Have you ever noticed the fact that our worship services incorporate a lot of Scripture?
On most Sundays, you’ll hear three separate passages read aloud during the service. But what you may also have noticed is that there is only one portion of Scripture that the congregation joins in reading during our services—both our Sunday morning Eucharist and our daily Morning and Evening Prayer services.
We are constantly invited to read aloud together the psalms.
Why is that? What’s so special about the psalms?
Scope of the Soul
Richard Hooker — perhaps the greatest of all Anglican theologians — writes beautifully on the psalms. He says they are comprehensive—in them we find all the treasures of the rest of the Scriptures, as well as the whole scope of our own lives in all their joy, complexity, and pain (as Wendell so eloquently shared on Sunday).
And what’s more, when we pray the psalms, we pray Jesus’ prayers. Jesus, the complete and perfect human, brings together these two aspects of the comprehensiveness of the psalms in his own prayer life.
His own life offers both everything that God wants to teach us, and the full scope of holy human living, from great joy and feasting to immense suffering, even unto death. It makes sense why Jesus quotes the psalms more than any other part of Israel’s Scriptures!
Our regular praying of the psalms, then, actually takes place within Jesus’ own life of prayer. When we pray the words God gives to us in the psalms, we pray in and with Jesus, who invites us to pray to “Our Father” together with him.
Put differently, we might even think of our praying the psalms as Jesus praying in us by the Holy Spirit. This means that even on a day where we may not feel the same emotions as the psalm we are praying expresses, we can still experience the psalms as Christ praying in and through us.
So why pray the psalms?
Praying with Jesus
Because when we truly pray them, we pray Jesus’ prayers, with Jesus. And slowly we start to look more like him. We allow Christ to give voice to the realities of our own lives, and to shape and mold us, through prayer, into his image.
Try taking up a psalm this week, then (even Psalm 117, only two verses!) and dwell with it for just a few minutes a day.
Practice inhabiting the psalm yourself, and let it speak to your own emotional life.
And even if it doesn’t connect this week, pray it as Jesus’ words, and allow his prayers to shape your own life of prayer before God.
From Sunday's Class
Here's a small excerpt from Wendell's talk.
