For today’s #LentArt post I’m once again prompted by the recommended psalm. In times like these I inevitably spend more time in the Psalms, with their compendium of responses to human life in all its variety. In this case it’s Psalm 146:
Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.
He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them - he remains faithful forever.
He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord.
Psalm 146 (NIV)
In some ways this Psalm is a corrective counterbalance to some of what I was saying yesterday. Whilst we look to our leaders (anointed or not, handsome or not) all of them are fallible. Our fate does not lie wholly in their hands and so we are instructed “Do not put your trust in princes” nor Prime Ministers, nor Presidents, nor any politician, nor indeed “in human beings, who cannot save.” Instead we are to told to put our hope in “The maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them.”
And that is where the picture, "Looking Across Lake Chelan" by Abby Williams Hill, comes in, although if truth be told, it probably owes as much to Psalm 121, which has been in my mind, and posts, over the past few days. In it we have the psalmist looking to the mountains or hills for help, perhaps expecting reinforcements to come pouring over them to rescue Jerusalem from a besieging enemy, (like the riders of Rohan coming to the rescue of those trapped within Helm’s Deep in Tolkien’s “The Two Towers” but instead being encouraged to look not to the hills but the maker of the hills.
In reflections over the weekend the hills in my mind were the hills that cradle Belfast, prompting in my mind the citizens of this frightened city being cradled in the arms of the God who made those hills. But in today’s image we have the much more impressive mountains of the Northern Cascades in Washington State, USA, that I visited last summer. When I sailed up that lake last June, to go and speak in Holden Village, the water was sparkling and the mountain tops stood out sharply against the cloudless blue sky. I suspect that Abby Williams Hill’s slightly more sombre rendering is a fairer representation of how things stand at present, not just physically, because of the season, but also emotionally, because Washington is a covid-19 hotspot, and high on my lengthening list of “To Do’s” is to contact the folks in Holden to see if my visit is still on the cards, especially given that my ticket is not yet booked and President Trump has currently suspended all air travel from Europe to the US. So I don’t know whether I will get to look to those mountains again this year…
But again we no more look to the mountain or the hills than we do to Presidents or Prime Ministers but to the God who made the mountains.
Political leaders come and go but the mountains and hills remain, and even more so the God who stands behind them.
And whatever the political opinions of our leaders the God who made the heavens and the earth is a God who “upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry…” who, “lifts up those who are bowed down” and who, notably in the light of too much of this “every nation look after its own” approach at present “watches over the foreigner” as well as “sustains the fatherless and the widow.”
We’re also told that “he frustrates the ways of the wicked…” which given the frustrating, if not frankly wicked, behaviour of hoarders, scam-merchants, hedge-funds profiteering from crashing stock and some businesses casting off staff while paying dividends and bonuses to their investors, is somewhat comforting.
That is the God whom we claim to worship.
PRAYER (based by material devised by Moira Laidlaw, and posted on Liturgies Online. http://www.liturgiesonline.com.au/)
We praise you, O God, for being not only the God of history but the God of our story.
You are the one to whom all power belongs,
The power that fashioned the heavens and the earth
That scooped out the sea and created every creature within it,
yet you care for the weak and powerless. You care for us.
We praise you for joining your story to ours in such a special way through Jesus, our Lord.
He proved his great love for you and for us in the way he lived:
releasing the captive, lifting up the burdened, empowering the powerless.
God, source of lovingkindness and strength, we worship you.
Jesus, foundation of our faith, we worship you.
Holy Spirit, ground of our very being, we worship you. Amen
Shalom
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