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Aug 01, 2021

Pray Angry

Pray Angry

Passage: Psalms

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Ascend

Keywords: prayer, mercy, psalms, dependence

We know that love, patience, and self control are, to name a few, fruit of the Spirit. So when we see in the Psalms prayers asking for judgment upon enemies, we wonder if we've happened upon a contradiction. This Psalm is known as one of the "imprecatory" psalms: fierce requests for God to overturn those who are opposed to Israel. How are we to think of God as just--as this Psalm highlights--when we are all immeasurably dependent on His mercy?

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: based on Psalm 36:5-9                        

LEADER:     O God, your constant love reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness extends to the skies.

ALL: Your righteousness towers like the mountains, your justice is deeper than the sea.   

Leader: All find protection under the shadow of your wings. We feast on the abundance you provide.

All: You are the source of all life, and in your light, we see light.       

CENTRAL TEXT:     Psalm 129 (NET)

Psa. 129:1 “Since my youth they have often attacked me,”
let Israel say.
2 “Since my youth they have often attacked me,
but they have not defeated me.
3 The plowers plowed my back;
they made their furrows long.
4 The LORD is just;
he cut the ropes of the wicked.”
5 May all who hate Zion
be humiliated and turned back.
6 May they be like the grass on the rooftops,
which withers before one can even pull it up,
7 which cannot fill the reaper’s hand,
or the lap of the one who gathers the grain.
8 Those who pass by will not say,
“May you experience the LORD’s blessing!
We pronounce a blessing on you in the name of the LORD.”

BENEDICTION:                                     
Leader: Now may the Lord Jesus Christ bless us with his own righteous anger at the injustices of our world, near and far away.  May God the Father bless us with tears for those who are suffering here and abroad--and to pray, in love, for justice to be done. And may God the Holy Spirit fill us with his otherworldly peace as we await the restoration of all things when Christ returns. The peace and compassion of our Triune God be with you all.

All: And also with you.   

 

SCRIPTURES:

  • Psalm 35:4
  • Psalm 37:2
  • Micah 3:12
  • 2 Corinthians 4:7-12

 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Ever been bullied or harassed--whether younger or as an adult? In person or online? How’d you process or respond to the feelings that emerged?
  2. You could break up the Psalm into two parts. Where might you? What might the main theme for each part be?
  3. What does the Psalmist praise about God? Why?
  4. What does this Psalmist want for his opposition? Why?
  5. Here’s the stretch question: how might what the Psalmist wants for his opposition be a kind of love for them? (I know--a stretch, a silver lining where it might be hard to see one; just indulge me)
  6. Here’s some help for that stretch question: when Jesus pronounces a woe on the Pharisees for instance, or an even harsher word upon his inner circle (e.g. “Get behind me, Satan,” to Peter), how might either be an expression of love, even as they are an expression of a holy anger?
  7. How is that a model for us in praying this kind of “angry” prayers? Moreover, how is what Jesus has done for us the motivation for that kind of angry prayer?

QUOTES:

 

  • My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? C.S. Lewis
  • You have to keep in your mind an imagery of infinite possibility. Rev James Lawson
  • My thesis . . . will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologians in the West. . . . I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone. . . . Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. . . . The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect non-coercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. Miroslav Volf
  • I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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