Mark 1:21-28

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Genesis 1:1-5

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Luke 2:1-7

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Mark 1:1-8

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Matthew 25:31-46

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1 Thessalonians 5:1-11

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Matthew 23:1-12

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World Communion Sunday

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20

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Ask any of your friends, “How are you?” and many of them are likely to answer with variations on the same answer, “I am so busy.” There is sadness and exhaustion in those words, but there is a little bit of pride in them too. If we are busy, then maybe we are also valuable and significant. Maybe we are indispensable. Maybe we matter.

Some of us are not as busy anymore as we once were. Loss of job, loss of health, loss of mobility – all of these can force us to stop with the busyness. For many, this can raise questions of identity and worth. Who are we if we are not busy? Do we still matter if we are not producing the way we used to?

Whether we find ourselves to be too busy or not busy enough, we stake an awful lot of our value on what we do, on what we produce with the time we spend.

“Time talks,” cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall writes, arguing that time “can shout the truth where words lie.”ⁱ How we spend our time tells who we are, and what we value.

What does time say about you?

I’m not entirely sure what my time would say about me, but I know what I would say about it. It goes too fast. I don’t have enough of it. I’m never sure if I’m using it as well as I should be.

I’m not alone in these thoughts and fears. If each of us had all the time in the world, how we used our time wouldn’t matter so much. But the fact that we have such a limited amount, and the fact that, the more time we’ve lived, the faster it seems to go mean that time does matter, very much. Time flies – whether you’re having fun or not.ⁱⁱ This makes us sad, and anxious, and sometimes guilty. We feel guilty for being too busy – and not having the time to spend with friends and family – and we feel guilty for not being busy enough – maybe we are wasting the time we have. There just never seems to be enough time to do everything that needs to be done.

Humans have always grappled with the fleeting nature of time, but life has never moved at quite the pace it does now. Most of our ancestors, even many of our recent ancestors, lived lives governed by the rhythms of the sun and the seasons. This meant there was natural downtime, a time for rest and renewal. Our own lives are largely unmoored from these rhythms. We live them instead by the light of screens, and with 24-hour access to information, entertainment, and commerce. But instead of making us happier than our ancestors, all of it seems to just make us more frenzied.

We try to manage the frenzy with time-saving devices and multitasking. But many of us find ourselves yearning for something more, some stronger response to the crushing sense that time is chewing us up. What we need, in the end, is not more time, but time of a different quality, time that can be dwelled in rather than wrestled with.  Time that can reshape us.

Christian theologian Dorothy C. Bass argues that the stronger response we need is something that is already in our Christian tradition, waiting to be remembered and recovered. What we need is Sabbath – one day a week for rest and for worship. “Whether we know the term Sabbath or not,” she writes, “we the harried citizens of late modernity yearn for the reality. We need Sabbath, even though we doubt that we have time for it.”ⁱⁱⁱ

The very word – Sabbath – may sound archaic to our ears: some quaint practice of people who had more time than we do. For others, the word has negative connotations: a legalism – a day when people were not allowed to have any fun. But such a view is a narrow and shallow understanding of what is meant to be a deep and powerful delight.

Our Old Testament reading this morning came from Exodus, a continuation of the story we’ve been reading for awhile now. We call this passage the Ten Commandments. In fact, the passage begins not with law but with liberation: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Everything that follows, follows from freedom. This is how life lived together in freedom should be shaped. Homiletician Tom Long writes that the good news of God’s liberation is like music, and “the commandments are the dance steps of those who hear it playing.” Because God has brought you out of slavery, you are free not to need any other gods. You are free from the tyranny of idols. You are free from the forces of covetousness.^iv We call them the Ten Commandments, but they could just as well be called the Ten Freedoms.

The longest of these ten is the fourth one: Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.

This word is just as important as any of the others – don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t commit adultery – but most of us don’t treat it as important at all. We take ourselves and our obligations too seriously, and we don’t take this commandment seriously enough. We treat it not as a commandment, but as a suggestion. We treat it not as an invitation to freedom, but as a dreary and outdated obligation.

Dorothy Bass tells a story of sitting around the dinner table one Saturday night with a group of teacher friends. They all complained about how much grading they had to do the following day, in order to return papers to their students on Monday.

And so we whined (she writes) and as we whined our complaints gradually shaded into boasts. Someone listening in might have thought that we were competing to see who had to grade the most, who worked hardest, and who was most put upon by the demands of his or her job.

That’s when it hit me. “Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.” This was a commandment, one of the ten laws in the basic moral code of Christianity, Judaism, and

Western civilization, and here we were, hatching plans to violate it. I could not imagine this group sitting around saying, … “I’m planning to commit adultery”; “I think I’ll steal something.” Yes, we might occasionally break one of the other commandments, … but if we did, we would hardly boast. Our approach to the Sabbath commandment was different. We had become so captivated by our work, so impressed by its demands on us and by our own indispensability, that it had simply vanished from our consciousness. We were in the habit of churchgoing, though our whines included a little complaint even about this. But I knew in my bones that we were a long way from keeping the Sabbath holy.^v

I’m guessing that most of us are a long way from that, too. I know I am. In fact, just sitting with this commandment over these last couple of weeks, I have felt such an intense combination of guilt and longing. Guilt, because I have failed to take this commandment seriously enough. And longing, because I yearn for the kind of spiritual rest and renewal and relationship that this commandment offers.

I go to church every Sunday, obviously, but this commandment is an invitation to more than church-going. It is an invitation to life-changing. Our worship together is an essential part of Sabbath, but it is only one part. Theologian Marva Dawn writes about Sabbath as a time for ceasing, for resting, for embracing, and for feasting – a comprehensive way of approaching one day each week, to reorient us toward God for the rest of the week.

I know people who take the command to keep the Sabbath holy seriously, some are Jews, some are Christian. They work hard for six days a week, and then when Sabbath comes, they stop. They are no less busy than the rest of us, but for that one day, they set aside the anxiety over getting things done and spend the day instead focused on enjoying God and enjoying people.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes of her Sabbath practice, “One day each week I (live) as if all my work (is) done. I (live) as if the kingdom (has) come and when I (do) the kingdom (does come), for 25 hours at least…. Sabbath is no longer a good idea or even a spiritual discipline for me. It is an experience of divine love that swamps both body and soul. It is the weekly practice of eternal life….”^vi

Can you imagine how such a practice could change a life over time? Set aside the seeming impossibility of it for a moment and consider it. Consider a day without all the things that occupy our attention and burden our souls. Consider a day without work – not just the work you get paid for, but the work of the house and the yard and the bill-paying. Can you consider a day without any of that? What about a day without worry? A day without shopping or errands? A day – or even just an afternoon – without the texting or the tweeting or the TV or the internet? Whoa – I realize I’m getting pretty radical. Let’s go further. It’s not just a day for “withouts” – what is the day for? How about a day for real rest? A day for joy. A day for cultivating real relationship with God and with others. A day for intentionality. A day for feasting. A day for friendship and for family. A day for long walks and long conversations. A day for music. A day for creativity. A day for play. A day to pray. A day for whatever feeds your soul. A day for being free of trying to manage your time and your life; a day to remember that God is God, and we are not.

Maybe you can’t imagine a whole day, free, like this. Maybe you need to start with a few hours, or an afternoon. Start where you are. Receive what you can.

The fourth commandment is a radical rule. It is a command to delight in the life we’ve been given. A command to embrace our freedom, to enjoy God and each other and creation. It’s an invitation to a revolution. Because it really is revolutionary to resist, even for a day, the forces of consumerism and worry. It really is revolutionary to resist slavery in all its forms. It’s revolutionary to resist the notion that the primary measure of human value is efficiency.

It is also revolutionary in what it envisions globally. The command to keep Sabbath holds up an image of countercultural justice. The freedom offered is freedom for all. On the seventh day, you shall not do any work, God declares, nor your family, your slaves, your animals, or the foreigners in your town. Out and out this revolution is meant to ripple – renewal and celebration for all.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book The Sabbath, wrote that time is our greatest challenge, because we cannot conquer or control it. He argued that honoring the Sabbath is how we are meant to meet the challenge of time. “We cannot solve the problem of time through the conquest of space, through either pyramids or fame. We can only solve the problem of time through sanctification of time. To men alone time is elusive; to men with God time is eternity in disguise.”^vii

Eternity in disguise – that is the gift that Sabbath offers us. There are few ideas as spiritually powerful as the idea of Sabbath, Heschel argued. It’s a gift with the power to change our lives if we open ourselves to receive it. As a person who struggles to receive this gift, I’m not in much position to give advice on how to do it well. But I do know this much: we need this gift. Now more than ever our world needs it, too. We need the radical notion that we are not what we do or what we produce. We are loved and valued entirely, for who we are, not what we do, and to keep Sabbath is to practice receiving that reality, opening ourselves to God’s grace and giving only ourselves in return. It’s a commandment. It’s a commandment. Maybe we could try to live by it.

_______________________

^I Dorothy C. Bass. Receiving the Day. Preface.

^Ii Favorite saying of Leona DuVall, one of my former parishioners.

ⁱⁱⁱ Bass. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=318

^iv Tom Long “Dancing the Decalogue.” The Christian Century. March 7, 2006.  online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3333

^v Bass. Receiving the Day. 35% (Kindle)

^vi Barbara Brown Taylor “Sabbath Resistance.  The Christian Century. March 31, 2005. http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2005-05/sabbath-resistance

^vii Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath. 100.

Exodus 16:2-15

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One of the great joys of parenting is when your child actually seems to “get” something you’ve been trying very hard to teach him. One day, when our sons were in kindergarten, their teacher pulled me aside to let me know that one of them had explained to the entire class the difference between a want and a need. The teacher was impressed; we were thrilled and proud. If you have children, then you know – when it comes to needs and wants, they don’t often seem to know the difference.

The problem is, I often don’t seem to know the difference either. And this child of mine does not hesitate to keep trying to educate me. I can say the most innocuous thing – “I need to clip your fingernails” – and he will respond, “Not need. Want. You want to clip my fingernails.” Or, “I need a little snack.” “That’s not a need, Mom, that’s a want. You don’t need a snack.” That kid doesn’t pull any punches.

I asked him recently to tell me exactly what the difference is, between a need and a want. “A need is something you gotta have to keep you alive,” he explained. “A want is something that won’t keep you alive, like cigarettes.” Later, he clarified: Well, it can help keep you alive, but you don’t have to have it to stay alive. It is very clear to him that the difference between need and want has to do with survival.

The Israelites did not always understand that difference.

They had been led by Moses out of Egypt, where they had been oppressed, abused, and enslaved. In the beginning, they were jubilant – happy to be free, grateful to be delivered from bondage, praising God, whose presence went with them. But it didn’t take long before they started grumbling. They got hungry. And then they got anxious. They complained against Moses and Aaron, and then they said the most remarkable thing, “If only we had died.” This is what fear can do – it can distort our perception. With freedom came anxiety, and the people began to think that the certainty of death would have been better than the uncertainty of freedom.

“If only we had died … in Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.” And they accuse Moses of bringing them out into the desert to die of hunger. Notice how their anxiety distorts their memory, even of the recent past. They remember Egypt as a place of meat and bread, a place of abundance, where they never went hungry. And that was true, at least in the physical sense. When they were in Egypt, they were not hungry for bread or meat. But their memory is selective. They leave out the part about the abuse and the oppression and the slavery. Their bodies had been enslaved but at least their bellies were full. If you had to choose between freedom and food, which would you choose? What is a want and what is a need? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

God seems to respond to both. Their deep need, their long-term hope, was for freedom and well-being. Their short-term anxiety was about food, physical, real, now. God does not rebuke them – not for their anxiety, not for their grumbling, and not for their yearning. They are not reprimanded for not trusting that the God who delivered them would also sustain them. God just responds.

They yearn for food, and they will receive it – but not the way they are dreaming of. Not with pots of meat, and not with bondage either.  God promises instead to make it rain bread.

The catch is this – they can only collect as much as they need for the day. It can’t be hoarded. It won’t keep. God would provide enough – everyone would have exactly what they needed, without having to worry about getting more.

The first time it happened, they were confused and surprised. “Man hu?” they said to each other, “What is it?” “Man hu?” And that’s where we get the name of it – manna. God made a promise, and kept the promise, and when that promise was fulfilled, the people looked right at it and asked, “What is it?”

It did not smell like the fleshpots they’d left in Egypt. It did not look like the bread they had eaten there. It was a fine, white, flaky substance. It looked like frost and it tasted like honey. “What is it?” the people ask. What it is, is God’s grace, God’s provision, God’s abundant love and care.

Morning by morning, it would rain down. But sometimes, people would still get anxious. They would start confusing their wants with their needs. They would try to get some extra, hide it away during the night, and when they woke up in the morning, it would be full of maggots, and it would stink. God’s grace must be trusted but mustn’t be hoarded. To grab too much shows a lack of trust.

For forty years, this is how God fed the people.  Manna was a daily reminder of God’s very earthy, very physical care of them. And later, when their journey in the wilderness was over, and food from the Promised Land was available to them, they would keep a jar of manna by the tablets of the law, to remind them of how they depended on God to provide for them in the wilderness. That jar sat there as an invitation, to still depend on God, even in the land of plenty.

Over the years, as people have read this story, the question about manna has still been asked a lot, “What is it?” Was manna a natural occurrence, or some sort of extraordinary miracle? The truth is, if you go to the Sinai peninsula, you can still find it.  There is a kind of plant lice there that feeds on tamarisk trees, and after they’ve fed, they excrete a honeydew. In the desert, this honeydrew dries rapidly and becomes a sticky solid – sort of white, fine, and flaky. It’s sweet. It tastes like honey. It spoils easily. And the people call it manna. Many people think it’s the same manna that those wandering Israelites ate all those centuries ago.

The people of Israel yearned for pots of meat and fresh hearty bread. God heard their complaint – God heard the want in it and God heard the need in it, and maybe God fed them with what was already right there. Honeydew from plant lice, mmm-mmm. And freedom. And all of it was enough, for all of them.

Some people balk at the idea of manna as a natural phenomenon. John Calvin went to great lengths to argue that the bread from heaven was “contrary to the order of nature.” We have a long history of imagining it as an extraordinary occurrence, bread raining down from heaven. But does manna have to be unnatural in order to be considered a miracle? Or could the miracle be the simple fact of it – a natural provision in an unexpected place, bug juice in the desert. Barbara Brown Taylor asks, “What makes something bread from heaven? Is it the thing itself or the one who sent it?”ⁱ

If the answer is the one who sent it, then it’s possible that everything we have is manna. If we can accept all we have as coming from God, then there is no end to the manna in our lives. There is no end to the miracle in our lives. All that we have has God in it. All that we have is abundance and grace. We pray every Sunday, “give us this day our daily bread,” and every day every one of us is taken care of. Every day, we have what we need to survive. Do we notice? Do we notice the One who has given us this day our daily bread? Do we recognize the presence of the One who, morning by morning, is faithful and present, in the most earthy and ordinary circumstances of our lives?

If not, then maybe what we need is not bread but eyes. Maybe we need to start looking at what we’ve got – the bread, yes, but also the friends, the family, the church, the work, the love, the life, maybe it’s time to start looking at all of it and asking, like the Israelites, “What is it?” And then letting our eyes be opened to what it really is – grace. God is in it, all of it. God is behind it, all of it. God sustains us. All that we have is the bread that God has given us to eat. We don’t always get what we want, but if we try sometimes, we might find we get what we need.

There is a Sabbath prayer from the Jewish Prayerbook Gates of Heaven, that goes like this:

Days pass and years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. Lord, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it.”

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ⁱBBT. Bread of Angels. Bread of Angels. 10.

Psalm 149

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Recently, I have fallen absolutely, entirely, enthusiastically and totally unexpectedly in love with a series of fantasy novels. The world created by George R. R. Martin in his Song of Fire and Ice series has me riveted. It is epic fantasy at its highest and fullest, and I love it. I know that I am not alone.

The stories, though complex, resonate with the simplest, deepest human struggles over good and evil, love and war, justice and power. As with many fantasy novels, warcraft and weaponry figure highly. In fact, swords have such a prominent place in these books that they seem themselves to be characters – they are even given names. There is Ice, Longclaw, Widow’s Wail, Oathbreaker, Lightbringer, Needle.

These swords are cherished companions, commissioned to help fulfill the highest hopes of the characters. It is with swords that terrible injustices are inflicted. It is with swords that great justices are accomplished. The swords carry the freight of putting into action their owners’ desires. The weapons act for evil – and they act for good.

The reader, of course, inevitably cheers for the good. We read such books, or watch such shows, in part to experience the triumph of justice over evil. Even those of us who would never raise a hand against another person – let along a sword or a gun – feel a sense of thrill and catharsis when the bad guy gets it. We root for the right swords to win. And when it comes to fiction, we don’t have a problem with this. Honestly, even when it comes to real life, we often don’t have a problem with it either. If might seems to be on the side of right, we will swallow our discomfort with violence and instead feel relieved and even vindicated. We can live with some violence if we believe greater violence and greater evil have been defeated. We can live with swords.

Except when they show up in our Scripture.

No matter how we feel about war in the “real” world, it makes most of us uncomfortable to read passages of the Bible extolling violence and vengeance. We don’t like our violence and our religion mixed. We know that some of the worst evil done in the history of the world has been done by people claiming to act on behalf of God.

I didn’t want to preach this Psalm this morning because of that. I thought that maybe I could preach part of the Psalm, and just stop before the uncomfortable part. But oftentimes, it’s the least palatable parts of Scripture that ought to be taken out and looked at, worked through and prayed with, learned from – and even claimed. So, like it or not, here we go.

Psalm 149 starts typically enough, with an invitation to praise:

Praise the Lord!

Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful.

Let Israel be glad in its Maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.

Let them praise God’s name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre.   (vv. 1-3)

The exuberance here is delightful, an invitation to sing, to dance, to make music – all of it is an exhortation to a full and right response to our Maker. In comparison to the psalmist’s images, our own worship comes off a bit pale. Where are our tambourines? Where is our dancing? Is our worship of God fittingly joyous? Does our faith move us to a full-bodied response? The psalmist challenges us as a community to get up and move, get up and sing, get up and make some noise. We heard in the Psalm we spoke together, the one that comes right before this one, Psalm 148, how every bit of creation raises its raucous voice in praise of God. The psalmist here exhorts us to get with it, too, to join the rest of creation in lavish offering.

“For the Lord takes pleasure in his people,” the psalmist goes on, “he adorns the humble with victory. Let the faithful exult in glory; let them sing for joy on their couches.” The call is to respond whole-heartedly to God, not just in the sanctuary, but on our couches, in our beds – from waking to bedtime. There is no sphere of life that is not touched by God’s love and sovereignty. There is no aspect of existence that cannot be lifted up to God’s glory.

It would be quite a nice psalm if it ended right there – a good reminder that all of life falls under the scope of God’s reign, and that all of life can be lived in grateful response to God’s goodness, and that our entire beings – voices, bodies, selves – should be given to this task. Wonderful! Praise God and Amen! But the psalmist won’t leave it there.

“Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands,” – and the whisk of steel that sounds so right in a fantasy novel crashes, and clangs, and makes us cringe when it shows up in our sacred texts. The psalmist puts these swords in the hands of the faithful – in our hands – and says we are to use them “to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, … to execute on them the judgment decreed. This is glory,” the psalmist says, “This is glory for all God’s faithful ones. Praise the Lord!”

For people like us, it is hard to go along with such bombast. It sounds so dangerous, so triumphalistic. We know the hazards of assuming our enemies are God’s enemies. In fact, this very Psalm was used by a German theologian to incite the German peasants to revolt in the early 1500’s. A hundred years later, a Catholic Cardinal appealed to this same Psalm when he called Catholic princes to war against the Protestants, kicking off the Thirty Years War.ⁱ How many zealots and extremists have used texts like these to justify the worst kind of violence? It is exactly these sorts of actions we have in mind when we distance ourselves from the parts of the Bible that talk about vengeance. We find this militaristic imagery problematic for good reason. Leave the swords in the fantasy stories, we would rather our faith be in the service of peace.

But isn’t it true that we yearn not only for peace – but also for justice? We want things to be put right. And ultimately, that is exactly what the psalmist’s call for vengeance expresses – a longing for justice, a deep desire for moral order, for goodness to cohere. The Psalms cry for vengeance repeatedly, without apology or embarrassment. And in the Psalms, vengeance is about justice. It is a declaration that somehow, someday, God will set things right; God wins.

The Psalms are so honest about this longing; we find it harder to be so. We fear such strong expressions, we try to keep them in check. The psalmist, however, doesn’t flinch. What is in us should be expressed – and what better place than in the context of worship? What is in us should be prayed. What is in us should be admitted and dealt with. John Calvin once described the Psalms as “An Anatomy of all Parts of the Soul.” ⁱⁱ They show us who we are, they show us what is in us, and they help us say it all out loud, to God. No human emotion is too raw or too ugly to speak to God.

But what do we do with it after having spoken it? What the psalmist envisions is the execution of justice, the righting of wrongs, the displacing of oppressors. He envisions not only that God wins but that we have a role to play in bring about God’s goodness and justice.

At bottom, this psalm is an affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God over all of life and an invitation for us to join God in his work in the world. In other words, if you can get past the swords, what you find is “a profoundly theological call to discipleship.” ⁱⁱⁱ Praise God! the psalmist says. Praise God fully! joyfully! noisily! Praise God! And now join God! Work with God for justice and righteousness and peace! Let your praise take on practical purpose!

What we sing and what we pray matters – it leads to action, or it should. If our praise is only on our lips and in our sanctuaries then it is false, it is not full. Praise – if it is true – must be linked to public practice. The psalmist reminds us that if the praises of God are going to be in our throats, then the work of God must also be in our hands.

It turns out that a sword is a good image for this after all, because our praise of God and our work with God does, in fact, happen in the face of opposition. The faithful life always involves a struggle. It really is a battle. Sometimes it is in violent contrast to the forces around us and within us. It is peace we are waging, and justice, and mercy, and goodness, and love, and hope – and all of it is at war with the ways of the world, and with our own selfish tendencies. To proclaim that God reigns, to praise God as sovereign and to live our own lives under the lordship of Christ – all of this is in opposition to our culture, in opposition to the temptation to see our own selves as rulers of our lives, and in opposition to the forces of cynicism, materialism, and despair. We have to fight every day against the seduction of selfishness, and faithlessness, and apathy.

So we put on our armor, which is made not of steel but of love. And we pick up our sword, which does, in fact, have a name. It is the sword of the Spirit. It is the word of God. That word was made flesh in Jesus, and in him all battles are won, not by might, but by the self-giving love of God’s own self. In the end, in love, he gave himself on a cross, surrounded by swords. He took all vengeance onto himself. He took all our rage and grief and terror and evil. He bore it all, and he set us free, for lives of compassion and praise. In him, all battles are already won. And we fight on his side when we, too, give ourselves every day in self-sacrificial love.

When we come into this place, when we come to this table, we are invited to bring our whole selves. And what is in us is fit to bring: Rage. Grief. Longing. Fear. Loneliness. A sense of helplessness. A sense of hope. Joy. Anticipation. Desire. Faith. Whatever is in you – bring it! Bring it, and praise God; praise God with your voice, with your body, with your life. Bring it all, every day. And as your prayers and your praise rise, open your hands, open your life, to the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, the person of Christ. Let him be in your hands, let him be in your mind, let him be in your heart, and let him lead your life into action – for peace, for justice, for freedom, for love, for good, for grace, for God.

______________________

ⁱ J. Clinton McCann, Jr. “Psalms.” The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume IV. Abingdon Press. 1996. 1276.

ⁱⁱ Brueggemann.  Praying the Psalms.  69

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.