A Psalm of David...

Psalm 5:1-2

   For the music leaders. For the flutes.  

            A Psalm of David.

Hear my words, Lord. 

Consider my groans.

Pay attention to the sound of my cries,

my king and my God,

Because I am praying to you.    – Common English Bible

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A loose translation might be...

“Pay attention God! I’m talking to you! 

Oh great king…LISTEN to MY voice!”

Seriously, David!?!  Get over yourself!

Don’t get me wrong, David, King of Israel…slayer of giants, is one of my favorite characters in the Bible… has been since I fell in love with him as a young girl.  He ran neck-and- neck with Jesus Christ himself for a few years, I’m slightly ashamed to admit, because…well, let’s face it…Jesus was Divine…Son of God…perfect, sinless, blameless, etc…and David was human.     

                                         I could relate to David.

Besides, what’s not to like…handsome, athletic, talented musician, rich young ruler, heart for God…every female church-nerd’s dream! And confidence is always attractive – going up before a giant with a slingshot, alone…that’s borderline arrogant, perhaps, but we’re told it was because of his faith in God, and we women are suckers for le grand geste.

My youthful self always pictured him as the epitome of male beauty. Not that smoldering, tall, dark, handsome, dangerous kind some girls go for...but the clean cut, dependable, unlikely hero type.  When we’re first introduced the Biblical narrative says: “Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome.” (Sigh!) Come on! Even Michelangelo was a fan!

And being short of stature myself, David circa Goliath became an icon of ‘little but mighty.’ In college, while I was editing the student newspaper, our cartoonist, a genuinely gentle giant, drew a frame of David standing between the upturned soles of defeated Goliath’s  sandals (the Biblical hero looking suspiciously like cartoons he’d previously done of me, from the back) with the caption, “For all the reasons you want to be taller.”  It was during a period of great strife between the paper and the school’s administration; and the sketch, which ran on our front page without further comment and therefore sailed quite over-the-heads of said administration, and then hung above my desk; warmed my heart…and won the Collegiate Press Association’s award that year! But I digress…

So David is a long time interest for me. I studied everything I could about him during my adolescent crush with the Old Testament hottie. Yes, you may be sad for me, no Davey Jones, or David Cassidy on MY bedroom walls…but if the Bible Bookstore had carried posters of Jesse’s shepherd son…they would have had a customer. In the interest of FULL disclosure, there were other, live, present-day idols who caught my eye…but this thing was David was pretty heavy. I remember a heated discussion with my clergyman father about why the book of Samuel didn’t contain more about David and Jonathan’s friendship or David’s romance with Princess Michael. And, God rest his soul, the poor man fielded more than a few of his teenaged daughter’s questions about what… for a long time in our house was referred to mysteriously as “that business with Bathsheba”. I vacillated between serious disappointment in my clay-footed hero’s carnal weakness, and contempt for some roof-top bathing temptress without the modesty to keep her clothes on when she clearly HAD to know that His Majesty could see her, a married woman, from his palace window!

                             Yes…Davey boy and I have history….we go waaaay back!

And so something has bugged me a little, especially in the last several months, as I read my (nearly) daily office.  I often feel like Ole King David is a bit of a drama queen…eh… monarch anyway!

Let’s face it, in a large portion of the Psalms, he’s asking for God to bring vengeance down on his enemies in some pretty frightful ways: everything from your garden variety “smite them on the cheek bone” to head crushing! And when that isn’t the content, David can come off as kind of a whiner.  Sure, Saul spent most of his own reign trying to kill the boy who’d saved his bacon out there on the battlefield with the Philistines, but come on, fellow… give the lamenting a rest! Don’t you ever get the idea that God has heard it ENOUGH? And I’ve got to admit that my adult reading of the poetry of my beloved teenage heart-throb can occasionally give new meaning to the words narcissistic, self-centered, and self-absorbed. If these were excerpts from his prayer diary, I’d dismiss that feeling immediately, protesting right along with the cranky Poet King at the outrageous lack of privacy given to religious celebrities! Agreeing wholeheartedly with the pontifical tradition of burning the pope’s journals after his death, to avoid voyeuristic speculation, like poor Mother Teresa suffered when hers went public! The man is speaking to his creator here…perhaps we shouldn’t listen-in. It just isn’t cricket!

But many of the Psalms of David are addressed to the palace choirmasters, with musical notations for public performance! Clearly, he wanted them to be heard!

So David may have been the first of the “put it all out there” poets, baring his soul for his art and the audience.  And as I read, day after day, how he complained, and cried…how he begged for divine retribution…and how sometimes, like in Psalm 5, he DEMANDS of God… I’m puzzled, to say the least.

Oh there is glorious poetry in them. Nobody can speak of the majesty of God’s creation, the height and the breadth of God’s love…nobody can pen “Come on all you people, let’s praise the Lord!” like the Psalmist David! And the imagery, the heart tugging beauty of the phrases, perfection of expression… it’s all there. And sets itself easily to music!

However, it still occurs to me, from time to time, that David pushes and pulls at his God…crying, wailing, be-moaning his plight…and even to the point of calling out “Hey! PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” to the High King of Kings, the Creator of the Universe. He basically has a temper tantrum!

                              …and you know what?                 

God does pay attention.

God shows up, despite all those “where are you God, why have you forsaken me” psalms. He’s there, listening to the gut-wrenching fears, to the numerous confessions of failure, to the perhaps pompous proclamations…for ALL of it…God is right there…listening…to every word…every note of the poet David’s beautiful, baffling, bipolar offering. Even after Bathsheba!

 Why?  Because, as God said of him: David was a man after His own heart...who shared His desires.                

                               God loved him. And that…was that.

So I continue to read the Psalms, because there’s no better way to rail at the injustice, to whine about the loneliness, to complain about our enemies. And though sometimes I laugh, or roll my eyes, or wish my long-time hero would “take it down a notch” (some days they actually make me cringe, “How do you talk to the Creator of Everything like that!?”) …David got it right! At least right enough that after everything, an affair, betrayal, killings, wardrobe malfunctions…God declared that David was a man that He loved. Unconditionally loved.

And so, I pray that something like that might be said about me…despite my lack of faith, my cries, my failures.  And so…I continue to read David’s Psalms.