The role of the Psalms in our spirituality... No one can truly learn to pray without knowing the psalms by heart. In the new book by NT Wright, a case for the psalms, he argues there for the restoration of psalms into our regular worship. He says Psalms transforms us and was used as a form of discipleship of the whole community being read daily for centuries, molding the mind of the Jews. Also, we are so many centuries detach from the world of the Psalms that often we involuntarily avoid it. But our goal in spirituality should be how we can learn to enter into that world again. This is a spiritual discipline that we sorely need today. We need to learn to enter into that world just like we need to learn to enter into the world of Revelations and be transformed. psalms assumes a certain reality and aliveness that may need to become the standard of our spirituality. Psalms sees the world very honestly and vulnerably. Wright makes a call to the church to bring back the psalms in worship and here, he points out why? 1. There is an observable growing neglect of the Psalms in worship. More and more of the churches that used to have Psalms in worship no longer do and for some who still do, there is a growing superficiality in their use of the name, not doing justice to the richness and depth of the Psalms. The sadder fact is that the new churches that never did, have never realized the rich spirituality they are missing in the Psalms. 2. The Psalms are the most quoted part of Old Testament in the New Testament and maybe it’s because it is at the core of Jewish Spirituality to whom New Testament was principally addressed. If you were talking to people steeped in the Psalms, incorporating it in your message should be critical. 3. The Psalms is also expectedly, the prayer book of Jesus, growing up. It was thoroughly present inside the Gospels and in the first church, to give expression to the way they understood God and what God was doing. For us today, to neglect the Psalms or distance ourselves from it could also mean, distancing ourselves from Jesus and the spirituality of the first church. 4. The Psalms are songs, poetry, prayers rolled together as one, describing intimately the way the people of God knew Him, their faith in God as Creator, Redeemer, judge, lover, friend, even adversary. It is unique as literature and as theology. The Psalms diver right to the depths of the human condition, our frailties, our passions and lusts. Psalms explore also the great promise of God, what they meant to the people then and what they did when those promises did not come true. 5. The Psalms actually disciple us when we use them in worship. Imagine how a thousand years of singing the Psalms transformed the people of God, molded their worldview. When we use the Psalms regularly, we get sorted out and guided, and our worldview will reconfigure according to the values, theology and modes of expression of the Psalms. 6. The Psalms actually struggles also with the same tension we face today, a clash of worldviews: the people of God who used the Psalms saw God as totally other than the world and also radically present (not distant), dangerously present, within the world. In the end, Psalms helped the people to navigate the world of their day, the same way it would for us today. 7. The Psalms had to be reconceived in the time of the first church when they now realized that Jesus was indeed the Messiah so as they as usual prayed and sang through the Psalms every day, they had this new perspective to the Psalms. It must have been disorienting at the start, for instead of the temple, a place, Jesus; a person was now in its place, where God was to dwell on earth. And with the Holy Spirit poured out upon the church, somehow, God’s presence is now everywhere, rather than concentrated in just one place. The Psalms then needed to be re-read and radically refocused around Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It was also this way that Jesus and the Holy Spirit now permeated their worship and prayer. 8. With respect to the imprecatory prayers, murderous prayers in for example Psalm 139 that God would slay the wicked, our biggest obstacle to embracing this actually is our wrong notion of that we in our modern times have already solved the problem of evil. The imprecatory psalms all remind us this is not so. We constantly experience being overcome by evil and our own extreme rage and hatred. The imprecatory psalms let us acknowledge this condition and the safest and best place to do this is in the presence of God. It is psalms way of providing us an avenue for worshiping God amidst turmoil and wickedness. 9. The psalms in that way promote a hyper-ideal hope for the world, a deep and desperate longing for a better world where there is no evil. The psalms looks at injustice and poverty and oppression and says, evil is real and some people are just so wicked we simply must wish judgment on them. For me, the Psalms feels like human kind has swallowed the Holy Spirit and is chewed in the mouth with all our saliva and bacteria, enters the esophagus and into the stomach, the acid and enzymes. Then after being liquefied and squeezed, it flows through the intestines, and comes out the anus. It is feces in a sense. God goes through our humanity, our pains, weaknesses, sins, lusts and anguish. It goes through our minds, our beliefs, our reasons, and through our fallenness, it comes out as the Psalms. It resonates with all our deepest desires. If we are angry, Psalms is angrier, if we hate, Psalms is murderous, if we are sad, Psalms is depressed if we are anxious, Psalms is in despair. If we are happy, Psalms is exuberant. If we have faith, Psalms touches God in the flesh. If we feel God is distant, Psalms feels abandoned. We can never exceed the Psalms. The Psalms make God so real, so near and also makes our agonies and brokenness, so real. Psalms gives us a way to speak our deepest prayers, it gives us words, poetic words that flow harmoniously, melodies so we can sing what is hard to utter. What we think we cannot say, or are too hard to say, Psalms expresses them for us. It is the only place in the Bible that man teaches God, transforms God. We cannot learn to pray without the Psalms.
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:12:38 +0000
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