{"id":802,"date":"2011-05-31T09:26:07","date_gmt":"2011-05-31T14:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/?p=802"},"modified":"2011-06-02T14:59:14","modified_gmt":"2011-06-02T19:59:14","slug":"of-cabbages-and-kings-the-psalms-in-our-worship-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/acugst\/of-cabbages-and-kings-the-psalms-in-our-worship-32\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Cabbages and Kings: The Psalms in Our Worship 32"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mark

Mark Hamilton, PhD - Associate Dean, Professor of Old Testament, ACU Graduate School of Theology<\/p><\/div>\n

It’s interesting how things converge in your brain.\u00a0 Impressions, ideas, and reflections on both stream through seeking to stick together before something else roots them out.\u00a0\u00a0 Yesterday, I spent time working on a survey instrument for David Miller of Princeton University, who is a leader of the “faith at work” movement, an attempt to help men and women have more integrated lives.\u00a0 See his website at http:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/faithandwork<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then comes today’s self-appointed assignment, to reflect on Psalm 40,\u00a0 a thanksgiving hymn praising God for an integrated life.\u00a0 What have these two assignments in common?\u00a0 A lot, as it turns out.<\/p>\n

The psalm has two basic parts: verses 1-11 (Hebrew 2-12) are a straightforward hymn of thanksgiving expressing trust and hope in God, and verses 12-17 (Hebrew 13-18) step backward to the time before God’s salvation and thus offer a retrospective petition, a flashback so to speak.\u00a0 Yet the two parts connect closely to each other, because salvation is never far away from the one seeking it from God, and the memory of trouble is never far away even from the most secure of us.\u00a0 Life, after all, hits us in this great stream of impressions, ideas, and reflections on both.<\/p>\n

How, according to this psalm, does one praise God rightly?\u00a0 One way to answer the question is to track the verbs used for the psalmist and for God.\u00a0 The psalmist trusts, stands in awe, and invites others to do the same.\u00a0 God, meanwhile, turns to the pray-er, listens, lifts out of the clay pit, sets feet on firm ground, and puts a new song (the psalm itself!) in one’s mouth.\u00a0 The active God makes it possible for the formerly passive, overborne human to become active again and to resume a communal role.<\/p>\n

Another way to track the pursuit of integration is to follow the structure of the psalm, which seems loose at first, but proves to be comprehensive in scope.\u00a0 The thanksgiving turns in verse 4 (Hebrew 5) to benediction: “blessed is anybody whose refuge\/place of trust is Yhwh.”\u00a0 It then moves back to direct address to God, praising the Almighty for doing miracles (nifla’ot<\/em> are often associated with the events of the exodus, though the concept is wider — the term means less suspension of the laws of nature, than simply actions that reorder the human world so that the righteous prosper as they should).\u00a0 The psalmist then considers, and rejects or at least relativizes, an alternative form of praise, namely, sacrifice.\u00a0 Yhwh does not need sacrifice.\u00a0 Words are enough when they bear fruit in life.\u00a0 Words and deeds, divine and human, all fit together somehow.<\/p>\n

Among the most interesting lines are those in verses 7-8 (Hebrew 8-9): “Then I said, ‘Indeed I have come.\u00a0 In the book it is written about me to do what pleases you, O God.\u00a0 This is what I delight in.\u00a0 So your law is in my inner being’.”\u00a0 The lining out of the verses is a bit unclear, or rather, debatable, here, but you get the drift.\u00a0 Many commentators associate the scroll in which the psalmist reads with the one written for the king in Deuteronomy 17:14-20, and thus argue that the psalm as a whole is a royal psalm.\u00a0 This thesis is possible, though far from certain.\u00a0 It seems also possible to think of the psalm as fairly late and thus as a specimen of a type of piety that emphasized the importance of the Law of Moses.\u00a0 There is nothing obviously kingly about the psalmist (in contrast to the case with a number of other psalms), though we cannot rule out the possibility that we are supposed to imagine here a king delivered from national trials.<\/p>\n

However you slice it, the ideal narrator of the psalm is someone who has experienced tragedy and deliverance and is now grateful for it.\u00a0 He (or she) has found an integrated life rather than one divided up into little pockets in which faith has no bearing on anything else or vice versa.<\/p>\n

In times of stress such as ours, we need this psalm.\u00a0 Whatever my objective experience, it is easy to find life’s problems, to highlight disappointments, and to underscore tragedies. \u00a0\u00a0 But this little poem describes someone who found another way by the simple expedient of trusting God and seeking guidance from Torah.\u00a0 What a concept!\u00a0 It is this extraordinary willingness to make a commitment that marks the person of faith off from the rest of the human race.\u00a0 Without such trust, we have no hope.\u00a0 With it, many things are possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s interesting how things converge in your brain.\u00a0 Impressions, ideas, and reflections on both stream through seeking to stick together before something else roots them out.\u00a0\u00a0 Yesterday, I spent time working on a survey instrument for David Miller of Princeton University, who is a leader of the “faith at work” movement, an attempt to help […]<\/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-802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nOf Cabbages and Kings: The Psalms in Our Worship 32 - 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\/of-cabbages-and-kings-the-psalms-in-our-worship-32\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Of Cabbages and Kings: The Psalms in Our Worship 32 - 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