Prayer, Part 3: Paying Attention to Good Stories (Psalm 16:3-4)

Prayer, Part 3:

Paying Attention to Good Stories

First UMC of Pocatello

January 26, 2025

Psalm 16:3-4

***

Several weeks ago, I shared with you that during this season of Epiphany I would be preaching a series on prayer, asking Jesus to “teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Prayer essentially means paying attention to God and being open before God. Prayer is the practice of true presence. Each of us was created in God’s image, and as a congregation we are entrusted with God’s “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). But it is hard for us to show others what God is like, and we certainly cannot effectively break down walls of division, if we are not grounded internally in God’s kindness and love. To become our fullest selves, we must learn to pray.

How do we do it, then? How do we pray? For this series, Psalm 16 is our guide. And as we reflect on one or two of its verses each Sunday, my goal is for each of us to come away with at least two things: a deeper longing for prayer and a simple practice to try during the week.

When we explored the first two verses of Psalm 16 last Sunday, I invited you to practice a prayer of the heart, a simple phrase playing on repeat that you could carry into any moment. I suggested one of the tried-and-true phrases like “Help me,” “Protect me,” or “Save me” – something that lets you be just as you are while opening a line of communication with God. “Help me” – it’s the way the psalm starts and it’s a good way to start learning how to pray.

Today we’re focusing on verses three and four of Psalm 16, so I invite you to hear the word of the Lord a second time:

3 As for the holy ones in the land,

they are the noble, in whom is all my delight.

4 Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows;

their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out,

or take their names upon my lips.

After asking God for protection and clinging to God as the source of all good things, the Psalmist now looks outward to consider other people. He sees, on the one hand, “the holy ones in the land,” and,

on the other,” those who pour out “offerings of blood” to “another god.” What’s brought to the forefront here is the question of who we are paying attention to.

Whose stories are we telling?

Whose names are we magnifying?

Whose actions are we delighting in and learning from?

Where are our emotional powers concentrated?

It's important to ask these questions. We live inside an economy where attention has become literal currency, where people make money based on how long they can keep your eyes looking at their product or using their app. And we live inside a politics bound to that economy, a politics that carefully manipulates our attention so that we are kept angry and engrossed in the chaos but ineffectively engaged on the ground. The algorithms will feed us a tweet coming out of or aimed at the White House, knowing it’ll raise our blood pressure and keep us scrolling, even as we remain unaware of suffering and injustice in our own backyards.

Let’s take some time to define these two groups of people, for the Psalmist the holy ones and those who choose another god.

The Hebrew word for “holy ones” is the plural form of the adjective qadosh, which means “holy.” Holiness means being set apart for a special purpose, which is a major theme in the Old Testament. Significantly, the first time this word is used is in Exodus chapter 19:3-6, when Moses hikes up Mt. Sinai to speak with God and receive the law. Here’s what God says to him as he goes up the mountain:

“This is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’”

What this tells us is that, for an ancient Israelite, the “holy ones in the land” were first and foremost other Israelites, people who shared in God’s covenant. The holy ones were simply the community, those bound together by a shared trust in God and a desire to live out God’s ways.

If we think about what it means to channel our delight toward the “holy ones” in our land, its most basic sense is paying attention to one another – this Beloved Community – looking out for one another, taking care of each other, delighting in the fact that God’s Spirit has brought us together in Jesus’ name.

Then, of course, there’s the way that “the holy ones” has been understood in the Christian tradition to mean “the saints” – special kinds of individuals. The Church has recognized that certain individual lives and stories have been particularly powerful, have manifested the beauty, servanthood, and love of God in radical, world-changing ways.

No matter how we might feel about the institutional idea of saints, the truth is that we all have people we admire and stories that inspire us. The saints are those who make us want to do better for ourselves, to rise up and meet the challenges of our own time. It’s good for us to have these personal saints. They make us braver, more generous, more committed, more loving. As the poet Rilke put it, “Because once someone dared to want you, / I know that we, too, may want you.” It’s not just a poetic truth but a scientific fact that inspiration transforms us, delight steadies us, and stories of remarkable people help us grow. Who are your saints?

Finally, we might consider the “holy ones in the land” a third way, as the people that Jesus specifically pointed out as blessed. The poor and poor in spirit; the ones who mourn; the humble; the peacemakers and workers of justice. Jesus told us that he would be among the hungry and thirsty, the sick and imprisoned in a special way. He promised us that in serving and getting to know them we would be serving and getting to know him.

So, we have these three possibilities for understanding “holy ones” as: one another, as the saints, and as the poor and oppressed. Consider what this means for attention, for where and how we might concentrate our delight and our feelings of connection.

In prayer, we name one another, and we thank God for each other.

We reimagine the stories of those who lived exceptional lives.

We remember those who are typically forgotten, those we are not “supposed to” see.

Now, how about these people that “choose another god.” To understand who the Psalmist is talking about, we have to let the verse fully unspool: “those who choose another God multiply their sorrows; / their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out; / nor will I take their name upon my lips.”

Saints arouse delight. But those who choose another god? Look for sorrow. Look for blood. Look for the readiness to do violence. This is very important for our own context, because part of the crisis for Christians in America is that so many people are using the name of Jesus and the whole vocabulary of Christianity to promote visions of life as different as night and day.

As we know, Christian Nationalism is on the rise, and our own state is a breeding ground for it. Christian Nationalism is a complete blurring of the lines between church and state, where people seek to attain positions of political power or economic influence so that they can use the full weight of governmental policy to constrict personal freedoms and enforce narrowly-defined “Biblical values” on all people. But if you look at the sorrow this ideology causes, if you observe the violence it preaches, teaches, condones, and even commits – these are not saints in the boat with us who we should try our best to delight in. They are people who have chosen a different god, who are multiplying sorrows, who require sacrifices that amount to violence. And of course this doesn’t just apply to Christian

Nationalists, but to anyone who has staked their life on something that diminishes rather than expands their love.

Yes, we are called to pray for our enemies, and even to serve them when they are in need. We absolutely should believe in everyone’s capacity to be transformed, to pray for that transformation, and we need to always remain aware of our own shortcomings and blind spots.

But if prayer is about attention, about who we make ourselves present to and how we make ourselves present, then obsessing over evil and violence, filling our time and our minds and our eyes with only the stories that increase hatred and despair, is really bad for us. It multiplies our sorrows. We should carefully consider whether even to speak these stories one more time, to bring those names to our lips. To be a person of prayer means giving our attention first and foremost to stories that fill us with wonder and courage, and to those among whom Jesus has promised to be.

Here's a test we might give ourselves: Do I feel burning anger? (That’s not right or wrong on its own, but its what we do with it that counts.) Do I feel burning anger? Has it moved me to change my life in a way that specifically addresses the source of that anger? Or am I just stewing in it, letting it consume me? Am I adding to the noise or making a difference?

I quoted the Austrian poet Rilke a moment ago. He lived from 1875 to 1926, dying eight years after the end of the First World War. He lived through a war that ravaged the countries that he loved, that consumed the lives of many people that he knew. During those years, Rilke remained steadfast in his commitment to poetry, in trying to offer a wounded Europe the gift of their forgotten humanity.

Here’s how another poet of that same era, the Russian Maria Tsvetayeva described Rilke’s significance to her:

War, slaughterhouses, flesh shredded by discord – and Rilke. The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of Rilke, who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary. The times did not commission him, they brought him forth… Rilke is as…necessary to our times as a priest to the battlefield: to be for these and for those, for them and for us: to pray – for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen.1

I’ve never read a better definition of what it means to be a saint.

In harmony with this, Howard Thurman, an African American pastor, writer, and spiritual director once said this: “Always there is some voice that rises up against what is destructive, calling attention to an alternative, another way.”2 Our times may be ugly and brutal, but if we listen closely and are thoughtful about our attention, we can tune into the alternative voices, the living antidotes, the saints who are here to heal rather than to harm. We can resist the appeal of those blood offerings.

To sum all this up, another verse from the psalms, Psalm 119:37, says this: “Turn my eyes from watching what is worthless; / give me life in your ways.”

And that’s just it: God, turn my focus away from violence, away from sorrow, and away from those who continually stoke violence and sorrow. Teach me who my delight should be in. Show me people who will show me You.

And now for a prayer practice that you can try this week:

Keep praying “Help me” everywhere and all the time. And add to that some focused reflection on a saint. It might be a grandparent, or a friend, or a mentor. It might be someone who lived decades, centuries, millennia ago. It might be someone who lived a very public life or someone whose name only you know. Perhaps in your memory there lingers just a single, bright moment when someone acted in a way that showed God to you, that changed what you believed was possible for your own life.

I want you to think about that moment, that person, or that story. Reimagine it. Journal about it. Tell someone about it. Notice how that offering of attention makes you feel in your body and what it makes you fantasize about. Pay attention to what is expansive in you and in others. That is prayer.

We focus on the holy ones because they teach us how to most honorable and effectively engage the world. They show us how to walk out onto the brutal landscape with a taste for delight rather than sorrow, having left the impulse to violence far behind.

May God make us holy and give us others to delight in.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Amen.