Open the Word

• Read and print out a copy of the Bible study sheet for each group member. Click here for additional Bible notes.
• In the session, read the Bible passage together, look at the Bible notes and Make connections sections. Use this conversation spark to provoke first reactions from the group: If you could live anywhere in the world, with anyone, where would you go and who would you be with?
• The Explore section guides individuals through the passage to discover what it might reveal to them.
• End with the Live in faith and Send out prayer items for the week.

Young people

• Encourage the group to respond to their discussion using one of the respond activities in the CYP Respond to the Word section. There is a specific activity for Young People which you may like to look at first.

• Every great achievement is an accumulation of smaller achievements. In restoring an old car, for example, or a house, the worker has many small triumphs, sometimes arrived at with great patience, before the whole job, which may take months or even years, is fulfilled. Psalm 126 embraces both the past and the future. The psalmist recalls the Lord’s activity, condent that it will be experienced again.
• How can we define joy? In what he called his ‘spiritual autobiography’, CS Lewis describes being Surprised by joy (see Further Resources). In his critical summary of the book, Bruce Edwards suggests that by ‘joy’, Lewis meant not mere pleasure but the sublime experience of the transcendent, the glimpse of the eternal that is only fleetingly available in earthly loves and aesthetics’.
• What will be discovered by the government’s ‘happiness agenda’, and its attempts to measure how happy Britain is? One opposition politician suggests there is a ‘danger ofpromoting “middle-class” materialistic aspirations and ignoring the urgent need to help people cope with life’s peaks andtroughs’. Might a ‘joy agenda’ be a better aspiration?
• Total fufillment can be only a future event, of which the present will sometimes offer glimpses, often drawn from past experience. Psalm 126 captures this, rooting it in the experience of exile and return and an ongoing journey. The event recalled here, and the memories we have of fullment and restoration in our lives, all lead us to consider what Jesus would describe as a concern for the kingdom, the overarching concern of the lectionary gospel readings for November, as we approach the end of the year.

Offer a little preparation, explaining that ‘Zion’ refers to Jerusalem, the holy city, but by extension to the Hebrew people. The ‘Negeb’ is a desert. ‘Sheaves’ represent the harvested wheat. Allow people a few moments to look through the passage and then read together.

Then make the rest of the psalm your own. Think of your congregational and community circumstances, and mould the psalm to fit your needs and what is going on at the present time: ‘Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the Clyde down by the docks; may those who sell poppies for Remembrance be blessed with success...’