Psalm
71
A fascinating aspect of the Psalms
is that they show up time and time again in the oddest places.
A few weeks ago I was watching an
episode of Orange Is the New Black,
which is hardly the most religiously attuned series. It deals with life inside a prison and the
lives of the women who have been sentenced, some of them for life. At times it does flashbacks to how they ended
up there. One character is a Dominican
woman who has two sons, an abusive boyfriend, and a protective aunt. There’s a scene where she and the aunt are
sitting on a park bench while the sons play.
The mother has a black eye and the aunt is telling her to get away
before the boyfriend starts beating the children, too. That’s when the boyfriend shows up and calls
to the mother, expressing his remorse and wanting to get back together. Despite the aunt’s wisdom, the woman walks
over to talk to the boyfriend. The aunt
gathers the children to her side and begins to recite Psalm 71 in Spanish,
"En
ti, Señor, me refugio ;
No
sea yo avergonzado…”
“In you, O Lord, I take refuge;
let me never be put to shame.
In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;
incline your ear to me and save me.
Be to me a rock of refuge,
a strong fortress, to save me,
for you are my rock and my fortress.
let me never be put to shame.
In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;
incline your ear to me and save me.
Be to me a rock of refuge,
a strong fortress, to save me,
for you are my rock and my fortress.
Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked,
from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
For you, O Lord, are my hope,
my trust, O Lord, from my youth.”
[Psalm
71:1-5]
“Who are you praying for, Tia?” asks one child. “For your mother,” she answers, as she
watches her niece making a very bad decision.
And you just know she is praying with her whole heart for all of them at
once, speaking words known and spoken by thousands upon thousands of others in
terrible situations throughout the centuries and around the world.
The Psalms echo
time and time again with that prayer, because all too often people face
situations where their only help is God and where their hope is for something
beyond this world, which is a fallen one where there is not always a happy ending
and where the hero doesn’t always win and where the innocent do get hurt. The Psalms – the Bible as a whole – is not at
all naïve about there being evil in the world.
The good news is that God, in Christ, conquers evil, not that there is
no struggle.
While we are in the midst of life, we often need protection and
there are cases where it comes in the next life. That’s a fact that can be twisted and
misused. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin
did that, sadly, following the example of those who had used bad theology for
their own ends or to justify their own greed, saying, “Just put up with
injustice now. You’ll get your reward
later.” That is definitely not what the
Christian faith teaches, any more than any of the Old Testament prophets had
taught. Lenin said,
“Those who toil and live in want all their lives are taught by religion
to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the
hope of a heavenly reward. But those who live by the labor of others are taught
by religion to practice charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap
way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a
moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven. Religion
is opium for the people.”[1]
He said that, and he was describing a warped version of religion
that, may God forgive us, we have allowed some people to get away with. The consequences have been tragic. Even so, we cannot stop proclaiming the full
message that our refuge is not in any source other than God, and that what we
are given is full and sufficient.
What Lenin and Marx and their followers missed was the
awareness that along with endurance under oppression comes the promise of
deliverance, as when the Hebrew slaves in Egypt labored under the Pharaoh’s
whips, and their cries rose to God, and God heard them.
What they missed was the awareness that for real and
lasting change to take place, those who labor and are heaven laden need to know
that at any moment, not just when their burdens are lifted by death, they can
turn to the Lord, and find rest.
What they missed was the degree to which hope itself is
the gift of God, and part of what keeps people going is the knowledge and
prayer that says,
“This is my
Father’s world;
O, let me
ne’er forget
That though
the wrong seems oft so strong
God is the
ruler yet.”
People who have been down and out can hold onto that, and find
the strength to rise above whatever they face, not through their own power, but
through the assurance that comes from the Spirit of God.
Remember that “down
and out” doesn’t always mean that you’re on the street, either. Everybody, if they are honest, will face
situations where they are powerless against trouble. You may find yourself looking on as a sister
or brother or child or friend gets swallowed up by addiction and there’s not a
thing you can do about it but suffer along in your own way. Yet do not ever rule out the ways that God
will find to break through. Even in the
worst case scenario, who is to say that someone’s remorse with their last
breath will not be looked at by the Lord with infinite mercy?
To take refuge in the Lord is to trust in life and in death,
sometimes not knowing which you face, but trusting all the same.
I knew a mother whose daughter developed anorexia and who did
not know what to do, until finally she would sit across the table from the girl
and would eat only as much as she did, matching her forkful-by-forkful and bite-by-bite
until the daughter saw her mother’s emaciation beginning to mirror her own and
came to understand that if she wanted her mother to survive, she would have to
return to a healthy weight. While that
went on, the mother took refuge in a hope that was desperate but real, and
which won through, all by the power of love, the power of God.
May God keep us
from the time of trial, but when it comes, we know enough to take refuge in God
through faith in his love and his care both in this world and in the world to
come, a love that we have seen confirmed in Jesus. And so, says the psalmist, and so, say we:
“I will hope continually,
and will praise you yet more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
of your deeds of salvation all day long,
though their number is past my knowledge.
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God,
I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.”
and will praise you yet more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
of your deeds of salvation all day long,
though their number is past my knowledge.
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God,
I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.”
[Psalm
71:14-16]
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