Mtr Kelli Joyce

1 Hear my cry, O God, *
and listen to my prayer.

2 I call upon you from the ends of the earth
with heaviness in my heart; *
set me upon the rock that is higher than I.

Dear friends,

I love these opening verses of Psalm 61. Who among us has not longed for God to hear our cries of despair and come help us? The heaviness of heart that the psalmist describes is an all-too-familiar part of the human experience.

The particular wording of David’s request in verse two is striking to me - “set me upon the rock that is higher than I.” Beyond its beautifully poetic language, this verse conveys a deep humility. In David’s sorrow, he is able to rightly understand who God is in comparison to him.

As humans, when we have power we are usually reluctant to put ourselves in a position of admitted inferiority. For David, it was his power as king that often stood in the way of a proper relationship to God’s will. (In parishes that do “Track One” of the lectionary, the story of David’s exploitation of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah was just read.) David did not always remember that he was subject to a steady and mighty power higher than himself.

Few of us today have kingdoms to tempt us towards thinking we are the pinnacle of power, but the tendency to forget “the rock that is higher” than we are persists in new ways. We risk making idols out of intellect and human enlightenment, turning tools given to us by God into substitutes for God. But no matter how wealthy or powerful or smart we are, we are fallible and finite and mortal - in need of the compassion of the one who created us in love and sustains us by grace. Every day, in good times and bad, whether we are weak or strong, we need God to set us upon the rock that is higher than we are; higher than anything we could achieve on our own.

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli