o placid psalmist

yesterday’s homily, in which the psalmist reminds me of too many men I’ve known

Psalm 37:1-12, 41-42

1 Do not fret yourself because of evildoers; *
do not be jealous of those who do wrong.

2 For they shall soon wither like the grass, *
and like the green grass fade away.

3 Put your trust in the Lord and do good; *
dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

4 Take delight in the Lord, *
and he shall give you your heart's desire.

5 Commit your way to the Lord and put your trust in him, *
and he will bring it to pass.

6 He will make your righteousness as clear as the light *
and your just dealing as the noonday.

7 Be still before the Lord *
and wait patiently for him.

8 Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers, *
the one who succeeds in evil schemes.

9 Refrain from anger, leave rage alone; *
do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.

10 For evildoers shall be cut off, *
but those who wait upon the Lord shall possess the land.

11 In a little while the wicked shall be no more; *
you shall search out their place, but they will not be there.

12 But the lowly shall possess the land; *
they will delight in abundance of peace.

41 But the deliverance of the righteous comes from the Lord; *
he is their stronghold in time of trouble.

42 The Lord will help them and rescue them; *
he will rescue them from the wicked and deliver them,
because they seek refuge in him.

A few weeks ago I was at lunch with a couple of women, and we were talking about our worries. One of these women told me that in her anxiety, she’d been reading Psalm 37 every day, and finding comfort in it.

This is a beautiful practice, and one I’d like to adopt. But first I’ve had to do some wrestling.

Because when I read the first line of this Psalm – do not fret yourself because of evildoers – my instinctual response is not to take a deep breath of relief, and rest in God, but to get a little irritated by it. If you’re not fretting, I want to say to the psalmist, you’re not paying attention. Or worse: if you’re not fretting, maybe you don’t actually care about your neighbors.

Because the evildoers are real – and they’re hurting my neighbors here and around the world, and you, o placid psalmist, are telling me to calm down and not be so emotional about it? (Too many men have said this to me over the course of my life when I’m upset about people being oppressed.)

So. There’s my confession. My immediate reaction to the Psalmist and his certainties

is not trust in God but

anger and grief and my own certainty that the Psalmist is just not taking the evildoers seriously enough. Like maybe the evildoers are not hurting him directly [yet] and so he’s able to keep it all at arm’s length. Like maybe he’s one of the white moderate pastors who told Martin Luther King Jr to just be patient in the face of oppression. MLK - you know this - replied “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

I’m not alone in responding with some skepticism to this Psalm. The Jewish poet Jacqueline Osherow wrote a response to it called “Psalm 37 at Auschwitz.” In her poem, she wonders if it’s possible that those interned in concentration camps found solace in Psalms like this. She writes:

What I want to know is:
could he have tried,
Before his slow death from starvation,
To bring himself a little consolation
By reciting all those psalms inside his head?
Just a little longer and there will be no wicked one,
He'd murmur to a shovel full of ash,
You'll contemplate his place and he'll be gone.
Unless he was too busy saying kaddish
For his father-lost a few days before
Along with his own reservoir of psalms,
Still stunned by the crudeness of the cattle car…¹

If we want to take the promises of God seriously
then we have to be willing to hold them against the very worst of the evil that we see in the world.

One thing I like about that poem, which I’ve been reading and re-reading this week, and of which I’ve only quoted you a bit – is that it is serious about the question, and also that it refuses to answer it. Could they find a little consolation in those words in a concentration camp?

There is space in the poem for us to wonder honestly too: can Scripture provide solace, even when we are realistic about the harm that evildoers are doing?

*

When you have an emotional reaction to a bit of Scripture, as I do with this Psalm, it’s an invitation to wrestle, as Jacqueline Osherow does in her poem. One way to wrestle is to write a response, a lament, as she did –

My wrestling led me to look more closely at the Hebrew words. If the Psalmist tells me three times not to fret, maybe I’d better figure out exactly what fretting is.

Robert Alter – Jewish poet and translator – doesn’t use the word fret in his translation. He says don’t be incensed. The verb in Hebrew conveys the idea of burning or kindling, of a fire that’s stoked to get hotter and hotter.

Don’t tend the fire of your anger, the Psalmist might be saying. Don’t go looking for more kindling to throw on the pile.

*

If I am not to tend the fires of anger, what am I to tend?

A few lines down, the Psalmist continues

Put your trust in the Lord and do good; *
dwell in the land and feed on its riches.

but again the English translation obscures something. The Hebrew doesn’t say feed on its riches. It says feed (the translator supplied the supposed object – the land’s riches.) Trust in the Lord, do good, dwell in the land and feed. That word feed is often translated as shepherd or pasture or tend. Trust in the Lord, do good, dwell in the land and tend. What are we supposed to tend? The land in which we’re dwelling, perhaps. But perhaps also our trust. I imagine my trust in God, even now, forty years old, still like a newborn lamb, unsteady on her feet but always eager to explore a little beyond until she gets herself lost. The Psalmist is saying trust in the Lord and shepherd that trust like a little lamb. Keep bringing your prone-to-wander-trust back to the patch of delicious green grass that is God’s provision.

Anton Mauve, A Shepherdess and Her Flock

I can tend the fire of my anger, a consuming blaze, and find myself consumed.
Or I can tend my trust, like a lamb on a hillside, and find myself nourished, and finally able, like my friend, to pray this Psalm and find the deep comfort that it holds.²

*

It’s true that there are some people who say “don’t fret” and “wait on the Lord” as a way of avoiding looking straight on at the evil and the evildoers in the world (and it’s true that this still makes me angry). Perhaps the suffering is too great, and so they say “Don’t worry – God is in control,” and stuff their ears with cotton and tuck in to a nice dinner and a little too much wine and find a bingeable tv show to watch. That’s not tending our trust in God. That’s avoidance of reality.

Tending my trust in God – being still before God, waiting for God – does not equal pulling the wool over my own eyes about the realities of evil, or keeping silent about it when I see it. It means being aware of it, and choosing to trust, anyway. It means acknowledging the grief and the tenderness that are underneath my anger, and bringing all of those emotions with me to God.

Such trust, such stillness, is not inactive. As my friend Ragan says,

“Being still at a lunch counter sit-in is something very different from mere passivity.”

*

At the risk of piling image on image here: It’s another poem that has helped me picture such stillness this week.

Hilda Domin was a German Jew forced to flee her homeland as antisemitism flared in the early 1930s. One of her last poems is called “Don’t Grow Weary”:

Don’t grow weary
but hold your hand out
quietly
to the miracle
as if to a bird.

This is a kind of stillness that is active. Alert. Openhanded. Expectant. Responsive to the other. That knows where attention should be given –

not to the flames of rage that threaten to burn us alive. We are called to a different and more difficult ethic, one of loving our enemies and returning good for evil.

We are called to tend things that can grow, not things that destroy.

Trust in the Lord.

Do good.

Don’t kindle your anger; shepherd your trust.

Hold out your hands.

God comes like a bird.

---

Threeish Things:

• Lent begins Wednesday, March 5. If that means Fish Fridays are in your future, here is my favorite salmon bowl.

• Lent is also a good time to consider the rite of reconciliation (that is, the practice of confessing your sins to God in the company of a priest). Last year I wrote a three-part series about confession. It begins here, with a story about a train ride I took in Germany twenty-three years ago.

• In Sunday School yesterday we were discussing strategies for dealing with the overwhelming amount of terrible news. One woman said she’s stopped checking her social media apps at all. She gets her news from NPR, and she’s also signed up for the Episcopal church action alerts. When she gets an email from them, she contacts her representatives. Seemed like a good strategy to me!

• Did you know that if you are a PBS donor of at least $5/month, you have PBS Passport, which means you can watch All Creatures Great and Small (new season streaming now!) and Sherlock (which, it turns out, might be the next family show in this household) and Magpie Murders and Ken Burns’s documentary The National Parks? Just throwing that out there in case anyone is thinking of canceling their Amazon Prime :-)

• Thirty Lonely But Beautiful Actions You Can Take Right Now

  

  Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
  Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.
  

1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4613905

2. Though to be quite honest, I still tend to pray it more like: “God, help me not to fret, and make those evildoers wither away like the green grass RIGHT NOW so that I don’t have to see their stupid faces on tv anymore.”