Psalm 1

Epiphany 6 - Year C
Easter 7 - Year B
Proper 18 (23) - Year C
Proper 20 (25) - Year B
Proper 25 (30) - Year A

Remember your joys. Live your joys. Anticipate your joys.

Then take a next quantum leap:
remember joy; live joy; anticipate joy.

No matter in what order you proceed through this trinity of joy, you will find yourself embarking on other aspects of love.

An excellent start to the Psalms; an excellent start, period. Now that it has begun, keep it rolling.

- - - - - - -

 

a tree by water
lives forward
season by season

 

chaff in the wind
is left behind
seasonless

 

if a choice were needed
polls show trees
well ahead

 

hulls have protected
tender seeds
and been jettisoned

 

their servant’s role
finished
they’re blown away

 

having come to serve
we thank the chaff
and are happy

 

As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience

 

 

According to the New Jerusalem Bible, in verse 4 the usual translation of "Judgment" can be understood as, "The great Judgement to come, according to the Massoretic Text; any divine judgement in this life, according to the Greek."

I hope you have read The Once and Future King to get a fix on the fluidity of a once and future judgement.

A part of our task is to not put all our eggs in one basket - that of eternal nitpicking each moment or leaving things to one great moment summing up everything. The more difficult way we have chosen is to play the present and the future off against one another, sometimes focusing on one and sometimes on the other. And, sometimes, focusing on neither so the goodness of creation can continue to flow through our present and days to be.

May you rejoice in YHWH and meditative prayer, in judgement and forgiveness.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/october2002.html

 

 

'Ashre (first Hebrew word of the Psalms - "happy," "blessed" - a relational term) is used 26 times in the Psalms and only 20 times in the rest of the "old testament." There may be something particularly lyrical about relational experiences that find one happy or blessed. Real life is found in the dynamism of a relational state. Often this back and forth movement toward perfection or healing of the split between divine humanness/ human divinity is revealed in prayer, psalm, hymn.

As you bring together the gifts of soil and sun, may you bear fruit in your season. May such fruit bless us all.

These comments were stimulated from notes in the new helpful resource The New Interpreter's Study Bible.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/june2003.html

 

 

Compare this psalm with the beatitudes in Matthew and Luke.

Both are songs (have you heard Sweet Honey in the Rock sing Beatitudes ? if not search it out).

Happiness/blessedness set the tone for the psalter and Jesus' teaching. If this is not a focal point for reading them, so much will be missed and the teaching of life will become rote.

May we be planted by streams of blessing and happily yield more of life's fullness, in every season.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/september2003.html

 

 

Trees planted by water do well, if they are trees that will do well beside water.

Presumably we will do well if we are located near a source of a resource that will nourish us.

Some folks are nurtured in a desert environment and some on the sea. What would you say was a key source of needed resources for you. Might it be your sacred texts, both communal and individual? Might it be your tradition, both common and unique?

Having identified such resources as are needed, what are you doing to care for receiving them?

Here a monthly retreat day is well in order. The days have been windy and drying. A good soaking will do wonders. If a good soaking is also in order for you, may you do something about that. If you are well soaked, may you put it to good use.

- - -

Water and Wind: Blessing and Curse. Wind and Water: Blessing and Curse.

Water to nurture the flowering and seeding process, wind to disperse the seed to where it is needed: Blessing.

Water to flood, wind to tear asunder: Curse.

Mix and match to your heart's content, and the content of many hearts.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/february2004.html

 

 

Psalm 1 or Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

Conventions have a way of bringing out the least in people. It is as though folks think that they are opaque to the Holy that searches and knows them through and through. This is true in terms of political conventions or any convention. Whether political or not, "an established technique, practice, or device" stands between ourselves and the complexity of realities around us. It is a way in which we can avoid questions and appeal to the lowest common denominator - that which everyone knows and thus no one knows.

So what conventions do these psalms bring to us. There is the convention of an all-knowing God who sees through us and rewards with water to prosper us for getting in line with God's never-changing way and penalizes us with an ill-wind for being out of line with same.

What conventions are you propagating; what conventions are you rebutting? Here is one of the better wrestlings with cliches, even though there are some grammaticals in its transcription.

May we all do better in our wrestling with the conventions around us that hem us in and keep us from recognizing larger choices to be made.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/september2004.html

 

 

Psalm 1 or Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

We flourish, we are renewed; we falter, we wither. In a model of times and seasons we can't simply claim one of them is going to hold sway forever. We look at a thousand days and we look at yesterday. In a model of humans having been made in "our" image, how do you pick the first day of a thousand or claim a specific most recent day to be the most relevant of all?

Loving and studying the experiences of G*D eventuates in a beautiful, multi-leaved tree. Each leaf for the healing/loving of a particular situation. To narrow all of life down to one leaf to cover all situations is to reduce G*D to a preordained outcome for every circumstance.

Even steadfast love presents a variety of faces.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/october2005.html

 

 

Psalm 1
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19

What is your name, your character, your nature?

Might it be Protecter?

Might it be Eternal?

Might it be Ent? [giant tree-like creatures who have become like the trees they shepherd and protect]

Might it be Prophet?

To which of these passages are you drawn? What would be your Myers-Briggs assessment of the personality of each name or passage? If you use a different personality descriptor, what attributes would you give to each character or nature in these passages?

As you look at the communities which which you spend the most time, what is their name, character, nature and your place within such? What needs to change within yourself and your community that your name might be more clearly lived and not simply be an appellation.

http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2006/may2006.html

 

 

Much of scripture is the positing of positions - "this" is the place one should end up. "Hooray", if you do. "Boo", if you don't.

What is not so clear is how to navigate the lives-we-really-live in relation to a particular endpoint. Journeys and destinations are not all that easily connected. It may not be all that helpful to turn this dynamic into static consequences of heaven or hell.

This comes down to saying that those who do well, do well and those who do not do well, do not do well. Fortunately there are still another 149 Psalms to go from this beginning point. I suppose that starting with the word "Happy" may have a slight edge over "It was a dark and stormy night". However the Psalm seems to run backward. Happiness here is a celebration of having avoided perishing wickedly. A dark and stormy night may yet have something to commend it - there is an adventure ahead.

- - -

a tree by water
lives forward
season by season

chaff in the wind
is left behind
seasonless

if a choice were needed
polls show trees
well ahead

hulls have protected
tender seeds
and been jettisoned

their servant's role
finished
they're blown away

having come to serve
we thank the chaff
and are happy

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

 

Psalm 1
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19

We get so caught in tradition, particularly new tradition. For whatever reason, Jesus had twelve male disciples/apostles (let's not argue about that).

Imagine them all in bed and someone calls out, "Roll over." And they all roll over and Judas fell out. What to do! What to do!

Obviously roll back the other way and add one more in. The form of twelve is at this point more important than anything.

By the time we get to chapter 12 and James is killed by Herod, there is no repeat of the selection of another twelfth. Are we learning that it is not so much the form that is crucial in G*D stuff as it is function? [although another way of coming at this is that we didn't want Judas to be a martyr and so we simply replaced him, James' death we could use in another way to our benefit and so we remembered him. - play with replaced and remembered for a bit]

- - -

sanctified in truth
protected from whatever
evil "one" approaches

happy in G*D's presence
planted by whatever
stream flows by

chosen or not
life is present
minister through it

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html

 

Psalm 1 or Jeremiah 11:18-20 or Psalm 54
Proverbs 31:10-31 or Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22
James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a
Mark 9:30-37

A gentleness born of wisdom beckons us closer and closer that, with its small hands, our large desires might be unbuttoned and left to drop as a marker of a holy place - a burden was dropped here.

Those places where many burdens drop become our cathedrals, temples, churches in wildwoods, thin places. They are rightly revered. But no more so than where a single burden was laid to rest. Even as disciples have argued as to who was the greatest, so we struggle within and between various spiritual traditions as to loci of holiness.

Wisdom gentles us to appreciate the smallest of new beginnings as equal with the largest of sacraments. This goes beyond issues of right and wrong to a center-spot welcoming. Whether forgiven much or little we honor each forgiveness, each release.

- - -

flames signify
a release
a solid lets go
a puff of gas
upon an airy eddy
adds to an unpredictable
rising up
wavering light
strong enough
to attract moths
and hold bears at bay

we add our bodies
to the kindling
of a funeral pyre
honoring a past
past its time
in anticipation
of a new phoenix
for its moment
strong enough
to call us back
and send us forth

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

 

Psalm 1 or Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

To be known, through and through, is not just "wonderful" but "awful". Hemmed in fore and aft, gee and haw, puts us at the end of puppet strings. Knowing how wonderfully intended we are ("Good" yelled at the top of G*D's lungs for all creation to hear), we find a crevasse between such intention and our realities.

In the end we finally come to the realization that neither intention or reality determine the important things of life and one of the grandest visions of life (avoiding the trap of duality between law-abiders and wicked) comes at the end of 139:18 - "I am still with you."

In my best of times and worst of times, a tale of two MEs, G*D and I are still at it. May it be so for you.

- - -

with apologies to D.H. Lawrence

god is so nice
so awfully nice
god is the nicest person in the world.

And what's more, god is nice about being nice
about your being nice as well!
If you're not nice, god will soon make you feel it.

Abrahamists and Buddhists and Hindus and Wiccans and so on
they're all very well
but they're not really nice, you know.
They're not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?

That's why one doesn't have to take them seriously,
We must be nice to them, of course,
of course, naturally.
But it doesn't really matter what you say to them,
they don't really understand -
you can say anything to them:
be nice, you know, just nice -
but you must never take them seriously, they wouldn't understand,
just be nice, you know! Oh, fairly nice,
not too nice of course, they take advantage -
but nice enough, just nice enough
to let them feel they're not quite as nice as they might be.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

 

Psalm 1 or Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
Deuteronomy 34:1-12 or Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18
1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Matthew 22:34-46

Moses, the great liberator, is shut up in foreign Moab. Ruth, the great grandmother, comes forth from Moab.

All of this disparagement and honoring of Moab, depending on time and perspective, is background to the famous "love your neighbor" dicta.

This is basic inclusionary, progressive vision. It allows Jesus to continue engaging those who would be his enemy, in this particular the Pharisees.

It is encouragement to us to keep the line open with our supposed enemies, for we may well find ourselves dying in their space and rejoicing when they bring forth a heroine of our own.

- - -

what is a millennia
what is a moment

a tension between
enlivens this present

relatives become enemies
enemies become friends

we chase one another
and flee the same

in a moment
all is lost

in a millennia
we can see today|

may we prosper
in our in-between time

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

 

Happy delight: an excellent starting place.

Yielding fruit in your time: the time for this is always now.

These two let us know we are moving toward the great better not yet arrived.

In this psalm there is a fine play between the joy of creation and the joy of participation. When these two are active we anticipate joy beyond joy yet to come.

Remember your joys. Live your joys. Anticipate your joys.

Then take the next quantum leap:
remember joy; live joy; anticipate joy.

No matter what order you proceed through this trinity of joy you will find yourself embarking on the other aspects of love.

An excellent start to the Psalms; an excellent start, period. Now that it has begun, keep it rolling.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

 

 

This beatitude of a psalm looks at the choices in life's journey and reflects that a choice that leads to greater rootedness in being open to new instructions by G*D is a far happier place to be than those who consider that they have a corner on decision-making and judgment.

Wisdom writings often have subtle environmental lessons to impart. Key images here are a tree deeply rooted by water that runs through it from root to leaf, bringing life (living water) from ground to sky, and chaff, the dryness when root is unable to hold the soil and life-giving humus is blown away. These images evince the result of journey choices.

The Wesley Study Bible notes that John Wesley understood the "righteousness" described here as right relationships, "holiness". Blessings, beatitudes, come clear in choices that bind us closer together. The futility of going-it-alone leads to more and more loneliness, being blown off course under the guise of self-determination.

Drop your roots a bit deeper, honor and hold the soil around you, delight in paying attention, in being open, to new instructions found in the relationships of G*D and Neighbor that aid us in journeying together.

This dropping of roots actually allows greater exploration. Here is a Soft Edges offering by Jim Taylor on the blessing of being open to new instructions/possibilities/choices/relationships/"law".

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html

 

 

Delight in law is not in its minutiae and restrictions, but in opening possibilities to a larger future. At stake here is not law qua law, but an ability to engage the experiences of life and learn. [Note: The usual translation of “law” is better understood as “instruction” or “opportunity for learning”.]

Delight is having a source of sustenance and refreshment as well as a result in participating in the future through fruit able to reproduce. Image yourself as a tree – what does that entail and are those universal needs that need protecting wherever law becomes restrictive and discriminatory.

This delight in learning and growing, experiencing and passing on, are available whether we walk, stand, or sit. No matter our current state of affairs, blessedness is available.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/05/psalm-1.html

 

 

It is not necessary to posit wicked people or sinners as a source of human difficulty. All that is needed is to consider our everyday responses toward getting more. In particular we are intrigued with getting enough power to be able to get our way. Whether two or teen or troubled (and who isn’t), we fantasize about getting what we want when we want it.

Shorthand: we want to be the greatest, we want to prosper just by sitting by a river of wealth.

What does this everday desire have to do with equality, with honoring the disadvantaged?

Well, not too much.

Regarding a righteous/prosperous connection, there is never enough proof that we are either. When righteousness is equated with prosperity, our energy goes to gaining more, not giving more. This is as good a measurement of the meaning of life as we are going to get, so heed it well.

http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/09/proverbs-3110-31_19.html