unclench
Thursday 7.2.26 | Psalm 145:8-14; Psalm 45:10-17; Song of Solomon 2:8-13 | Proper 9A
unclench
Thursday 7.2.26 | Psalm 145:8-14; Psalm 45:10-17;
Song of Solomon 2:8-13 | Proper 9A
God’s power is an open palm. you’ve been making a fist.
TL;DR: Psalm 145 describes a God whose hand is open, who picks up the falling and feeds the hungry. This week's texts say the same thing from different angles: God love is never coercive, always invitational.
Read Psalm 145:8-14; Psalm 45:10-17; Song of Solomon 2:8-13
fist
Check your hands right now.
I’m serious. Look at them. Are they clenched? Are your shoulders up near your ears? Is your jaw tight? Is there a knot between your shoulder blades that has been there so long you stopped noticing it?
Most of us carry stress in our bodies without realizing it. We grip the steering wheel harder than we need to. We hold our phone like it might run away. We clench our teeth in our sleep. We wake up tired because our bodies spent the whole night bracing for something.
That’s what living in a system of constant demand does to a body. It teaches you to hold on. To grip. To protect yourself by staying tight, because if you let go, something might fall apart.
I’m writing this with a clenched body. I just found out my rheumatologist is leaving his practice. My mid-July appointment has been cancelled. For someone living with chronic illness, your specialist is not optional. They are the person who knows your history, who understands the medication, who has spent years learning how your body works. And now I have to start over. Find someone new. Explain everything again. Hope they listen. My shoulders have been up near my ears since I got the news. My hands are tight. My whole body is bracing for a transition I didn’t choose and can’t control.
So when I say check your hands, I’m checking mine too.
Psalm 145 opens with a God whose hand is doing the opposite.
open palm
“The Lord is gracious and merciful (rachum),
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love (hesed(.”
— Psalm 145:8 (NRSVue)
That sentence contains two Hebrew words worth slowing down for.
The first is rachum, translated as merciful or compassionate. It comes from the Hebrew word rechem, which means womb. It’s the fierce, protective, gut-level love of a mother for the child she carried. It’s visceral. It’s physical. It’s the kind of compassion that doesn’t think before it moves, because the body already knows what to do.
The second is hesed. We’ve been living with this word all week. Steadfast love. Covenant loyalty that doesn’t quit. The Eastern tradition connected it to olive oil, medicine rubbed into a wound by someone close enough to touch you. Hesed is not a feeling. It’s something applied.
Then the psalm says:
“The Lord upholds all who are falling
and raises up all who are bowed down.”
— Psalm 145:14 (NRSVue)
and
“You open your hand,
satisfying the desire of every living thing.”
— Psalm 145:16 (NRSVue)
The image is an open palm. This is more important than meets the eye.
Empire’s power is a clenched fist.
It takes and grips and holds.
God’s power is a hand that opens,
that feeds and lifts and lets go.
Psalm 145 is describing a God whose basic posture toward those who are falling, toward the bowed down, toward every hungry living thing, is open.
That’s a different kind of power than anything the world runs on.
the voice on the other side
Song of Solomon is a love poem. Two people, deeply attracted to each other, speaking in the kind of language that makes you feel like you’re reading someone’s private letters.
The church has never quite known what to do with it.
There are basically three ways to read it.
The first is the most straightforward, the literal interpretation: it’s a poem about human love and desire between two people, and it’s in the Bible because the Bible takes the body seriously enough to include erotic poetry.
The second is allegorical: the lover represents God, the beloved represents God’s people, and the whole poem is about divine love pursuing the human soul.
The third is the simplest and the one I find most honest: it’s both. It’s a real love poem between real people, and it’s also a window into how God loves.
The early church actually had a framework for this. They read scripture on multiple levels, with the literal meaning as the starting point but the spiritual or allegorical meaning as the deeper one.
St. Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux all wrote extensively on Song of Solomon as an allegory of God’s pursuit of the soul. They didn’t dismiss the literal reading. They just believed there was something underneath it that mattered more.
So let’s read it that way for a moment. And when we do, the poem becomes something remarkable.
The voice of my beloved!
Look, he comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Look, there he stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
— Song of Solomon 2:8-9
The lover doesn’t break the wall down. He comes close, looks through, and speaks.
My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away,
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come.”
— Song of Solomon 2:10-12
I think about the walls I build. The ones made of theology and competence and the careful management of how people see me. The ones made of pain I don’t talk about and questions I’m afraid to ask out loud. The walls I built to survive, and the walls I’ve kept standing long past the season when I needed them.
God doesn’t knock those walls down. God stands behind them and speaks. The voice is gentle. The invitation is simple. Winter is over. You can come out now. You don’t have to stay behind the thing that protected you when the cold was real. The cold has passed. Spring is here. Arise.
The early church fathers read Song of Solomon as a picture of God pursuing the human soul. Not with force. With patience.
St. Gregory of Nyssa described the spiritual life as epektasis, an endless reaching toward a God who can never be captured or controlled but who keeps calling from the other side of the wall, inviting us further in.
That’s what these psalms and poems are doing this week.
They’re not commanding. They’re inviting.
for the ones on the ground
This week we started with burnout. We named the exhaustion of carrying a yoke that was never designed for us.
We sat inside the loop of wanting to do good and watching ourselves do the opposite.
We stood at the well, in the tent, and beside the donkey, watching God show up without weapons.
Now the psalms say: God picks up those who are falling.
That’s not a metaphor for people who made a mistake.
The Hebrew for “falling” is physical. It means people whose legs gave out. People who are on the ground because their body couldn’t hold them up anymore. The bowed down are people bent under weight they were never designed to carry.
God’s response to those people is not a lecture about trying harder.
God’s response is an open hand.
If you are falling right now, these texts are for you.
If your body is tired and your faith feels thin and you’ve been gripping so hard for so long that your hands hurt, these texts are saying something simple:
You can let go.
The hand underneath you is open.
The voice behind the wall is gentle.
The winter you’ve been living in is not the last season of your life.
You don’t have to break through the wall.
You just have to hear the voice on the other side and take one step toward it.
reflect
where are you clenching?
what wall have you kept standing past the season when you needed it?
what would it feel like to open your hands and let God’s open hand meet them?
Thank you, Paul. Even though I don’t know you personally and I will likely never meet you, you have become a true pastor to me. Your honesty and teachings are helping me heal here in the garden wilderness. 💜
So often you say beautifully just what I need to hear