Prayer, Part 4: My Chosen Portion (Psalm 16:5-6)
Prayer, Part 4:
My Chosen Portion
First UMC of Pocatello
February 2, 2025
Psalm 16:5-6
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The scriptures call us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). This is not because prayer is an end in itself, or because it magically solves all our problems, or because God is handing out gold stars to people who do it. It’s because prayer is communion. Prayer is the practice of being with and before God, letting love search us, claim us, fill us. In this series on prayer, we’ve already seen that one of the ways ancient Christians discovered they could “pray without ceasing” was by asking God for help, everywhere and at all times.
Do you remember Wendell Berry’s poem from two weeks ago?
It puzzled me once,
that ancient call
to ceaseless prayer.
Now I know.
Help me. Help me.
If I must stay
longer at work
give me strength.
We are always in need of help; we never outgrow our dependence on God. Asking God for help is a great foundation for a life of prayer. I want to add to that today.
As we read the scriptures, we see how richly they use metaphors when they are talking about who God is and what God is like. We make metaphors when we place two images or ideas side by side and explore their relationship – not just how they are like one another or not, but how they draw out of each other new dimensions, illuminating was had been hidden.
God is light. God is a vine. God is a rock. God is a desert shrub burning but not consumed. God is a shepherd. God is love. God is a groan. God is a wrestling match in the night. God is the sound of sheer silence. God is a fetus, and a midwife, and a womb. God is water, wind, and bread. An obscure carpenter, a gardener, the first sculptor of primordial clay.
God! Father running to embrace us. God! Son with a criminal record. God! Spirit that is sometimes fire and sometimes a bird and sometimes breath itself. God is.
God is, in the words of Psalm 16, “my chosen portion and my cup” (NRSV). These are metaphors, and their presence in the prayers of the Bible is an invitation for us to cultivate a metaphor-rich imagination and prayer language.
There is a sense in which God is, by definition, ineffable. If something is ineffable, it is “too great to be expressed or described in words.” That’s partly what God meant when Moses asked for God’s name at the burning bush and God said, “I am who I am.” Our words and concepts and images can never capture God with any kind of finality. God exceeds all the bounds.
But God is also the Creator of all things. Creation has its origin in God’s love, desire, and imagination and bears some likeness to its source. Traditionally, theologians have talked of the “two books of divine revelation,” the first ‘book’ being the natural world, and the second being the scriptures.
But more than that, for Christians, is the startling experience of a God who has opened his very life up to the world, to people, to everyday stuff by becoming incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus thought with a human mind and spoke in a human language – and the linguists, neuroscientists, and artists tell us that thought and speech are metaphor all the way down.
There is a kind of boundless playfulness that comes from God’s openness to us, and Jesus creatively worked from his own palette of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic words, walking around and pointing: “I am like that…and that… and that. And the kingdom of heaven is like that… and that… and that.” Seeds and yeast, salt and light.
One of the ways we can pray without ceasing is by imitating our open and creative God and our image-rich scriptures. If God might be speaking to us, or at least inviting our curious gaze, through all things, then we can move through our day engaged in prayer.
How is God like the waiter who pours your coffee?
How is God like the cup that holds your coffee, that you hold in your hands?
How is God like the chair you sit in, or the friend you sit across from, or the morning light that slants in through the gray clouds and smudged window?
What do these simple, everyday experiences teach us about the God who is in and through all things? Where do they break down and stop making any kind of sense? And once we are playing with an image of God, we can consider how we might relate to a God who is like this thing. For example, here’s a beautiful passage from St. Francis of Assisi: “We are spouses when the faithful soul is joined by the Holy Spirit to our Lord Jesus Christ. We are brothers to Him when we do the will of the Father who is in heaven [sic]. We are mothers when we carry Him in our heart and body through a divine love and a pure and sincere conscience and give birth to Him through a holy activity which must shine as an example before others.” Do you see what he’s doing? He’s saying, ‘Okay, if Jesus is a lover and a brother and a son, what might it mean for us to relate to him in that way – if we were his spouse, sibling, and mother, like Mary?’
Praying with metaphor is not primarily about having interesting ideas about God – though there is pleasure in that. The real heart of it is that metaphor unlocks new ways or relating to God, of imagining who we are to God and with God, and who we are for the world. The Christian tradition, and perhaps our own prayers on account of our formation in it, come heavily laden with dominating, masculine metaphors: Master, King, Warrior, Father, Judge. Not bad metaphors when held in creative tension and conversation with all the others – but definitely bloated ones in many traditions and minds. They’re definitely the metaphors energizing persons and groups vying for power in Jesus’ name in 2025 America. I’d argue that people who have a richer imagination for where and how God might reveal something about who he is and what he is like tend to be more appreciative of differences in the human family.
If God is like that friend sitting across from you and your steaming cup of coffee, if God sees you so kindly and clearly in that way, without agenda, simply enjoying your presence whether you are talking or being silent – well, maybe that’s a different kind of God than you’re used to relating to. Maybe you’d actually open up and tell that God some things you’ve been afraid to say to the God who is Judge or King. And here’s what’s surprising: a true friend might tell us the very thing we need to hear but would rather not hear; a God who is a friend might be the most incisive judge of all, a judge who names what is there directly, with mercy, knowing our faults and possibilities and wanting what’s best for us.
So there is both beauty and seriousness in metaphor play. The beauty is in coming to know God as being very near to us, very eager to engage us. The seriousness is in examining our own certainties about how God acts in the world and asking if they are built upon a very narrow set of pictures. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and images generate feelings – of proximity or distance, of contrition or joy, of purposeful energy or quiet rest.
Do you have favorite metaphors for God? Favorite images?
Each day this week, pick something that you encounter in your daily life and ponder for a while, ‘How is God like this and not like this? How would I relate to God, speak to God, and act toward others, if I believed God was like this.’ And don’t be afraid of pushing some boundaries or venturing into heresy. God can take it. And a robustness of metaphors keeps us in touch with the God who, in his Great Mystery, dwells in the endless beyond, yet meets us here and there and everywhere.
The images in verses 5 and 6 of Psalm 16 all have something to do with measurement, things that hold or contain: a portion, a cup, one’s lot; boundary lines; inheritance.
Here’s how different English translations render verse 5:
NRSV: The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.
NAB: LORD, my allotted portion and my cup, you have made my destiny secure.
CSB: LORD, you are my portion and my cup of blessing; you hold my future. (CSB)
NLT: LORD, you alone are my inheritance, my cup of blessing. You guard all that is mine.
Pausing over a portion of food to eat or over a cup to drink. Considering the boundary lines of our lives as holding good things. Hoping for a good future, a good lot and inheritance. These all brought to mind the idea of thresholds for me, thresholds being moments or places of transition, where we either pause in our day or move from one thing to the next
So, taking a cue from the particular metaphors of this psalm, I’ll also invite you this week to pray a prayer during the “threshold moments” of your own day – when you have your morning coffee or leave for work or come home in the evening.
Blessing the threshold is an ancient practice from Celtic Christianity, and I’ve composed a simple prayer for us using Psalm 121:8 and a line from St Francis of Assisi. It goes like this:
“Lord, you protect our coming and going,
both now and forever” (Psalm 121:8).
“Therefore, let nothing hinder us,
nothing separate us,
nothing come between us.”
Take one of these with you, and tuck in your pocket or your wallet as you go about your days this week.
Lord, as we imagine an illuminated world full of your truth, as we seek to know you in and through all things, and as we pray at our thresholds, help us, for the sake of your love, which is for us and for many. You are our portion and cup, and we want nothing less than to taste and see that you are good. Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.