Eric W. Sayers

The text: Psalm 121 – NRSV

There is a particular point on northbound highway 191 as you leave Jackson, WY where the road ascends sufficiently so that, at last, one can see clearly what lies to the west. It is a moment of pure magic, and I will never forget my kids’ reactions when it happened almost 10 years ago now on our first trip to the most wondrous place of my childhood, Yellowstone. Seeing the Tetons for the first time, especially on a clear day, even more if you have only seen mountains that barely equal their foothills, can be a life-changing and intensely spiritual event. Being in the presence of raw majesty can, if we let it, profoundly correct our perspective. I cannot read this little jewel of a psalm without remembering such experiences. To me there is no psalm more beautiful than Psalm 121, no psalm more eloquent in its concise construction, no psalm more evocative of God’s nature. My advice is simple: memorize it. Take it with you. For the psalm is one of pilgrimage, encompassing the entire journey of a life of faith. What will you find when you look to the hills? It may be peace, it may be faith, or like Julie Andrew’s Maria, it may even be music. There is something about a mountain…

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The text: Psalm 29 – NRSV

This psalm appears to be right at home during the springtime. The main metaphoric event is a great storm, mostly likely in the local context the kind that would blow into Lebanon from the Mediterranean Sea. But any image of storm will do. I’ve already alluded to my Oklahoma childhood back when we discussed Psalm 49, and so this psalm brings to mind those spring thunderstorms, full of wind, thunder, lightning, and sometimes hail. On my more recent sojourns on the East Coast, I could add Nor’easters and an occasional tropical storm or two. I’m sure you have your storm images and experiences. While it may be tempting to think that the message here is that God’s power is made manifest in nature, or that God’s power is great, like that of a storm, I suspect there’s more going on here. It’s fascinating that the storm is never directly mentioned in the psalm; rather, the active agent is God’s voice. Some suspect that this hymn may have originated from Canaanite worship of Baal (the storm god), and that the Hebrew psalmist adapted it to describe the God of Israel (and indirectly ridicule Baal in the process!). As others have observed, the psalm mentions God’s voice seven times, a number indicating holy completeness in Hebrew numerology. This perspective may remind us of Genesis 1 and John 1, where God’s Word is proclaimed to be the agent of all creation. What does it mean to you for God’s voice, God’s Word, to have such power? If we, as John did, consider the Christ to be God’s Word, how might this inform our attitude toward prayer? When we ask God to speak, are we aware of what we are asking? It is a marvelous prospect! It may even help us understand how the psalm ends, where God is proclaimed to sit enthroned over any and every storm, to be king forever, blessing us with strength and peace.

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The text: Psalm 80 – NRSV

Psalm 80 is a communal lament, a national cry to God for salvation. As you read it, however, the cause of the trouble is not at first clear. The psalmist, speaking for the entire community, pleas to God for salvation and questions how long God will remain angry. But angry at what? In an extended metaphor that dominates the psalm, the nation is compared to a vine that God planted and nurtured. Interestingly, this vine has walls, and it is these walls that God broke, allowing invaders to attack the vine. What is happening here? Did God abandon his precious vine? The psalm doesn’t give away the answer until the penultimate verse, and even then indirectly. After all of the pleas and cries comes the awful admission: it was not God who abandoned the vine; rather, the vine abandoned God. It’s one of the oldest stories in the Good Book. Yes, this psalm is a lament; but at its heart, it is a confession. We should take care here. Neither this psalm, nor the practice of confession that it so well exemplifies, is about blaming the victim, nor are its cries a call to self-loathing about our failings, either at the level of the individual or that of the nation. Confession is about restoration. It is about laying ourselves bare to God so that our relationship with God can be healed. Why else does the psalm repeat the refrain, let your face shine, that we may be saved? This Lent, how can you let God’s face shine?

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The text: Psalm 55 – NRSV

Often we hear it said, “All politics is local.” Perhaps that is also true of personal relationships, especially when a relationship is broken by betrayal. It is one thing to cry out in response to a social injustice, a tragedy, or even an illness, but the pain is often more wrenching when its source is one of our closest friends. Such is the situation in this psalm of lament. At first it reads like many other laments, lifting up complaints against the “enemy”, and maybe we begin to see armies or oppressors in our mind’s eye. Then comes v. 12-13, and the boom falls. It is not an enemy that afflicts the psalmist, but my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. The psalm then moves into a statement of faith before again returning in v. 20-21 to friend that has betrayed him. The emotions are raw here, and few psalms are so intimately personal. But in that intimacy is the psalm’s great gift, giving words to much needed prayers. For what are our lives but a network of personal relationships, so many of which are more broken than whole?

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The text: Psalm 73 – NRSV

Today’s psalm is one to remember, bookmark, and study, particularly in times such as these. This wisdom poem marks a progression in Hebrew philosophical and moral thought. In early psalms, particularly the very first psalm, we see a philosophy often called “the two ways”. It is a simple idea: there are the righteous and there are the wicked. God will bless the righteous and punish the wicked. Psalm 1 clearly articulates this perspective. The problem is that, as we all know, life is very often inconsistent with this perspective: bad things happen to good people, and vice versa. Scripture is not silent on this complexity: the great wisdom books of Ecclesiastes and Job are frontal assaults against “the two ways”. Psalm 73 is much briefer, but contains the seeds of these challenges, and asks the same questions posed forcefully in Ecclesiastes and Job.

It starts in the opening verses, culminating in v. 3: I saw the prosperity of the wicked. The verses that follow give examples of the problem, until in v. 13 the psalmist utters a cry that resonates so well with so many modern people who struggle with faith: All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. What is the value of faith in a morally complex and corrupt world? Watch and read carefully what happens next, for it is remarkable. The tone changes in v. 16 when the psalmist enters God’s sanctuary. It may seem a glib solution; after all, life is still unfair outside the church in the real world, and the wicked are still prospering. But then, at least to me, come two of the most stirring verses in the psalm, v. 21-22. While we can’t always do very much to change the wicked, what we can change is our own hearts and minds. We do have control over that. It’s a marvelous and convicting image: the faithful psalmist reduced to a brute beast simply because of the psalmist’s bitterness toward the wicked! So what is the answer to that? None other than the close relationship with God we have heard described repeatedly in other psalms so far (such as Psalm 139). There is a pathway to peace here, and out of that peace can grow hope. In this, perhaps this singular psalm can illuminate how you read Romans 5:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

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The text: Psalm 47 – NRSV

On this “little Easter” we lift up one of the clear enthronement psalms that celebrates God’s kingship over all nations. That God is king of all nations and not just our own, or not simply a given “chosen” nation, is perhaps an easy thing to say and outwardly fitting and majestic, but should give us pause if we take it seriously. What does it mean for God to be king of all humanity? What relevance does any nationalism have if this is true? Absolutely none, of course. What relationship do we have with people of other nations, if this is true? Are we not all one people? As the psalm proclaims, the princes of the peoples gather as the people of the God of Abraham. In many ways this psalm envisages the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, that God will bless all peoples of the earth through Abraham. It must be said that this proclamation seems contradicted by the realities of this or any other time (including the psalmist’s!); nevertheless, that God is king over all remains true, and the psalm looks toward a time when what it proclaims is fully true, and as Revelation says, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. Amen!

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The text: Psalm 69 – NRSV

Psalm 69 is an extended personal lament, one of the longest psalms of this kind. It shares many similarities with Psalm 22, famous for its opening line, My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Indeed, it seems clear that the Gospel writers saw the suffering of Jesus, in particular the stages of the crucifixion, in the words of both of these psalms. As you read, watch for those clues, those characteristics of the suffering Christ. Take turns imagining Jesus to be the speaker, and then place yourself in that role, allowing the words to resonate with your own experience of suffering. What insights does this give?

As you read, you may notice the overall structure of two stanzas (v. 1-12, 13-21) followed by an imprecatory section, and finally a hymn of praise. This is not a jumble of seemingly unrelated or even contradictory topics. It is a pattern of prayer: two pleas for help, a cry of anger at one’s oppressors, and a proclamation of faith in God’s healing salvation. How would the prayer be different if the anger were suppressed and left unsaid? How would it be different if it ended in an angry rant without the final proclamation of faith? My prayer is that when we are at a loss for words to pray, this psalm shows us a way, and provides them.  

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The text: Psalm 14 – NRSV

When I started this project, it was psalms like this one that provided the motivation. This potent little poem speaks powerfully not only to the current climate, but to every climate in history. There is some hope in that. The first line of the first verse is a clarion call, a sharp retort highly unusual in Scripture. Very rarely does Scripture ever directly address the question of God’s existence, but such is the nature of this psalm that it begins not with the question, but a statement of the absurdity of asking the question at all. It’s not that the question is the problem; it’s that by asking the question we reveal our true motivation: that we were rather be God than worship God. That is the Problem, with a giant, capital “P”. This is, of course, Paul’s exact argument in the opening chapters of Romans. Indeed, Paul quotes this very psalm, v. 1-3, in Romans 3 (it’s very much worth a read, particularly if you have Psalm 14 handy). Romans 3 is likewise a clarion call that almost assuredly made Paul quite unpopular with his Pharisee colleagues by claiming that no one is righteous­—not even the most learned Pharisee, of which Paul was an example—and therefore that all people are in need of the saving grace of God. The brilliant thing is that the words weren’t Paul’s! They came from Psalm 14, the Pharisee’s own treasured literature. But it’s not just the Pharisees that were uncomfortable. Paul (and Jesus, by the way) made lots of people uncomfortable. Honestly, if we truly hear the words of this psalm, it should make each of us uncomfortable, as the truth is that we are all flawed. The very “Ash Wednesday” message of this psalm is that only by acknowledging this truth about ourselves can God truly become our refuge. We must become poor to become rich.

The Pharisees would have you believe that religion is about what you believe and whether you’re following the rules. This psalm, and Paul, (oh, and Jesus, by the way) claim instead that your faith is about the choices you make, the way you behave, and the way you love God and love neighbor. This is why James ardently claimed that faith without works is dead. Scripture is saturated with this idea (By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another… Therefore by their fruits you will know them…). Christianity is about ministry. Is it any wonder that in so many cases unchurched people are drawn first to service projects or mission trips, and that faith blossoms later as a result of these experiences? So be careful with this little psalm. Only seven little verses. But those seven little verses contain the power to rock the world, to rock your world…in a very good way. You then may very well join the chorus:

O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

    When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people,

    Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

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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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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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