Psalm 25 is the first fully alphabetical psalm, a prayer built on the letters of the alphabet by a man whose life had come apart. In this episode, we see why that scaffolding matters when grief makes coherent speech impossible. We watch him lift his soul to God, the exact opposite of the disqualification in Psalm 24, and ask four times in two verses to be taught. He asks God to remember his own mercies and to forget the sins of a youth he was still wincing at decades later. We find a "therefore" that says God's goodness is precisely why he takes sinners as students, paths worn into ruts by mercy, and the boldest sentence in the psalm: pardon my sin, because it is great. Then a man with his eyes up and his feet tangled ends by praying for everybody.

Psalm 24 begins by declaring that every square inch of the earth belongs to God, and ends with that same God standing outside a gate asking to be let in. In this episode, we see how its three puzzling sections hold together around one theme: entrance. Two processions move in opposite directions, one coming up the hill to God and one arriving from outside. We find that the qualifications for entry are entirely ethical, clean hands and a pure heart, and that almost none of them could be checked by a gatekeeper, because they live behind the door we all keep closed. We trace the lift-and-carry word that ties the psalm together, and we listen to gates being told to grow taller for a King who will not fit through the low doors we build for him.

Psalm 23 is so familiar that most of us have stopped hearing it. In this episode, we clean the soot off a few spots. The shepherd of the ancient world was a royal title and a rough job, and the man who wrote this psalm had killed a lion and a bear with his hands. We notice that "I shall not want" has no object attached, and that the psalm supplies its own inventory of what God has pledged. We watch the pronouns change at the exact center of the poem, where David stops talking about God and starts talking to him, down in the canyon. We find two sticks, one pointed at enemies and one pointed at us, both called a comfort. And we discover that goodness and mercy do not stroll politely behind us. They run us down all the days of our lives.