Early last year, in preparing a pastoral prayer for Morning Worship at Salem, I decided to pray through the psalm for the day with its text spread out in front of me while praying. It was a moving experience to merge the psalm with the theme chosen from all the texts for that day, and to do so spontaneously in light of what the people and I were bringing to worship that week or facing the next. In light of that experience, and the many comments from others on how helpful it had been to them, I decided to adopt this practice as a weekly discipline for my own benefit.
In doing so, I am fully aware that I am only entering in on a historic practice, followed by God’s people in every age. My hope is simply to learn myself from the discipline how to better enter into God’s sovereign presence and be filled with his Spirit.
Week of June 7 (Trinity – First after Pentecost) - Psalm 29
How, Lord, shall we ”ascribe to [you] glory and strength” and “worship [you] in holy splendor”? Are you calling us to greater efforts of our own, as if we might by strength of mind and will honor you as you deserve and want to be honored?
Thank you for the psalmist’s awareness that ascribing to you all these things is but reflecting who you are and what you have done and still do. I am reminded of the hymn, “Dear Father of all humankind, forgive our feverish ways. Re=clothe us in our rightful mind, in purer lives your service find, in deeper rev’rence, praise.”
In this Pentecost season, help us see and remember you as you are--whose glory is over the waters, whose voice is full of majesty and flashes forth flames of fire, who causes the oaks to whirl and strips the forest bare, who is enthroned over the flood and is king forever!
Come among us, Lord, in all your glory. Then we will ascribe to you the glory do your name. Amen.
Week of June 14 (Second after Pentecost) Psalm 20
We are so needy, Lord, and all around us are needs even more profound than ours which only you can meet. How wonderful that we can intercede for others, personally and communally, for help in times of trouble, for comfort and support.
How wonderful, too, that we can do so, poor and sinful though we be, in full confidence-- given the faith you have planted in us by your grace. “I know that the Lord will help … will answer from his holy heaven,” The psalmist said. And so do we!
Keep us at these intercessions, Lord, as well as all the other aspects of prayer that point us toward you. Save us from putting our trust in anything less. Our help is not ultimately in our military force or our economy. They, like strong horses and chariots in the psalmist’s time, will collapse and fall. “But we shall rise and stand upright,” if and as long as “our pride is in the name of the Lord our God.” Amen.
Week of June 21 (Third after Pentecost) Psalm 9:9-20
Even as we intercede for others, Lord, help us not to lose our own sense of who you alone are, lest our own faith slumber within us and not be awakened by your presence day by day. Surely trusting you and seeking you is central to calling on you. Help us to live in the richness of your mighty acts in history, and help us while living there to long for the fresh winds of your Spirit still moving among those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Both for our own safety in our own little world, threatened by those who hate us and would love to do us in, and for the sake of other peoples and nations who “have sunk in the pit that they made,” their own feet caught in the nets they thought would hide and protect them,, make yourself known—among us and among them.
“Rise up, O Lord! Do not let mortals prevail…. Let the nations know that they are only human.” And remind us as well, lest we forsake the sacred memories we share with all God’s people, and the Spirit who alone seals them in our hearts. Amen.
Week of June 28 (Fourth after Pentecost) Psalm 130
Surely you know, Dear God, the pain we sometimes feel in spite of our faith in you. Like Peter, invited to walk on troubled waters to you, we too often start sinking for lack of faith. Martin Luther knew the feeling as well, even wrote a hymn on this psalm (The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook, No 361).
How quickly we often fall from mountains of pleasure to depths of despair! And how soon we discover again there our absolute dependence of you. Sometimes, with the psalmist, we must only wait awhile and hope in your word. “more than those who watch for the morning.”
And then, and there, your steadfast love and great power to redeem restore us, as they restored Israel in times past. “Who is like this,” people in New Testament times wondered,
“who even the winds and the waves obey?” Who, indeed?
“O Israel, hope in the Lord … It is he who will redeem Israel from all its iniquities.” It is also he, and he alone, who will deliver all who cry out to him from the pits they and others have dug for themselves. Amen.
