Blog or weed? Are those verbs or nouns?
To blog or to weed, that is the question. To sit in the sun and type, or put the gardening gloves on, kneel by the perennial bed and pull out thistles? Or maybe this is a metaphor. Are the words I'm about to type worth keeping, or will they end up in the compost pile?
It's a blessed Sunday in May when you can sit in the sun and look through the green leaves of the maples into a vividly blue sky. The house sparrows are chipping in surround-sound in all the backyards up and down the alley. A few minutes ago a dogged robin sat on the corner of the fence and sang the same five or six notes over and over again, calling, calling, with every part of its body from grey-brown tail to yellow beak.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
We had Psalm 67 this morning.
and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe.
Stand silently in awe. Or praise with chirps and bouncing tails. From one end of the earth to the other.
There are too many words in this world, and too many of them lately mean nothing or worse than nothing. They're weapons, or bullshit, or obfuscation, the kind that may not fool listeners but that the speaker uses to fool himself.
"Ugh" was a significant part of my vocabulary this week, the word I yelled at the news on the car radio. "Ugh" and another word with a similar vowel. We now have a budget bill in this country that will rob the poor in order to make the rich richer while compromising our collective economic future as a nation. Because money means more to the people who have more of it?
This morning's preaching included a lot of "I." I didn't want to look inside the preacher's soul; I didn't even want to look inside my own. I didn't come to church to be soothed. I turned to my phone and was able to provide useful affirmation to a fellow knitter on Facebook. And then I got the pencil out of my choir folder and set myself a puzzle, inspired by the entrance hymn we had sung earlier in the service:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
in light inaccessible hid from our eyes.
Its final lines:
All praise we would render, O help us to see
'tis only the splendor of light hideth thee.
Fill in the blank:
'Tis only the splendor of _______ hideth thee.
So many things could go there. God's vision for justice, blinding unimaginable justice? God's merciful and gracious will, reaching beyond our comprehension? Or the splendor of divine love described by Jesus in the gospel for the day:
“Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." (John 14:23)
Surely some dazzling imperatives would come with having Jesus and his Father for housemates. Works powered by light, hope, revelation in a new kingdom, so much larger than ourselves.
Full text of the hymn here. Psalm 67 here.
