Liberation - a picture of the crowds in Paris when the city
was liberated at the end of the Second World War.
1 Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth;
2 sing the glory of his name; give to him glorious praise.
3 Say to God, ‘How awesome are your deeds!
Because of your great power, your enemies cringe before you.
4 All the earth worships you; they sing praises to you, sing praises to your name. Selah: Pause in God’s presence
5 Come and see what God has done: he is awesome in his deeds among mortals.
6 He turned the sea into dry land; they passed through the river on foot.
There we rejoiced in him,
7 who rules by his might for ever, whose eyes keep watch on the nations—
let the rebellious not exalt themselves. Selah: Pause in God’s presence
8 Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard,
9 who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.
10 For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.
11 You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs;
12 you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
13 I will come into your house with burnt-offerings; I will pay you my vows,
14 those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.
15 I will offer to you burnt-offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams;
I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Selah: Pause in God’s presence
16 Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.
17 I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue.
18 If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.
19 But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer.
20 Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer
or removed his steadfast love from me.
Pause in God’s presence. That is what the occasional ‘selah’ instruction means. Take time between these verses to let the message sink in. This morning in a reading from Luke’s gospel we came across an instruction of Jesus’ to the disciples as he was struggling to get them to listen to his words. ‘Let these words sink into your ears,’ he said to them (9.44). It was a phrase that made us sit up and take note.
Well, here in the psalm, as in many but not all of them, is that tell-tale reminder to those who are participating in the psalm as a worshipful poem, to pause, reflect, and let the words ‘sink in to our ears’.
Psalm 66 is a praise song about God’s liberating acts and steadfast love. It is a psalm for ‘all the earth’ (vs1 and 4) to sing. But it is also very particularly a song about the fundamental experience of liberation told generation after generation by the Jewish people. It is a song that remembers the ancient story of exodus (vs 5-7). And then after another pause, it moves on to something more current in the life of the psalmist, something that again has required God’s liberating intervention (vs 8-12). What God did before God can accomplish again. The psalmist does not look to explain why things went wrong again, but he does not spare the details either of that desperate dip in fortunes. He spells out how trampled upon, how trapped, how tested and how burdened the whole people had felt. Yet he is also able to testify to a liberation effected by God: a liberation that has taken them into a spacious place, a land for living in.
The psalm then progresses to a point of covenant, a place of worship, a repaying of vows, sacrifices of thanksgiving (vs13-15). And finally, after yet another pause in God’s presence, the psalmist’s lips are loosened to share, with evangelical zeal, the good news of God’s deliverance to anyone who will hear it (vs16-20). The cycle of thanksgiving is completed. And in the thanksgiving comes personal liberation too.
This is true in my experience. My liberation from difficulty or harm, from stress or ennui, from pain or sickness, is only complete when I have uttered my thanks to God and shared the good news with others. This is a simple truth: praise is the articulation of liberation.
‘Let my people go,’ was the call of God articulated through Moses. ‘Let my people go,’ has been the call of all liberation movements. And whether we long for liberation from lockdown, liberation from fear of the virus or liberation from fear of police brutality or persecution for religious beliefs – this is the cry of God’s heart always.
[1]
New Revised Standard Version,
Anglicised (NRSVA) New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition, copyright ©
1989, 1995 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All
rights reserved.
There is an invitation in this psalm to “come and see” and “come and hear” what the Lord has done in delivering his people from their enemies and, it seems from another occasion, from fire and water. God heard their prayers for help and delivered them. The people have been through many dangers and troubles but have been brought to “a spacious place” (v12) where they can worship and give thanks. In our days of trouble we can trust God to deliver us and bring us again to a spacious place of praise.
ReplyDeleteJohn Eaton (in Psalms for Life) informs us that it is an ancient custom for Ps66 to be used by the Church on Easter Day. Looking in the lectionary this was the case for Evening Prayer this year. Apparently in some Greek and Latin manuscripts the heading for the psalm is “Of the Resurrection”. Just as the exodus story is read at Eastertide with its motif of freedom from slavery and liberation so this psalm too speaks of God’s mighty power to bring salvation and life. It is through the death and resurrection of Jesus that we have hope that even now during this pandemic we can experience his risen life. God’s invitation is still to “come and see”. to “come and hear” and to let the words of resurrection sink into our ears.