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PART ONE
WHY WE SING
What is the linkage between a hymnal and my work in the Old Testament? I propose that the interface or commonality is this: We have 150 psalms, and we only know and use six of them (Pss. 23, 46, 103, 121, and two more on special occasions in the church year: Ps. 22 on Good Friday and Ps. 51 on Ash Wednesday). That practice leaves us free to disregard all the other psalms.
When hymnal committees convene to choose the texts for their new collection, they have tough choices to make. Some hymns are obvious candidates for inclusion. Some will barely make it. Some will cause the hymnal committee no end of consternation, even long after they’ve made their particular decisions. But mostly we know, love, and are likely to sing about thirty-five of them, if that many, no matter what the particular hymnal committee had in mind. Thus we treat both collections, the Psalter and our hymnal, in the same way: as inventories of rich resources—in both of which we are highly selective and exclusionary in practice, sometimes militantly and defiantly so.
Thus I begin by considering the psalms along with the question, “Why do we sing hymns and psalms?” If one were an anthropologist and regarded a worshiping congregation as a primitive tribe (sometimes it is!) and observed its worship practice from the back of the room, congregational singing might appear odd indeed. It consists in a mighty effort, sometimes with the urging by the leader to do louder or better, sometimes poorly and inadequately rendered, and sometimes done well by paid professionals. But it is always a serious investment in a bodily enterprise that requires some energy and that at its best brings us into community. An anthropologist would readily see that we are engaged when we sing hymns in “world construction,” the articulation of a world that is very different from the one we have regularly in front of us.1
Martin Luther, the great father of congregational singing, was of course no disciplined anthropologist. He was rather a bold energetic preacher, teacher, liturgist, and exegete who celebrated the notion of “evangelical” in order to assert that our ultimate trust is not in any humanly constructed world—not the Bible, the church, or the church’s doctrine; not morality, liturgy, piety, or polity; and not the flag, the currency of the state, or the ideology of the corporation or the market. Instead, our ultimate trust is in the God of the gospel, who is out beyond our best reason, distorted as that reason is. Luther understood that congregational singing not only creates unity in the body but also offers a particular kind of unity, a shared act of rendering one’s whole life before the mystery of God. That rendering, because it probes the emotional extremities of our existence, must perforce be done in a lyrical fashion that creates openings in our reasoning, that invites a kind of honest assertion and submission that is lacking in reasonable prose. We sing because life is God-given, God-sustained, and God-claimed. Our singing is our glad assent to that God-givenness and a refusal to have our lives be less than, more than, or other than that.
In the next four chapters I will consider four long psalms that come in sequence and are in the center of the Psalter (Pss. 104, 105, 106, 107), none of which makes “the big six” that we know and love. I will bring to each of these psalms in turn the question “Why do we sing?” I will ask it particularly of each psalm: “Why do we sing this psalm?” What are we doing when we sing it? What would we miss if we did not sing it? What do we miss because we mostly do not sing any of these four psalms? My comments will be quite text specific; as you read, however, I invite you to generate a list of hymns that would be linked to and reflective of particular psalms. You can work from your best thirty-five, but perhaps more than that will be given to you by the spirit. Or you can probe your own hymnal to find what you may have overlooked.
Thus we sing to render our lives in all of their rich complexity, in honesty, back to God. Gerhard von Rad has famously concluded that the psalms, along with the wisdom tradition, constitute a “response” to God, to who God is and to what God has done.2 We do so as a part of a singing company that has been so rendering its life back to God since the tambourines of Miriam (Exod. 15:20–21), since the triumph of Deborah (Judg. 5:2–31), since the grief of David (2 Sam. 1:19–27), and since the defiant hope of Mary (Luke 1:46–55).
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Chapter 1
Psalm 104
I begin with Psalm 104 because it is our best model for a “creation hymn,” partly derived from Egyptian religion but now drawn close to YHWH, the God of covenant in Israel.1 We sing it in order to situate our lives amid God’s creation, locating ourselves among the many creatures, fully honest about our creatureliness, which is like all the other plethora of God’s creatures but peculiar among them in our particular mode of feedback to the creator. Clearly other creatures all praise God, as the Psalms assume, each in its own appropriate mode.
We sing because we trust the structured generativity of creation that we receive with sacramental sensibility (vv. 1–24). The speaker, a glad creature of God, makes a quick self-identification at the outset: “O my soul . . . my God.” But then it is all about YHWH, all about “you” in direct address. The divine name is uttered once in verse 1, and then not again until verse 24 (except for the incidental mention in verse 16). The hymn is direct address to “you,” a known, named primal agent who has acted and who continues to act. This speaker knows that “you” must be addressed and dares to imagine that when “I” (“my soul”) sings to YHWH, YHWH’s glory, honor, and sovereignty are in mighty ways enhanced or, as we say, “magnified.” As we have voice, so we declare ourselves to the creator God. This long inventory of twenty-three verses moves from the grand landscape of creation to the particulars of daily life, all held in God’s purview.
The doxology begins with the ordering of all the creation, all the heavens, all the earth, all the clouds, all the wind (vv. 1–9).
• You are clothed.
• You are wrapped.
• You stretch out the heavens.
• You set the beams.
• You make the clouds.
• You ride on the wings.
• You make the winds.
• You set the earth.
• You cover it.
• You set a boundary.
The singer has no doubt that this seething mass of vitality is ordered and rebuked, tamed and limited, restrained by a God-authorized boundary that it will not cross (v. 9). The singer takes into full account the seething but knows about the sovereign voice that presides over it to cause safe living space. The chaos is contained and must submit to the will of the creator. Thus the very singing evokes a world in which the effect and threat of chaos are limited and contained. The poetry refuses any explanation; the song is about wonder, not explanation, about trust, not control.2
The song is sung in an arid climate, and we may sing it now as we come to the “water wars” in which water will be scarcer even than oil. Here in exuberance the singer chooses terms that “splash” with freshness:
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;
they flow between the hills,
giving drink to every wild animal;
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By the streams the birds of the air have their habitation . . .
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.
vv. 10–13
Even in translation we get the concrete, life-giving goodness of the water: “gush” (v. 10), “quench” (v. 11), “satisfied” (v. 13). Human creatures have no privilege here; “all creatures of our God and king” are sustained. In the singing we may imagine ourselves “quenched” and “satisfied,” like animals at an African watering hole along with wild asses and birds, all of them guaranteed in the earth. When we are quenched and satisfied, moreover, we may gain a bit of distance from our anxious consumerism, discerning that we are never quenched and satisfied by commodities but only by gifts given by the creator. That same water causes grass to grow:
You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to use.
v. 14
In a single verse the nonhuman and human creatures stand together before the life-giving gifts of God.
But then the lyric comes closer to us human creatures. Now the concern is for our “heart” and our “face” (v. 15), that is, full human health flourishing. Our face and our heart require the following:
• Wine to gladden
• Oil to shine
• Bread to strengthen
After all the big structure of heaven and earth, the real gift of the creator is bread, wine, and oil. This is the stuff of daily food without which we cannot live. It has, however, been transposed in our liturgical imagination into the stuff of sacrament, the gift making real the giver. So we pray,
Gracious God, pour out your Holy Spirit upon us
and upon these your gifts of bread and wine,
that the bread we break and the cup we bless
may be the communion of the body and blood of Christ.3
It is an audacious albeit familiar prayer. It is, however, an audacity that is rooted in the deep sense already voiced by the psalmist, who saw that such food is more than biological sustenance, though it is that. It is a holy gift that “gladdens” and “makes shine,” that vivifies “humanness.” Daily food is sacramental! These daily elements witness to the truth of gift, giving, and giver; we, we creatures, are on the glad receiving end of olive oil from trees that we did not grow...
