psalms

How Does God “Keep” Us?

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Psalm 121

Psalm 121 is “A Song of Ascents.” Eugene Peterson (The Message) calls it “A Pilgrim Song.” It is a psalm sung by the people of God as they made their way to the temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem is built on a plateau; no matter how you approach it, you’re traveling uphill. The temple was located on the highest part of the city of Jerusalem, so the entire journey was a journey uphill. The psalms were not just about the worship life of the people of God, however. The psalms were about all of life, every aspect, all goings and comings. The psalms remind us that our whole life is about how we worship God and how we abide in God’s presence, not just on holy days or on Sunday mornings, but at all times and in all places. As Wendell Berry writes, “There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

A form of the Hebrew word for “keep,” shamar, appears six times in the eight verses of Psalm 121. Clearly, God’s “keeping” is the psalm’s focus. What does it mean for God to “keep” God’s people? We might be tempted by the facile notion that if we trust in God, nothing bad will ever happen to us. “[God] will not let your foot be moved” sounds as though that may be the case. But we know that bad things happen to good people (and to bad people, and to all people) all the time. So, what does this “keeping” mean for us today? What does it mean for us to commit ourselves to God’s keeping, to trust in God’s keeping?

Verse 2 of the psalm gives us a clue:
“My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.”

It is central to this psalm that God is the author of Creation; as Psalm 24:1 puts it, “The earth is the LORD’s, and all that is in it; the world, and those who live in it.” We are part of Creation; we are of nature, not in it. The world God created sustains us with all we need to survive and thrive: food, water, clean air, rest, companions, our rational judgment, our compassion, and so much more. God’s creation “keeps” us; it is the “help” that God provides to every single one of us.

You might argue that not everyone has sufficient food and water, sufficient rest, sufficient companionship, and so on. God’s intention to “keep” us is threatened, not by anything God has done, but by human choice and action. The Interfaith Center for Sustainable Development notes, “’The foundational moral experience is reverence for the human person, and her/his environment.’ For centuries, Christian moralists have focused almost exclusively on the first part of this statement – ‘the person.’ The current environmental crisis extending from the later 20th Century to the present raises numerous challenges to that focus and other traditional approaches to Christian Ethics.”

It is impossible to have reverence for “the person” or any other creature without reverence for the Creation that sustains them. We always assume God cares that we stay within moral and spiritual boundaries. What about the moral and spiritual boundaries that preserve and care for God’s Creation? In an interview with Krista Tippett, biblical scholar and professor Ellen Davis said, “[T]he best index in the Bible of the health of the relationship between God and Israel or between God and humankind is the health of the land of Israel or the earth as a whole, its fertility. And I think at the root of it is the notion that we are a part of an intricate web of physical relations, which are at the same time moral relations.”

Our relations with the rest of Creation are moral relations. So doesn’t trusting God to “keep” us include reverence for God’s Creation? Doesn’t it mean committing ourselves to those boundaries that allow God to continue to sustain us, to “keep” us? Boundaries that value our fellow creatures, rather than driving them to extinction? Boundaries that ensure that our own species will survive and thrive? The question becomes not, “How does God ‘keep’ us?” but “Will we allow God to continue to ‘keep’ us?”

In the psalm, when the pilgrim lifts his eyes, he is making a choice (Psalm 121:1). He is choosing to look towards God, to worship God. There is no definition of worshiping God that does not include reverence for God’s Creation. We, like the pilgrim, are faced with a choice, a choice to live as though there are no unsacred places.

In this vein, the United Church of Christ reworked Psalm 121 as a Lenten prayer:

Living Psalm 121—Second Sunday of Lent

I lift up my eyes to the snow-capped mountains-
The green-sloped fields and the cliffs by the bay.
Oh, beautiful world!
Where will our help come? I cry to the skies.
Our guidance comes from God, our Co-Creator of heaven and earth.

Even as we sleep, our Maker will not rest.
Even when we turn our face away from creation’s needs,
God will continue to call us.

God who molds and carries the lands of
Israel and Palestine, United States and Mexico,
Russia, Botswana, Bhutan, Ecuador, and Australia
will neither slumber nor sleep-
Not as human walls are crafted, as sea levels rise, as land burns.

Our Maker offers us shade and tools
when temperatures climb and as hate surges.
Even as Creation burns with fevers,
we’re gifted the sun’s comfort and the moon’s compassion
to accompany us around the clock.

God our Maker will call us from all evil.
“Children, care for one another.
See this world as an extension of me and you,”
God will beg us.

And as we extend our hands to our neighbors,
to the grass below and sun above, we will see that God our Maker will keep our going out and our coming in
from this time on and until Heaven and Earth pass away.

Amen.

© Joanne Whitt 2026 all rights reserved.

Resources:
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship-planning/selah-life-in-a-minor-key/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-lectionary-planning-notes/second-sunday-in-lent-year-a-preaching-notes
Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet,” in Given (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005).
https://interfaithsustain.com/to-care-for-the-earth-ethics-and-the-environment/
Ellen Davis, in an interview with Krista Tippett, https://www.dailygood.org/story/2497/the-art-of-being-creatures-krista-tippett/
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/living_psalm_121_creation_justice_lent_2/

Out of the Depths

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Psalm 130

   Once you reach a certain age, you realize that into everyone’s life come times of crisis, times when it seems the bottom has fallen out.  Psalm 130 begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.”  We don’t know what happened to the psalmist.  Tradition says this prayer reflects King David’s anguish at the death of his son Absalom.  Absalom led an insurrection against his father, which must have been horrible enough.  David sent word to his army to spare the life of his son, but in spite of that, Absalom’s life came to a violent end.

   I’m glad the psalmist isn’t specific about Absalom or anything else because that way we can insert our own experience of what has caused the bottom to fall out.  When I served a congregation, I could look out at the folks in the pews on a Sunday morning and know that many people’s lives were going very well, at least that morning.  But sitting two pews up from these happy worshipers, or right behind them, or maybe even right next to them, chances are there was someone who was either in the midst of a crisis or whose memory of a crisis was very fresh.  Someone who had been out of work for months.  Someone dealing with dementia.  Someone who had just received a frightening diagnosis.  Someone whose child wouldn’t call them, or whose marriage had grown cold. 

   For many people in crisis, God seems not only distant but absent; it can feel as though God has abandoned you.  Notice that in Psalm 130, the psalmist assumes that Someone is already there to hear the cry.  “Let your ears, O God, be attentive to my need.”  The simple, unadorned cry for God to hear and to help is a prayer, and any prayer puts us squarely in front of God and opens our hearts to what God can do in us and through us.  Our prayers don’t need to be pretty or full of churchy words.  Joanna Adams writes, “If you ever find yourself in a valley so dark it makes the bottom of the well look like sunshine, remember this.  You do not have to outline the situation with appropriate sentence structure for the Almighty.  You do not have to compose perfect paragraphs.  You just have to know your need and know that God knows your need before you even put words to it.  God’s love is steadfast.  God’s love is plenteous enough for any terrible situation.  A cry in the dark suffices.”    

   Note also that the psalmist doesn’t blame God for whatever happened.  On a rainy night in 1983, William Sloane Coffin’s son Alex died in a car accident. Coffin, a minister and civil rights activist, was at his sister’s house the next day when one of her friends came by to offer comfort and a stack of quiches.  When the woman saw Coffin, she shook her head and said, “I just don’t understand the will of God when something like this happens.”  Coffin says instantly he was up and in hot pursuit.  “I’ll say you don’t, lady!”  He knew the anger would do him good, so he continued: “Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his?  Do you think it was the will of God that Alex was driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of [beers] too many?  Do you think it is God’s will that there [is] … no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?  My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves in Boston harbor closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” 

   Out of the depths we cry to God and discover that God is there ahead of us.

   In verse 3, the psalmist refers to his wrongdoings, his “iniquities.”  It’s very common for people in the depths to wonder, “Why is this happening to me?  Is God punishing me?”  Certainly actions can have consequences and bad actions can have bad consequences.  But the psalmist is correcting a wrong belief that God is a God of retribution.  He is denying the image of an angry God pacing back and forth up in heaven with a rolled up newspaper just ready to swat someone.  The psalmist tells us that he knows he has sinned but so has everyone else, and he knows that’s not why he’s stuck in the depths.  If that were the case, there would be no hope for anyone; the depths would be the only possibility.  But that is not God’s way, says the psalmist.  Forgiveness is the way of the Lord.  God’s way is reconciliation, not punishment. 

   The psalmist’s prescription is waiting and hoping, which is very, very hard when physical, emotional, or spiritual pain is severe.  That’s where the rest of us come in, those of us who are not in crisis, who are not in the depths – for now.  When church folks said to me, “I don’t have any hope left,” that’s when I’d say, “Then you’ll have to let those of us who love you hope for you.  You are carrying enough.  We will carry the hope for now.”

   Anne Lamott wrote in Traveling Mercies, “Our preacher … said recently that this is life’s nature: that lives and hearts get broken – those of people we love, those of people we’ll never meet.  She said that the world sometimes feels like the waiting room of the emergency ward and that we who are more or less OK for now need to take the tenderest possible care of the more wounded people in the waiting room, until the healer comes.  You sit with people, she said, you bring them juice and crackers.”

   That, my friends, is what church should be. 

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.

I Shall Not Want

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Psalm 23

“I shall not want,” says the psalmist. My first thought is that everybody wants something. Some things we want are good: I want children to grow up feeling valued and loved; I want the unemployed to find work, and the unhoused to find homes. I want the planet Earth to continue to support human life. I want school children to be safe from gun violence. I want quite a lot, really.

But the psalmist in Psalm 23 isn’t saying he’ll never desire anything. What he means is he is free from want – he has what he needs. A better translation of verse 1 is, “I lack nothing,” “I have everything I need to live a healthy, peaceful life.”

We know this doesn’t apply to everyone, locally or globally. In Pulitzer Prize-winning author Matthew Desmond’s book, Poverty By America, he explains that the United States is the richest nation in the world and yet we have more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Almost 1 in 9 Americans lives in poverty, including 1 in 8 children. There are more than 38 million people living in the United States who can’t afford the basic necessities. At the same time, we see billionaires hoarding money they couldn’t spend in a lifetime while their workers struggle to get by on two jobs. So, you have to wonder: Is there a way that this verse – “I have everything I need” – can be true for everyone? Because if there isn’t, this psalm could feel like a cruel joke, a gloating paean to privilege.

The beginning of the verse gives us a clue to what the psalmist means. “The Lord is my shepherd.” We’ve heard this psalm so often that the power of those words may be lost on us. The Lord is my shepherd, says the psalm, and then it lists all the basic necessities a shepherd provides for the sheep: food, water, and protection. In the second part of the psalm, the gracious host also provides for these needs.

Psalm 23 affirms that life is essentially a gift, a gift from the shepherd. And even though the psalm is spoken in the first-person singular, we know that the shepherd cares for the entire flock. It’s fine for one individual, this psalmist, to sing a song of gratitude and trust for what the shepherd provides. It’s not okay for any one sheep – or for any one person – to assume God has singled out just one individual or even just one group of individuals for the abundance of God’s gifts.

What if we lived as though, “The Lord is our shepherd”? When we say, “The Lord is my shepherd” we reject the claims of anyone else who seeks that status. It’s like saying, “The Lord is my shepherd – you’re not.” Who is the “you” in “you’re not”? It depends on who or what is oppressing us. In some countries, tyrannical regimes try to take the place of trust in God. In our culture, we’re bombarded with ads telling us we need a new car every few years, we need to wear the latest fashions, we need the newest iPhone even if our current phone works fine. Wealth is status, security, and the measure of a person’s worth. It’s not surprising that our society is characterized by what Alan Greenspan once called “infectious greed.”

But consumer culture is not our shepherd. Greed is not our shepherd. The Lord is our shepherd. A few years ago, a world hunger summit in Rome concluded that there’s enough food in the world today to feed everybody. Hunger isn’t caused by a lack of food but by the fact that some people don’t have the money to buy food. The problem isn’t supply. It is distribution. The Shepherd has provided enough for the basic sustenance of life. That is how “I shall not want” can apply to everybody. What this means is that the Lord is not the problem. We are. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every [one’s] need, but not every [one’s] greed.” Or as Matthew Desmond puts it, “America’s poverty isn’t for lack of resources. We lack something else.”

In order to address poverty in our nation and world, I agree with Desmond that the most important step is acquiring that “something else” that we lack: We need the will, the desire; we need to become “poverty abolitionists,” as Desmond puts it. That is our calling as those who trust that the Lord is our shepherd. The psalm doesn’t tell us we won’t face challenges, enemies, even death, but God has given us all we need to meet them. And: we have God. The focal point of the psalm is, “Thou art with me.” The whole Gospel tells us God is with us. Jesus was called “Emmanuel,” and that means “God with us.”

God is with us. Author Barbara Ehrenreich was asked in an interview what she would give up to live in a more human world. She answered, “I think we shouldn’t think of what we would give up to have a more human world; we should think of what we would gain.”

© Joanne Whitt 2024 all rights reserved.