“Come and See”
Series on Worship, III
Psalm 66
July 6, 2014
The author Kathleen Norris once told the story of teaching poetry in an elementary school. Wandering through the class of fifth graders, she looked down at a boy’s paper to see his poem was titled “My very first Dad.” The title itself was evocative, signaling a very deep, very personal response to an assignment about writing similes. The poem read
“I remember him
like God in my heart,
I remember him in my heart
like the clouds overhead,
and strawberry ice cream and bananas
when I was a little kid.
But the most I remember
is his love
as big as Texas
when I was born.”[1]
It was written by a boy, born in Texas who now lived in North Dakota with his mother and stepfather. His very first dad, in fact, had left town on the day he was born. Norris shared the story to illustrate how the act of writing poetry can be revealing; uncovering truths our hearts need to say. The boy’s words had revealed something about himself, of course, but its message surely tugs our hearts as well. As Norris says, “That boy spoke to our own loneliness and exile, and reminded us that our everyday world is more mysterious than we know: who would have guessed that an ordinary boy, in an ordinary classroom in North Dakota, was walking around with a love, and a loss, as big as Texas in his heart?”[2] How would he have told us, except through an unexpected poem?
The psalms are poetry. They are not stories, although they are born of experience. Nor are they teachings; even though they certainly instruct. The psalms reveal ‘God in our hearts.’
As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs for you.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil…
By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and there we wept. How can we sing the Lord’s
song in a foreign land?
Like the boy’s poem, the psalms reveal what we need to speak and what sacred words have been spoken into our hearts. Like all good poetry, every emotion is acceptable: rage, doubt, longing, trust, hope, and love. Because the exchange is between God and us, the psalms are prayers. The whole collection of 150 is the church’s prayer book, given to us so that we might know a wide, freeing space where love is bigger than Texas and remember how secure it feels to be held in love’s embrace.
In some Christian communities, the psalms are part of every worship service. For our purposes today, I want to explore how the first moments of prayer in worship reorient our heart. In this summer series about worship, today’s subject is the prayer that opens the service. This prayer, at its best, is a piece of poetry about God and to God that opens us to our vulnerabilities, our longings, our memories, and our trust. It readies us for worship by saying who God is and who we wish to be. Psalm 66 summaries the prayer as a “come and see” moment. Come and see what God has done. Mighty works. Merciful gestures. Saving moments. Come and see.
What has God done? According to the writer of Psalm 66, God has done a great deal:
led our ancestors from slavery into freedom,
kept an eye upon beloved people,
In moments of danger, God did not let our feet slip
and even when the way was fiery, God brought us to a spacious place.
All these powerful events are why we worship, but they are also what we remember when we do worship. Like a grateful survivor who must recount the story again and again, or a well-filled dinner guest who wants to relive a perfectly prepared meal, we enter God’s presence recounting the stories. You have kept us alive. You have fed us when we were famished. You have parted the chaos so that a path becomes clear. We don’t say all of this in that short, opening prayer. But we do tell a small piece of the story, enough to jog our memories, because our worship flows from saying God you are the source of our life and we stand upon that unchanging truth.
Perhaps during the days since we’ve last gathered you have forgotten what God can do. Perhaps during the past week your faith in God’s power has been tested. So come and see what God has done. Had the prayer been composed this morning rather than earlier in the week, the prayer might have marveled at the cloudless blue skies and a gentle, cool breeze on the first weekend in July. Truly, God, the earth is full of your glory. Or, we could have prayed“Your eyes have kept watch over us. In the midst of this holiday, we bless you for your protection.” Some weeks we might need to hear “God does not let our feet slip,”as a calming balm to a soul walking at cliff’s edge. There are those weeks when “Come and see what God has done” rings like a mockery, for it appears God has done nothing. Those weeks we rest in the reality that this is a unison prayer – a community prayer offered in one voice - which beckons us into the stream of faithful witnesses, reassuring us of a God who continually refines us like silver and never, ever, rejects our prayers.
And what of the young boy who remembered his lost father as God in his heart? Surely we all enter worship with holes in our hearts only God can fill. We come to remember a wide, unflappable love that might well be the only thing that has kept us in life. In the moments of prayer that begin worship, we open ourselves to the love and to the losses, trusting God was with us from the very first and God wants to show us all that God can do. So, come and see.
[1] Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead books, 1996), 54. The poem “My Very First Dad” was published in 1987 by the North Dakota Council on the Arts and COMPAS.
[2] Norris, 56.