Eric W. Sayers

The text: Psalm 111 – NRSV

This wisdom psalm is worth studying carefully and slowly. At first this poem seems more like a song of praise as it recounts the marvelous acts of God. But the further one reads into the psalm, it becomes clearer that the focus is not on the deeds themselves, but on the nature of the God that did them. We at last get the famous “punch line” in the final verse (where “fear” here is more like “honor” or “respect” than “dread” or “terror”). Having saved the central claim until the end, the psalm invites us to reread it with that focus in mind. As you do this, pause on each couplet (verse), and ask yourself how the two statements of the couplet are related. What are the connections? You may find that the more you ask of this psalm, the more questions arise, and that’s a good sign you’re dealing with Hebrew wisdom literature! A quick example: in v. 2 (where we already get a sense of the importance of wisdom here), the greatness of God’s works is coupled with the study of those works by those who delight in them. How do we study the works of God? How do we delight in those works? What does it mean for God’s works to be “great”? How can we tell? And so on. Let the psalm guide you, and maybe it will also become a psalm of praise for you! (Maybe there’s even a connection between wisdom and praise…) Enjoy the journey!

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Want to catch up on any you missed? See them all by clicking on ‘Lenten Psalms” below.

The text: Psalm 76 – NRSV

This psalm is a powerful statement about our powerful God. As you read it you can almost feel God’s presences sweeping over the chaos of the earth, rendering it all silent and stunned. God’s appearance and God’s presence break the weapons of war, rendering armies incapable of fighting. As we discussed with Psalm 124, these metaphors of warring armies were particularly relevant to ancient Israel and may carry less meaning for us. The exercise for us could then become identifying what threats we are facing, what warring armies are approaching from the horizons of our lives, and then reading the psalm with these in mind and imagining God silencing them, rendering them inert and harmless. What is left in that silence? What does it look like to you for God to rise up in that silence and establish justice (remember Psalm 9?), to save all the oppressed of the earth. Could that even be you, your loved ones, or others that you know who are oppressed? The psalm concludes with a call to make vows to God and perform them. What response, what vows, would you make? If that isn’t an invitation to a Lenten discipline, I don’t know what is!

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The text: Psalm 38 – NRSV

We come at last to a psalm of confession. These psalms, sometimes called penitential psalms, are laments. But they are introspective. Here the primary enemies are no longer external forces or armies; rather, they are the psalmist herself! The pleas, the cries of pain are as poignant as those in Psalms 3 or 109, but the pain here is perhaps more intense because of the realization that it is within us, part of us, and caused by us. As you read, listen how the psalmist describes why she is suffering, and the things she has done to cause it. Hear the agony of her broken relationship with God, that incredibly close relationship described in Psalm 139 and lamented by Paul in Romans 7. It is because of the psalmist’s faith in God and in this relationship that the psalm does not end in despair, but clings to the hope of restoration.

How do we restore our relationship with God? Such a great Lenten question! Confession, as a Lenten discipline in its own right, is a necessary first step. It requires honest, clear-sighted self-assessment. As even Aristotle famously said, knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. Be curious about why you behave as you do. Bring the results of that curiosity back to God in prayer. In the process, allow yourself to forgive yourself, as only then can you accept God’s forgiveness. Then read this Psalm again and let it speak for you. You may find that it hits hard, quite hard. But that can be a good thing. As Malachi says, he is like a refiner’s fire. Cleansing. Clarifying. When the fire is past, you may even find that you have repented just a bit, that you have changed your orientation just a bit in a Godward direction, and that you and a being that loves you more than you can imagine are almost seeing eye to eye. Now we’re talking.

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The text: Psalm 9 – NRSV

We come now to an interesting feature of the psalter. You may remember when we discussed Psalm 34, we mentioned that the psalm was acrostic, meaning that each successive verse begins with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It’s a fairly common pattern, and indeed we find this in Psalm 9, except that the pattern is not complete at the end of this psalm, but continues into Psalm 10. This is why many scholars conclude that originally Psalms 9-10 formed one poem, but were separated in the process of editing the psalter into its current form. Given that we’ve already encountered Psalm 10, this is an opportunity to read both of these together for the full effect. If you return to Psalm 10, we found that it was a cry of pain in response to the actions of the wicked, and that these actions primarily surrounded how people treat the poor. In reading Psalm 9, you may find that it’s the perfect setup for its companion psalm, because in Psalm 9 we see God enthroned over all the earth, establishing justice. Over and over the psalmist cycles between praising God and proclaiming the nature of God’s justice, so that this becomes the central question of this pair of psalms: what is God’s justice? What does the world look like when God gets God’s way? This becomes an exercise for the reader. When meditating on this, perhaps another question arises: If this is the nature of God’s justice, what then is the nature of God’s power? Or, how does God choose to act? What is our role as God’s disciples? I suspect this is a Lenten walk worth taking.

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The text: Psalm 19 – NRSV

We have reached the halfway point in this little discipline of daily Lenten psalms, and on this “midway” Sabbath, we celebrate a truly beautiful hymn of praise to God famously set to music by Joseph Haydn in The Creation. The opening of the psalm is reminiscent of part of Paul’s opening argument in Romans 1: Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. It is a powerful statement: not only are we surrounded by God’s creation, we are God’s creation. Our God is not a pagan god: Nature is not God; rather, Nature reveals who God is. Maybe the writer of John had this in mind in the opening of the gospel: All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. This point is underscored in the psalm by the extended celebration of the Law, the ideal representation of the Covenant, the relationship between God and humankind. Perhaps take a moment to read it alongside Psalm 8 or 139. Again, the closeness of God’s relationship with us becomes the focus of the psalm: But who can detect one’s own errors? Clear me from hidden faults. Fittingly, the psalm ends with a prayer I have heard prayed before countless sermons. The goal, in all that we do, is alignment with God, our creator and source. What a beautiful prayer for our Lent!

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The text: Psalm 25 – NRSV

Life is full of choices. Indeed, the courses of our lives is largely determined by the choices that we make. So perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the most natural prayers to God is a prayer for guidance. I can clearly remember uttering such prayers almost daily during my college years, when so many major decisions confronted me like the chocolates on that “I Love Lucy” conveyor belt. But it didn’t stop there; that was only the beginning. For me, leaning on God during these times of decision, seeking discernment, and having my eyes open to the path that God would have me travel has made the journey all the more fulfilling. Let the psalm guide you. While asking for guidance, it also calls us to remember God’s past acts, to confess of our own shortcomings, to praise God for God’s close relationship to us, and to plea for forgiveness. In short, it is an entire worship service wrapped in a lovely passage, a true guide to prayer.

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The text: Psalm 124 – NRSV

It may seem difficult to relate to a psalm like this, a psalm that offers thanks to God for victory in battle. It’s been a very long time since actual battles happened in North America, and so few of us who live there may understand what it is like to have an invading army rampaging through land that you call home. But such was very much the case for ancient Israel, whose land was a crossroads between the massive empires of Egypt and first Assyria and then Babylon. It may be hard to imagine what it was like to live under the continual threat of invasion from every direction; even the Mediterranean Sea was not safe, as it was the source of the Philistine invasions. It should be no surprise then that ancient Israel saw God’s actions as an explanation for their survival in such a hostile world.

Perhaps one way to approach this psalm is to remember that all psalms are poetry and therefore highly symbolic, and that Hebrew poetry can often be read at several levels: that of the nation (the surface read of this psalm), that of a local community, and that of the individual. So the psalm could be about our nation; it could be about our local church, workplace, or family; or it could be about us individually. Battles assault us in life at all three levels. What are the struggles in your own life? Are they issues at the national level? Are they conflicts at your workplace or within your family? Are they individual battles with a life crisis, a close relationship, or illness? Taking a moment to name these battles before reading the psalm again, particularly those in which you have seen God’s hand and guidance, and then allowing the psalm to speak into that struggle may be a path to a meaningful Lenten prayer of thanksgiving.

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The text: Psalm 2 – NRSV

To be honest, George Frideric Handel has likely done more than anyone could or perhaps will ever do to memorialize a psalm in music than what he did with Psalm 2. In the Messiah he devoted not one, not two, but three pieces to this psalm: two arias and a chorus. They all occur back-to-back in succession in a most notable place: immediately before the Hallelujah Chorus at the conclusion of Part 2. The bass soloist begins with “Why Do the Nations so Furiously Rage Together?”, followed without pause (attacca) by the chorus “Let Us Break Their Bonds Asunder”, after which the tenor soloist steps forward and sings “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn: the Lord shall have them in derision”, and then sings the aria, “Thou Shalt Break Them.” Then HALLELUJAH! It is one of most marvelous moments in the entire oratorio.

This psalm, at the very beginning of the psalter, is often called a royal psalm given its focus on the kingship of God, and especially the idea that God is King of all Kings and Lord of all Lords. As you read, you’ll find that the voice changes in the middle of the psalm, and we get a sense that this is no ordinary psalmist speaking! While it is tempting to see this psalm as a critique of earthly rulers by a divine king (and it is, of course), I would suggest that we ordinary folk are not merely bystanders. What earthly things do we rule over, and in such matters, what does the psalm say to us? What perspective does the psalm call us into? Pondering this may very well forever change the way you experience that famous moment of Handel’s most famous oratorio.

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The text: Psalm 34 – NRSV

This psalm will forever hold a special place in my spirit, as about two years ago it became a very personal prayer for me. It was about that time that I narrowly avoided a personal crisis. When it was clear that the danger had passed, in a wave of thanksgiving I went to the piano and played the opening bars of what would become “Come, O Children,” one of my little anthems. At that moment, the music was there, but I had no text. I knew that what I wanted was a psalm of thanksgiving, particularly a psalm of personal thanksgiving, and after consulting a few references and flipping through the psalter, found myself reading Psalm 34. It was amazing to find the words I wanted to express right there on the printed page!

It’s a fascinating psalm, and rather complex the more one studies it. It is an acrostic psalm, in that each verse begins with a successive letter in the Hebrew alphabet. It is a psalm of thanksgiving, but also one of teaching. The psalmist speaks, but not to God. Who is the audience? At first glance, one might suppose the audience is the psalmist’s disciples. But if we are reading it, then does the audience shift so that it is also us, simultaneously? Then who is truly speaking? Who do you hear saying, “Come, O Children, listen to me…”? This is a lovely example of Hebrew poetry that speaks through multiple layers, together and at once. Listen for them, and perhaps you’ll find a prayer of thanksgiving to call your own.

The text: Psalm 109 – NRSV

When I was much younger, a friend surprised me one day by saying something like “I was so made today that I had to go yell at God!” Never had I heard someone claim to be mad at God. It gave me pause. So today we come to a type of Psalm that may likewise give us pause, as it doesn’t appear to be the kind of song that has a place in polite company. This is not a psalm you will likely hear read in church or at weddings, funerals, or almost any other occasion for that matter. The psalm is like a lament, but the emotions are more raw, and there are calls for retribution or even violence. Such psalms (yes, there are others) are often called imprecatory psalms, literally  psalms that call down a curse. What is something like this doing in Scripture? We might feel ourselves recoiling from this text, much like we might recoil from another person who is raging or in agony. These parts of human experience—pain, suffering, anger, despair—make us uncomfortable. Nevertheless they are very much part of being human, and we have all experienced them, and know that we will experience them in the future. That, I think, is a big reason why these psalms exist, because the psalms express the full range of human emotions. Like we discussed when considering Psalm 10, God is very familiar with these emotions, and God does not recoil from us when we experience them. It reminds me of the story of the Good Samaritan. In that story, to whom is the character of God drawn? From whom do the outwardly “good” people recoil and avoid? Pointedly, the psalmist in v. 22 makes the central claim: For I am poor and needy. It is no longer someone else who is least and lost, it is I. In this sense, the psalm is a profound testament of faith, as the God who cares for the poor and needy will certainly care for us when we find ourselves down and out. Perhaps this Lent, when we feel the presence of enemies at the gate and need to yell at God, this psalm can be a prayer for us.

Perhaps another illustration may help. When I was a teenage my mother would say to people that when she came home after work, she could always tell what kind of mood I was in by the kind of music I was playing on the piano. When I was upset, bothered, or angry, I reliably found that an appropriately angry passage from Beethoven, Brahms, or Rachmaninoff would do the trick. No matter how hard I would throw myself and my disquiet at the instrument, all that would come out is music.

Curious about this series of posts? Read the initial post.

Want to catch up on any you missed? See them all by clicking on ‘Lenten Psalms” below.