psalms for passiontide: Holy Tuesday Psalm 70

Psalm 70 is a psalm for anyone (like me) whose faith seriously wobbles from day to day, moment to moment.  It is a psalm that is a cry for help, and the psalmist needs help in a hurry.  It is full of worry, of panic, and there is a growing sense of urgency as the poet pleads with God to respond:

O Lord make haste to help me!

… You are my help and my deliverer,

O Lord, do not delay!

(Psalm 70.1b, 5. NRSV)

Too often I want a God who is an on-demand-fixer of the discomfort of my now.  Unthinkingly, I absorb the zeitgeist of immediate gratification and transfer it to my spirituality.  I run after new insight, new revelation, new intensity, new sensation, all in a rush to find a reassuring feeling that I am in contact with You.

This psalmist asks for immediate deliverance from the situations where she is criticised, ridiculed and mocked; situations where it feels like everyone is against her; situations where she feels persecuted for being who she is.

This psalmist runs to God for sanctuary:

Let all who seek you

rejoice and be glad in you.

(Psalm 70.4 NRSV)

Suddenly I am pulled up sharp by this reminder to rejoice.  In the midst of all my frantic need for real change of the situations I find myself in, I am asked to rejoice?

I am asked to rejoice in You.  I am asked to rejoice in Your steadfast love, in Your constancy, precisely at the very moment when I feel most in danger.  And in order to rejoice I have to stop my hamster-wheel anxiety and be still; become utterly present to the I AM.

You are my present.  Your presence with me is joy. 

All the faith and trust I ever might need is in that statement.  So I repeat that reconnection with Joy, again and again, growing gladness in me with every repetition.

In the midst of all my sorrows, God keeps calling me out to gladness: there are always, always, things to rejoice over, if I will but look. 

Again I pray with the psalmist whose words I read yesterday:

open our eyes to light

(Psalm 36.9 The Message).

Again I pray with the psalmist whose words I read on Passion Sunday:

shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life

(Psalm 51.10 The Message)

exercising my rejoicing muscles. (iPhone image).