The Structure of Psalms

 

When we read the psalms there is an underlying story you are entering.  Often, we view the psalms as individual and isolated and not really related or connected one to another.  To be sure, the beauty of the psalms is you can skip around. But, as you heard last week, there is profound power in praying and singing Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and in the next breath singing out with Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd.”  To be sure, this is complex, complicated, competing, even contradictory emotions.  We can treat our emotions like we are in middle school, where if you were friends with one person then clearly you cannot be friends with this other person.  But adult-sized emotions can co-exist and contradict.  Unfortunately, we don’t always outgrow that middle school ideal of thinking, “Well if I am happy than I can’t be sad.”  Until you go to a funeral where gratitude for loving the person and grief for the person’s death sit side-by-side in your soul.  Part of the reason why we are so uncomfortable at funerals is that the emotions are raw and open and even in tension, we ping from one to another quickly, in ways we don’t understand and can’t explain.

The psalms invite us into the messiness of human emotions.  I want to share a few ideas about the structure of the psalms.  Please note, these are human concepts that may or may not have been intended by our Hebrew ancestors who put together the psalm hymnal.  Scholar Walter Bruggemann said that one structure of the psalms is as a process of order to disorder to reorder.  You have heard this in the psalms we’ve read thus far.  Psalm 1 presents an order that you are a tree planted by the river of God where you grow good fruit, not like those people who race and run after idols!  But turn the page to Psalm 2 where the psalmist asks, “Why then do people rate and rank others?  Why do the nations flex their muscles?”  Do you hear the disorder and deconstruction between the two psalms? There is a tension linking the two psalms.  In the first one there is an order given ~ root yourself in God and all will be well.  Then, Psalm 2, after reading the newspaper, “Wait, this isn’t right.”  The movement from order to disorder can happen even within a psalm.  Where the psalmist starts by singing the blues about being surrounded by enemies (which is disorder!), only a few verses in says, “But I trust in God,” which is a movement to reorder, a new way of being.  Wait, our middle school emotions object, which is it?  Is life going to you know where in a handbasket OR is God good and present?  You must choose.

But life, friends, is not a multiple-choice test where you fill in the bubble with your #2 pencil. Life is a mystery.   Life is not a puzzle to be solved or a math problem where there is only one right answer.  Life is complex and beautiful and holy and messy and more words than I could ever write. 

The psalms give voice to this.  Invite you to read Psalm 25.  If you read this in the Voice translation, you will notice that what the poet psalm writer was trying to do was use all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the Voice translation does a beautiful job of showing this intention in our alphabet.  May these words awaken you to God who is the witness to your beautifully messy life every moment this day. Amen.