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Read: Psalm 39
I was silent and still;
I held my peace to no avail;
my distress grew worse,
my heart became hot within me.
While I mused, the fire burned;
then I spoke with my tongue...
Psalm 39:1-2
For most of us, a warmed heart is the summit of the Christmas experience, and so we are constantly hunting through the snow for the elusive moments that radiate that warmth through the cooler fibers of our lives. Look, for example, at our vibrant Christmas tree decorations and holiday parties, not to mention our constant radio-scanning for that one carol that might reignite an ember of joy. While “heartwarming” experience surely includes sentimentality, it also transcends it. Remember now that nearly immortal reflection from John Wesley that his heart felt “strangely warmed.” Some among our congregation have felt this kind of tender nearness to the divine life; it’s a deep grace to be held dear and savored, even shared if the Spirit so invites.
For the psalmist, though, her warmed heart feels more like chronic indigestion than enriching intimacy. Her painstaking habits of prayer have backfired, and now her spirit burns hotter as the minutes pass. Like many of her contemporaries, this Hebrew poet fears that her distress is God’s punishment for sin, though she seemingly does not know what incited such severe judgment. Exhausted by her anxiety, she bares open her heart and requests healing for whatever remains of the “mere breath” that comprises her fragile lifetime. What shines through her psalm is not a sense of hopelessness before a punitive deity; it is precisely the opposite – her hope in God (v.7). Tested as she is, she still hopes that God may actually relate to her differently than she previously assumed. This, after all, is why she even bothers to pray and use what breath she has left in a plea for mercy.
This Advent, many in our congregation are delighting in the interior warmth that spreads out from Chrismons, candles, and hymns, all of which we use together in anticipation of Our Lord’s Nativity. Still others among us are oppressed by an agony burning deep inside their spirits that, for them, is making the Advent gifts frightfully scarce. In such a moment, Psalm 39 has insurmountable worth in the life of the Church. Each of us can pray this Psalm, as either a plea from within our own situations or as an empathetic intercession for a faithful sibling toiling in the scalding shadows of their dark night.
With this psalm as our guide, we may now pass the breath that powers our prayer into God’s ever- listening ear. Let us exhale toward heaven each fear of the encroaching darkness so that we may grant the Creator access to the very substance of our humanity. The God of every psalmist craves the consecration of our whole, embodied selves because, on Christmas Eve, this same God will hand it all back to us from inside Mary’s womb, only then our consecrated humanity will be forever transfigured by God’s own luminous life. This Light will shine from the manger, and the God wrapped inside it will smile as he calls all of us into the incomprehensible depths of his Father’s very warm heart.
~Austin Maynor
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