Psalm 9.1“I will praise you, O Lord, with all my heart. I will tell of all your wonders.”
This is more, much more, than the power of positive thinking. These are the words of someone who has nurtured a sense of wonder, who knows that gratitude is a source of energy, who has learned to see and pay attention to what’s going on around them, and has come to see God at work in the ordinary and everyday routines. Yes there are tough experiences, times we need a secure foothold. But most of the time life is as it is, we are part of it, we love and are loved, we are blessed and we bless.
Years ago someone regularly phoned our house and often began the conversation with “What a day I’ve had!” followed by a long litany of complaints. That opening line could have a different tone: “What a day I’ve had! Let me tell you of all God’s wonders!”
Psalm 10.1“Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?”
Some of our most desperate prayers end in a question mark. ‘Why’ always has the sound of urgency when it is a prayer. Each of us have times when God seems so far off, and silent. The Psalm poet is blunt and up front about this, and shows us how human it is to complain. To ask God why, is not a lack of faith or a failure of trust. On the contrary, our faith is made evident and audible exactly as we ask our urgent questions of the One whom we call Lord. In our hardest experiences of loss, confusion, depression, anxiety, guilt or whatever, there is a recurring sense that God is absent and silent. But remember, however abandoned we may feel, that ringing promise still holds: “Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That truth depends on God’s faithfulness, not our faith.
In 1971 I went to Glasgow University as an Arts undergraduate. I was three years a Christian, a Baptist an avowed Evangelical and then some. My major subjects were Moral Philosophy and Principles of Religion. This was to be an education in learning to think for myself with critical appreciation, developing intellectual humility and willingness to question my certainties.
Principles of Religion included critical study of sacred texts from the Bhagavad Gita, Deuteronomy, the tractate Pirkei Avot from the Mishnah, the Hindu Scriptures, the Quran, and yes, Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Welcome to comparative religion and the phenomenological study of religious experience!
We had to do a critical exegesis of selected passages from each of those texts, explaining the cultural context, key religious concepts, analysing the religious experience that underlay the text, and which the text evoked and reinforced. I was back studying Galatians, but with very different aims.
At that time there were few recent critical commentaries dealing with the English text of Galatians – (Greek would come later in my Divinity studies). That’s when I bought Donald Guthrie’s 1969 commentary on Galatians in the New Century Bible. I made my way through Guthrie’s solid, careful and compact exegesis, and cherry picked two Greek commentaries (Lightfoot and De Witt Burton) as best I could. I passed the course and won the class prize!
I mention the prize only because the two lecturers insisted that class assignments were pieces of research and evidenced argument – not opportunities to push a conservative evangelical line! If I wanted to argue a position, I had to make that case, evaluate the evidence and construct a reasoned argument.
Here’s how that worked. One essay was on the authorship of Deuteronomy; I still have that essay! By the 1970s the mainstream position rejected the sole authorship of Moses. My first sentence was, “Much as I would prefer to establish the Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy, the arguments for an editorial process would seem to be more persuasive.” Nick Wyatt was the marker and he wrote in the margin alongside that first sentence, “Tough!” That comment was written with a grin and not an iota of hurtful intent. We got on very well, and he was a superb teacher.
So that was my first critical study of biblical texts, Deuteronomy and Galatians. It was in an Arts course, and I was being trained to read a text with critical questions and respectful care. Donald Guthrie’s commentary was seen as conservative then, and still is. But like all his work, Guthrie had done his homework. Of course Guthrie on Galatians is long eclipsed by newer approaches of far greater length and complexity, including rhetorical studies, social science, new perspectives on Paul, and rival theological interpretations.
It would take time, and much wider and deeper study, for me to be adequately equipped before I was able to explore Galatians, or any other biblical text, with the proper tools, skills and training. But Galatians, which had entered my spiritual bloodstream through John Stott’s pastoral and theological exposition, was now a text that was problematic. Not in a negative sense, but as a text that refuses to be tamed and neatly tied up as a parcel of fully understandable theology. Galatians was written to provoke, to confront, to persuade, to change minds and transform worldview and lifestyle. That much I had already grasped.
Psalm 16.1 “Keep me safe, O God, for in you I take refuge.”
This is an arrow prayer, a one liner that goes straight to the point. There’s no waiting patiently in this prayer, just the need of the moment, and that instinctive turning in faith to the One who is our refuge. By the way, when we pray this prayer, and turn to God for protection in the emergency of feeling threatened, that makes us refugees in the arms of God. The theme of refuge, and of care for the refugee, is dyed into the fabric of the Bible, from Abraham to the Exodus, to the Exiles, and the flight from Herod to Egypt. Before God we are all refugees, looking for a place to find safety.
This afternoon, preparing to cut the grass at the back of my neighbour’s house, I’m lowering my cable extension over the fence between us. On our side, as I leaned over, I had to negotiate my way around this rose, carefully feeding the cable behind it and up over the fence.
The last day of September, sunny but breezy, the tail end of a storm on its way in a day or two, and today, for a moment or two, this floral miracle was right in my face!
Yes, I’m easily pleased – maybe that’s a low-key form of gratitude, to hear an echo of the Creator’s grace when face to face with a rose. Or so it seemed to me
Psalm 27.1“The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear.”
That’s a good line to start the day; it might also be a fitting line to end a bad day! The truth is, every day of our lives we live through a host of moods and emotions, which make it either a good day or a bad day. The Psalm poet knows that in all the change he needs constancy, when things pile up and we are struggling to find a way forward, “The Lord is my light and my salvation.” The fixed point is not our own energy and capacity, but God’s promised presence. “If God be for us, who can be against us?”
Psalm 40.1“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.”
I am not good at waiting patiently. It’s a learned discipline, an intentional training of the mind and the heart to trust, in a world where things don’t always happen on demand. God is not tied to our agenda or our timetable, thank God! The Psalm poet has learned that waiting is an act of trust that comes from knowing the One for whom we wait. That lovely phrase, ‘he turned to me’, has all the reassurance of the child who sees the face of her mother or father. “He bent down to me and listened to my cry.” (REB) Prayer is answered when we know we are heard and listened to.
As this is all new to me, I’ll keep it simple – for my benefit! For more than 18 years Living Wittily lived on the Typepad platform. Now that Typepad is going out of commission we are moving to this temporary home before a full migration to WordPress.
All new content will be posted here, and at a later stage on WordPress.
