Apr 28 2019 Psalm 145

The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.

I’ve seen calendars and memes full of pithy comments from the psalms. Maybe it’s the artificially enhanced sunsets or the puppies, but I’ve never been called to those. But actually reading through the psalms themselves, day after day? That’s more compelling. 

I find it intriguing that they seem to capture all human emotions. There are psalm for all occasions. Happy, lamenting, grief, despair, joy, violence, retribution. It’s all there. I’m intrigued that the compilers of the book we know as the Psalms included all these. 

There have been times in human history where the gods were seen as mean and punishing. That is not a god you’d rail against, for fear of retribution. Nor is it a god to which so much praise is offered. 

Maybe the psalms reflect humanity’s changing understanding of God; our God, unlike the understanding of the gods of yester-yester-year, is able to withstand all of humanity’s grief, lamenting, anger, pleas for retribution and justice. Our God is actually on our side, and like a really good friend, can sit with us at our pity party. 

Our God is worthy of the kind of praise piled on in the psalms. 
Maybe the writers of the psalms were newly aware of a God who in fact is gracious and full of compassion. We read the psalms all these years later with our modern understanding of a God who is good, all the time, and wonder why there’s so much praising. Yes, of course God is full of great kindness. That’s the narrative I’ve heard my whole life. Maybe that’s not the narrative the psalm writers had heard, so to them, it’s a shocking revelation. 

This morning, I’m thinking about those kinds of epiphanies, where, like the psalmist, we learn something that is counter to all of our previous thoughts and understandings. We make statements during that time of transition, that are shocking, and plainly express our new-found understanding. When everyone around us is in that same before-space, the statements are universally heard as new. 

If the gods had been previously understood and experienced as punitive, for the psalmist to write that God is worthy of praise, that would have been shocking. But now, in our new understanding, it’s not shocking. It’s a statement of what is. It has become the norm. In my world, things that are new and surprising to me now, will be normal, eventually. 

I’m thinking about all the ways life has and will be changing in my world. About all the statements that I make that today, and how they sound radical to me and those around me, because they’re different than my yesterday understandings. I'm thinking about all sorts of changes and transitions around me, and how change starts as shocking, and eventually becomes the new normal.  

I’m grateful for a God that can hear my cries, and who is fact, gracious and full of compassion.