Lent Meditation: Day 22 - March 11, 2026

📖 Scripture Verse

I hear a voice I had not known:

“I relieved your shoulder of the burden;

your hands were freed from the basket.

In distress you called, and I rescued you;

I answered you in the secret place of thunder.

—Psalm 81:5c-7b

🕯️Meditation

Many of the psalms call to mind the history of God’s saving relationship with Israel, God’s call of Abraham, the Exodus, the giving of the law, God’s covenant with David, and other great moments  The recitation of the stories in poem and song was a way to keep in front of mind a living memory of God’s ongoing relationship with his people.  But in psalm 81, the work of memory takes a somewhat mystical turn.  The psalmist says he hears a voice that tells him, “It was you I took from the bondage of Egypt.  You were there at the base of Mount Sinai when I gave the law in thunder.”  The memory of great deeds becomes for the psalmist a participation in the present in the saving acts of God in the past.

God invites us to find ourselves in the great deeds and moment of faith and struggle that unfold in scripture—God call us when he calls Abraham.  God rescues us when he rescues the Israelites from Egypt. God promises his loving-kindness to us when he makes his covenant with the people.  These stories are moments for us to find ourselves in the present confronted by God’s living presence in our lives.

This is the central act of Christian worship in the Lord’s Supper: Do this in remembrance of me.  We break the bread and share the cup and place ourselves with Christ’s friends in the Upper Room, at the Cross, at the Empty Tomb.  The present is illuminated by God’s eternal light, bringing us next to the faith of old.  God’s great future shimmers just beyond our edge of vision, the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven in the Revelation to St. John.

The Christian life is not simply as set of practices, or some proverbial wisdom for daily living (though it is those things), but a way of understanding our whole life, and the life of the world as part of God’s great story with humankind.  “I heard a voice I had not known: In distress you called, and I rescued you.”

🙏 Prayer

Eternal God, let me know myself to be apart of your great and faithful story with humankind.  let me know and feel that I am part of your people, your plan, your faithful love for the world. Amen.

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