Read: Psalm 19
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable to you,
O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”
In my seminary days, classes on preaching recommended that our sermons begin with this prayer, offered from the pulpit just after reading one’s text. The prayer was amended to: “the meditation of our hearts,” as a way of reminding the congregation that they were a part of the proclamation experience, sharing the responsibility by, at least, not going to sleep. Certainly the text comforts the preacher, with the reminder that God is the solid rock foundation of the sermon and also the redeemer of it, no matter how bad it might be.
The prayer comes not from a sermon but from the psalmist’s hymn of praise to God for creating the heavens and giving God’s law to humankind. It seems like an unusual combination of God’s attributes, but that is why the psalmist writes it, to point out that the God of the 10 commandments who came so close to the Israelites on Mt. Sinai is the same God whose word created the highest heavens and the ends of the earth. The psalmist sees the law as a great gift from God who cares enough to provide instruction to mere mortals.
Then the psalmist prays for forgiveness. With all of nature to reveal God, and all of scripture to rely on, the writer still makes mistakes. He wants to give praise by living a blameless life, but he does not. So he prays for protection from his own sin, and concludes by asking for God’s acceptance of his prayer, which in itself is a humble human offering to the God of the whole universe.
The psalm gives us a beautiful pattern to follow in our own time of prayer in Lent: praise, thanksgiving, repentance, and offering of ourselves up for acceptance by the one who is Lord of all the worlds that are, yet also our rock and our redeemer.
Prayer: Glorious God, we want to be better servants to you, and we need your help: forgive and accept us, we pray. Amen.
Betsy Lunz
