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by
N.T. Wright
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January 4 - January 8, 2016
But sing them also pneumatologically—that is, reflect, as you sing, on the New Testament’s vision of the church as the new Temple, indwelt by the Spirit of the living God.
Watch how, without any complex theological or hermeneutical footwork, the early Christian vision of covenant renewal gene...
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The Psalms stand at the intersection of both time and space, of the present Jerusalem Temple and the future cosmic Temple. That is close to what Paul is saying in Romans 8.18–27;
They had to learn to understand their own often painful and frightening situation according to the pattern Jesus had established.
If the Psalms provide a sense of sacred space, that space is where celebration and sorrow are held together within the powerful love and presence of the one God.
"where celebration & sorrow are held together within the powerful love and presence of the one God."
the Psalms themselves that the claim they celebrate—the belief that the living God has made his home in Jerusalem—comes at a huge cost: enemies attacking from outside, corruption threatening from within.
The psalmists’ notions of sacred space have not been abandoned. They have been translated into the mode of Messiah and Spirit.
His kingdom was and is most emphatically for this world.
what looks to the flattened-out imagination of late Western modernity like “lifeless” matter is in fact a world throbbing with God-given life.
it means on the one hand the glorious combination of creation being fully alive, fully itself, and on the other hand human society being properly ordered through justice and prosperity.
Paul leaves us in no doubt that he is picking up this tradition of “creation through wisdom,” joining together Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8.
The Messiah, he says, “is the place where you’ll find all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2.2–3);
And if this is so for the whole creation—trees and seas and birds and animals—it is so above all for human beings.
The mode in which that glory is to be seen in the present is praise.
God creates “that which is not God” out of generous love in order that he may then, in the end, fill it, flood it, drench it, with his love and his glory.
There is, of course, a constant tension in the Psalms between the celebration of creation the way it is and the longing for YHWH to come and put it all right at last.
those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.
It is all very well to praise YHWH and to celebrate his creation, but your own life must then be brought into line, without grumbling or murmuring (95.7–11).
To put it in modern shorthand, you find the political message within the “creational” message. Once you summon the whole of creation to praise its maker, you can begin to see clearly where the fault lines lie within the world of human power.
The Psalms offer a different vision: a people of praise who, out of their celebration of God’s goodness in creation and out of their eager anticipation of his coming in judgment at last, speak his word and his truth to those in power, reminding them that they are answerable to the God who will one day hold them accountable.
“resurrection” is what you get once you embrace those two other doctrines: the good creation and the promise that the same creator God will one day sort it all out.
The material world matters; our human material bodies matter because the God who made them will remake them, and what we do with them in the present, as Paul insists to the Corinthians, is a genuine anticipation of what they will be in the future (1 Cor. 6.14).
It is important that God’s people are embodied, because God made this world and has no intention of abandoning it.
Do not some of the most gloriously hopeful psalms sit side by side with some of the most desperate and fearful?
Seedtime and harvest, like day and night, are built into the present creation as signposts, indications that the God who made the world has new purposes yet to be unveiled.
The Psalms themselves indicate that the human beings who sing them are actually being changed by doing so.
That hope enables all who sing the Psalms to celebrate not only the present matter of creation, made as it is by YHWH’s own wisdom, but the future matter: the new world and the newly embodied humans who will people and rule it.
We find ourselves at the intersection of the times, the overlap of God’s space and our own, and the place where the ultimate new life of resurrection is already making inroads into our material being.
The Psalms speak of change, but more importantly they are agents of change: change within the humans who sing them, and change through those humans, as their transformed lives bring God’s kindness and justice into the world.
I find it impossible, therefore, to imagine a growing and maturing church or individual Christian doing without the Psalms.
Much of what the Psalms are designed to do, they are designed to do as a complete set.
We should do our best to find ways to use the whole Psalter.
(I once heard Billy Graham say that he read five psalms every day because they taught him how to get along with God, and a chapter of Proverbs every day because it taught him how to get along with other people. Psalms and Proverbs right through, every month: a great discipline.)
Things happen when you use the whole cycle that are less likely to happen when you only use part or skip back and forth by following your own principle of selection rather than that of the compilers and, we may suppose, the Holy Spirit.
Churches and Christian groups of whatever tradition should be wary of taking too many steps down the road, whether in mission or in liturgy or anywhere else, without the Psalms as the deep, fast-flowing river washing the steps of the church day by day and hour by hour.
My enjoyment of the music itself is enhanced, each time, by the aura of certain special occasions, to which each new hearing can contribute.
the earth is not divine, but it is the glorious creation of the true God and celebrates his kingdom arriving “on earth as in heaven.”
The initial sense of God’s calling is often exciting: Can it be that God really wants me to do something special for him? (The answer, by the way, is always “yes,” but God’s sense and ours of what is “special” are usually different.)
There are the hot tears of frustration as the plans you made are ruined by someone else’s stupidity or malevolence—or by your own.
