Sometimes there is nothing left to do but sing. Does that sound odd? It is said of the Methodist movement that we were born in song. We sing our faith, and our songs are about calling out to God. This late summer/early fall we turn to the song book that has sustained and defined the people of God from the very beginning – the Psalms. The Psalms give words to a variety of emotions and circumstances out of which we call upon the Lord. We shape our worship around these words to give voice to people in our communities who may feel unheard even by God. The witness of the Psalms is that God is prepared to meet us where we are. So let us call upon the Lord.
God Knows My Name (September 7)
Seen. Heard. Known. However you put it, we humans long for relationships where we trust others to care about who we are, what we feel, and how we experience the world. We want to belong, and one of the key ways we create belonging is to search and know each other. Today’s psalm reading describes this process of creating belonging between God and us. I remember when I was growing up, I believed that God loved me because God had to love me, God is obligated to love me. As I grew up and studied more of the Bible, I slowly realized that God wants to love me. God searches and knows me—knows us—because God desires to love us and build belonging with us.
Our Hope is in the Lord (September 14)
How do we find hope? How do we keep hope? In Psalm 14, hope happens somewhere in the space between the comma and the “but”: “You would confound the plans of the poor, but the LORD is their refuge” (Psalm 14:6). But God. But the good news. But grace. We find and keep hope when we name all that is hard in our world, take a breath, and then remember, but God.
For the Glory (September 21)
If it’s been a while since your congregation engaged with the psalms for an extended time, they may now be ready for the joyful, happy psalms. However, that’s not what this week (or the next) presents us. Far from victorious or jubilant, the first half of Psalm 79 reads like a list of social media headlines and nightly news reports, viscerally true reports of the chaos we humans create for ourselves and the worry that we will never find our way out of the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We have enough of this in our daily life. Can’t scripture give us a bit of a break, a quiet respite from the chaos surrounding us?
Safety in the Shadow of the Lord (September 28)
I was a teenager when I first encountered Psalm 91, and I loved the idea that reading Psalm 91:1 was like calling 9-1-1: “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty…” There is a sense of safety and security, a feeling that somehow everything will be okay. That’s definitely the feeling I want to feel if I have to call 9-1-1, and let’s face it, there are a lot of emergencies in our world right now, many of which are bigger than a whole fleet of fire trucks can fix.
Originally published by Discipleship Ministries. Republished with permission by ResourceUMC.