assigned Psalm for this week.

I’ve struggled with Psalm 18. It’s long. That’s a pathetic thing to say, but I have to push myself through those 50 verses. At times the language is strange on my tongue, violent and vengeful and then suddenly speaking of "my righteousness" and how God deals with me according to "my blamelessness." Apart from Jesus, there’s no way anyone can really pray Psalm 18 with a straight face.

But after seeing the World Vision newsletter, the words of the Psalmist sounded different. They meant something different. I began to understand this morning that the prayer has nothing to do with me. I prayed Psalm 18 for children around the world who can’t afford enough food and who get up every day to work 11 hour shifts in mines and who will not go to school next week. The Psalm allowed me to say more than “God please bless those children and help them find food to eat.”

Psalm 18 gave language for crying out against enemies and oppressors. The Psalm verbalized the distress and the sense of being swallowed by death, and that would include the death of starvation. The Psalm affirmed that God hears and praised God who is our strength and help and confidence.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is quoted as having said that “those who will not cry out for the Jews cannot sing Gregorian chant.” If we cannot stand up and stand with those who suffer, our words of praise whether spoken or sung are empty. We are only posturing as we pray.

So I am thankful for Psalm 18. I think that tomorrow it will not be so hard to make my way through those 50 verses. I will pray the Psalm for those afflicted by disease and hunger and corrupt governments and evil people. And next week, when I drop my kids off for that first day of School, I won’t simply be relieved. I will be truly thankful.

Enemy of Soul

Deliver me from my enemies, O Lord! (Psalm 143:9).

David had enemies. Real enemies. The kind that lurk in the dark with both the intent and the capacity to do you harm. The kind that draw blood and leave you for dead; the kind that lie to smear your name or cheat to leave you bankrupt. There’s nothing theoretical about the damage they can do. From the moment David heard the cursing taunts of the Philistine giant, David knew he had an enemy. From the moment Saul hurled his spear at David’s singing face, David knew he had an enemy. This was simply a part of life, and he learned this early on. It never changed.

When you know you’ve got enemies you learn to keep your eyes open. You discern their presence intuitively because your life depends on it. To listen to David’s prayers it seems that he had grown adept at naming his enemies, and not just the cursing giants and half-crazed kings. David knew the insidious presence of other enemies, and we would do well to learn from him. The soul has enemies. Real enemies. And they are alive and well in metro Atlanta.

I’m reading Psalm 143 this week. There’s plenty of standard enemy language here, but reading it this morning I started to wonder about who this enemy is. What is the prayer dealing with? The enemy language blends with prayers for the well being and preservation of the soul. The soul, the deepest part of the self, is being threatened. That’s what Psalm 143 is about. Or is it? Sure, the enemy that wants to cut your throat can also play havoc with soul and spirit. Soul health isn’t abstract and ethereal. The steely blade that opens your jugular can also tear at your soul. But the language of Psalm 143 suggests a particular concern for the dangers confronted in shadowy interior places.

For the enemy has pursued my soul (v. 3)

My spirit faints within me (v. 4)

My soul thirsts for you (v. 6)

For to you I lift up my soul (v. 8)

Bring my soul out of trouble (v. 11)

Every Monday morning I meet with a group of men for prayer and talk mingled with Bible reading. Yesterday we were joined by Maqsood Kamil, the head of the Presbyterian Church in Pakistan. He is also professor of theology at the seminary in Gurjanwala. Yes, there is a seminary in Pakistan. Maqsood’s presence with us for an hour, the chance to listen to him and ask questions, this was a great gift to us. He lives his faith in a very difficult and hostile setting. He understands enemies. Real enemies.

And as he talked with us I think we all became increasingly aware of how easy it is here. We have our stories about gunmen who storm into schools and churches; we know that terrorism is a real threat in our land. But in the conduct of daily life we still assume safety. This is the “normal” we insist on maintaining even in the age of terrorism. It is an assumption so closely connected with our notions of freedom that we cannot let it go. We walk the streets and go to school and drive our roads with the assumption that we will accomplish whatever we have on our to-do list for the day.

In some ways the absence of enemies is itself our great enemy. Maqsood remarked that when every meal is provided for and easily obtained, the prayer “give us this day our daily bread” doesn’t have much meaning. Of course, we can pray it in our wealthy churches, but those who have little food, or who don’t know where a meal will come from, they pray it differently. I don’t have answers to the questions that confront the church given its affluence. Folks like Ron Sider have thought long and hard about it. Not me. I say that to my shame.

Right in the center of Psalm 143 are the words “my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.” Thirst and hunger are by definition rooted in some kind of lack, a deprivation. It may seem that in a place like Pakistan the enemy has the upper hand. Perhaps, in the land of plenty, where there is little or no hunger and thirst of soul, the enemy has in fact already won.

Are Resolutions "Bad Spirituality?"

Offer right sacrifices and trust inthe Lord. (Psalm 4:5)

I’ve been pondering that line from Eugene Peterson about resolutions being bad spirituality. For one thing, I feel that a clarification is in order. I’m not sure you’ll find that statement in any of Peterson’s published works. I heard him say this years ago as I listened to a recording of one of his class sessions at Regent College. I know in my own teaching I’ll make some throw-away statements that I’d have to carefully unpack if someone questioned me or asked me to explain myself. And honestly, some of those statements I might simply retract. That might be true for Peterson in this case. I don’t know.

I get some help in understanding him, or at least articulating my own understanding of what he meant, from Psalm 4:5. “Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.” I find in this short verse a pattern for living the New Year. Better than that, a pattern for what it means to get out of bed every day and do whatever the day might demand of you, or whatever it might bring your way or dump in your lap – however you choose to look at it.

Offer right sacrifices: the essence of bringing sacrifice was bringing something of worth, usually the best of the crop or the best animal. Without extensive exegetical work in the Hebrew, I read this to mean “bring the best that you are to all that you do.” Teaching, writing, parenting, litigating, changing light bulbs, navigating congested roads into work, emailing colleagues, answering the phone – whatever. Do your best work. I often say those four words to my kids as they hop out of the car every morning in the carpool line and rush into school. Do your best work. Bring right sacrifices.

But having done our best, we trust. Ultimately, we don’t determine outcomes. We do our best work, bring our best self to the task, and then we step back to see how God might use what we do for his purposes. This is at the heart of Peterson’s statement I believe. Our lives are more about what God is doing through us and around us than they are about what we intend to do by our best efforts and good intentions.

It’s the trust part that I find difficult. And truthfully, the bringing of right sacrifices isn’t always that easy either. I don’t always bring my best to my teaching or writing; I don’t always give my family the best energies of my day. My hard-hearted self doesn’t simply want to teach the Bible on Wednesday nights. I want people to like what I say and how I say it and come back in greater numbers – and yes, hopefully be helped in their life of faith. It’s hard to bring the sacrifice, and then simply leave it on the altar, offer it up for God’s glory and leave it at that. After all, what does he do with it? That's entirely up to God. We're simply invited to trust.

“Offer right sacrifices and trust in the Lord.” It’s a short verse that takes a long time to get into the living of our days. Getting it right is good spirituality; worthy of our resolve.