It's been about 25 years since I gave a series of messages at the annual sessions of Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends. The messages were linked to this psalm:
Psalm 131 (New English Bible)
1 O LORD, my heart is not proud,
nor are my eyes haughty;
I do not busy myself with great matters
or things too marvellous for me.
2 No; I submit myself, I account myself lowly,
as a weaned child clinging to its mother.
3 O Israel, look for the LORD
now and evermore.
For the last three years, I've been giving sermons once a month at Spokane Friends Meeting, in Washington state, USA. Several of my sermons have been encouragements to enter into a conversation with the Holy Spirit on what the Bible is showing us through texts that seem to contain a lot under the surface. Last month, partly in response to the feverish political climate in the USA these days, I wanted to offer something that could bring the fever down a bit—and this psalm came back to me from that series I wrote a quarter century ago. It seemed to meet the need.
I had no memory of what I actually said in those long-ago messages. I hope they were suitable at the time, but now I had no choice but to take a fresh look at the text.
At first I assumed that I would use the New English Bible translation, because that was the first Bible I ever owned and the first place I got to know this psalm. But in preparing for my Spokane message, I looked up the psalm in the New Interpreter's Study Bible. The commentary there said that verse two seems to suggest that the psalm might have been written by a woman. So I looked again at the translation included in that Bible, the New Revised Standard Version, and look what I found:
Psalm 131 (New Revised Standard Version)
1 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
2 but I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. [see note]
3 O Israel, hope in the LORD
for this time on and forevermore.[Note: Or my soul within me is like a weaned child]
Not sure which version to choose for this message, and further intrigued by that note with its alternate reading, I went to a Hebrew-English interlinear Bible to see if that second reference to the “weaned child that is with me” was in that resource ... and indeed it is.
One of the reasons I am so fond of this psalm, especially in the context of preaching, is that it reminds me that, when I speak in meeting for worship, my job is to be faithful, not clever. My task is confined to two things: first, to point toward trustworthy sources of inspiration and vision, and, second, to suggest some implications of those sources as a way of encouraging you to do the same, to consider the implications for yourselves. It is not my purpose to do your work for you, to show off my own cleverness (as obvious as it is), or to one-up someone else, or to even hint that I’ve covered all the possibilities.
From what I’ve just said, you can see why I loved the way John Kinney began his message to Spokane Friends the previous week—and here I’m quoting from his online text:
When I give a message, it is presumptuous of me and you to think that I know what I am talking about. I am groping in the dark. What I say makes sense to me but I am confident that there are theologically and spiritually astute people that could poke holes in most of what I say so always take my message with a grain of salt.
Exactly! The same caveat goes for everything that I say when I visit you.
John Kinney talked about some of the realities we encounter when we do intercessory prayer for others. When our prayers don’t result in healing, is it because we were two prayers short? John’s message reminded us of some important Scriptures that illuminate this picture: in Romans, Paul says that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans; and in Matthew, God causes the son “to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike.” We are to pray continually, but not babble on as if God didn’t already know what we need. In light of God’s promises and the Bible’s teachings on prayer, the temptation to overthink all these questions becomes unbearable, at least for some of us.
… And it’s at that moment Psalm 131 becomes the healing song of quiet trust that I need.
Maybe some of you have seen this cartoon:
Maybe this isn't exactly theology, but it's an example of the tangents we can go on when we overthink something. God is both deeper and more direct, but we don’t become aware of it until we, like the dog in the third frame, are in an attitude of acceptance rather than reaction.
Does this mean that the good dog was wrong to contemplate the meaning of “good”? I honestly don’t think so. I don’t think God gave us our brains to torture us when we encounter something we don’t understand. I remember Paul saying in 1 Corinthians 14:15 “...I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also; I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.” His point is that our participation in worship should be in language that is understandable to others, but in this cause he honors the role of the mind. Back in the same letter, chapter two, Paul says, “‘For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”
Going back to Psalm 131, “...My eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” I don’t interpret this as a way of telling us that piety equals dumb passivity, but that when we encounter Godly mysteries in Scripture and in life, we simply acknowledge our limitations, and don’t make our intellects a sort of limitation beyond which we won’t allow God to go. We don’t stand above those mysteries in some sort of detached or superior position, the way the citizens of the Snarky District live:
 |
| (By permission of cartoonstock.com.) |
Instead of overthinking, or resorting to irony or intellectual distancing, we can enter into dialogue with the text. Even comparing translations might be part of that dialogue. I think it is entirely consistent with Psalm 131 to ask God to help us discern what the implications of the Scripture are for us.
For example, the question that really touches my heart is the meaning of the weaned child. How do I apply this image? Quoting, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” In this scene, my soul is not trapped by my arrogance or skepticism or the temptation to react on my own terms, but what is my soul’s relation to God in this receptive place? Is God my mother in this image? Having been weaned, am I now in the world as God’s creation, in some way separate from my Creator? But in any case, I’m not far off; my soul is like the weaned child, still with its mother but now vulnerable to the world’s hazards, just like every other person in God’s creation.
As it happens, this image recalls a very specific memory from my early childhood. When I was about three or four years old, my beloved German grandma, my Oma, was teaching me how to tie my shoes. I was living with her and my Opa in their house in Stuttgart, Germany, before I went to Chicago to be reunited with my parents. As my grandmother helped me with my shoelaces, she told me about the Good Shepherd who loved me. Those memories came back to me years later, even as I was living in a family where faith was a taboo subject. It’s like my soul was never cut off from the silver thread that led back to my grandmother’s care.
(Here’s a picture of my Oma holding me, alongside my mom and my Opa. I included this picture so you can maybe glimpse some of the care that gave me that silver thread that never broke.)
Back to Psalm 131. This is my reality: my soul can relax, stop obsessing, and enjoy companionship with God, but at the same time, it remains true that I’m as vulnerable as any other creature. My hope isn’t in any physical shield or force, but in remembering, as Israel is exhorted to do in the third verse, to “hope in the Lord, now and forevermore.”
At Spokane Friends meeting for worship, I ended my sermon and we went into open worship. For that period of quiet, I offered these queries for those who wanted to continue to reflect on the psalm:
- Is there comfort or discomfort for you in Psalm 131, or perhaps both?
- In either case, can your questions open up a place of dialogue?
- Are there people in your life or past who personify God’s ongoing love for you? Are there other ways you’ve experienced this love? Do you feel free to ask for more?
Another set of queries that comes to me now, as election day in the USA draws ever closer:
- In this moment, is there a tension between "calming and quieting" our souls, and being conscientious and persistent participants in a nation's civic life?
The hope I have for today is not a denial of reality, but a deeper perspective, "now and forevermore." In another election season, eight years ago, I mentioned another psalm that I also keep before me these days: (Psalm 119:45-46, NIV; context)
I will walk about in freedom,
for I have sought out your precepts.
I will speak of your statutes before kings
and will not be put to shame...
Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Madison Square Garden spectacle of a few days ago.
We're just back from another four-week visit to London. I continue to be fascinated by the two (at least two) Englishes we experience in these visits, and how they influence each other. As Ben Yagoda says, it's a two-way street.
Sarah Thomas Baldwin on the subversive spiritual quality of "lingering." (With references to the events of February 2023 at Asbury University.)
A serious look at an influential periodical of my teenage years. Were you also a loyal reader of MAD?
Sarah Quintana, "Rolling and Tumbling" in French.
