{"id":277,"date":"2010-10-05T19:52:19","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T00:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=277"},"modified":"2010-10-05T19:52:19","modified_gmt":"2010-10-06T00:52:19","slug":"on-not-discounting-god-the-psalms-in-our-worship-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/on-not-discounting-god-the-psalms-in-our-worship-9\/","title":{"rendered":"On Not Discounting God: The Psalms in Our Worship 9"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, as I was flying back from a deans’ meeting in Pittsburgh (aren’t you envious?), I tried to change my flight to get back home a little earlier.\u00a0 The meeting had ended sooner than anticipated, so it made sense to try.\u00a0 After fiddling with her computer a bit, the airlines desk person said to me finally, “You don’t have a gold or platinum card do you, Mr. Hamilton?\u00a0 I’m sorry, but since you have no status with us, I can’t change your flight.”\u00a0 You don’t have any status with us.\u00a0 Really?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now this is not a big deal since I got home safely and on my original schedule.\u00a0 Not having status with the airlines simply means that I haven’t wasted too much of my life sitting in crowded coach seats or idling about terminals crammed with people I don’t know.\u00a0 Not having status might be a good thing, on the whole.<\/p>\n

But a lot of people undoubtedly hear sentences equivalent to that all the time, for many of our fellow human beings have no status with anyone.\u00a0 “I’m sorry, but because you’re young or old, a woman, a person of a group different from mine or you have less education or more life baggage, I can’t take you seriously.”\u00a0 That’s the message, spoken or unspoken, that we humans have found myriad ways to deliver.<\/p>\n

The author of Psalm 14 knows this too.\u00a0 The psalm is best known for its apparent critique of atheism, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”\u00a0 But this is not quite the point, for no one (as far as we know) was an atheist in the ancient Near East, at least in our sense of denying that any divine realm existed at all.\u00a0 As you read the psalm carefully, then, you realize that what the psalmist means is that some people believe that God is indifferent to the plight of those who suffer.\u00a0 They have erroneously concluded that God will not take sides in the struggle of human existence, or perhaps that victory in the race for the survival of the fittest proves divine favor.\u00a0 In this, they do not differ much from a great many people we know, who believe that their wealth and power are divine blessings and signs of divine approval.\u00a0 Alas, we are all susceptible to such careless thinking, as becomes clear in our prayers that thank God for the blessing of living in a country with our material wealth, as though we are quite sure that such wealth is, without further ado, a blessing.<\/p>\n

For the psalmist, the insolence involved in believing that God will not help the poor or the vulnerable will lead to a nasty end, for God will send forth deliverance from Zion.\u00a0 Apparently, he or she has in mind the return of exiles deported by one of the empires that swept over Israel and Judah, hence verse 7’s description of the context of salvation: “when the LORD returns the turning (Hebrew: shuv shevut<\/em>) of his people.”\u00a0 Far from allowing the present evil to continue indefinitely, God will let “Jacob rejoice, Israel celebrate.”\u00a0 Thus the future will not look like the present.<\/p>\n

In our own time, it is too easy to blame the atheists and agnostics for distrusting God while ignoring our own acts of distrust.\u00a0 Atheists at least are often honest.\u00a0 We Christians sometimes are not because we expect God to act in ways that preserve the structures with which we are comfortable.\u00a0 But God is not limited by our expectations.\u00a0 And this is why our worship and love for God make sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, as I was flying back from a deans’ meeting in Pittsburgh (aren’t you envious?), I tried to change my flight to get back home a little earlier.\u00a0 The meeting had ended sooner than anticipated, so it made sense to try.\u00a0 After fiddling with her computer a bit, the airlines desk person said to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOn Not Discounting God: The Psalms in Our Worship 9 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/on-not-discounting-god-the-psalms-in-our-worship-9\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On Not Discounting God: The Psalms in Our Worship 9 - 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