Psalm 95

1 Come, let us sing to the Lord; let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.

2 Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving and raise a loud shout to him with psalms.

3 For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

4 In his hand are the caverns of the earth, and the heights of the hills are his also.

5 The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands have molded the dry land.

6 Come, let us bow down, and bend the knee, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.

7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand. Oh, that today you would hearken to his voice!

8 Harden not your hearts, as your forebears did in the wilderness, at Meribah, and on that day at Massah, when they tempted me.

9 They put me to the test, though they had seen my works.

10 Forty years long I detested that generation and said, "This people are wayward in their hearts; they do not know my ways."

11 So I swore in my wrath, "They shall not enter into my rest."

This year, Monday Matters will focus on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We'll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen.

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel. I do not want to live in a world where there is no one to adore. It is a lonely and labored world if I am its only center. - Richard Rohr

As I suspect many of you have discovered, the service of Morning Prayer can be a great way to start the day. Whether you say the service on your own, or with others in person at a church, or by zoom, it’s a powerful way to get going in the morning, a helpful way to orient yourself to face whatever the day may bring.

The service includes readings that change each day, dictated by the Daily Lectionary in the Prayer Book. But there are a few set pieces as well, worth repeating 365 days out of the year. These include a canticle called the Venite, which is really a portion of the psalm heard in church yesterday and reprinted in this email.

In the service of Morning Prayer, we read the first seven verses of that psalm, verses which extend an invitation in several ways. (The word venite translates as a word of invitation: come.) The psalmist offers three invitations: Come let us sing to the Lord. Come before God’s presence with thanksgiving. Come let us bow down and bend the knee and kneel before the Lord our maker. All of which remind us of the amazing grace that God extends invitation to us to be part of God’s life.

That spirit of invitation from the psalmist is echoed in the life and teaching of Jesus. I have in mind the parable of the wedding banquet, where the table is set for everyone to come, even and especially those who live on the margins. I think of the comfortable words that Jesus says to those battling anxiety: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.

Maybe a good question for this Lenten season is to ask ourselves how we are responding to those invitations. One of the chilling aspects of Jesus’ parable about the wedding banquet is that many of the guests say “Thanks, but no thanks.” As I noted, in the canticle offered in Morning Prayer, we only read verses 1-7 of Psalm 95. The remaining verses offer something of a caution, a warning against hardening our hearts. If the greatest commandment in scripture is to love God with all that we are and all that we have, the violation of that commandment can come as we refuse to open our hearts.

The hardening of the heart can happen in so many ways and for so many reasons. Ironically, it is often religiously observant folks who end up with stone cold hearts. I imagine those are the folks who turned down Jesus’ invitation to the wedding banquet. That refusal can happen for all kinds of reasons. One of my favorite admonitions for St. Paul’s letters comes in a letter to the Corinthians where he tells them to widen their hearts (II Corinthians 6). In II Corinthians 5, he warns: Do not accept the grace of God in vain. (We heard that passage on Ash Wednesday.)

Taking the entirety of Psalm 95 into consideration, we balance the invitation with expectation. How can we open our hearts to accept the invitation to God’s life? A good first step is to admit we need help, perhaps praying the words of Psalm 51 that we said at the beginning of Lent: Create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me. I’ve mentioned before the Litany of Penitence from the Ash Wednesday service. It captures for me the ways our hearts harden: a refusal to forgive, a refusal to be of service, envy, pride, hypocrisy, indifference to those in need, indifference to care for creation, contempt towards those who differ from us. The list goes on.

Give it a shot today. Find your own way to respond to the invitation. Come sing to the Lord. Come offer thanksgiving. Come bow the knee before the Lord our maker. It’s the key to widened heart. Find a way this week to widen, not harden, your heart.

-Jay Sidebotham