Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 2

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Prayer in the Psalms (Part 2)

Lesson Transcript

Well, to sum up what we’ve just been saying, fundamentally kingship and the Psalter is really expressive of what the godly life should be. The king himself is acknowledging that God is king and David’s role is the role to express in humility the lordship of Yahweh. That’s basically what it’s all about. And so it’s interesting that in the Qumran Scrolls there’s a Psalm entitled A Hallelujah of David, Son of Jesse. And this is what it states. It’s a midrash on 1 Samuel 16:1–13, the incident when Samuel anointed David. ‘Smaller was I than my brothers and the youngest of the sons of my father. So he made me shepherd of the flock and ruler over his kids.’ And kids, of course, is referring to goats not to American youth. ‘My hands are made an instrument and my fingers a lyre; and so have I rendered glory to God as I thought within my soul.’ In other words, this whole theme of praise to God is so pivotal upon humility of heart.

When we’re so big in our own estimate, God shrinks to nothing in our prayer life. So it is the essence of living in that dependence of spirit that is essential for prayer. Blockages of much of our prayer life then are the result of pride, whether concealed or covert in so many different ways. So we realise that the Psalms are very complex and there are various words such as I’ve spelt out here, which are used, which means a sacred song accompanied by string instruments, as we have in the Songs of Ascent in Psalms 120–134. Sometimes it’s meek timbre, which means it’s all done in a soft chant. It also might be even be a silent prayer. And perhaps in our prayerful consciousness, an awful lot of our prayer life is just in silence before the Lord. We’ve nothing to say and yet everything is happening in our life before the Lord. And then there’s maskill, individual mediation, maybe something that we’re humming or murmuring quietly to ourselves in private soliquy. Or there’s the Tefillah: the prayer of petition, perhaps intoned in grief, sometimes accompanied by various musical instruments to denote the differing emotions that we’re facing. Or there’s the new song not in its composition, but it its reorientation of our emotions and of our perceptions of reality. Now we see things in a new way, perhaps looking to a new future.

One of the things that I think is so significant about the prayers of Israel is their poetic structure. C.S. Lewis made the observation once that perhaps poetry is an inkling of incarnation. What he meant by that was that poetry brings out new creative suggestions of accompaniment alongside things that are inarticulate within us, but are now given space to be expressed and to become incarnate within our lives. And of course, the nuances of the poetic means that you’re always living with an awareness of symbols and symbols, as we’ve often mentioned, are like sky hooks that link the terrestrial with the divine. As we’ve said, you can never speak of God other than in metaphor, but they’re pointing you to another world and they help you to recognise that you’re looking not only with the eye, but through the eye, that much of what we think is perception is, in fact, determined by conceptions. And really what the Psalter does is to give us new conceptions to help us to reorientate things that were distressing, but now become consoling when we see things in a new way.

[00:05:13]

And so now before we close we want to examine the spirituality of this prayer book to see what are the some of things that can help us to be connected with God. Because that’s the essence of what it is to be spiritual. The essence of spirit is connectedness, so we have spirit when we have empathy or sympathy or intuition or mutual understanding. And, of course, the profound climax of being spiritual is the expression of love. So what we’re saying about being spiritual is that we’re resisting being misjudged or misunderstood or alienated or cut off or living in isolation and loneliness. These are all the enemy of the spirit. So to be cut off is, in a profound sense, to be profoundly without spirit. So what then is the spirituality of the Psalms? It’s all about our connectedness with God.

And so we start with those positive Psalms that help us to live appropriately in the world that God has made. To enter into the Psalter is to enter into creation and to live with creation all around is. I was profoundly influenced at one stage in my life in the late 1960s and 1970s to be befriended by Malcolm Muggeridge. And he was an old pro as one of the television pioneers. He was very fond then of quoting William Blake that speaks of seeing, seeing through the eye as well as with the eye, because seeing through is having prior conceptions that determine the perceptions that we have. And I was in the field myself professionally at that time on an international commission of examining how people’s perceptions were perceiving catastrophe or not perceiving it. If you’re a real estate man that is wanting to sell a flood plain cheaply, he doesn’t perceive the 20 year cycle of flood. He perceives the flood is over and he can have a quick getaway in creating land that’s cheap for sale, but he doesn’t tell you that there’ll be a flood another 20 years later on. That’s what we call environmental perception. And often our perception is clouded by greed.

[00:08:23]

Likewise, a great deal of our prayer life is influenced by our conceptions of reality. If you like Dante, who says that his concept of the world is that he who rules the sun and the other stars is love, you’ll walk through that world in a different way from somebody else who’s only measured the heavens astronomically with a telescope. There are always two ways of looking at the universe: one with the total sense of alienation; as Loron Eiseley puts it, becoming the cosmic orphan alone in the universe, alone to observe its utter incredible, measureless nature. But Psalm 8, for example, begins with a different awareness. ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man…?’ Not as an astronomer might say what is man, but now as a covenant keeper says what an incredible privilege we have that God should deign to communicate with us and not the stars in the intimacy of this relationship of love. So the Psalmist is observing that our view of the cosmos does determine our prayer life. And of course, when we realise that to make man the ruler of all things as the priest or indeed the king is to say that God has made him to be the worshipper of all things, that he’s placed us as the one who articulates the praise of all creation. All creation would murmur its gratitude for its creator, but it’s man under which everything has been placed that he should be their kingly worshipper, their kingly mediator, their priestly king indeed. Perhaps in this age of geophysics and astronomy this is an orientation that we Christians ourselves have not taught our young people.

Then again, Psalm 19 illustrates another way of relating to our external world and that is to bring together the reality that day after day they pour forth speech and night after night they pour out knowledge. They have no speech. They use no words. No sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out to all the Earth, their words to the ends of the world. Einstein said that more incredible than the vastness and the mystery of the cosmos is the intelligibility that the human mind has with the cosmos. He was really helping us to understand Psalm 19. So we need to hear the speech of creation in ways that will revise our conception of reality. As I said in a book that I wrote a long time ago, I believe in the Creator, that we should realise that every blade of grass is expressive of the word of God. Do we think of our lawn like that? Do we see the branches of the trees as they clap their hands together in joy? Who is the one who can articulate all this? It’s the pray-er. It’s we who are expressing the Psalm, who can sing of these wonders.

[00:12:46]

At the same time, of course, we can look back and see that Psalm 19 is a polemic against the sun god of Egypt, of Aten, in particular, or the Babylonian Shamash. It’s the statutes of the Lord that are trustworthy, that make the wise simple. It’s the precepts of the Lord that are right, giving joy to the heart. And the commands of the Lord that are radiant, giving light to the eyes. And the fear of the Lord that is pure and enduring forever. And the ordinances of the Lord are sure and all of them are righteous. No wonder C.S. Lewis said that perhaps Psalm 19 is the most wonderful lyric in the whole of the Bible, one of the greatest poems that has ever been composed by a human artist, for what the Psalm is recognising for us all is that everything is interpreted and interpenetrated, sustained and expressive of the Word of God. So no wonder then if this is true, as the Psalmist reflects on this, we should make sure that our prayer life is saturated with the wonder of creation.

[00:14:22]

Then there are the Psalms, like Psalm 136, that see creation as a distant act. We, of course, can see it too as perhaps being born, what, 14, 16, billion years ago, but it’s still an act of God. So really this perspective that Psalm 136 gives is indicating the actuality of God in things past as well as present and future. And so the Psalm doesn’t really separate the God of creation from the God of history. He’s the same God. And that history itself is still the manifestation of creation continua, not only of the creation that came into being, but the creation that is still coming into being, still coming by the acts of God. And so this awareness that He who created all things by the Word of His power is the God who still speaks, the God who still creates. The whole theory of evolution shouldn’t faze us. God has patience and so whether it took millions of years for man to be created by God or the plant life or the token of all the evidence of the fossils of animal life, all of this is still in the sequence that is historical. Man is the end-stage. But the purpose of it all was for man’s redemption.

So it’s a new approach that we should be thinking of teaching our young people, that they should use the Psalms for the study of science. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone make that suggestion. It’s time we did.

[00:16:44]

And now we come to Psalms of lament and praise. The Psalms of both the lament book of Israel as well as the praise book of Israel? Why lament? Why such groaning? Why such distress? Is it because the Psalmist is such a complainer? Is it because he’s always so miserable? No. There are many grounds for lament in our lives and the way that the Psalmist develops the significance of lament is first of all because all those who are going through deep suffering have every legitimacy to express their suffering. It’s often when we’re in deepest distress that we feel that no one will listen to us, so what’s the point? We bury it all in our inner being. We get psychosomatic illnesses. We die of stress, from cancer, because we’ve lived with so many stresses in our inner lives. Nobody has told me in medical science that lament will help to cure cancer or prevent it. But it’s true. We punish our bodies by not lamenting. It can be said that we deserve the body we have by the spirit we have.

And you say, ‘Wow! Am I doing all this to myself?’ Of course you are. Of course our culture does it so much more because it’s so much alienated from God. If we had the comfort zones of certainty and safety and security as the Palmist has in God then we should tell God everything. There’s nothing that we cannot articulate to Him. Indeed, lament honours God. Lament is the manifestation of the sovereignty of God and lament is the certainty with which we can trust the sovereign God. How often a mother says to her little child, ‘Tell me why you’re crying? Why didn’t you tell me you were so hurt?’ God is like the father that invites us as little children to say it all. One of the reasons why you can lament in the Psalter is because in the ancient world the people who had a new spiritual authority were the dying. And the dying were experiencing the anguish of moving from this world into another world. But tragically today we put people in old people’s homes and we don’t want to know anything about their dying. Their process of dying is giving them authority to express things that the rest of us are still repressing. They are facing. We are privileged to go into the life of a hospice. There you face reality.

[00:20:29]

I remember once when I’d been invited to be the plenary speaker for a congress of Presbyterians in South Africa. They had their meetings once in five years and so for some reason I was invited as the speaker to then speak to the first church, Presbyterian church, in Johannesburg, which was a very wealthy church. And of course, the pastor in his insecurity boasted to me all about his qualifications from Princeton Seminary, but I noticed that at the front door there was a big glass of whiskey, so I thought yes, this guy’s an alcoholic. And I saw his wife’s face at the luncheon table looking very sad, so I knew that he was living in a world of unreality and she was not. And of course, he was very keen to show me that his study had been taken over not by books, but by a train set that covered the whole of the floor and the windows of the room. He had returned to his own childhood. So I turned to her and said what do you do during the week. And she saw me looking into the eyes of reality and she said well, I go to the hospice three times a week. Oh, I said, and you go there for reality. And the answer was yes. She didn’t need to tell me. I knew. We are privileged to go to hospices to face reality.

And perhaps one of the most wonderful experiences of reality that I’ve had in my life that I had with two of my children was when my wife was dying. We knew it was her last day. We knew that all systems were shutting down. We were amazed at the length of time it takes a woman to die. Because she is the life-giver and so when her life-giving faculties are gradually withdrawn, it takes quite a long time to die. She spent the whole day dying. One side of her had already shut down so she was paralysed and I took her left hand, which was still alive. And at 7 o’clock in the morning when I went there. I held her hand and she gripped my hand and she held it. And I held it and all day we were communicating to each other that we were trusting each other through the valley of the shadow of death. It was the greatest legacy of my life. How privileged we are to enter into the world of the dying. They’re experiencing the anguish of moving from this world into another world. There’s great fear for many people. But how tragically it is when we shut them off. Of course, Rita being Rita, when we walked away with my son and daughter at 3 o’clock in the morning, there was an eclipse of the moon. Oh, we thought, Rita’s going to heaven in a big way. Yes.

[00:24:51]

Well, this is what the Psalmist does. It helps us to face death with all its terrors. This King of Kings, this king of terrors, that has maggots and worms as His minions, appears a terrifying reality for all of us as we grow older, yet as we grow older, we can begin to say well, I don’t like to think of the physical process of my disintegration. None of us would when we think of the dignity of our life before God, but in suffering there’s no absence from God. His presence gets closer and closer and closer. And so now myself at the age of 94, waking up every morning and saying thank you, Lord, you’ve given me another day of life, I realise that I have a new transparency and it’s the transparency between this life and the life to come. It’s no big deal. And if we bear in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus that the life force of Jesus is found in us, there should be very little transition between the horizontality of dying every day and the verticality, or we might say the difference between the transcendence of death and the immanence of death. Death should be immanent for the Christian every day, so we should have been rehearsing all our life what dying is. And that’s what lament is about. It’s yes, in our distress, whether it’s immanent or transcendent, it’s being poor in spirit. It’s crying to the Lord.

So fundamentally, lament is a noble privilege of the Psalter. Lament is expressing trust: the trust of the Psalter. There’s no point in lamenting if we don’t trust Him. It’s precisely because we honour Him with lament that we’re honouring Him with our trust. You see, what lament does, as suffering does, is to deepen our whole spiritual life. So I find that I’m constantly looking at people seeking to know why they’re so wise, what is the secret of that way of life and the real question is tell me how you suffered redemptively? That tells you it all.

[00:28:03]

It’s suffering that deepens our life. It’s suffering that makes us wise unto salvation. Yes, there are Psalms of the darkness of the soul, like Psalm 88, which is a Psalm that anticipates the disintegration that death will bring. It’s a Psalm that reflects on the loneliness of being in death, in Sheol, of feeling the remoteness of God in the first eight verses, of entering into death’s loneliness in verses 9 and 11 and feeling totally deprived of God in verses 12–19. Why is it then in the Psalter? Because God uses lament to enter into the consequences of what we sang at the beginning of our service this morning: Psalm 23. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ So this Psalm, of course, is set after the ultimate lament of Psalm 22. Psalm 22 is the prelude for the affirmation that I will fear no evil in Psalm 23. So as you read Psalm 18 and then Psalm 22 then you have much more understanding of what Psalm 23 is all about. Yes, God is there through it all.

[00:30:01]

Now, of course, there are many kinds of lament in the Psalter, like there are many human conditions. There’s the lament of family rebellion that David suffered in Psalm 3. It’s the lament of David faced by the rebellion of his own son Absalom. And perhaps Psalms 3–10 are all Psalms connected with the lament of a father for his wayward child. So there are all sorts of exigencies and circumstances that mean that our prayer life should not be blocked by our sufferings, but rather they open a door for far more deeply understanding the richness of life before God. What robs the Stoic with his stiff upper lip is that it robs us of our prayer life. So if most of your life is lived with a lot of suffering, you simply have a lot of opportunity to relate much more deeply with God. You’re more blessed than the rest of us. Well, that’s a new way of looking at it.

But of course, the ultimate recognition is that lament is not the end of the story. It may be a long part of the story for some of us, but the end of the story is the Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. The end of the Psalmist’s awareness is contentment with God, and so then when we enter into that then once more we move from desolation to consolation. The Old Testament scholar Brueggemann has made a great deal about this psychological switch from desolation to consolation. And this is certainly one of the great movements of our prayer life that we can go moving from one to the other. And the consequence of that shift is then to live a life of praise. And so the Psalter, as we know, ends with this great climax. and the reminder of the Psalms, especially in the last book of the Psalter, and especially most of all climactically in the last ten Psalms that illustrate so marvellously that everything has to be used, all the instruments, all the creativity, all the sprit that we have within us, to praise the Lord for all things. ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me: bless his holy name.’

[00:33:23]

So may the Psalms become our little Bible, as it was for the late Christians in the Middle Ages. It’s Athanasius who first remarked in his wonderful letter to Marcellinus—which you should all read; it’s a great classic—he says the Psalms are the little Bible. All the elements of the Old Testament, creation, the Fall, the Exodus, the wanderings in the desert, the exiles, the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem, they’re all there. So you’re holding a little Bible in your hands when you hold the Psalms and they help you to understand in the vernacular with the rawness of our human emotions that all this is to be directed towards God.

How often we find that it’s our sufferings that inhibit our prayer life. Just the reverse. Our sufferings should profoundly enrich our prayer lives. So shall we just bow in prayer as we close this session.

Loving Lord, we just pray that You will teach us to pray. And we know that the way that You teach us are the ways of the heart, not just simply theological instruction, though that has its place and importance. But most of all, Lord, the way that You give us is Your emotional intelligence and that you want us to gain also spiritual intelligence: how we can connect with You in all our ways in thought and in emotion and in spirit. So we do pray Lord, teach us to pray. And thank you that you’ve given us the provision in Your Word and we thank you in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[00:35:55]

Well, as you may reflect on this, let us ask for two or three questions for discussion. Perhaps the most obvious question to ask is are you excited by having a new vista of how important the Psalms should be in our devotional life? Discuss together what is it in our culture or in our heritage that has made us so blind to their centrality that they should have. The second question is—we all suffer—have you been able to express through the Psalms the central importance that lament has in the Psalter? Possibly, certainly a third, but perhaps even a half of the Psalms have echoes of lament. Isn’t that true of our lives that lament is really, well, sometimes it’s complaint; sometimes it’s deep sorrow? There’s a huge amplitude of the emotions of sorrow and fear. As I mentioned elsewhere, a current, important neuroscientist has pointed out that the basic emotion of the human condition is fear. How then do the Psalms recognise fear in our lives?

And of course, the final question to really ask ourselves now is how can I radically change my life of prayer when I incorporate the Psalms as the basis for prayer ? It was the prayer book of Israel, how can we redeem it to be the prayer book of the Christian Church today?