Living in God's Overflow - Psalm 133

This week, we begin a season called “Eastertide.”  It is the season between Easter and Pentecost, and traditionally the church focuses our attention during this season on what it means to be a church.  This Eastertide, we are focusing on that most fundamental part of our existence as people of God - prayer.  Today is the first day of a seven week series on the Psalms.  We will not only preach them.  We will pray them.  We will celebrate them.  We will meditate them.  We will live them.  

To set the frame for this journey through the Psalms, today, we need to spend a little time talking about the book of Psalms as a whole.  I’m guessing that you have some questions about the Psalms - even if you haven’t exactly put them into words.

What are the Psalms?  A psalm is basically a prayer, actually a prayer song.  Some were written by individuals - like David - in response to specific situations.  Others were written for specific worship situations - like crowning a new king or pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  They are like Israel’s hymnbook, full of poetic imagery.  They were collected over hundreds of years.  They cover all kinds of topics and situations and attitudes.  They soar with amazing poetry and roll in the dirt with gritty honesty.    But the key thing to remember about the Psalms is that they are the prayer songs of the people of Israel.   

Why do Christians pray the Psalms?  Well, actually, some Christians stopped - for a while.  In Nazi Germany, the Psalms and the whole Old Testament, were considered Jewish and outdated and almost barbaric.  Thankfully, the Church at large (and minority of German Christians) rejected that view and continued in the ancient tradition of praying the psalms.

But why?  Why do we still pray these prayers that are 2-3,000 years old?  There are three basic reasons we stick with these prayers.

1. The Psalms put us in the stream of God’s interaction with people.  We return to the Psalms for the same reason we return to the old hymns (and our favorite new songs).  They connect us with the deep flow of God’s grace among God’s people.  These prayers have been recorded and preserved because generation after generation has found them helpful for connecting with God.
2. The Psalms give voice to the prayers of our hearts.  Sometimes, we just don’t know what to pray.  Other times, we have all of these feelings inside us, but we can’t quite put words to what we want to say.  Sometimes, we are actually afraid to say what we feel.  But the Psalms help us to pray our feelings.  They are raw and honest.  They go into the depths of the human experience and bring out our pains and joys and put them into words in our prayers to God.
3. The Psalms reshape the prayers of our hearts.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of those resisting German Christians in the Nazi era who stayed committed to the Psalms.  In his little book, Psalms - The Prayer Book of the Bible, he explains: “If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. ... If we were dependent entirely on ourselves, we would probably pray only the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. ... The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”  In other words, if we just pray what we feel, most of the time we’ll keep asking for “our daily bread” or all the stuff we need or want.  The Psalms stretch us beyond our selfish limited view of the world and help us see the world from the perspective of others and even from God’s perspective.

One last question: If Psalms are the people’s prayers, then how are they “the Word of God”?