Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 3-004 Sunday 05 Jan 2003

Reading: Psalm 141 – TRIANGULATION

How do you react when the malice of others knocks you off your bearings? How do you regain your course?

See here the daily (evening? v 2) disciplines of a pilgrim, marshalling his thoughts, facing the reality of difficulty and opposition, reintegrating himself (voice, hands, mouth, heart, eyes), setting his course. The psalm is set between the Lord, with whom it starts, and to whom it returns (it’s you my eyes are fixed on… it’s you in whom I take refuge, v 8) and the traveller of verse 10 who avoids the traps and snares set for the unwary, and presses on, all in one piece. Imagine yourself in his position.

What strategies would you use in the face of the provocation and slander spelt out in other psalms, for example 140? Here we consider the urgent cry (v 1); the steadily ascending smoke of sacrifice, fragrance of incense (v 2); the sentry duty over the mouth (v 3); the refusal of table-fellowship, however delicious (v 4 – CS Lewis wrote of the seductive delights of the ‘inner ring’ which can cause good people to do very bad things *); the accepting of kind criticism, while at the same time calling wrong wrong (v5).

Verses 5 to 7 are hard to rephrase. The psalms (like our prayers) are sometimes like cries; an agitated person does not speak in smooth paragraphs; thoughts get jumbled, abbreviated, coming out in jerks. Verse 6 refers to the hope that one day justice will be done – and even then it will not be time to gloat, but to speak with kindness and generosity. Ignore the NIV’s bracketed words in verse 7 – the psalmist sometimes feels at death’s door: but still he keeps his eyes fixed on the Lord. Here we see the resoluteness of faith, which in the Bible is not only in something or someone, but also always against opposing forces.

Murmur or hum to yourself the words of the old spiritual: ‘Through the storms and the night, Lead me on to the light, Thou who never lost a battle, Stand by me!'(Thomas A Dorsey)

* Transposition, Geoffrey Bles, 1949

– Howard Peskett

Copyright Scripture Union, 2003

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