Lent Day 14: Longing for God

 O God, you are my God; I seek you;
    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
~Psalm 63:1

Image courtesy of Todd Bolen

Here's the God's honest truth (which, I hope I am sharing on a regular basis, and not only when I make an announcement about it): I didn't post yesterday for a number of reasons. In no particular order: I had an unexpectedly extra busy day; I was experiencing a lot of physical fatigue (new work-out-swimming routine, which, along with Daylight Savings Time, is kicking my butt); and--probably the biggest reason: I couldn't connect with any of the lectionary passages for yesterday. Well, not until late enough that I knew my brain would be useless if I tried to write something coherent. 

And then, today, voila, God and the daily lectionary present me with my favorite psalm, one that I have mostly memorized because I pray it so often. Actually, I sing it. I sing it when I am using my PCUSA Daily Prayer Book for morning prayers, and I sing ig in my head when I am lying in bed at night, especially when I am struggling with sleep. 

The psalm has a title: A psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness in Judah. 

I love the stories of David, a flawed human who nevertheless captures our imaginations at every turn. I know a bit about David, but I had to Google "when was David in the wilderness of Judah"? And the answer was: He was in the wilderness of Judah twice; once when he was fleeing from King Saul, and once when he was fleeing from his son, Absalom. 

Reading that was a like a punch in the gut. 

Scholars believe the more likely context was the latter. David was fleeing his son.

David was fleeing Absalom because... the sins of the father are visited on the children, as scripture reminds us. In other words, the family system was broken, and it went all the way back to David's taking and raping the married woman Bathsheba, followed by David's arranging for Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, to be killed, in order to cover up her pregnancy by David. The prophet Nathan told David God's response to all this: "Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife."  Or, as Eugene Peterson elaborated on it in The Message,

"And now, because you treated God with such contempt and took Uriah the Hittite’s wife as your wife, killing and murder will continually plague your family." ~2 Samuel 22:10

The enmity between David and Absolom emerged because David never punished his other son, Amnon, who had raped his half-sister, Tamar. Absolom was avenging his sister and trying to take the throne from his father, who he deemed unworthy of it.

Knowing the background of this psalm--that it wasn't simply written in the context of one of his many wars or battles, but most likely in the context of his flight from his own son, which he had brought about by many actions and inactions over many years--has shaken me. But also it makes me love the psalm even more.

David is in more than one kind of wilderness. He is in the wilderness of Judah which, truly, is an inhospitable environment for life. But he is also in the wilderness of his soul. He is using his physical hunger and thirst to connect to that deeper and more devastating wilderness, where he isn't sure God is still listening. He is longing for the old, familiar connection, in which God and he were on easy terms, David freely speaking and singing his praise and devotion to God, and God, in turn, continually inspiring him to more and more beautiful songs of praise.

For me, this psalm is a psalm of deep comfort. I call out and I trust that God hears. I understand that this may not be everyone's experience, and I remember times when it might not have been mine. But today, I am grateful for the beauty of this psalm, and for the reminder that God is listening. And today, I grieve once again the texts of terror* that are about both Bathsheba and Tamar, and remember: one of the things that makes scripture so important, and so holy, is its willingness to tell us the truth, even about our heroes. 

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

* Coined by scripture Scholar, Phyllis Trible, author of Texts of Terror: Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.

Lent Day 10: 40 days

Off the top of my head, I can come up with about three examples of the number 40 in scripture:

The forty days and nights of rain, the great flood of Genesis and Noah and pairs of animals.

The forty years God's covenant people were in the wilderness.

The forty days Jesus was in the wilderness.

And... those are, to me, the Big Three.

But our Presbyterian Book of Common Worship highlights these and more in a litany for Lent. We are reminded that...

Moses spent forty days on the mountain, learning the commandments of God.

Elijah traveled forty days in the wilderness to hear the voice of God in the silence,

Jonah cried out to the people of Nineveh, Repent, or in forty days you will perish.

In scripture, forty is a number that makes you sit up and take notice. When something lasts forty days (or years) the story you are reading involves a sea change in the people affected. From the re-fashioning of the human race after God's deadly flooding, to the prophet Elijah running for his life, waiting for the still, quiet voice of God to suddenly become audible to him, to Jesus undergoing grueling testing of his physical strength and moral character, things change. People are changed. In the story of God's people in the wilderness after their escape from enslavement, it is made clear that a new people will enter the land of promise--literally. Nearly all the original escapees will have died, including Moses and his siblings, Miriam and Aaron. The spies Joshua and Caleb are the only two of the original 600,000 who cross over. God wants them to be a new people, and so they are.

We observe Lent for forty days because of similar reasoning. At the end, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, new life emerging from a tomb, new life that seems impossible, yet, there it is. And the idea of Lent-- the traditional idea--is that we will be new, too. In the ancient church, following a lengthy process of study and prayer, converts were baptized at the Easter Vigil. We are made new.

This year we are approaching Lent from a different perspective. It is still a time of transformation, but the desired transformation is not that we have given up something or taken on a strict discipline of some kind. The transformation that we all need most deeply is to finally believe that God loves us, and there is nothing we can do about it. 

We can run away from it, we can doubt it, we can try to block it out, but we can't make it stop. 

We can mess up, we break down, we can refuse to budge, but God is still love.

I have often wondered whether the forty days of Lent were based on a basic hunch about how long it takes to establish a pattern, or form a habit. The conventional wisdom is that it takes 21 days to form a habit, but I've always believed that wasn't long enough. They've done a study (of course), and it turns out, most people will take between 18 and (gulp) 254 days to form and solidify a habit. Lent can, at the very least, give you a good start.

For Lent this year, I encourage all of us to take up the habit of trusting in God's love for us. That's it, that's the message.

God loves us, and there's not a thing we can do about it.

Color against the white of snow.
Artist: Joanne Thorne Arnold