{"id":690,"date":"2011-03-24T09:31:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-24T14:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=690"},"modified":"2011-03-24T09:31:00","modified_gmt":"2011-03-24T14:31:00","slug":"the-tales-we-tell-the-psalms-in-our-worship-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-tales-we-tell-the-psalms-in-our-worship-26\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tales we Tell: The Psalms in our Worship 26"},"content":{"rendered":"

You are what you narrate.\u00a0 When I was a little boy, I loved to hear my grandmothers tell\u00a0 about their childhoods.\u00a0 One was born in 1900, the other in 1907.\u00a0 Each had seen hard times and good, had brought children into the world, and had led lives of integrity.\u00a0 I believed them because of who they were, and their stories were interesting and orienting because their very strangeness still made sense in my very different life through them. \u00a0 (My grandmother Hamilton had once heard William Howard Taft speak, for example, and both she and my grandmother Sullivan knew how to hitch up a wagon and wash clothes on a washboard, among many other now forgotten skills.)\u00a0 You are the stories you tell and the stories to which you listen.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If this is so, then choosing the right stories and the right ways of telling them becomes crucial.\u00a0 This is why I am struck today by the opening lines of Psalm 34.\u00a0 This elegant little acrostic psalm (each verse starts with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, except the final, summarizing verse) celebrates the fact that, as the conclusion puts it, “Yhwh redeems the life of his servants, so that none who seek refuge in Yhwh are ashamed.”\u00a0 The end of humiliation is the sign and result of Yhwh’s saving work.<\/p>\n

Who are those ashamed?\u00a0 The opening of the psalm makes the answer very clear:<\/p>\n

I will bless Yhwh all the time;\u00a0 Yhwh’s praise will be in my mouth perpetually.<\/em><\/p>\n

My very life praises Yhwh.\u00a0 The poor hear it and rejoice<\/em><\/p>\n

They will praise Yhwh along with me, and we will exalt his name together.<\/em><\/p>\n

Why does the psalmist include the poor here?\u00a0 What is it about the praise of God that encourages the poor?<\/p>\n

In this conversation, you can almost hear Karl Marx, who famously wrote that “Religion is the cry of the oppressed creature; it is the opiate of the people.”\u00a0 He argued that religion was a way of both naming the standing crisis of our inhumanity to each other as one of the few species of animal that hunts its own members, and of pretending that crisis away.\u00a0 There is some truth to that position, though I think it vastly oversimplifies things.<\/p>\n

A better direction is to ask, what sort of faith offers truly good news to the oppressed of the earth, and how can I join the story of that faith? \u00a0 \u00a0 Such a religion would have a God who cared for all human beings alike, was unimpressed by our hierarchies and patterns of deference and control (or at least used them for higher purposes), and who offered tangible ways to feed the human spirit in all its dimensions (not just its real need for physical well-being).\u00a0 Such a faith would comprehensively work in human individual and communal life in order to bring about such results.\u00a0 And so the stories of such a faith would report acts of deliverance from suffering in all sorts of forms, ranging from outright healing to an altering of the mind leading to alteration of practices.\u00a0 There would be great variety in the story, but also continuity so that those of us who have not hitched up wagons could love and understand those who have.<\/p>\n

In short, one candidate for such a faith would be the religion of Israel and the faiths that came from it.\u00a0 The God of the Bible would be a candidate for the inspiration of such a faith because the stories about this God consistently report just such concerns and actions.\u00a0 Yhwh protects families who wander in strange lands, hears the cries of slaves, brings healing to the sick and fertility to the childless.\u00a0 Not always.\u00a0 Not always in the same way.\u00a0 But often and with a consistent logic.\u00a0 Even more tellingly, Yhwh never acts to strengthen the wicked in their power, to confirm the prejudices of the affluent and comfortable, to defeat those who have a just complaint about mistreatment, or to turn away the penitent.\u00a0 I say this because with our modern hermeneutic of suspicion, it is easier to focus on the problems (holy war, so-called Israelite nationalism etc., themes I’ll talk about in later posts) and to forget the larger picture.<\/p>\n

So, today let’s tell the story of the God who delivers the poor.\u00a0 May those of us who are not poor join those who are in this celebration so that we too can be redeemed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You are what you narrate.\u00a0 When I was a little boy, I loved to hear my grandmothers tell\u00a0 about their childhoods.\u00a0 One was born in 1900, the other in 1907.\u00a0 Each had seen hard times and good, had brought children into the world, and had led lives of integrity.\u00a0 I believed them because of who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3538,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Tales we Tell: The Psalms in our Worship 26 - ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/the-tales-we-tell-the-psalms-in-our-worship-26\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Tales we Tell: The Psalms in our Worship 26 - 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