Psongs for Psaints and Psinners

Preaching text: Psalm 1

Ken Sundet Jones

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In our inaugural program year the Preaching Fellows in the Iowa Preachers Project will develop a sermon series on the book of Psalms. Here's a sermon that serves as an introduction to what God is up to in this collection of the ancient Israelites' hymns. When you've read it, click here to try out the form our congregational teams and our stable of Sermon Whisperers use to provide feedback to our Preaching Fellows.

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All through the book of Psalms, we find the Israelites singing their hearts out. These ancient people had come into being not out of a choice to band together, but because of God’s choice of them and for them. They were a singing people. In the psalms we miss their tunes, but we find revealed their singing hearts.

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In Psalm 1 the Psalmist declares the reason for their songs. They’ve been planted in the very will and being of God. “Blessed is the one…whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.” The Israelites have been brought near to God’s bosom. Though they didn’t have any idea of the science of it, God had let them in on both the vastness of divine creative love and the quantum detail behind their genetic helix. They gazed at a star-strewn night sky in Psalm 8 and wondered that God noticed them in the vastness of the heavens. In Psalm 139 they sang of God’s hands clicking heavenly needles together to knit them into being in utero.

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The entire book of Psalms shows us the Israelites singing their faith, sometimes warbling, sometimes wobbling, but always with their lungs, teeth, and tongues shaping a witness to the relationship God had begun with them. We find no reluctance to engage this God. There was no circumstance that was unsingable, because God was right there in everything, the matrix that held it all together.

 

So it is that they sang praise in high times. They ululated laments for themselves and for their communities when facing tragedy or ridicule. They let out desperate and aching cries for the destruction of foes who sought to undo what God had made. They had songs that helped them ascend the steep paths to Jerusalem on pilgrimage treks. God’s people sang of their king as the embodiment of the Lord’s shepherding of them. No matter what, even when the Temple was razed and they were dragged into exile in Babylon, because God could not and would not quit them. The covenant has been declared, and they for their part did not quit singing.

 

When I was twenty, I did quit singing, because I wasn’t good enough. Now “I wasn’t good enough” isn’t the same as “I didn’t love singing.” I had been a kid with a tune on my lips. For the whole of the hour-long drive to visit our grandparents’ ranch on Sundays and holidays, my older sister and I sat in the back seat of our family’s Ford Edsel and sang our little hearts out. We sang ditties our German mom taught us: “Hänschen Klein Ging Allein” and “Alle Vögel Sind Schon Da.“ We belted out hymns like “Thine Is the glory” and “I Know that My Redeemer Lives.” We did “London Bridge” and “This Old Man” and “Old McDonald.”

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n fifth grade I reveled when we sang a concert for our parents. It was a strange program featuring Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and Sgt. Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets.” Later I sang in school choir. I competed in vocal ensembles. I was in musicals. I had a solo in Oklahoma!: “Carrots and pertaters.” When I got my license, I sang along with 1970s one-hit wonders on KKLS-AM radio out of Rapid City, South Dakota. I did my share of head-banging behind the wheel while listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

 

After high school I went to college at one of those upper Midwest Lutheran institutions with a glorious choir. The Lutheran choral tradition is rightly admired, with its tight intonation, fine-tuned control, and emotional resonance. To hear my college choir end the annual Christmas vespers service with the F. Melius Christianson arrangement of “Beautiful Savior” is to know the same good and faithful God the Israelites knew. My junior year of college I auditioned for the choir and on a bulletin board outside the choir room I found my name on a roster of second tenors who would wear burgundy velvet robes and make a joyful noise to the Lord. My whole singing life led to that choir room as I took my place in the third row, three seats from the end.

 

I was singing better than I ever had. My ears were better tuned to others’ voices. I was committed to following our director’s will for us. I wanted to be one who produced that Lutheran choral sound. But during a pause at our second rehearsal, the director pointed to me and said, “Come to my studio after rehearsal.” In his office he told me I was out of the choir. A senior had decided he wanted to be back in that year, so I was out. I was devastated. It was obvious to me: I was the worst singer of the bunch.

 

The kid who loved to sing Elton John’s songs at his piano heard that man’s words as a declaration of unworthiness and the slamming of a prison door, shutting my song in a locked cell. I quit singing, because I wasn’t good enough. It became a secret thing to be done alone while driving. Or singing my infant son back to sleep with a 2:00 a.m. lullaby. But I would not expose my shameful voice and bring down a choir’s beauty. I had no confidence in being able to hold either the standard or the pitch.

 

How often has the church made the song of the faithful something to be intoned only by those with perfect pitch and diaphragms of steel? We treat access to God’s mercy as something to be earned with good behavior and proper deportment. Baptism is allowed for those who’ve made proper prior amendment of life. The Lord’s Supper is allowed for those with a correct and mature understanding of sacramental theology or perfect agreement with our denominational tradition. The pews are for people who adhere to the community’s ethos, despite Jesus’ explicit invitation to the weary and heavy-laden to come to him.

 

So the church creates a people unlike the uninhibited songsters of Israel. We sinners are kept apart. We become skittish with our performance anxiety and imposter syndrome. In so many ways the tin-eared and pitch-imperfect are turned away with spoken and unspoken declarations that sinners will be welcomed in the choir that is the church only when they’re opera ready.

 

But hear the Psalmist again: “Blessed is the one…whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.” It’s not those who flawlessly recite the law of the Lord who are blessed. It’s not those whose meditations have brought them the proper depth of understanding or have taken them to the heights of heavenly fervor who have God’s favor.

 

The body of Christ is not the finely tuned and well controlled ensemble of a Lutheran college choir. It’s actually more like a stadium full of British soccer fan Hooligans belting out their beloved AFC Richmond team song on Ted Lasso. The church is more like four zitty greasy-haired fourteen-year-olds plugging into a garage outlet and screaming some emo-screamo ballad of their own creation. It’s like two kids in the way-back of the family station wagon singing as an unconscious antidote to their parents’ failing marriage. The church is the true church when the grieving gather to warble a defiant dirge against death, often with signs too deep for words.

 

There is no perfection in that, save for the perfect One who is the object of their songs, the One who is the Word of God sung from the foundation of the world. That it is Jesus’ present in the Holy Spirit opening mouths, pulling out ridiculous disharmony and making it a single unified tuned chord in him, this is what makes anyone’s song worthy.

 

It was true for the 150 songs of the ancient Israelites. It was true for St. Ambrose and St. Hildegard of Bingen. It was true for Carolina Sandell Berg writing hymn texts in Sweden in the face of personal tragedy and for Charles Wesley and Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, all in the 19th Century, and for Jaroslav Vajda and Susan Briehl and John Ylvisaker in the last century.

 

The body of Christ sings because it is his body resurrected with perfect imperfection, with holes in its hands, feet, and side. The combined song from the mouth of Christ is sung by all those who’ve mouthed Psalm 22’s “My God, why have you forsaken me” and had it turn in voice into “Praise the Lord, O my soul and bless his holy name.”

 

How does anyone who is excluded as a sinner ever join such a glorious cacophony of praise? There’s no audition process. Instead, the church must tune its ears to listen intently to the voices around it. If you’re quiet you can hear anguished songs of people languishing, enslaved to calendars, screens, and devices. You can hear sorrows sung under endless bondage to work demands, parenting chaos, and too little bandwidth.

 

If you’re one of those imperfect singers, then let me tell you the rest of the story. Almost forty years after being dismissed from that choir, the choir director at the college where I taught invited me to sing with her ensemble on its tour to Germany for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. I got to sing in the tiny Bavarian village of Schney, in a gorgeous church in Gotha, and in the castle church in Wittenberg where Luther posted the 95 Theses. Our final concert was in the chapel in the castle at Torgau, the first church built according to Reformation specifications. There I stood surrounded by college kids forty years younger, in my tux and bow tie and uncomfortable patent leather shoes, adding my imperfection to theirs and somehow, feeling the privilege of it all. In my heart my voice was heard by God as in tune not just with the rest of the choir but with the whole hosts of heaven. With tears streaming down my face, every imperfect note of my life, including the agony of being unceremoniously dismissed from choir in college, was transfigured into the open shape of the cross and the perfect roundness of an empty tomb.

 

I knew that like the Psalmist in my baptism I was a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, not when I wanted to sing but when I was bidden to come bear my song as fruit. So today I’ve come as God’s talent scout looking in the streets and alleys for squawkers and screechers, raspers and rappers, for the tongue-tied and those confounded in their muteness, for those who don’t read the music of the cosmos, for shower-singers and pew-whisperers. 

 

As the old song says, all God’s critters got a place in the choir. All God’s children have a place in the Psalms. In them you will find yourself singing low and swinging high. But here as we delve into the Psalms we’ll sing together as the people God has joined together. When you’re in the ensemble, it’s his doing not your abilities that does it. And no one can ever tell you that you don’t have a place here. There’s an empty seat in row three, four seats from the end, right next to me. I’ll help you learn the music. It starts with one word: Jesus. Amen.