Daily Lesson for September 15, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Psalm 61 verses 1 and 2a:

Hear my cry, O God,
listen to my prayer;
2 from the end of the earth I call to you.

I am thinking today of what the psalmist does not know.

It is obvious that he does not know that the earth or round. He thinks it is flat.  He thinks it's flat and that there is an end and edge to it and that you can come to that end and that edge and stand there and not be able to go any further.

This is why the Bible ought not to be confused and used as a science book; the psalmist is not a scientist.

But what he is is faithful. And even in his geographical ignorance, his metaphor of there being an end of the world, makes a powerful spiritual point.

And the point is this: we may think we've come to our end, we may think we are standing at the edge of oblivion, we may think there is nowhere else we can go, and it's there -- right there at the place we believe to be our end -- that we do what the psalmist does; we cry out in prayer to God.

In a sense, all prayer is spoken in ignorance -- in fact, faith requires some level of ignorance because it necessitates us not knowing something -- not knowing if it is or isn't the end of the world. A faithful prayer is humanity's cry from what we think is the end of the world; answered prayer is the discovery that's it's really not the end of the world after all.

There's a lot the psalmist didn't know. There's a lot we don't know. There's always some limit to what we can know or see or foresee.  We all come to some end.

And then there's prayer.