A Grip on a Rope
Psalm 117
“Prayer recovers the shape of creation” (Eugene Peterson).
Psalm 117 is a weird little psalm, only two verses, only 28 words in the ESV. Essentially, the song has five thoughts, and three of the five are repeats: praise the Lord, extol Him, praise the Lord. The other two phrases are the meat of this short song: great is His steadfast love towards us and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
That’s all he wrote.
At first read, this looks like a writing assignment submitted by a lazy student, or perhaps the last-minute submission quickly scribbled because the student forget it was due today. What can I scribble out quickly? Praise the Lord and great is His love. Done.
Eugene Peterson, in his book Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer, reminds us that the Psalms are poetry and not prose, which means that every word is chosen and placed deliberately. Some of the poems are acrostics, meaning each line begins with a successive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Most lack this kind of structure, but even the pouring out of prayers through tears has a poetic feel. Economy of words.
And Psalm 117 is the ultimate economy of words.
Peterson’s point is simple. He writes,
Prayer recovers the shape of creation. We are created in the image of God. We are declared, on the authority of Genesis, good….But we very often don’t feel at all good….We are conscious of failure and inadequacy; we experience criticism and rejection; we feel lousy. The memory of our good creation is obscured in a thick fog of failure and inadequacy (109).
Our memory of a good creation is obscured in a thick fog of failure and inadequacy. Sounds like a Monday morning to me.
How does prayer change that? Prayer reorients us to the beauty of creation. Even the act of naming God, directing our prayer to the Lord, recovers the goodness of creation. “When I name the Name,” Peterson writes, “I have a grip on a rope by which I can be pulled from the mire of subjectivism: my life is now oriented to another who is more and other than I am” (110).
How long must that prayer be? According to Psalm 117, not very long. With economy of words, this prayer names the Lord, the One who is greater than me, the Creator and Sustainer of All Things. And with one sentence, the prayer names two characteristics of this Great God that will radically change how we feel about today.
In the midst of all our feelings of failure and inadequacy: God’s steadfast love towards us is great, and His faithfulness is eternal.
Instead of droning on and on about these two truths, like I’m doing now, this short song invites us to mediate on these two life changing truths. The God of All Creation loves us greatly and will be faithful to us for eternity. And what a long poem could not do, these 28 words accomplish, washing away my Monday morning feelings of failure and inadequacy.
Praise the Lord, I now have a grip on a rope.
(Quotes are from Eugene Peterson’s book, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer)