Sermon for Sunday, March 22, 2009

                                                   “Praying and the Psalms”

                                                   Rev. Sharon James Fazel

Today in worship, you will have done something that we rarely do here, and I suspect is rarely done in other “proper” Protestant churches – you will have read aloud and/or heard read aloud, an entire Psalm, from the Old Testament of the Bible, beginning to end. But recent scholarship tells us that the Psalms were in their own time forms of public worship, even the ones we consider “individual” or “personal” in nature.  Yet public worship using the psalms doesn’t go too well with our contemporary society’s tendency, as poet and essayist Kathleen Norris puts it, “to idolize individual experience.” Born in my hometown, Washington, DC,  but raised in South Dakota and Honolulu, “Norris became known for her writings about Christian spirituality, especially after she became a Benedictine oblate and spent two extended periods at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota,” among resident monks and nuns. “Saint John's [by the way]is the second-largest Benedictine abbey in the Western Hemisphere, with 153 professed monks.” (Wikkipedia) The nuns, of course, reside at the College of Saint Benedict, where we have for the last several years held, and will again this year hold, our Minnesota Conference UCC annual meeting.

In her 1996 book The Cloister Walk, Norris recounts her experiences with the Benedictines at Saint John’s. Having kept the discipline adopted by residents of  praying the psalms every day, several times a day, she learned their value as spiritual poetry. She learned that they connected her solidly to the earthiness of life, at the same time that they brought her closer to God. She says of what she learned there: “Praying the psalms is often disconcerting for contemporary people who encounter Benedictine life … they find it difficult to recite a lament when they’re in a good mood, or to sing a hymn of praise when they’re in pain.” She continues, “The communal recitation of the psalms works against this form of narcissism, the tendency in America to insist that everything be self-discovery. One soon finds, that a strength of the monastic choir is, that it always contains someone ready to lament over a lifetime of days of ‘emptiness and pain’…or to shout with a joy loud enough to make ‘the rivers clap their hands.’” (The Cloister Walk, p.101)

It’s true that we are aware of both extremes these days here – in this congregation. Nearly every week Chris and I hear of someone else who’s lost a job, or whose business is dissolving into the recessionary swill of our economy, or whose hours have been cut enough to make significant differences in their daily budgets. Or, we hear how the stress of such times has forced mental health issues to the surface with renewed intensity for some of us, rendering confusion, fear, a sense of abandonment – in both those for whom mental illness is a personal burden, and for the loved ones who stand at their sides, feeling helpless. Or, we know of relationships that have finally ended in rifts, splits, tearing asunder the fabric of what had been held together by a fading image of “family.” Physical illness, mental illness, relational illness, financial illness -- it all seems rampant just now, not only in the world we see in print in our newspapers, or read on-line on our computer screens, or even on our telephones, but right here and right now.

And yet, it lives hand in glove with our joys and our stories of deliverance: children and youth growing and learning despite adjustments in their parents’s relationships, babies being born to loving parents, marriages being planned, partners committing or re-committing themselves to each other, friends standing side by side with us. And for some of us, the passing of the spring equinox, bringing blue skies, birds chirping above the snow cover, and the promise of buds and leaves and flowers … All of these images are part of our real lives now, as they were for the psalmists and the communities for which they wrote, ages ago. “The psalms mirror our world but do not allow us to become voyeurs,” says Kathleen Norris. Recognizing that violence and anger are often elements in psalms, she says: “In a nation unwilling to look at its own violence, they force us to recognize our part in it. They make us reexamine our values,” (Cloister, p. 103).

And so, with all of that in mind, and with deference to the poetic nature of this morning’s music, song and even sacred dance, I’d like to read to you one more time, Psalm 107, in its entirety. But this time I read from a contemporary translation, The Message, translated by Eugene Peterson. Listen as you would to poetry. Drink in the images, as well as the underlying message that they deliver. If you can, hear this reading as a prayer, and pray with me. When we have finished this prayer, we will hear the Lord’s Prayer, sung to us by Deborah Braun, and danced by Darcy Herman. You are welcome to follow along silently, once more drinking in the language of the poetry and the music of yet another sacred prayer. Let us now be in prayer together, with Psalm 107:

Psalm 107 (The Message)

 (1-3 ) Oh, thank God—God is so good! God’s love never runs out.

   All of you set free by God, tell the world!

      Tell how God freed you from oppression,

   Then rounded you up from all over the place,

      from the four winds, from the seven seas.

( 4-9) Some of you wandered for years in the desert,

      looking but not finding a good place to live,

Half-starved and parched with thirst,

      staggering and stumbling, on the brink of exhaustion.

   Then, in your desperate condition, you called out to God.

      God got you out in the nick of time;

God put your feet on a wonderful road

      that took you straight to a good place to live.

   So thank God for God’s marvelous love,

      for God’s miracle mercy to the children God loves.

   God poured great draughts of water down parched throats;

      the starved and hungry got plenty to eat.

(10-16 ) Some of you were locked in a dark cell,

      cruelly confined behind bars,

   Punished for defying God's Word,

      for turning your back on the High God's counsel—

   A hard sentence, and your hearts so heavy,

      and not a soul in sight to help.

   Then you called out to God in your desperate condition;

God got you out in the nick of time.

   God led you out of your dark, dark cell,

      broke open the jail and led you out.

   So thank God for God’s marvelous love,

      for God’s miracle mercy to the children God loves;

   God shattered the heavy jailhouse doors,

      God snapped the prison bars like matchsticks!

 (17-22) Some of you were sick because you'd lived a bad life,

      your bodies feeling the effects of your sin;

   You couldn't stand the sight of food,

      so miserable you thought you'd be better off dead.

   Then you called out to God in your desperate condition;

      God got you out in the nick of time.

   God spoke the word that healed you,

      that pulled you back from the brink of death.

   So thank God for God’s marvelous love,

      for God’s miracle mercy to the children God loves;

   Offer thanksgiving sacrifices,

      tell the world what God has done—sing it out!

(23-32) Some of you set sail in big ships;

      you put to sea to do business in faraway ports.

   Out at sea you saw God in action,

      saw God’s breathtaking ways with the ocean:

   With a word God called up the wind—

      an ocean storm, towering waves!

   You shot high in the sky, then the bottom dropped out;

      your hearts were stuck in your throats.

   You were spun like a top, you reeled like a drunk,

      you didn't know which end was up.

   Then you called out to God in your desperate condition;

God got you out in the nick of time.

   God quieted the wind down to a whisper,

      put a muzzle on all the big waves.

   And you were so glad when the storm died down,

      and God led you safely back to harbor.

   So thank God for God’s marvelous love,

      for God’s miracle mercy to the children God loves.

   Lift high your praises when the people assemble,

      shout Hallelujah when the elders meet!

 (33-41) God turned rivers into wasteland,

      springs of water into sunbaked mud;

Luscious orchards became alkali flats

      because of the evil of the people who lived there.

   Then God changed wasteland into fresh pools of water,

      arid earth into springs of water,

   Brought in the hungry and settled them there;

      they moved in—what a great place to live!

   They sowed the fields, they planted vineyards,

      they reaped a bountiful harvest.

   God blessed them and they prospered greatly;

      their herds of cattle never decreased.

   But abuse and evil and trouble declined

      as God heaped scorn on princes and sent them away.

   God gave the poor a safe place to live,

      treated their clans like well-cared-for sheep.

 ( 42-43) Good people see this and are glad;

      bad people are speechless, stopped in their tracks.

   If you are really wise, you'll think this over—

      it's time you appreciated God's d love.   AMEN.

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