Praise the LORD, O my soul!
I will praise the LORD as long as I live;
I will sing praises to my God all my life long.
Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God,
who made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them;
who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed;
who gives food to the hungry. (from Ps. 146)
Most of us take some note of what other people think of us. It bothers us if they think poorly of us and heartens us if they think us impressive in some way. If I stumble and nearly fall, I quickly look around to see if anyone was watching. Strange that I give others so much power over me, worrying constantly about how they see me.
Most of us tend to be very ego driven. We are very focused on self, on staking out and defending an identity. We do this almost completely in comparison to others. We are forever building our
résumé, trying to portray ourselves in the best light compared to others. And most of us want to be better, more powerful, richer, prettier, better dressed, and so on than those around us. The last thing we want to be is unimportant and insignificant. We know that we can't always be first, but we can't stand the idea that we might be last.
I think this is why we so value being independent. Becoming dependent on others is a huge blow to our egos, to those résumés we work so hard to build. To move from independent to dependent is a move toward insignificance in many people's minds, and some of us will go to absurd lengths to guard our independence and supposed significance.
In ancient times, royalty was about as significant as they come, but this morning's psalm insists on their insignificance. And the psalm calls for a radical dependence, a call echoed over and over in the Bible. "Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, who hope is in Yahweh their God."
Richard Rohr's meditations this week have been on "Healing Our Violence." (They were not a response to the shooting at the Sikh temple but are certainly fitting.) In today's piece he speaks of how our résumé-building egos are inherently insecure, "grasping for significance." And this striving for significance, importance, and power is at the root of much of the conflict in our world. But when our selves find their true identity in God, in radical dependence on God, we discover that we have "very little to defend, fight about, compete with, overcome, hate, or fear."
My own Protestant roots are about dependence on God's gratuitous love and tender care. Not by works but by grace, we say. But in practice we have worked very hard at explaining just how this grace works and insisting that our explanation is better than yours and that those with wrong explanations are in trouble. And we end up being very impressed with how well and systematically we figured all this out, and we don't look the least bit dependent or insignificant.
How dependent on God are you? I sometimes think this issue is the single biggest obstacle to my work as a pastor. I so want to be a good pastor, a successful pastor, that my insecurities make it nearly impossible to simply trust God. Change my heart, O God.
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