Where there is Darkness, Light (Psalm 16:1-11)

Prayer, Part 2: Protect Me, O God

First UMC of Pocatello

January 19, 2025

Psalm 16:1-2

***

There are 150 written psalms in the Psalter. If you read them straight through, you’ll notice that these prayers express the full range of human emotion: ecstatic joy, blistering anger, deep shame, quiet hope, wide-eyed wonder, and more. For this reason, the Psalms have always been regarded as the essential “school of prayer” by both Jews and Christians. One of the tried-and-true spiritual practices from both religions is to pray psalms every day. From a Christian perspective, there is a unique layer of significance in that Jesus himself would have grown up praying the Psalms, knowing them by heart and drawing upon them in his own spiritual communion with the Father. So, there is a mystical yet very real sense in which we commune with Jesus in his own praying when we pray the psalms.

Psalm 16 will be our guide over the next several weeks as we explore some of the scriptural foundations and practical beginnings of prayer. Today, we will focus on verses one and two, so I invite you to hear the word of the Lord a second time:

Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;

I have no good apart from you.”

There are three insights that I want to draw out of these verses, the first being that prayer is not talk about God but conversation and communion with God.

I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord.” That’s first- and second-person speech: I, You. When we say “I” we speak from our personal center. We take ownership of our words and feelings, and we enter into a conversation. When we say “You” we acknowledge the livingness of God. God is not an idea to be debated or dissected, not a creed to assent to, but a personal Being who knows us and wants us. The original Hebrew of this phrase is even more poetic: “I said to the Lord, ‘My Lord, You.’” We can feel the basic affirmation and relishing of God’s there-ness.

There is plenty of room in Christian life to reflect upon God – I’m doing it right now, talking to you about God and prayer in the third person – but if all we ever do is reflect and we never actually pray; if we never say to God “Here I am,” then our talk about God will lose its helpfulness, its edge, its grounding in love.

In our society, we are formed to think of and speak about other people from a distance. Those people over there. They, them. We are quick to talk about people rather than to people. It’s certainly easier. There’s no room for argument, no human face to temper our speech, no other voice that might question our neat, closed narrative.

Prayer teaches us a different way of communication, because it brings even the most burning and painful and confusing emotions into the I-You conversation. “If only you, O God, would slay the wicked!” says Psalm 139:19, a fairly frequent sentiment in the psalms, actually. The motivation there is not so great; slaying the wicked isn’t, at least at face value, a “good” prayer. But it is a true prayer because what was in his heart was spoken to God, giving God space to respond to and transform – or even deny, for our own good – that request. When we learn to communicate with God as I and You, our relationships with other people, our whole posture toward the world, can be transformed, too.

I keep saying words like communication and conversation, but I want to make sure I’m clear that there’s no one “correct” way to pray. Not all prayer sounds or even looks like verbal conversation, something that could be written as dialogue in a story. The point of the “I” and “You” is that prayer means opening our depths to God and expecting to be met by a God who personally reveals himself to us. Prayer is presence, being who we are and as we are before God. So even something like silence can be a very powerful form of prayer if our intention in that silence is to simply be in God’s presence and allow the Spirit of God to search us completely.

The second point to make about these verses is that prayer often begins with acknowledging our dependence on God and our need for God’s provision and protection. “Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” That’s how the psalm starts – with a demand, a plea, for protection. One of the best prayers we can pray, whether we are just starting off or have been at it for a while, is this: Help me. Help me. Help me. As the poet Wendell Berry has written:

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.

Learning this was a huge breakthrough in my own walk with God about a year ago. I’m the kind of person who likes to do research, to go and learn a concept or idea or technique about prayer and then come and actually try to put into practice. Teach me over here, then I’ll pray over here.

But there was a time when Adrienne was still very little and not sleeping very well, and we had been sick probably ten times in a row, and it was late in the wintertime, and all the regular pressures of life and work were there – and I was so desperate for prayer but feeling so unable to pray, and I was short on time and even on interest for going off to learn some profound new thing or brilliant prayer hack. And my spiritual director encouraged me to just start praying the words, Help me, moment by moment, day by day. To turn “Help me” into what the ancients called a Prayer of the Heart, a word or phrase kept on continuous loop within us.

And so I did. I prayed it when I was awake with one of the kids for the 3rd time that night. I prayed it when I felt myself tempted toward anger or hopelessness. I prayed it when I about to have a hard conversation. I prayed it when something spontaneous interrupted my day and all I could do was respond as myself. I prayed “Help me” while grappling with an unexpected painful memory.

I might even be praying it right now!

Help me. Protect me. Save me. These can all be wonderful prayers of the heart. And here’s what was amazing about that: asking for Help is prayer. Even if what we’re needing help with is prayer itself, saying help me or protect me becomes prayer, the very thing we’re longing for. We might feel so stuck, so resistant, so confused or antagonistic or disinterested when it comes to prayer, but if we can be in that feeling and still say, Help me, then God has an opening to transform our hearts.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reaching out to God for help. We are dependent, finite, vulnerable creatures. But there is a difference between, on the one hand, crying out to God every so often when something very devastating or difficult happens and, on the other hand, praying “Help me” on repeat without ceasing, which is something the psalms model for us:

“O Lord my God, in you I take refuge; / save me from all my pursuers, and deliver me, / or like a lion they will tear me apart; / they will drag me away with no one to rescue” (7:1).

“O guard my life and deliver me; / do not let me be put to shame, for I take refuge in you” (25:20).

Psalm 70:1: “Hasten, O God, to save me; / O Lord, come quickly to help me.”

And that’s only scratching the surface.

The third and final point I want to make about these first two verses of Psalm 16 is that prayer is about claiming God as our ultimate good and placing ourselves in God’s story: “I say to the Lord, You are my Lord, apart from you I have no good thing.”

These two short verses contain three different Hebrew names for God. The first, “Protect me, O God” – that’s El, the generic Hebrew term for a god.

I say to the Lord – that’s the holy name revealed to Moses at the burning bush which Jews do not pronounce out of reverence but which Christians occasionally translate as “Yahweh.” It’s the name of the God who makes covenant with the people.

And then, “I say to the Lord, You are my Lord” – that last one is Adonai, another name for God that means Lord or Master, someone in charge who we will listen to and follow and trust.

So, if we play with the translation a bit to bring out the nuances of those names, we might say something like: “Protect me, Creator – you who hold all things – for in you I take refuge. I say to the personal, promise-making God of the People, I am entering your way and your story. I have no good apart from you.”

Prayer is not about coming to know just any God, not God as blind force or impersonal energy or the philosophical idea of Being, but this God – the God of the covenant, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of Ruth and David and Solomon; the God of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; the God of Elizabeth and Mary and Joseph; of Peter and Andrew, and James and John; of Paul – and of all people from every nation who trust him and receive his Holy Spirit. When we pray we are entering into God’s great story, trusting that it guide us truly and be a source of good.

To sum this up: Prayer begins when, out of courage or desperation or innocence, we speak to God in personal terms. If we do that, we will find that God is always already reaching out to us, too. Prayer integrates us into a story and a community. And, finally, one of the best ways to begin own prayer practice is with that simple, ceaseless, honest prayer of the heart: Help me. Save me. Protect me. Pray it so that it becomes like a creek running outside a cabin, whose sounds become part of the landscape

Lord, teach us to pray.

And help us, for in you we take refuge. Apart from you we have no good thing.

Amen.