Prayer: Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love, for they are from everlasting.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts.....

(Play one note on pipe.)
Was that one sound or many?
Yes, and no.
It was one note, and also a whole set of interrelated sounds, which musicians call overtones. Overtones give musical notes their richness, and increase their effects on our feelings. Now, words are like musical notes - they too, have overtones. Their overtones also affect our feelings, and give depth and richness to poetry, e.g. ocean
Today's Psalm is a poem, and it is full of rich words with some wonderful overtones. It's in the form of a prayer, a prayer for guidance, for instruction, for forgiveness. Above all it's a personal confession of faith.

If you like, you can turn again to p 262, and follow the text.

What I plan to do is to look at the overtones of some of the key words in this poem, to open up their teachings about God's attitude to us, the poet's attitude to God.

We begin at v1 with "nephesh". Yes, we have to translate, and the more meaningful the word, the more difficult it is to find a good translation, one which conveys some of the overtones as well as the main note.
Nephesh is translated as "soul", and I freely confess that I want to run away whenever I hear that word. Because we have this traditional belief that a soul is something a person HAS, which survives when the body dies, and goes either to heaven or hell.
In ancient Israel, they believed that a person was a single united being, and would have been very confused by the idea that you could split somebody up that way. So, when we read "my soul" in the Hebrew scriptures, we understand it as "myself", "my feelings", or, "me in relation to God".
We don't have souls. We are souls. It is the whole self which the poet lifts up to God - mind, body, feelings, the lot.

And why? Because he/she trusts God. Again, rich overtones! It is the word used for a baby clinging to its Mum, it means "rely on", and "have total confidence in". This is the kind of complete unwavering trust with which our poet approaches God.

V4 is a petition - show me your ways, teach me your paths. As in English, this word for "way" has two meanings - the route to follow,- the way to the station - and the way of doing things - the way to prune roses. The word for "path" or "road" is simply the one you can follow on the map.
So the overtones in this verse show the psalmist's desire to learn God's instructions both for the routines of daily living, and for journeying through life along God's road. This is a life going somewhere, for God.

V 6 is just so beautiful, "Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love, for they are from everlasting." I'm tempted to advise you to fasten your seat belts for this word, "compassion", because it was a major eye-opener for me when I learned Hebrew. In the singular it carries a meaning a lot like the English, to be in harmony with somebody else's feelings, and we usually limit it to bad feelings.
But if the word is plural, the depths of its meaning shine out. For the plural of "compassion" is "womb". In Hebrew you cannot talk about God's compassion without reminding yourself that it is like a mother's love for her child. It's intense, self-giving, enduring, like the best maternal compassion.
In the case of God's compassion for us, it has always been there, and always will be there. These overtones are reinforced by the word "Chesed". Here, it is translated "love". The trouble with the word "love" is that it is well nigh worn out from overuse.
In English we love our partners, we love chocolate cake, we love the cat, and we love God. Oh, dear! Chesed does not apply to chocolate cake, and it's got very little to do with St Valentine's Day. It's "steadfast love" in a recent translation, and it is characterised by the idea of always, stubbornly, behaving in a caring fashion, whether we are appreciated or not, and whatever the consequences for ourselves. This is how God cares for us, peoples.

Verses 6&7 give us an image of God as our teacher. God teaches us because God is good, upright, straightforward. Out of God's faithfulness to his own nature, which is compassion, God teaches us sinners the right way. God does not deceive us or leave us in the dark when we need to understand.
If we are willing to come to God admitting how far we have strayed from the right way: If we are realistic about the poverty of our understanding of the Way, then God is only too happy to teach us - and we note that the word for "teach" is also the word for "laying the foundations".

The first part of the poem ends with the assurance that everything God is and does comes out of divine steadfast love, and true faithfulness towards those who really want to live the right way.

Let's look at these ideas in a bit more detail

First, this business of "souls". We live in a culture which loves to divide things up into their parts in order to understand them better - so a scientist is a chemist, OR a physicist, or a geologist, and so on. It's an approach which has worked wonderfully well in the natural sciences, which in turn have made the miracles of modern medicine possible.
It is interesting to note, however, that we are beginning to hear new voices saying that , hey, human beings are not that simple. The patient's headache may be due to physical or chemical problems in the brain, but it may also be due to eye trouble, or neck trouble, or divorce. So it is becoming increasingly OK for medical people to look for non-physical factors in sickness and health.
You may have been somewhat bemused, as I was, to learn that clinical tests have shown that the patient who is prayed for will recover at a better rate than average. Well, well, well, we could have told them that and saved them a bit of research money!

The human person is just one being. And it is the whole person with whom God wants to relate. Trying to keep our relationship with him in a separate compartment from the rest of our lives is all wrong. It is bad for us because it effectively stops God from loving us wholly, and it hurts God to be cut out of big slabs of our lives.

So, when we worship, let us follow the psalmist's example and lift up our whole selves in worship. Let Sunday morning service be a time when we really get involved, never simply a performance we come to hear.
Let us come to worship wanting to get close to God, and praying that others will be able to come nearer, too. Let us come ready to find new light shining from a familiar scripture passage. Let's come really trusting God, clinging on to God the way we used to cling onto Mummy.

Let us come as students. There is nobody so hard to teach as the one who already has all the answers. This is why we need to come humbly - not with extravagant words about how totally evil or ignorant we are - God doesn't believe that any more than we do.
Instead we should come saying, God, I know I don't understand your ways as well as I could. Because I'm so grateful for your reliable compassion, I want to walk closer to you. I want your teachings to be a solid foundation for my future, so that as I journey on in life I can follow your road more closely.

We can never spend too much time contemplating the depths of God's compassion for us. Some images of God make us think of a perfect man out there somewhere beyond us, or perhaps a soft sentimental God who doesn't really mind all that much when we go astray. The coming of Jesus wipes out those inadequate pictures, and replaces them with a God who doesn't just say, "I care about you".
God in Christ is so committed to us that he pitches his tent amongst us. That's how John says it in the first chapter of his gospel story. We might say, "buys a unit in our street". For love of us, Jesus was baptised, saying in an action that spoke louder than words, "I'm one with you in your sin, and I know how it feels to really tempted."
God's passionate, unswerving love for us is, of course, most fully demonstrated on the cross. Here is God who would rather die than live alienated from us humans.

The psalmist had to manage without that most powerful evidence of how urgently God wants to be reconciled with us. But he knew enough to be grateful, and expressed that gratitude by asking for God's teaching.
Every devout Jew understands that what God wants most for us is the willingness and the wisdom to walk in God's ways, to travel God's road, to learn God's will for our everyday lives. So the psalmist prays, lead me, teach me, lay a firm foundation for my life.

I think this is a good attitude for us to copy, a good prayer for us to make our own, as we begin our preparation for the commemoration of Christ's death and resurrection. Lent is a very good time to seek more guidance, more wisdom, and more understanding. We are not beginners on the Christian way, but there is always so much more listening to do. All of us need more practice at doing God's thing.

Where is this all leading us? Assuming we want to respond to God's compassion, what sort of people are we supposed to be at the end of God's road?

Christ-like people. The aim of Christian living is to become more like Christ, who is both the living image of God AND the most compassionate of human beings. God wants us to end up as profoundly and stubbornly compassionate as Jesus was, and is. God wants us to trust, cling to God, as Jesus did, however painful the consequences.

Last year I ended my contribution to the parish newsletter with the words,
"May the Lord be with you, may She bless you." I heard indirectly that a number of readers were shocked, though only one thought it was important enough to talk to me about it.

It is from words like "trust" and "compassion", with their maternal overtones, that some Christians are deriving feminine images of God. So we cling to God our mother, because God acts out of maternal compassion for us.
It does not mean that we throw out other images of God as father, teacher, husband, potter, tree, light. All those images come from the Bible. Rather, the feminine ones are added, giving us a greater range of words, images, to enrich our prayers and widen our vision of the One who both more mysterious and more deeply loving, than all our partial images.

At the beginning of Lent, let us resolve to follow the example of the psalmist.
Let us cling to God, let us learn from God, and let us respond with our love to her infinite compassion.

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