1 O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
2 So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
beholding your power and glory.
3 Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.
4 So I will bless you as long as I live;
I will lift up my hands and call on your name.
5 My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,
and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
6 when I think of you on my bed,
and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
7 for you have been my help,
and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
8 My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.
9 But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
10 they shall be given over to the power of the sword,
they shall be prey for jackals.
11 But the king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall exult,
for the mouths of liars will be stopped.
Psalm 63[2]
1 O God of my life, I’m lovesick for you in this weary wilderness. I thirst with the deepest longings to love you more, with cravings in my heart that can’t be described. Such yearning grips my soul for you, my God!
2 I’m energized every time I enter your heavenly sanctuary to seek more of your power and drink in more of your glory. 3 For your tender mercies mean more to me than life itself. How I love and praise you, God! 4 Daily I will worship you passionately and with all my heart. My arms will wave to you like banners of praise. 5 I overflow with praise when I come before you, for the anointing of your presence satisfies me like nothing else. You are such a rich banquet of pleasure to my soul. 6–7 I lie awake each night thinking of you and reflecting on how you help me like a father. I sing through the night under your splendour-shadow, offering up to you my songs of delight and joy! 8 With passion I pursue and cling to you. Because I feel your grip on my life, I keep my soul close to your heart.
9 Those who plot to destroy me shall descend into the darkness of hell. 10 They will be consumed by their own evil and become nothing more than dust under our feet (or food for foxes). 11 These liars will be silenced forever! But with the anointing of a king I will dance and rejoice along with all his lovers who trust in him.
Today is Pentecost Sunday. It is the day the Christian church across the globe remembers her birth. For it is on this Sunday, 10 days after Jesus’ ascension – when he moved from this much-loved planet to carry on his work from home in heaven – that the group of frightened and fearful disciples huddled in isolation in their upper room were transformed into brave, passionate and outspoken witnesses to Christ. All this because of the power and gift of the Holy Spirit. This was God’s initiative, not theirs.
And so it is for us today. In our weakness and need, in our hunger and thirst for justice, in our deepening realisation of dependence upon God in this time of pandemic, we too can open ourselves to God’s generous overflowing initiative. We too can receive this lavish unending gift of a loving companion, an advocate alongside us, a passionate comforter. Psalm 63 is one of these hope-filled prayers of faith that can give us the language to open us up to God’s gift. The psalmist’s heartfelt desire for God is clear. This is a faithful person whose open mouth – full of praise (vs3 & 5), thirsty (vs1) and hungry (vs5) for God – is contrasted with the person of lies and falsehood, whose mouth will be stopped (vs11) by God.
Today is the day we remember how the tongues of fire, signifying the gift of God’s Holy Spirit to the disciples (Acts 2.1-21), also gave those passionate apprentices of Jesus the ability to speak in many tongues to a large multi-national crowd gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Pentecost.
You will notice that I am offering up two translations of the psalm today. One is the more familiar New Revised Standard Version. The other is from a relatively new version called The Passion Translation.
Here is the ethos that lies behind this fresh approach: ‘Since every translation interposes a fallible human interpretation between the reader and an infallible text, a translation can be a problem. However, the problem is solved when we seek to transfer meaning and not merely words from the original text to the receptor language. That’s the governing philosophy behind The Passion Translation: to transfer the essential meaning of God’s original message found in the biblical languages to modern English. We believe that the essential meaning of a passage should take priority over the literal form of the original words, while still ensuring the essence of those words is conveyed, so that every English speaker can clearly and naturally encounter the heart of God through his message of truth and love. The Passion Translation is an essential equivalence translation. TPT maintains the essential form and essential function of the original words. It is a meaning-for-meaning translation, translating the essence of God’s original message and heart into modern English.’[3]
This morning I awoke with the cry on my lips: ‘Help me God.’ I was gripped with a deep yearning for God’s presence. Desolation overwhelmed me as I awoke to this Pentecost Sunday of pent up anger (especially identifying with the profound pain of African Americans, but also BAME brothers and sisters here) and weariness as we enter another week of pandemic life. ‘Help me God’ is all I can utter. And then, turning to this psalm, that deep tap-root of hope which is one of God’s best gifts, began to reconnect me to the drink and food of God. Trust began to rise in my being, like sap pulling the goodness of the roots into the trunk and branches of a tree.
The Passion Translation brings to us that sense of the passionate love of God for us: the one who nourishes us, knows our yearnings, energises us in our weariness, takes a grip of us in our ennui and gives us the passion to pursue God. It gives a Spirit-filled language for a Pentecost people. May we find the pent-up fears and worries of this age transformed by the Pentecost experience of all those whose mouths are opened by praise. And may God indeed close the mouths of all those who lie, who terrify, who harm and whose narcistic tendencies in powerful places are causing such danger to this world. May something incredible yet happen to silence a particular presidential person.
[1] New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)
New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
2 The Passion Translation (TPT) The
Passion Translation®. Copyright © 2017 by BroadStreet Publishing® Group, LLC.Used
by permission. All rights reserved. thePassionTranslation.com
[3] https://www.thepassiontranslation.com/translation-philosophy/
[3] https://www.thepassiontranslation.com/translation-philosophy/
This psalm is so appropriate to be reading at Pentecost when the Gospel reading (John 7:37-39) was Jesus’ invitation, “ Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”’ Like the psalmist, who according to the psalm’s title was in the wilderness, we are thirsty for God’s living presence, fainting for his life. The world of gross inequalities and injustice needs God’s renewing life. Jesus promises the gift of the Holy Spirit to those who acknowledge their thirst and their need. The living waters of the Spirit will revive and renew us.
ReplyDeleteAt Morning Prayer in the 10 days between Ascension and Pentecost we have been saying the canticle with words from Ezekiel 36 looking forward to God’s promise of a new heart of flesh and a new spirit within us, when “you shall be my people, and I will be your God”. So we find ourselves on the Day of Pentecost, using Ps 63, saying to the Lord “You are my God”, claiming God’s covenant faithful love. And sometimes, we do this as a community or nation, but sometimes, with the psalmist, we pray this for ourselves. God’s covenant love is intimate and personal, and the deeply personal language of the psalm is so helpful for us to pray when we might be so thirsty we cannot find our own words.
The Holy Spirit quenches our thirst, revives our fainting spirit and out of our hearts flows praise once again “I will bless you as long as I love and lift up my hands in your name”.