Worship Weblog
Monday, March 12, 2007
Meditation on Psalm 6: Groan
Reading 2: Psalms 6-8
Psalm 6 focal phrase: “while you, O LORD—how long?” focal word: groan What struck me about this line is that it’s an incomplete sentence. A fragment. You expect the sentence to read, “while you, O Lord, ignore my cries,” or something like that. But the psalmist is too weary and too sick to even complete his sentence. All he can muster is groaning, he says in verse 6, and even that is getting too tiring. The syntax of verse 3 makes it feel more like a groan than a sentence. Some translations smooth this bumpy line out. The Geneva Bible rendered verse 3 this way: “My soule is also sore troubled/but Lorde how long wilt thou delay?” The NIV reads: “My soul is in anguish/How long, O LORD, how long?” The New Living Translation has this: “I am sick at heart/How long, O Lord, until you restore me?” In the words of these translations, the abbreviated utterance becomes a complete sentence, a rounded out thought. (more) Part of what makes the Psalms so poetic is their gut-wrenching expressions, their throaty, visceral, untidy ejections of emotion, their passion in both senses of the word: suffering and fervor. In English, sadly, this poetry often reads a little more like prose. We lose some of the shape of expression, the arcs and dips, the fits and starts. So I appreciate the versions of Psalm 6 that give us a feeling of halting, spontaneous cries. In the space of the dash between “O Lord” and “how long,” where a logical connector or conclusion should be placed, the psalmist instead wearily abandons his half-formed complaint and goes straight to his urgent request for relief. I read this Psalm very differently after learning (here) that this was the Psalm that David heaved out during the illness of the first child he had with Bathsheba (in 2 Samuel 12). The baby is dying as punishment for David’s capital crime, and his soul is bleeding guilt. In my first few readings of this psalm, without this background, I took it as more of a general cry of weary illness (one given title of Psalm 6 is “A Prayer for Mercy in Time of Trouble,” leaving “trouble” vague enough to accommodate a variety of maladies). Psalm 6 fits right in with its surrounding psalms (Psalms 3 through 7, 10, 12, and 13, to name a few in the same neighborhood)—a series of urgent complaints and demands that starts off this songbook on some startlingly discordant notes. We don’t get much of a warmup before we get to the wailing. Pastor Tim Keller says(mp3) that there are three things Christians can do with their emotions: hide them, vent them, or pray them. The desperate pleas of the opening psalms—8 of the first 13—model for us that third way, the biblical way. But the Bathsheba connection (which is left out in the introductory text above the psalm) frames the sick moans of Psalm 6 more specifically. The psalmist now has less of a sympathetic argument; his illness is self-inflicted. He’s getting exactly what he deserved for his conniving crimes. He knows he can’t plea bargain his way out of God’s wrath. He can’t lament, “Why, Lord?” So he pleads, “OK, I get it! Enough!” And he shows us that even that is a legitimate prayer. Even a sheepish, guilty whimper can be taken to God and plopped in front of him. The baby dies; Solomon comes next; the Bible continues. But the cries keep coming, from exile, from the cross, all the way into Romans 8: “We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” But then Paul makes this beautiful promise: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” The Spirit steps in and fixes and amplifies and raises our prayers, even when they’re just groans. Even when we can’t even complete the sentence.
More Meditations on the Psalms
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The Biblical Psalms and Christian Worship
Alban Weekly on ‘Designing a Staff Team for Ministry’
Whether you’re working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
Christian History on Andrew Walls
Andrew Walls was mildly incredulous when I phoned him in Aberdeen, Scotland, to ask for an interview. Of course he would gladly help me, he said in a restrained Scotch brogue, but was I sure I had the right person? He couldn’t understand why Christianity Today would want to write about him.
The reason is simple: Andrew Walls may be the most important person you don’t know. Most Americans and Europeans think of Christianity as a Western religion. Prominent leaders of the last 50 years, like Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, and Pope John Paul II, are known primarily for their influence in the West, though in fact each of them has played a significant role in wider, global Christianity. But the most important development for the church in the 20th and 21st centuries has not been in the West at all, but in the astonishing shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from the Western industrialized nations to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In a short time, Christianity has been transformed from a European religion to a global one.
Andrew Walls is the person to help us understand what this means. ...
Interdisciplinary Application • World • (0) Comments • Permalink
‘Makarios’ - ‘blessed’, not ‘happy’!
Makarios - “blessed; the state of one who has become a partaker of God; to experience the fullness of God.”
... Maka/riov is an adjective that is the long form of ma/kar in classical Greek. The idea embodied within this word is satisfaction from experiencing the fullness of something. Aristotle contrasted maka/riov with e¹ndeh/v which means “to be in want, to be needy, to be destitute.” In the New Testament, maka/riov is translated by the English words “blessed,” “fortunate,” and “happy.” However, the meaning “happy” (as we understand it in English) is not actually found in the New Testament. This is because the word happy comes from “hap” which means luck or a favorable circumstance. The actual concept of “happy” would be expressed by Greek words other than maka/riov, such as eu¹tuxh/v meaning “happy, lucky,” “fortunate,” or eu¹daimoni/a meaning “prosperity”. Once we remove the English concept of “happy” from maka/riov, its Greek meaning becomes clear showing us that maka/riov refers to the believer in Christ who is satisfied and secure in the midst of life’s hardships because of the indwelling fullness of the Spirit. ...
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Interdisciplinary Application • Language • (0) Comments • Permalink
Catapult on Faith and Music: “Tuning In”
A theme issue on music from catapult:
One of the most diverse and ancient art forms is music. Demonstrating its centrality to human culture, we have car radios, home stereos, live performance outlets in every church and town, and conferences dedicated entirely to exploring its connection to life lived faithfully in God. So what about faith and music?
Interdisciplinary Application • Music • (0) Comments • Permalink