Psalm 104:24-34, 35b Commentary

Would it ruin anyone’s Pentecost if the Revised Common Lectionary had allowed Psalm 104:35a to be a part of this lection rather than coyly skipping over its line about wishing that evil and wicked people would vanish from the earth?  And by itself, is that desire so terrible?  Maybe it’s a luxury for people in most Western countries to not know what it is like to suffer under an evil regime of oppression and terror.  Would we begrudge it if once upon a time as they suffered under the horrors of Idi Amin we heard some Ugandan Christians had asked God to remove the evil from their midst?  Or the Jews in concentration camps under Hitler?  Would we begrudge them taking the first half of verse 35 upon their lips?  Yes, we are to pray for our enemies as Jesus told us we must but longing for a day when wicked people do not get to call the shots need not undermine that.

OK, so I got that out of my system.

So now let’s return to the rest of Psalm 104, which admittedly does not even mention evil or wickedness anywhere else in its 35 lyric verses that celebrate the wonders of God’s creation and of God’s ongoing superintendence of that creation through divine providence.  Although Psalm 104 is a bit on the lengthy side, there is no good reason the whole song could not be read in public worship before preaching on it.  Or it would make for a nice responsive reading litany.  The whole psalm is packed with wonderful imagery and lovely poetic metaphors to depict God’s wrapping himself in light as in blanket and clothing the earth with the waters like adorning the world in a resplendent garment.

The parts of the psalm that are assigned by the Lectionary deal a lot with God’s life-giving powers.  If God feeds the creatures of this world, they eat.  If God does not so provide, they starve.  God is the one who puts his divine breath into each creature and that allows them to live until that day when God withdraws his breath and they perish.  And of course although verse 30 is the only place in English translations where we see the word “spirit,” that Hebrew word ruach means firstly “breath” and so everywhere in this psalm where the breath of creatures is mentioned, it is this same word.

But verse 30 is the obvious reason this song is assigned for Pentecost Sunday in the Year A Lectionary in that it says when God sends his spirit, creatures are created and the very ground of the earth is renewed.  Some translations now capitalize the “S” of “spirit” as a kind of Trinitarian nod to the third person in the Godhead that we now refer to as the Holy Spirit.  There is no warrant for that in the original Hebrew, of course, nor did this poet have the slightest inkling that there were distinct persons within God to be discerned.

But through the idea that under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit biblical authors told more than they often knew, we could allow ourselves a retrospective Trinitarian interpretation of this passage.  We can recognize this psalm’s “spirit” at work in creation as the same Holy Spirit active on the day of Pentecost long ago in Jerusalem when the disciples-turned-apostles suddenly found their life renewed once the promised Spirit of God got poured out upon them in power.

But reading Psalm 104 in the light of Pentecost may yield some other curious theological and spiritual benefits.  Consider: we are not accustomed to thinking that every breath we take is a direct blessing of God’s providence.  We don’t move through our days consciously thinking that it is the very Holy Spirit of God who gives us our life moment to moment.  We may be grateful to God for our life and we pray regularly for God’s sustaining presence to give us good health, avoid accidents, or to heal us and make us better when we do fall ill or get injured.  But is the Holy Spirit of Pentecost involved in our every respiration to the extent Psalm 104 depicts it?

In terms of the actual contraction and expansion of our lungs we maybe are not sure God has to attend to every single breath.  God has other things to do presumably!  However, Psalm 104 may push us to remember that we should not think of something like Pentecost as some one-and-done action of God.  Pentecost and the pouring out of God’s Holy Spirit was not just a one-day-only event like some Memorial Day sale at an appliance superstore.  The Holy Spirit of Pentecost is as alive and as moving in the church and in each of our individual lives today as on that long ago day in Jerusalem.

We don’t need to hear rushing winds, see tongues of fire, or experience utterances in multiple foreign languages to know that still yet today, the Spirit inspires us and respires into us.  As I write this psalm sermon commentary that you are now reading, I believe the Spirit is equipping me to do this task.  When we encounter people at church with particular gifts for hospitality, service, mission work, disaster relief work, administration, preaching, teaching, and anything else you could name, those are the direct results of the Spirit’s working in someone’s life for the betterment of the church and its mission to the world.

When we encounter people who so clearly grow the Fruit of the Spirit on the limbs and branches of their lives—people who are good and gentle, self-controlled and kind, loving and peaceable, generous and joyful—those are indeed traits cultivated in us by the Holy Spirit every bit as much as the apples that are starting to grow in nearby Michigan orchards are being cultivated by fruit growers.

Psalm 104 reminds us of God’s wonderful twin works of creation and providence.  It further suggests that the very ruach or spirit-breath of God is what animates all life.  But by extension it is also a lyric reminder that spiritually in the church, we are just as animated moment by moment, Sunday after Sunday, season after season by that same Spirit that fell in power on the disciples once long ago and that led them to proclaim, “Jesus is Lord!”

Illustration Idea

Blessedly enough we generally never need to think about the act of respiration, of breathing as we take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide around sixteen times per minute every moment of our lives.  But one of the more famous incidents of three people becoming acutely aware of their ongoing respiration of good air in and bad air out happened to the three astronauts of Apollo 13, the space flight that experienced a dangerous explosion en route to the moon in 1970.  The explosion sufficiently damaged the command module that they had to temporarily shut it down and use the lunar module as a lifeboat as they headed back to earth.

In the scene from the movie version of this that you can watch here, we see the discovery of a major problem as three people needed to occupy the undamaged lunar module for far longer (and with one more additional person) than its air filters were designed to handle to filter out the CO2.

NASA had to leap into action and you can watch that play out here in this fine scene.  Since in this commentary we thought about a psalm that made us ponder our every breath, perhaps no moment is more telling as to the importance of breathing than something commander Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) tells his anxious crewmates.  As they wait to see if the jury-rigged substitute air filter they had just built would work, Lovell says “Just breathe normal, fellas.”

When we can do that, it’s a gift after all!