Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-191 Sunday 04 Nov 2001

Reading: PSALM 85 – GOD OF FIDELITY

(From ‘Encounter with God’ Bible Reading Notes)

The Lord invites you as you are. Worship him, bring him your feelings and needs. Ask his Holy Spirit to help you understand and respond to what you read.

I’ll always remember a reading of this psalm at a conference on peace-making and reconciliation. Men and women from Rwanda, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Croatia described their struggles with prejudice, hatred and fear and their commitment to seeking reconciliation in their societies. One Christian leader from Belfast spoke passionately of how easily we domesticate God’s requirement to love our neighbour as ourselves, how glibly we read a psalm like this, filtering out its true demands on us.

He asked four groups of people to act out the four values of verse 10: love (or mercy in some translations) and truth (or faithfulness), righteousness (or justice) and peace. If justice and truth were to take priority in any peace process (as many who had suffered violence and terror wished), how did mercy and peace feel? Conversely, justice and truth expressed their sense of betrayal if mercy and peace were to stand on equal ground with them. Participants expressed their anger and frustration, wept their pain, as they struggled to give way to a seemingly opposing value in order to reach reconciliation rooted in all the qualities God values.

‘Restore us again … revive us again,’ (vs 4,6) can be prayers for our community and for ourselves in relationship with God – This poem works in our imaginations to show us the possibilities of life centred on God’s priorities (v 8), not a life of pragmatic balancing acts, but one in which seemingly opposing values can meet in creative resolution (v 12; see also Isa 42:8,9; 2 Cor 5:17; Rev 21:5). ‘The God of fidelity continues to open what the world regards as closed’ (Walter Brueggemann, Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, Augsburg Fortress).

‘Lord, you know where and how our lives need you to open up, restore and revive. We trust you to “give what is good” (v 12); keep us from foolish ways.’

– Pauline Hoggarth

Copyright Scripture Union, 2001