Acts 13: 26-37 – Paul preaches in Pisidian Antioch.
Luke 24: 36-48 – Jesus appears to the disciples.
“Learning to love the Psalms”:
To help us focus on today’s reflection, think for a moment how the psalms have figured in your life.
Did you learn psalms by heart as a child? Perhaps read in church school assemblies? Sunday School? Become familiar with them through regular church attendance, church school, school assemblies? In family worship times? Are the psalms now a part of your private devotional life or are they for you a closed book?
My first meaningful encounter with the psalms was in my late teens, when I met my husband to be. At that time, he was heavily involved as youth leader at St James New Town. I was worshipping with my family at Wesley Methodist in central Hobart.
Soon I began regular attendance at St James evensong our Sunday date with the rest of the youth fellowship. There the psalms were always an important part of the liturgy.
After our marriage I was confirmed in the Anglican Church, in which I’ve worshipped and ministered in various ways ever since.
How do I regard my relationship with the Psalms from that teenage start through to the present? My knowledge of individual psalms increased over time, of course, as I sang and prayed them regularly in Sunday services. Through the years I was more and more blessed and inspired by these favourites, but I still saw the psalms in total as a book of sublime peaks of beauty, faith and comfort, rising out of a sea of material that I rarely read, or indeed, wanted to read. Then something changed.
About eight years ago, in that January, in addition to my usual Bible reading, I resolved to keep a Bible near the bed to read one psalm first in the morning and one, last thing at night in numerical order. When I finished the final psalm 150, I began again at Psalm 1.
This experience of sustained, regular reading of the psalms during that year bookending each day and night deepened my love and understanding of them all in ways that I could never have predicted when I began. The habit of a psalm in the morning and a psalm at night, laid down during that first year of disciplined reading, has stayed with me and becomes more precious to me as time passes.
That’s my story; I hope it has stimulated your thoughts and memories too.
Jewish and Christian traditions see King David as the writer of the psalms, a thousand years before Jesus. Some researchers date many of them much later, and research continues to this day.
For our purpose, let’s think of the psalms in their present form~ being collected and shaped at the time of the exile in Babylon, 600 years before Jesus when the Jewish captives found that singing these psalms, (and writing some new ones,) was one of the few things that kept them sane and gave them hope.
When the exile ended and the people returned home, the second temple was reconstructed in Jerusalem, and the psalms became the basic hymnbook of Temple worship, and of the thousands of local Jewish gatherings in synagogues around the world and in the holy land itself. The Psalms were the hymnbook that Jesus and his first followers would have known by heart.
Jesus quoted and referred to the psalms in the manner of someone who had been accustomed to praying and reflecting on them from his earliest years.
Paul too would have prayed and sung the psalms all his life. What Jesus believed and understood about his own identity and vocation, and what Paul came to believe about Jesus, they both believed and understood within a world of faith shaped by the psalms.
Paul, in his preaching in Antioch, our first reading today, quotes Psalm 2:
“Today you are my son. Today I have become your father.”
and Psalm 16: 10 –
“You will not let your holy one see decay.”
Each of these is a foreshadowing of the coming Messiah, the first, as the Son of God, and the second as the conqueror of death.
In today’s passage from Luke, the risen Jesus explains to the puzzled and previously downcast disciples:
“Everything written about me in the Law of Moses and in the prophets and the psalms had to be fulfilled.” Luke 24: 36-48
Here we have Jesus citing the whole scriptural story, and within it, the entire book of psalms, setting himself as Messiah at the heart of them both.
The book of Psalms forms the great poem of the Creator, the God of the covenant, who will, at the last day, visit and redeem his people, and with them, transform and heal the whole of his creation.
The story the psalms tell is the story Jesus came to complete. It’s the story of God the Creator taking his power, ruling on earth as in heaven, delighting in his whole creation, and sorting out its injuries and injustices, messes and muddles once and for all.
It’s the story, too, of evil enemies prowling around, of people whispering lies and setting traps, of sleepless nights and many tears, of revenge and deep regrets. It’s the story of fear and shame through time, and of the pain in us all that cries out in our times of deepest need, “Why have you abandoned me?”
We see in the story something of our own souls, the nature of our own sins, the depth of the griefs we carry, the pain of the losses we bear so much deep within each of us, unnamed and often unrecognized, but there for us in full sight to reflect on and share with our Lord in the psalms.
They also tell the story of wonderful rescue, the power of God’s forgiveness, of comfort and restoration and rediscovered joy. These contrasting stories live together side by side in the psalms, frequently blended and overlapping~ and sometimes confusing!
Anyone whose heart is open to new dimensions of our human experience anyone who wants a window into the brightness and the dark corners of the human soul can find it in the poetry of the psalms.
But equally the psalms are prayers, the language we use to answer God, when he speaks to us. Think of that wonderful moment in Jesus’ parable of the loving Father and his wayward son: the climax, when the father runs joyfully to meet the returning wanderer. Before the son can even draw breath to speak, his father’s loving arms are around him, and he is receiving from his father the kiss of welcome and love the love that never faltered or changed no matter how far the son strayed.
The young man’s response is to speak the words of regret and sorrow and self-judgement that he’s carried in his heart all the way home. The words he uses are the words of Psalm 51:
“Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight.” (Ps 51:4)
The rest of the parable, of course, is about restoration and healing and forgiveness and the boundless love of the father. The father opened the dialogue with his loving welcome and the son answered. That’s the very pattern of our prayers. God speaks to us and we answer. So often in our prayers we beat on the doors of heaven to get God’s attention. We forget that he I s with us already that he has already welcomed us home with open arms and the kiss of love, waiting for our answer whether that answer comes from our darkness or our joy, from our faith or our despair.
Our answers are not always in words. Sometimes it’s silence, sighs, groaning, weeping or joyful laughter these are also our responses to God, part of the language of prayer and all of them embedded somewhere in the psalms for us to read and to pray.
The poetry and the prayer of the psalms, sitting together, require different things of us. The poetry plunges us straight into our own humanity, through our pretences, into depths and heights where we discover new truths about ourselves. The prayer requires us to answer our heavenly father whose desire for each of us is nothing less than the total renewal of our lives.
Praying the psalms is a serious business. Billy Graham famously said, “I read five psalms every day, because they teach me to get along with God.”
I can’t claim to have followed in Billy Graham’s footsteps to the extent of five psalms a day, but the wisdom is there in that one sentence for all of us to reflect on. My prayer for each of you today is that you will discover or rediscover the psalms, explore the heights and depths of them, and that as you read and pray, and learn ‘to get along with God’, you will be just as blessed each day as I have been I’d like to conclude our reflection today by praying Psalm 139, together. I have prayed this prayer countless times over the years, and there’s something different for me to find in it every time. Today, I can hear the prodigal son in his father’s embrace saying these very words. Whatever your circumstances are today, make this prayer your own, as you open your heart to the God who loves you.
Let us pray ….
Psalm 139
You have searched me and you know me, Lord,
You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down;
You are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens you are there;
If I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
Search me, Lord, and know my heart;
Test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
And lead me in the way everlasting. Amen