Journey through the Psalms

Denise Dombkowski Hopkins

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780827217225
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Reclaim the Psalms for true worship, as well as prayer, as you learn how to approach God with the emotional intensity of the ancient psalmists. Denise Dombkowski Hopkins combines the insights of scholarship on the Psalms with artwork, liturgy, song, and poetry, to give us a new way to use the Psalms in our life of faith together, to empower our corporate identity and revitalize our worship. She examines how the Psalms formed the worship of ancient synagogues and the earliest churches and how they can do the same for our churches today. Reflective questions bring worship leaders and individuals alike to a new awareness of the power of the Psalms to enrich public worship and private devotions with an honesty that does not turn away from the realities of suffering and anger.

CHAPTER ONE

Praying the Psalms, Praying into Wholeness

One of the main reasons for the powerful hold that the psalms have on us is that they offer us what Roland Murphy calls “a school of prayer,” not simply in the sense of a collection of prayers, but rather as lessons in how to pray.¹ The psalms teach us that there are many different kinds of prayer and many different ways of praying to God that articulate the entire range of human emotions: fear, praise, anger, thanksgiving, joy, despair. All the feelings that mark our struggle for faith from day to day appear in the Psalter. Psalm language grasps for us the many facets of God and our relationship to God, whom we experience as both present and absent. Psalms allow us to be honest and whole before God as we express our faith in good times and bad and every time in between. A journey through the psalms is the journey of the life of faith.

Several years ago, I attended a United Church of Christ Conference workshop on “How to Talk about Your Faith” led by the Reverend Dr. Bill McGregor. Ours was a large group of about forty laity and clergy who were a bit apprehensive about the topic, but who wanted to be more confident about sharing their faith. As part of the workshop process we paired up, with ’A’ asking ’B,’ “Why are you a Christian?” At the end of five minutes, ’A’ asked ’B’ the question again. Then the procedure was reversed, with ’B’ asking and ’A’ answering, twice. In the plenary session, we all shared what we had learned. To a person, we had not responded to the question “Why are you a Christian?” with doctrine or creedal statements, but with our personal stories. Since most of us had not even been asked the question before, we were surprised by the form our answers took and by the feeling of empowerment rather than embarrassment that accompanied our storytelling. Furthermore, none of us produced one smooth narrative, but rather, a series of mini-stories punctuated by memories of joy and cries of pain, often accompanied by tears. We learned firsthand the truth of the Kiowah saying: “Laughter and tears are first cousins.”² Realizing that we never would have guessed the burdens others were carrying, we acknowledged the importance of the listener in our sharing, especially in accepting the “negative” parts of our story. We saw that asking the question twice offered a way to stay with each other and leave room for the voicing of the pain, the questions, and the joy of each story. We trusted one another to hear, and gave one another permission to voice whatever was in our minds and hearts.

Looking back on that workshop experience, I can see that what we did that day by telling our stories was to produce our own collections of psalms, mini-Psalters that expressed the whole range of our emotions and life experiences before God. No wonder, then, that so many of us are drawn to the book of Psalms in the Bible—the psalms offer us ready vehicles for the telling of our whole story. Just as we gave each other permission in our workshop pairings to tell and hear our stories, so too does the canon of our faith, which includes the book of Psalms with its laments, thanksgivings, and praises, give us permission to take our whole range of human experience to God in prayer. A journey through the psalms from the beginning of the collection to the end mirrors the storytelling we did that day.

A psalms journey takes us on a roller-coaster ride from praise to doubt and back again with a swiftness that takes one’s breath away. No matter how fast or how low the roller coaster dips, however, it never leaves the track. Even the angry psalm prayers filled with doubt and questions lead us to God. As Kathleen Billman and Daniel Migliore note, prayer has both a summer and a winter voice: the hallelujah of psalm 150 and the anguished cry out of the depths of Psalm 130; the voice of Christmas and Easter and Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” as well as the voice of the wilderness, the exile, the cross, and the Negro spirituals; the voice of Rachel weeping, refusing to be comforted (Jer. 31:15) and the voice of Mary, accepting and rejoicing (Lk. 1:46–55).³ Rachel and Mary are bound together in Christian tradition, reminding us that “the danger of praise without lament is triumphalism, and the danger of lament without praise is hopelessness.”⁴

To sit down and skim the book of Psalms rapidly is to embark on the roller-coaster ride of prayer, from summer to winter prayer and back again. Yet we end the ride in praise. Some people cannot see this movement from the beginning to the end of the collection, because they focus only on their favorite psalms, ignoring those psalms that are different or unfamiliar. But a closer look shows a preponderance of praises toward the end of the Psalter. More laments are found in the first half of the Psalter, more hymns in the second half. One cannot trace this movement along a straight line, but “the shift of emphasis is noticeable. To go through the book of psalms is to be led increasingly toward the praise of God as the final word.”⁵ Psalm 1 is intentionally placed at the beginning of the Psalter to call Israel to obedience to Torah⁶ and to assure Israel about the good consequences of obedience. The Psalter concludes with Psalm 150, placed intentionally at the end of the collection to engage Israel in unconditional praise.

How do we move from obedience to praise, from Psalm 1 to Psalm 150? Not directly, for that is too simple and not at all characteristic of the life of faith. Walter Brueggemann suggests that we move from Psalm 1 to 150 “by way of the suffering voiced in the complaints and the hope sounded in the hymns.”⁷ Lived experience intervenes between obedience and praise, and it is in this between place “where Israel mostly lives…the obedience of Psalm 1 and the praise of Psalm 150 are not simply literary boundaries but the boundaries for Israel’s life and faith.”⁸ As Renita Weems puts it, “this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next time you hear from God.”⁹ The movement toward praise is punctuated by lurches into despair, but these are not faith relapses or aberrations. “Doubt and despair are not mere sidesteps in an otherwise optimistic faith. They are in fact integral to the faith experience.”¹⁰ “Israel’s lament is never simply an emotional outburst or an exercise in self-pity. It is a cry for relief from suffering so that God may once again be praised.”¹¹

Over the years, my students in seminary and local churches have been surprised to find so many angry laments in the book of Psalms. They had never encountered them in church before or paid attention to them in their reading of the psalms. Their surprise is understandable. Unfortunately, the church has been quite selective in designing the curriculum for the “school of prayer” that is the psalms. Despite the fact that more than one third of the Psalter contains lament psalms, Christian tradition has drawn heavily only from the seven penitential laments (Pss. 6, 32, 51, 102, 130, 143), especially during the Lenten season.¹² Perhaps the church’s theological tradition has viewed laments as a violation of “an assumed prayer etiquette.”¹³ Though not denying the need for penitential lament, Roland Murphy wonders “if we have lost the art of complaining in faith to God in favor of a stoic concept of what obedience or resignation to the divine will really means.”¹⁴ Theologian Martin Marty recognized this when he decided not to read lament Psalm 88 to his dying wife during one of their nightly readings of the psalms, because he thought that neither he nor she could take it. She insisted that it be read: “I need that kind most.”¹⁵

The church has inherited the lament from Judaism, which rooted its understanding of lament in the biblical covenant tradition. Darrell Fasching argues that “the covenantal understanding of faith as a dialogue in which the Jew was not only expected to trust and obey God but was also allowed to question (and even call into question) the behavior of God seems to have disappeared in Christianity. The complex dialectic of faith as trust and questioning came to be reduced in Christianity to a very different understanding of faith as unquestioning trust and obedience.”¹⁶ Questioning and persistence mark Israel’s relationship with God as expressed in Jacob’s wrestling with God at the Jabbok River (Gen. 32:22–30),¹⁷ in Job’s angry poetry (Job 3–42:6), and in Abraham’s arguing with God (Gen. 18:16–33). This hutzpah, as it is known in Jewish tradition, appears in a few places in the New Testament: “Ask, search, knock” (Mt. 7:7; Lk. 11:9–13); the Canaanite woman (Mt. 15:21–28; Mk. 7:24–30); the woman with the issue of blood (Mk. 5:24–34); the persistent widow (Lk. 18:1–8).¹⁸ Belden Lane explains the virtual absence of the hutzpah k’lapei shamaya (“boldness with regard to heaven”) tradition in Christianity both theologically and sociologically.¹⁹ Theologically, it is rooted in Paul’s emphasis on the patient bearing of suffering in light of the cross and the imminent resurrected world to come. God shares in the suffering through Jesus. Eschatology (doctrine of the end time) makes suffering temporary and honorable. Sociologically, the loss of daring prayer in Christianity can be traced to the church’s socioeconomic prosperity and security, which blunted the eschatological impatience for God’s reign; prayer reflects this situation.²⁰

One of the most appreciated Lenten Bible studies I have ever led focuses upon the angry lament psalms as a way of accompanying Jesus to Good Friday and the cross. As one initially skeptical parishioner told me after a Lenten lament study: “I thought God would shut me out when I told God I was just so sick of God not making things better. Instead, I feel closer to God than I ever have. Do you think that maybe by being so honest there was somehow more room in me for God? I guess being an Easter people and lamenting are not mutually exclusive. Honest praise can’t happen if you’re filled with pain.”²¹ On our way to Easter, Lent invites the use of laments. Recognizing this, Victoria Bailey has created “A Service of Silence and Lamentation for Good Friday or Holy Saturday,” whose purpose is “to allow us to enter into the experience of apparent abandonment by God as Jesus expressed it in His cry from the cross and as some of His followers must surely have felt during the interim between His crucifixion and resurrection.” She sees this service as a way to enter into “our own sense of abandonment and despair, which many of us experience from time to time but are not always encouraged, allowed or enabled to voice.”²² See the appendix for this service. We need more liturgies like this one that name our experience and take it before God within the liturgical rhythms of the church year.

Without the angry laments, we are cut off from the opportunity to be honest and whole in our prayer before God. This recognition, however, bumps up against liturgical renewal begun in the 1960s, which “attempted to recover earlier forms of eucharistic celebration, with the result that an emphasis on thanksgiving, celebration, and victory over sin and death replaced the earlier severe emphasis on contrition and penitence.”²³ This move “has, in effect, driven the hurtful side of experience either into obscure corners of faith practice or completely out of Christian worship,” warns Brueggemann; the church’s “failure of nerve” regarding the lament is clear.²⁴ The emphasis on celebration coincided with what sociologist Robert Wuthnow calls the move from a “spirituality of dwelling” anchored in houses of worship, denominations, and neighborhoods in the 1950s to a “spirituality of seeking” in the 1960s, when people moved beyond established religious institutions, and new spiritual centers emerged throughout U.S. society in the form of support and small groups: Twelve Step, Bible study, survivor classes. The result was a kind of “spiritual consumerism.”²⁵ The emphasis was on feeling good and satisfying our interests. The problem with that emphasis is, when we do not or cannot feel good, what do we do?

The psalm lament certainly extends what the church has for too long seen to be the traditional range of prayer. That the church has restricted our praying of the psalms in worship is clear from a glance at the responsive psalm readings in the back of most hymnals. I call this the scissors-and-paste method of liturgical psalm use. When angry laments are used, the guts of the lament are cut out, with the psalm jumping immediately from petition to praise, skipping over the angry questions.²⁶ Check your own church’s hymnal to see whether or not the psalms have been cut and pasted in the responsive readings and which psalms have been left out altogether. What do you find? Lester Meyer²⁷ surveyed the Lutheran Book of Worship, the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer, and the Lectionary for Mass: The Roman Missal and found that the majority of psalms omitted from liturgical use are the laments. I have found that the same is true for The Hymnal of the United Church of Christ and The United Methodist Hymnal.

One of my favorite exercises for helping people to discover the range of prayer available in the book of Psalms has produced the same results year after year.²⁸ I put verses from six different psalms on newsprint: Psalm 1:6, a wisdom psalm focusing on obedience; 13:1, an angr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One - Praying the Psalms, Praying into Wholeness
• Chapter Two - The Synagogue, the Church, and the Psalms
• Chapter Three - Your Hallelujahs Don’t Have to Be Hollow Anymore: Praise Psalms
• Chapter Four - You Get What You Deserve, Don’t You?: The Torah and Wisdom Psalms
• Chapter Five - Complaining in Faith to God: Psalm Laments
• Chapter Six - Life in the Meanwhile: The Process of Lament
• Chapter Seven - I’ll Never Be the Same Again: Thanksgiving Psalms and Enthronement Psalms
• Appendix - A Service of Silence and Lamentation for Good Friday or Holy Saturday
• Notes