A lonely bird on the housetop

As we pray through Holy Week, the psalms continue to speak to us, addressing our human condition. Are we perhaps consoled, challenged or transformed as we speak them? 

The psalmist reaches out to God - articulating hopes of deliverance. 'Lord, deliver me' perhaps summarises the heartfelt cries our hearts - expressed by generations gone before us; expressed in our own lives.

Psalm 25 begins 'To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. / O my God, in you I trust'.

This is our first most and most fundamental orientation: our desire for God and a desire to walk in God's ways. Perhaps this is what we might describe as a way of holiness? The psalmist goes before us in this way - in the face of adversity, there are hopeful echoes that God's character will shape our lives. 

This psalm enables us to overhear, to stand alongside, to become a pupil of prayer; learner in the ways of God.  'Make me know your ways, Lord': teach me and lead me; remember not my sins but be mindful of your mercy, O Lord. For 'all the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness.' 

 

The language is both of intimate friendship and also of reverence and awe. To say that we fear the Lord is to enter into a Hebrew frame of thought expressing love of God as our first priority.  Out of this place of trust, the psalmist names concerns which are our concerns: loneliness and affliction; the desire for forgiveness and relief from troubles.  

In naming them before God, they become arrow prayers. In the midst of human anxiety and confusion and the desire to live in God's love - such prayers root us moment by moment in that love. We are hooked into God. We're filled with a patient impatience.

I wait. I wait. I wait.

If the words resonate with our lives; they resonate too with the way Jesus himself walks this week. We catch our breath as we hear in psalm 41 the line: 'Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, / who ate my bread has lifted the heel against me.'

If that makes us flinch with an awareness of what is to come as bread is broken, as friends speculate about who will betray their Lord, then so does the expression of the desire to repay such disloyalty.

Yet, in the face of acknowledging such human instincts - the thoughts of our innermost hearts - the acknowledgement of God's character remains. The Lord delivers, protects, sustains and heals. The Lord is the stronghold of our life - of whom shall we be afraid?  Assurance breaks in. In psalm 27 we hear: 'The Lord is my light and salvation; whom shall I fear?'  This is a psalm full of conviction - that God is faithful; God is with us.

  

Our horizon is extended beyond the trials of this life: desire to abide with God, to behold the mystery and beauty of the Lord. That is our ultimate hope. It’s so boldly declared that songs and melodies combine with cries of the heart.  Even when parental bonds fray, the plea for face to face encounter is directed to the Lord. Perhaps such defiant assurance shaped Paul's letter to the Romans, when he lists all the threats and adversities that overwhelm us, and writes boldly that 'nothing can separate us from the love of God, in Christ Jesus'.

Yet again we are bidden: wait for the Lord...be strong... take courage... wait.

Even when it is our equal, our companion and our own familiar friend who taunts us? Even when it is the one whose company we've enjoyed - who walked with us to worship God - who betrays us? Then do we have courage and strength?  As we enacted the Last Supper with the Year 2 children from St. Peter's, one of them said 'betrayal is when your friend goes on to the other side'.  To be human is to know the reality of the violation of trust, friendship; psalm 55 expresses that burden of such anguish.

Then is our heart stricken. Then we groan. Then we lie awake. The restless isolation of being taunted is described in psalm 102 as being like 'a lonely bird on the housetop'. 

'Hear my prayer, O Lord; / let my cry come to you.'  Such patience and persistence is part of our spiritual discipline; is it perhaps an impatient patience? 

For when our soul is troubled, when it feels that our cries go unheard, our questioning intensifies. The litany of psalm 88 is a longing for salvation in the depths of despair: forsaken, without help, as if in the grave already; cut off, forgotten, overwhelmed; darkness encroaches and we feel shut in. Even then we spread out our hands to God.

 

Is God's steadfast love declared in the grave? Is there hope for the dead? In the depths of despair, the 'whys' of our cries ring out. 

In our own generation, where death might be regarded as the final annihilation of all that we are; the Hebrew thought of this psalm perhaps has a contemporary twist. Yet we are called to have hope; we are to declare that death is not the ultimate reality; it doesn't have the final world.

In this holiest of weeks, all this is taken up by God in Christ: the betrayal by our familiar friend; the isolation of garden, cross and grave; the depths of despair and overwhelming darkness. All our cries are heard and made by God with us.  There is no longer anywhere where God's love is not: even in the depths of the grave.

For us, these psalms have immersed in the drama of human life. These laments and praises, prayers and honest self-expression are offered by us; but also lead us in to the nature of God's love. They invite us to walk with Jesus this week - confronting betrayal, suffering and death in a real time out working of the drama of this week.

 
 

© Julie Gittoes 2016