Psalm 97

Easter 7 - Year C

Psalm 97

In verse 2 we hear about the foundational relationship between "Righteousness" and "Justice". Many times we pair "Peace" with justice. A helpful perspective here is that righteousness and justice correspond with an internal and external component of a our life. Peace and justice have a greater tendency to both be external, not requiring ourselves to participate in justice as a part of our wholeness and that of creation.

By the time we come to verses 10 and 11 we hear some parallelism. Justice is paralleled to external actions of guarding and rescuing. Righteousness is paralleled to internal responses of light and joy.

If we begin to bring these together we need to ask about what light we might shed on situations where someone or some part of creation needs to be guarded. Immigrants and ocean gulfs come easily to mind today. We also need to investigate the connection between joy and rescuing. If you have been on a mission trip of some sort, you probably have a sense of this and a question about why you don't do it more regularly.

Without having to posit an externalized anthropomorphic "Lord" to be "king", we might better recognize a mystery larger than ourselves in qualities of righteousness and justice, in guarding light (no not the soap opera Guiding Light where little guarding went on), and rescuing joy which are much to be sought and lived. In some sense the Lord language puts the focus on being authorized rather than our own inherent integrity and integration (so close in sound and so distinct in derivation).