(Psalm 145; Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 1:1-11)
As we’re concluding our series from the Psalms this morning, it seemed good to me to take a few minutes to look back at how we got here. We’ve considered a selection of psalms through the lens of the question that opens Psalm 137: how can we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land? Most of us, at least, have not endured the kind of savagery that community had, but as followers of Jesus, we are in a strange land even in our own nation. Remember the statement from Meister Eckhardt I quoted some weeks ago: “God is at home. We are in the far country.” From Jesus on through to Revelation, the New Testament is clear: this world is hostile territory for him and thus for all who follow him, whether it seems to be or not. If we are to sing the Lord’s song, then—both literally, in our songs of worship, and figuratively, in the way we live our lives—we have to understand what it means to do that in a strange land.
I’m not claiming to have offered a comprehensive answer to that question; even if I had one, which I don’t, it would take a lot longer than we’ve had so far. We’ve seen some pieces of the answer, though, which I think fall into three categories. First, singing the Lord’s song in a strange land requires honesty, toward God, ourselves, and other people, about our reality—ourselves, our situation, and our struggles. So, for instance, Psalm 88 shows us our need to be honest about the reality that life is hard, faith is hard, and doubt happens. We’re responsible for how we handle the hard times and what we do with our doubt, but if we judge others—or ourselves—as if those things shouldn’t happen at all, we aren’t operating in the truth.
As well, we have to face honestly the reality of our sin; we see this most clearly in Psalm 51, and note a couple things here. One, that’s our sin, not just our sins; our sinful acts matter, absolutely, but the root of the sin in our hearts from which they grow is the primary problem with which God is primarily concerned. Two, the great majority of churchgoers in this country only see themselves as sinners in the abstract. They will affirm, “of course I’m a sinner, everyone is,” but they’ve never reckoned with themselves as the particular sinners they are, and so they don’t really believe they’re sinners in any way that truly matters. That’s the biggest reason so many pastorates are so short: both church and pastor begin the relationship with the implicit assumption that the other won’t sin against them in any way they really dislike, and when that proves false, they feel betrayed. For that reason, for the sake of our witness to the world, for the sake of our own spiritual health and growth, each of us needs to confront the reality, “I am this particular sinner”; we need to admit that to God and to those around us (whom we’ll find unflatteringly unsurprised); and we need to accept that we have no hope in ourselves but only in the utterly undeserved mercy of God. Nor is this just an individual reality; as Psalm 2 shows us, it’s also a corporate reality which we need to face and admit together.
Along with this, we have to face honestly the reality of the sin committed against us, and our response to it—this we see in Psalm 137. This means looking into our souls with eyes wide open to face unflinchingly the fury and the hatred we may hold, but not stopping there. We need to look deeper yet, to see and acknowledge the deep, deep wounds which produce that dark and violent response—wounds inflicted by sin and the jagged, slashing brokenness of this world. Spiritually speaking, the world is a broken beer bottle which is too often wielded by thugs. We’ve all been hurt, many of us badly; we need to be real about that, and about our capacity for hatred in response, and then—here’s the key: bring it all to God without trying to make it safe or sanitize it or spiritualize it away. Obviously it would be deeply twisted and wrong for us to do vile, traumatic things to those who have hurt us; but if, deep down, we want to, we need to be real about that if we’re ever going to heal.
This points us to our need for justice—against those who hurt us, and against ourselves—which is highlighted by Psalm 139; this in turn lays bare our need for salvation which only God can provide. Psalm 146 makes clear that our efforts to find salvation elsewhere, from the powers of the world, are doomed to failure. Our only hope is that God is big enough, and indeed bigger than enough, and so we can cry out to the One who has been faithful to deliver us before in trust that he will be faithful to do so again.
Second, we can only sing the Lord’s song insofar as we’re holding on tight to him. He’s bigger than enough for anything, including our expectations of him; we see this clearly when we lay Psalm 118 alongside Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. God is faithful and he will save us, but he’s not going to conform to our expectations of how he ought to do it. We look around at our circumstances and think they tell us the story of what we need and what God can do, but there’s more to our circumstances than our circumstances, as we see in Psalms 146 and 139. We are in a strange land, but we aren’t lost in a strange land, and we aren’t on our own. Psalm 139 affirms God is leading us even when we don’t see him; Psalm 23 shows us God is leading us even when it doesn’t look like it, even when we walk a road where we see no earthly good, and so even in the valley of the shadow, we sing as those who are homeward bound.
Third, looking back to the introduction to the Psalter, Psalms 1 and 2, we see the importance of singing with our hearts open. It’s easy for us to sing to God with hearts closed to him, and many people do. When we make our worship about ourselves, our needs, our experience, our comfort, our desires, it doesn’t reach up to God; indeed, it doesn’t go anywhere at all. When we refuse to sing anything we don’t like, or ignore anything that challenges us, we close ourselves off to his voice—even if our objections happen to be theologically correct at times, we’re setting ourselves up as the authority and the judge, claiming God’s place for ourselves. Our ancient Enemy is always pulling us to do that, to make worship about us and our agenda; Psalm 1 makes it clear we need to be always working intentionally against that pull to make our worship all about God. That opens a channel in our hearts to him through which he can then work to shape us and change us as he will. As Psalm 2 shows us, that includes shaping and changing our relationship to the world around us and the powers that be—powers we tend to trust even though, as Psalm 146 tells us, we shouldn’t; and it includes opening us to the heart reality that this truly is a strange land where we can never be at home. This reality and the aching desire for home which goes along with it give us the desire to follow the Good Shepherd who alone can lead us home, for he alone knows the way, for he alone is the way.
So this brings us to the landing point of our journey in the Psalms, which is Psalm 145. That might seem like an odd choice, since it isn’t obviously isn’t the very end of the book, but here’s the thing: this psalm is the beginning of the end. That’s true in a few different ways. Like many in this book, this is a David psalm; it’s the last of them. It’s also an acrostic. If you’re not familiar with that type of poetry, it’s a poem which is organized alphabetically. For the standard Hebrew acrostic, you would have 22 couplets, each beginning with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet, arranged in alphabetical order. (For Psalm 119, take that and multiply it by eight; that’s why it’s so long.) You’ll note Psalm 145 only has 21 verses, and there’s an extra part in there in brackets—the ESV adds it to verse 13; that’s because somewhere along the way the Hebrew manuscripts lost the couplet beginning with nun, the 14th letter, so it didn’t get included in the verse count. Anyway, there are eight acrostics in the Psalms—five of them written by David—and this is the last of the eight.
Now, you might ask why that matters, but here’s the deal: the goal of an acrostic is to create a sense of comprehensiveness—you’re using the whole alphabet from start to finish. It’s just like we would say “everything from a to z”; it’s why Amazon created its logo as a wordmark with an arrow from the first a to the z, because that’s what they were going to sell. First books from a to z, then more and more and now, well, everything but the kitchen sink. So it is with an acrostic—the form tells you the poet is going to cover the subject from a to z—or aleph to tav, if you’re doing it in Hebrew. (I don’t recommend trying it in English, as we lack words that start with the letter x.) The form tells you this is going to be a comprehensive word picture, and then the content needs to live up to that. So this is actually an important type of psalm.
Psalm 145 is also a psalm of praise—interestingly, the only psalm of praise attributed to David—and one which the Old Testament scholar James Luther Mays calls “the overture to the final movement of the Psalter.” That final movement is the five-part conclusion to the book that we’ve talked about a couple times; the last five psalms all begin and end with “Hallelujah!” which means, “Praise the Lord!” 145 does not, so it’s not one of them, but just as the overture to, say, an opera includes all the major musical themes which will be turned into full songs later on, Psalm 145 sounds the themes that the five concluding psalms will pick up and develop.
This is a psalm of praise, so its subject is reasons why God is worthy of our praise. As is fitting for an acrostic and necessary for an overture on such a grand subject, the sweep of this psalm is cosmic. In looking at it, we could choose to consider each of the great themes in this overture; we could serve the purpose of the psalm by unpacking all the reasons it gives us for praise. To do that well, we could also end up being here a very long time, and I have my daughter’s wedding in six days. The other approach we can take is not to serve the purpose of the psalm but to try to understand and articulate that purpose—and as you’ve probably already figured out from the sermon title and our closing hymn, this is the approach I’ve chosen to take. The writer of that hymn is Greg Scheer, out of the Dutch Reformed stream in which I was raised; I don’t know him, but I know people who do (including my second daughter, from attending his church) and I know his work, and I know he is what every good hymnwriter has to be: he’s a good theologian. In particular, he was a very good biblical theologian when he identified verse 4 as the purpose statement for this psalm and used it as the chorus of his hymn. Put another way, verse 4 tells us what this psalm is doing; the rest of the psalm is the details. One generation will call to the next, and the purpose of Psalm 145 is to prompt and propel that to happen.
It’s a purpose which Jesus brings forward and develops in his departing words to his disciples. Acts gives his big-picture description of the life ahead for them: “You will be my witnesses”—which is to say, you will tell others what you have seen and heard. Matthew shows us their specific responsibilities. Jesus commands, “Make disciples of all nations”—in other words, do for them what I have done for you—in part by “teaching them to observe all I have commanded you”—do for others what I have done for you by giving them what you have been given. Jesus expands the mission in a few ways, first by basing his commands on his own authority, which he has been given by God the Father. Second, he directs them, “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; this also is doing for others what he has done for them, but it’s in a new and deeper way that they won’t even begin to understand until the Holy Spirit fills them all at the Feast of Weeks, the feast of Pentecost. This is in part because of the last and most important thing: unlike almost everyone who has gone before them, they won’t have to obey Jesus’ commands in their own strength, out of their own resources. They will be filled by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit will power them in their mission.
So as we bring this series to a close, the last word for us is this: when we sing the Lord’s song in this strange land, when we are his witnesses in this lost and broken world so loved by God, we don’t sing only for ourselves. We are links in the chain. We are runners in a relay. We are torchbearers who received the light from the hands of those who came before us, and we carry it to pass it on to those who come after us. We sing the great song of the life of the people of God, joining those who taught it to us, so others will hear the song, and be caught up in it, and learn it, and sing it as their own.
We sing to give heart and comfort to those who falter, as we can draw heart and comfort from others when we falter; and we sing to bear witness to the world. It’s important to note that this is true in our worship just as in every other part of life, and it’s also important to understand how that’s true. A few decades ago, when the “seeker-sensitive movement” was all the rage, Sally Morgenthaler wrote a book titled Worship Evangelism in which she contended that Christian worship should be designed to be primarily evangelistic in purpose—worship should be about evangelism. Morgenthaler has since rejected and repudiated that position, and rightly so, because our worship should be about God, for God, to God, period. The thing is—and this is becoming a huge reality in my kids’ generations—it is precisely as our worship is about God and God alone, not accommodated to our preferences or anyone else’s, precisely as it is “deep and strange and ancient,” that it bears witness to the world that there is a God in the heavens who loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend.
The beauty of this is, it’s not up to us. The weight isn’t on our shoulders. I love the way the Gaither Vocal Band put it in a song they first released decades ago:
The song of love I’m singing, you’ll remember,
though I might not always sing on key.
The music’s sure to stick there in your memory
even if you don’t remember me.There’s a limit to the time we have for singing;
it’s almost like we’re singing in the round.
We’ll pass the tune right on when we are finished
as our children add their voices to the sound.You might forget the singer, but you won’t forget the song;
singers come and go and fade away.
The melody of love remains; the truth goes marching on.
You might forget the singer, but you won’t forget the song.
We may all be forgotten by the world, but the song we carry will not be; and whether the world remembers our names or not, God does.
Photo, © unknown; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
