Like One Who Watches For The Morning: Psalm 126

Reflection:

There are ebbs and flows in our lived experience, tears flow, joy is shouted, and there are countless feelings in the in-between. Psalms can provide language and liturgy for all moments we need to articulate our emotions before God. Psalms for joy and celebration. Psalms for sorrow and grief. Psalms for love and peace. Psalms for despair. Psalms for hope. Psalms for when everything is falling apart. Psalms for holy anger and screams for justice.  Psalms for communal worship and for personal prayer. Psalms for God’s mysteriousness that we cannot quite put into words.  Psalms for holy wonder at the sacredness of everyday moments. 

I'm reflecting on this psalm in what is yet another season of transition in my life. Circumstances will change. It will get better and it will get worse. God’s love is steadfast.

It seems to me that God has a habit of bringing us out of the difficult times. God is renewing, transforming, and enlivening us again. God’s work is for our salvation; the cycle of life, death, and resurrection spiral anew in each generation.  This cycle is not only for the forgiveness of sin but for the reversal of the oppression and injustice caused by sin.  Even now, the prisoners suffer, the poor are hungry, the sick are terrified by their illness, and yet, we believe that the injustices that each of them face will be righted, even though the work is still incomplete. There is hope that while the pattern repeats, it is not an exact repeat, more like a spiral than a circle. We are moving closer to the kin-dom of God. 

In advent, we sow tears, we mourn, we repent, and we hope that God will be born within us once again, to bring the joy of our salvation.

1 I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever;
    with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.
2 I declare that your steadfast love is established forever;
    your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.
49 Lord, where is your steadfast love of old,
    which by your faithfulness you swore to David?
50 Remember, O Lord, how your servant is taunted,
    how I bear in my bosom the insults of the peoples,
51 with which your enemies taunt, O Lord,
    with which they taunted the footsteps of your anointed.

52 Blessed be the Lord forever.
                Amen and Amen.