I wonder about the editor the Psalms. How do you go from such praise to such despair in a few short lines?
Modern poetry books, and all hymnals I've ever seen, make an attempt to create some order out of the collected works. The Psalms lay the praise psalms, the royal psalms, and the psalms of despair in rather random order.
The emotions that I bring to God are rather chaotic - like the presented order of the Psalms - and I imagine that the emotions that we bring to God in corporate worship are even more so.
I wish that the religion would try to make order out of this chaos. That the Psalms would work the way that our hymnals or our order of service does....put an established framework down in which we can explore our faith.
God separated the light from the darkness and the waters from the dry land. God created laws for the people to follow and established the holiness rituals.
But so much about life with Christ is about disorder - Love that is uncontrolled and random and unexpected. He intentionally broke through barriers and destroyed categories, and asks us to continue to do so. Dealing with this chaos is one of the harder aspects of faith for me.
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It's interesting that we read this Psalm on Maundy Thursday every year, as the altar is being stripped.
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