I have fled to you for refuge. Teach me to do your will,
for you are my God.
Let your good spirit lead me
on a level path. Psalm 143:9-10
Though I've not lived there in over a decade, I think of myself as a North Carolinian. So I have been distressed at some of the goings on in my homes state as the legislature has sought to curtail funding for education and make voting more difficult, along with other things that have greatly damaged NC's reputation as a "progressive southern state."
I try to make room in my worldview for a wide range of political ideas, and I have often times discovered some treasured position of my own to be ill-informed or incorrect. Yet I find myself dumbfounded by the mean-spirited tone, the outright lies, and the seeming lack of concern for others that has been spewed by some NC politicians. And as probably happens with anyone who worries about the state of the world, I wonder how it is things get this way. How is it that people can act in such ways without even a hint of remorse or self-doubt?
Such a question can be extended to all sort of areas. Just this week an FBI sweep arrested 150 pimps and rescued over 100 children used as prostitutes. The FBI called child prostitution as "persistent threat" in our country. How can this be? How can so many seemingly normal people be involved in such reprehensible behavior?
I'm not comparing NC politicians to people involved in prostitution. These are two very different things. The only commonality I'm thinking about is one that all humans seem to share, a capacity for excusing the unsavory things we are inclined to do. Those engaged in child prostitution obviously have this capacity in grotesque proportions, but the capacity itself is regularly on display in all sorts of smaller ways. The amount of hate and violence that has been perpetuated over the centuries by those professing Christian motivations is an all too common, and often all too grotesque, example.
All of this may seem totally unrelated to the verses of Psalm 143 that open this post, but it was those verses, along with a little prod from Jesus in today's gospel reading, that got me thinking about NC legislators and pimps.
The psalmist seems to expect a couple of things from Yahweh because Yahweh is God. The first is salvation. No surprise there. We religious sorts are forever asking God to rescue us for all manner of things, some major, some minor, some beyond trivial. But the psalmist expects something else because God is God. "Teach me to do your will, for you are my God."
In my experience, we Christians are often more inclined toward trying to convince God to do our will than we are at wanting to be conformed to God's. And so we more liberal sorts expect God to have liberal leanings while conservatives assume God is a conservative sort. This of course means that we think fixing the world is about enough people seeing things the way we do.
But the psalmist wants to be taught God's will. This would seem to presume we don't simply know it on our own. We need to be taught it and led into it. Jesus says much the same thing, and he cautions us about how easily religious traditions substitute our own will for God's. According to Jesus, that's because we all have a "defiling" capacity within us. Yet most of us would like to think that such a capacity is only a problem for those other folks.
"Teach me your will, O God. Show me your ways." Surely a prayer that all of us should pray, as well as a reminder that our own ways need adjusting if they are to conform to God's. As the late cartoonist Walt Kelly said all too well, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."
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