During the next nine weeks, up to Palm Sunday, we will engage in a sermon series focusing on the Psalms. The Psalms come to us from our Judeo-Christian roots. Psalms were the hymn book of ancient Israel, were used during worship in the early church and continue to be used today throughout both the Jewish and Christian world.
As I opened the bible recently to look for a psalm to find words to fit my situation (sometimes I prefer to use other people’s words. They seem so appropriate!) I was struck by how many psalms were psalms of lament – grief over the situation in which the person praying finds herself, a complaint to God, a petition to God and thanksgiving that God is faithful to attend to the particular situation. There are other psalms as well -- Psalms of praise, psalms of thanksgiving, royal psalms, wisdom/torah psalms, entrance (to the temple) liturgies, prophetic exhortation, psalms of confidence and trust.
Scholars believe that many of the individual psalms of lament were prayers from individuals in distress who went to the temple to pray for God’s help. Sometimes the prayer is for relief from evil – sickness, war or conflict, and sometimes the prayers are admissions of the praying person’s own guilt, but always the psalms acknowledge our fundamental dependence on God for life and the future. The righteous are those who understand this and try to live it.
We will be following the psalm of the day in the lectionary calendar, begin-ning with Psalm 119 – the longest psalm in the bible – 176 verses, although we will only be reading the first eight verses in worship, UMH # 840. The fact of the matter is that this psalm is repetitive, but we find the essence of the teaching in the first eight verses – those who follow God’s law are blessed, or happy. So I have titled the first sermon HAPPY PEOPLE. I follow this theme throughout the series with a description of the kind of people the psalm focuses on, so for example one sermon will be titled Righteous People, another Humble People. The neat thing about following the lectionary is that themes run through all of the readings for the day, and so I am able to include references from the other readings, to tie the message all together neatly.
I hope you will find the series useful in enriching your personal prayer life and for your own personal spiritual growth. (Shalom. Shalvah) Peace, Safety and security to you, which are the results of praying the psalms.