Psalm 16
Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge. I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.” As for the holy ones in the land, they are the noble, in whom is all my delight. Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows; their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out or take their names upon my lips. The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage. I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure. For you do not give me up to Sheol, or let your faithful one see the Pit. You show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
This past January marked the 10th anniversary of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital city, Port-Au-Prince and much of the surrounding area, claiming over 200,000 lives and displacing hundreds of thousands more. One of the images that has remained with me all these years later is that of a 21-year-old man, trapped under the rubble of a five-story building. Nearly four days after the building collapsed, he was still lying on his side, pinned under a large slab of cement.
A crowd is gathered around as family members and rescue workers go about the painstakingly slow and difficult task of digging him out, using chisels and a blowtorch. The man is conscious and seems to be saying something, but they can’t quite make it out. So someone passes a reporter’s microphone to the man and asks, “What are you saying to yourself?”
The man calmly responds, “As I am a Christian, I say: Jesus, you know my life is in your hands.” I remember how struck I was by his response. It wasn’t an impassioned cry for help or a plea for mercy, which is what I was expecting – and which would no doubt have been coming out of my mouth. Instead, it was a statement of belief; a confession of faith: “Jesus, you know my life is in your hands.”
The earthquake had rendered this man completely powerless. For four days he lay helpless under the concrete. Yet his words are not unlike those of the psalmist: “I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”
In his book, “Praying the Psalms,” Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes about two different images that are often seen in the Hebrew Scriptures: one is the Pit (mentioned in the psalm above) and the other is what Bruggemann calls Under Safe Wings. “In the pit,” he says, “people are effectively removed from life. Historically, this is the device used for Joseph by his brothers and for the prophet Jeremiah by his enemies. In the pit, one is denied all the resources necessary for life.”
But a starkly contrasting image is that of being safe under the protective wings of God: Be merciful to me, O God, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge (Psalm 57:1). Whereas the pit is associated with danger and threat, wings evokes images of safety and tenderness.
None of us can escape the pit altogether, of course. It’s an inevitable part of the human experience. We might be aware that we are slowly sliding into the pit, or we might be thrust into it so quickly that it makes our head spin. But God is with us even in the pit and God promises not to leave us there. As Bruggemann points out, “Our lives always move between the pit and the wing, between the shattering of disorientation and the gift of life. This is what our baptism is about – to die and to rise with Christ to newness of life.”
Sometimes we are so bombarded with all the bad news in the world that we fail to fully embrace the Good News that has been ours all along – that despite the danger, pain and uncertainty in our lives, we can rest securely in the loving arms of our God who has claimed us in the waters of baptism and who promises never to let us go.
Jesus, you know our lives are in your hands. Thank you for your loving presence and never-ending faithfulness. Amen.
