Proper 13 Year A 2026: Psalm 17:1-8,16
One of the things I appreciate the most about our theology as Episcopalians is how acceptable it is to feel multiple feelings at the same time. We are encouraged to cry out to God with whatever we are feeling, whatever we are experiencing, and nothing is off limits. We can hope in God while sitting in the darkness. Through our prayers and our liturgies, we can weep and hope simultaneously - as we say in our funeral liturgy, “even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!” That doesn’t mean that at the grave we talk ourselves out of being sad. It means that at the grave we recognize the hope for “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” Nothing has been “fixed” but everything has been redeemed. We are left at the same place as the writer of psalm 17 is at the end of their psalm. Psalm 17, which we prayed the bookends of this morning, is directed to Yahweh - to the personal name of God. At the time the psalms were written, it wasn’t enough to just say “g...