Introduction

The Congregation Council at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., where I am serving as interim pastor, opens its monthly meetings with devotions. These are the thoughts for the October 2010 meeting. The Psalm is the one appointed for Sunday, Oct. 17, the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost. The council reads it antiphonally in choirs.

Invocation

In the name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

Reading

Psalm 121

¹I lift up my eyes to the hills—
from where will my help come?
²My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
³He will not let your foot be moved;
he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.
⁴He who keeps Israel
will never slumber nor sleep.
⁵The LORD is your keeper;
the LORD is your shade at your right hand.
⁶The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
⁷The LORD will keep you from all evil;
he will keep you safe.
⁸The LORD will keep your going out and your coming
in from this time on and forevermore.

Devotion

So many times over the past year and a half, this has been one of the psalms that members of our congregation and I have shared. We’ve listened to these comforting words in hospital rooms before and after surgery and when facing troubling diagnoses. Sometimes, before funerals, we’ve heard these verses during devotions with families. Other times, we’ve heard this psalm within a loved one’s funeral or by the grace.

These times in our lives, when we face the hurt and the pain that afflict us bodily and the loss and the sadness that come when we mourn a loved one’s death, are times when we run up against our own mortality, the frailty of our own bodies.

On the one hand, we are grateful to God for making us and for placing us in the midst of his world. Yet, as we remember on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return. Illness and death are the reminders of our dustiness.

But that’s where this psalm speaks so clearly of God’s hope and grace. When we are bowed down with pain and sadness, the psalm calls us to “lift up [our] eyes.” When we find ourselves stumbling under the burdens of illness and death, then we receive the comfort, “He will not let your foot be moved.” When we wither under the scorching heat of the desert times in our lives, then we remember, “The LORD is [our] shade at [our] right hand.”

And finally, from the cradle to the grave, from our first cry to our last breath, “The LORD will keep [us] from all evil; he will keep [us] safe.” This is the comfort and the assurance and the promise of grace that God gives to us, “from this time on and forevermore.”

Discussion

+ When have you felt God’s protection at work in your life?

+ Do we live as if we really trust that the LORD will keep us from all evil?

+ What can we, as a congregation, do to share the message that our Lord protects us, even in the face of disease and death?

Prayer

LORD, our keeper and shade, watch over us and protect us from all that threatens us. When we are tempted to despair, renew our hope in your grace and love. Fill us with the assurance that you will keep watch over us and remain with us both now and forever; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.