The Psalms: prayers for all the time

 I ran a Christian bookshop in the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s. One of my customers introduced me to Dale Ralph Davis’ books. He’d written helpful - and often witty - commentaries on the books of Joshua through to 2 Kings. I’ve read them all repeatedly since then. 

Davis has more recently written books on the Psalms. There are now three of these books, each one looking at around a dozen Psalms. The books began life as a series of sermons he’d preached in his home church. He reminds us that though some of the Psalms are statements about God and life, primarily they’re prayers.* 

Davis has the knack of digging deep into the words on the page to give us a greater understanding of what the original writer was saying.  He clarifies things that may puzzle contemporary readers, and encourages us to listen to what God is saying through these ancient words. 

It’s my habit to read something from the Bible every day. The Book of Psalms is amongst my favourite sections of the Bible, and I’ve worked my way through it a number of times. Nevertheless, some days my mind skims through the words because, after a number of readings, they’ve become very familiar. (At one point some monasteries used to work their way through the entire book of 150 Psalms every week. That would make them very familiar!) 

Why are the Psalms so valuable? Why should we use them as examples of the way to pray? Didn’t Jesus give us a short and easy prayer that covers everything? 

I’ve thought about this last question. The disciples, even though they were classed as ‘unlearned’ men, would have heard the Psalms over and over in the synagogues. Why did they ask Jesus to teach them how to pray? Did Jesus offer them anything new? 

He gave them something concise, but I suspect he didn’t intend this to be the only prayer they should ever pray. The Christian Church agrees: while the Lord’s Prayer has high priority, the Church has always used the Psalms as part of its prayer life, as well as writing countless other prayers for use in liturgies throughout its history. 

Not only that, but the Lord’s Prayer has nothing in it that can’t be found in the Psalms, or at the very least, elsewhere in the Old Testament. Maybe Jesus was getting them to focus on essentials in this short prayer. 

So do we 21^st century people need to use the Psalms as prayers then? Davis would say, Absolutely. The importance of the Psalms is that they show us how prayer can take a wide variety of forms. Some of these may not connect with us personally at all: most Westerners won’t tend to pray for our enemies’ babies to be dashed against the wall, but I imagine there have been believers throughout the centuries who have been in such anguish about their circumstances that similar thoughts have seemed appropriate. Even today such believers might be African, under attack from violent opponents; people under Communist rule, or those having their lives wrecked by ISIS and the like. 

But there are plenty of other reasons to use the Psalms. Without their assistance, it’s easy to get into a routine of prayer, feeling as though you’re saying the same things over and over. And feeling, often, that God doesn’t hear you. 

The Psalms give us the means to come to prayer in a fresh state of mind. They enable us to see that we’re not the first to feel God is silent when we pray, nor are we the first to feel immense anguish and bewilderment while praying. 

The Psalms offer us ways to rejoice in prayer, to bow in worship, to exalt God for all he does and for all his blessings to us. 

I mentioned earlier how we can slide over words that become too familiar. Years ago I began to memorise portions of Scripture, including a number of the Psalms. (I won’t boast about the fact that a couple of years ago I finally committed all the 176 verses of Psalm 119 to memory. Whoops! I just did.)

Memorising Scripture opens the words up to us in a different way – just as memorising poetry does.  Instead of the words being either too familiar, or too difficult, we discover as we commit words to memory that we get a new clarity about what’s written. Moreover, if we continue to revise the pieces to make sure we don’t forget them, we find them becoming part of our bones. 

This provides another benefit.  There’s nothing quite like a Psalm to still your mind in the wee hours of the morning, when sleep refuses to come; or to have those familiar lines come to mind when life appears to have gone askew.

* Davis' books on the Psalms have memorable titles:
The Way of the Righteous in the Muck of Life
Slogging Along in the Paths of Righteousness
In the Presence of My Enemies

Accompanying

The poem in the Writer's Almanac for the 17th January this year was The Accompanist, by William Matthews.

The title naturally caught my attention, since I've spent a good deal of my life accompanying singers on the piano, and though Matthews is talking about a jazz situation, the elements are similar:

Don't play too much, don't play
too loud, don't play the melody.
You have to anticipate her
and to subdue yourself.

Wow, that's so familiar! Matthews puts those who suggest that the accompanist and the singer have a 'partly sexual' relationship in their place with the line:

it's partly
sexual but it's mostly practice
and music.

There's a similar thing goes on in playing for 'worship' times at church. Both the Assembly of God (which we used to attend) and the Baptist church (where we still are) lean towards an element of improvisation in the music. Some of the song leaders (often ones that don't play an instrument) think that worship doesn't really require attention to the details of the music. They think that even though we'll have a 'practice' this practice should also be a worship time. Nope, it's a time to practise. I could paraphrase Matthews on this point:

it's partly
worship but it's mostly practice
and music.

There's no worship without the fingers knowing where they're going to go. Musicians in worship bands have a difficult role to play. They're leading the congregation into a place of worship, but they often don't get there themselves, because they have to use a good deal of their brain to keep track of what the rest of their body is doing: keeping to the chord structure, playing the right rhythms for the particular moment, hitting the right notes (or turning wrong ones into right ones). It's a servant role: the guests enjoy the food, the servant brings the dishes in and clears them away again.

Execution of Christians in North Korea

Christian World Mission reports that three church leaders in the Pyongan province of North Korea have been executed.
The Christian ministers, from secret underground churches, were killed by authorities in Pyungsung county in the Pyongan province.  Another 20 Christians were reportedly sent to hard labour camps.
Religion is completely outlawed in North Korea and citizens are expected to worship only their leader, Kim Jong-il [photo at left] and his late father and predecessor, Kim il-sung.
Open Doors - an organisation that supports persecuted Christians around the world - has said that the country is the worst in the world for persecuting Christians. 
The country’s estimated 400,000 Christians are forced to worship behind closed doors.  They face imprisonment, torture or public execution if the authorities discover their faith.
400,000 Christians in a country that is supposed to be one of the most atheistic in the world.   (If that's the word you can use about a place that worships a man.)   This is an extraordinary figure, and shows how Christianity persists even in the face of the most violent persecution.  

Richard Dawkins is dead

If ever a headline was going to catch my attention - particularly in view of my past posts about Richard Dawkins - it was one that proclaimed: Richard Dawkins is Dead.
For a moment, until I began to read the post, I thought the grand old man of insane thinking had actually shuffled off this mortal coil. For better or worse, this is a joke, and, as far as we know, he still exists in a state which may be equated with a normal human life-form.
The post begins thus: After years of research by people who call themselves science lovers it was finally discovered that Richard Dawkins is dead. Richard (Latin for Dick) Dawkins (Latin for Dork King ie: king of the dorks) was found to have died at his irony board having exploded his mind trying to convince the himself that his genes still fit. Actually they stopped fitting long ago and ran off with some floozy because they were so selfish.
It probably has to be regarded as fairly low-level satire, (the sub-heading is: Dawkings Butt Kissers unite in prayer) but I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Campolo/Kendrick Tour

I'm most disappointed to discover that Tony Campolo and Graham Kendrick won’t be coming to Dunedin on their NZ tour. They’re going to Invercargill, but not Dunedin? How can such things be?
I’ve admired Campolo for years: his wit, his storytelling, his utter energy, his enthusiasm for God and his ability to communicate it to others, his intelligence and theology, and his willingness to step out into areas that many Christian speakers avoid - such as homosexuality – and give his honest opinions on the subject. Which usually aren’t the same as many other Christians. (He’d probably disagree with the latest Presbyterian approach to dealing with gay ministers, for example; maybe he wouldn’t!)
He’s a bit scary: he puts your own Christianity in the spotlight and makes you question where you’re at – but that’s okay. We need people with what-might-be-called a modern prophetic gift in the wider church. (Far preferable to those who have a ‘prophetic gift’ that’s always proclaiming doom and gloom for the world in general. Sure there were OT prophets like that, but they mixed it with some hope!) Campolo’s prophetic gifting is to focus on issues within the Body and expect some changes to come. He never says, ‘Thus saith the Lord’, but he might often be doing so, in fact.
Yes, I’d probably like to see Graham Kendrick too, although I’m not sure that he’s written anything startling in the music scene for quite some time. He certainly pioneered a bit of a move in the Christian music scene: some of his early songs were outstanding and very popular with congregations. But some of them are also quite awful – the one called, (I think) God of the Poor, is very earnest, and the words themselves make sense, and deal with good issues, and the tune is not too bad, but somehow it never seems to come off, to me, as a whole. Then again, it doesn’t help to have heard Kendrick himself singing it: he has one of those melancholy voices that don’t record well. (Although, if it comes to that, melancholy seems the ‘in’ thing for Christian singers, especially worship leaders. Don’t you hate that catch-in-the-throat thing they all do? And the kind of sobbing feel they use when they’re ‘talking’ to God in a live worship recording? Where’s the joy?)