Today’s
Scripture Reading (June 2, 2019): Psalm
61
French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze argued that “You never walk alone. Even the devil is
the lord of flies.” If the greatest evil that we can imagine cannot keep the
flies away, then someone will always be attracted to us. Our problem and the
center of our loneliness is not that there is no one walking with us; instead,
our problem is that we do not have the right people willing to walk with us.
Too often we want people to walk with us who we really don’t need. We want
people who will stroke our ego, or who are willing to tell us that everything
will be alright, whatever the circumstance. We want these people but, usually,
these are not the people that we need in our life. These are often conditional
friends who only want to take from us what it is that we have, until the moment
when we have nothing else to give. And it is at that moment that they decide to
disappear.
We also want people who will
protect us when we are weak, and watch over us as we sleep. We need someone who
will be there when we have nothing left to give. We need these people to speak
truth into our lives, even when we don’t want to hear that truth. The
unfortunate reality of our existences is that, given a choice, we will always reject
these truth givers in favor of those who are willing to tell us that what we
are doing is always right. But these conditional friends never stay very long,
and when they leave we often feel that we are even more isolated than we were
before, and we begin to long for even a tormentor to come and be with us.
We don’t know exactly what was
going on in David’s life, but he is overwhelmed by something. And so he calls
to God from the ends of the earth (verse 2). From what we know of David, he
never journeyed far from the Promised Land, so this is not a literal statement
describing where the poet-king was on the globe, but rather one that echoes his
emotional state. At the time of the writing of this Psalm, David may have been
feeling alienated and isolated, maybe even experiencing a spiritual distance
from God. He longs to spend time in the Tabernacle, the tent of God. But more
than that, David longs to trust in the shelter of God’s wings. The imagery is
that of a bird protecting her young.
The imagery that David uses here
also takes us back to a time in the desert when Israel sat encamped around the
tent of God. Feeling a spiritual distance from God, he longed nostalgically for
the days when he could walk out of his tent and see the Tabernacle rising out
of the sea of tents belonging to his brothers and sister. David looks back to a
day when the spiritual distance between the people and God was literally
reduced to just a few steps. Maybe then David wouldn’t feel like he does at
this moment; alone and rejected by all who count in his life.
Tomorrow’s
Scripture Reading: Psalm 62
No comments:
Post a Comment