Verse 1: The psalmist begins with an expression of trouble. It is serious trouble; the prayer is a crying out. He feels desperate and all alone: "Don't hide from me, O God."
Verse 2: Incline to me. He is asking God to lean-in to his prayer. It is an image of intimacy - like a child needing the adult to bend down to hear and feel to the little troubled voice.
Verses 3-5: It sounds as if the problem is physical sickness. Perhaps the psalmist even contemplates his death. "Bones burning like coals." Imagine the doctor's alarm if we confided these symptoms. He feels withered. He's not eating which reduces him to skin and bones. He's so uncomfortable; he's groaning. This poor fellow is in bad shape.
We might take a moment to think gratefully of all the doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, seen and unseen technicians who have helped to restore us to health or treat our discomfort. There are scores of them!
Verse 6: Here the psalmist references two birds: a vulture (another translation says pelican) and an owl. A pelican belongs by the ocean where it can fish. An owl belongs in the forest or over the fields, not in a desert or ruined city. It is an image that things are not right. A sad image.
Verse 7: Here, the sparrow is referenced - a sparrow alone on a rooftop. But a sparrow is not a solitary bird - it lives together in flocks. How isolated the psalmist feels.
Verses 8-9: Maybe the sickness is related to some relational or emotional problem. Sometimes we can make ourselves sick with worry. The he acknowledges he's got some serious enemies - even for good cause. He is crying in repentance - in the ash heap. A person who is repentant for some crime or serious failure will understand: the addict who has abused his family, someone who has brought about marital or parental failure, the cause of an accident by carelessness, ignorance or stupidity.
Verses 10-12: The flaw must be serious enough for him to worry that God holds it against him. He'd understand if God were to be done with him - like a passing shadow or withered grass. But then he snaps out of his misery-song and begins to ponder how enduring God is: God's Name is mercy, compassion, forgiveness, loving kindness!
Verses 13-14: The psalmist gets out of himself and reminds God of the larger need to rebuild the ruined temple in Jerusalem (Zion). He stands amidst the broken down walls and the dust of destruction. He believes God feels with him.
Verses 15,16: He looks to the day when everyone will love God - when all the nations will acclaim how awesome God is. The temple will be rebuilt as a reflection of God's beauty and goodness.
Verse 17: Now the psalmist sings that from the temple sanctuary God will show favor to the plight of the homeless. Does this ancient message foreshadow the Catholic "preferential option for the poor?" Do today's pulpits announce this? Or is the priest afraid of someone disapproving of this kind of religion? "God helps those who help themselves," they claim the bible says. It doesn't. We're often afraid of the poor? We might connect with them just long enough to give them some charity, but we're afraid that justice means we'll have to share, do without, feel insecure or uncomfortable.
Verse 18: Would that we would think of the future generations - we would take better care of our planet, for God's sake. In the interests of money, we're rolling back all the environmental protections that keep the water and the air clean. What are we leaving "the children yet to be born" - a treeless landscape, endless pavement, waste and garbage, a few animals in cages or simulated wild environments?
Verse 19: God's view is not from the roof top of the temple sanctuary, but so high as to see what is happening all over and around the world - even (or maybe especially) the things that powerful people keep secret to protect their interests - the sub-contracting of African mines so we have the precious metals needed to make our computers and the raping of the local women around those protected mines. Father forgive!
Verse 20: That God might hear the groan of the captive. Lots of people are held captive in their addictions. And lots of people are groaning in prisons where they are held, wrongly condemned. Or the prisons are torturous and cruel, where nothing is done to rehabilitate; only punish. "Lock em up and throw away the key," some Christians say. That's not God's way. Christians are supposed to be the world's healing experts.
Verses 21,22: Again, the psalmist celebrates Jerusalem as the symbol of God's in-gathering. God is for everyone. What a pity that God's city is so divided, embittered and bloody. And the people are gathered to be God's people and to serve God, which is to love God and other people brothers and sisters. Early on in his papacy, Pope Francis said, "We will meet the atheists in the doing of good deeds." How hopeful is that - a uniter!
Verse 23: "Brought down my strength before my time; shortened the number of my days." I'm thinking of the UNICEF commercials, the Shriners and St. Jude's Hospital commercials, the children aborted, the children who die in the first year of life for lack of clean water, the children blown up in cities which have been reduced to dust and which we call collateral damage, the young soldiers killed in the ill-conceived and wasteful wars of proud men. God is insulted!
Verse 24-26: But for all that threatens and shortens our human lives, God endures - God, who has imagined everything that exists: the living things, even the stones and the heavens which we can see into more deeply than ever before - God has envisioned and created it. The picture up top was taken from the Hubble Space telescope, offering a window into the colorful assortment of white, yellow and blue stars inside the core of Omega Centauri, a giant cluster of ten million stars whose light is 15,000 light years away!
