On Performing the Psalms

If you read my last article, I suspect that you asked what I meant when I proposed that we “perform Psalm 77.” How does a congregation perform a psalm? Why Psalm 77? Twenty years ago, I attended a Sermon Seminar at Rochester College, formerly Michigan Christian College, in Rochester, MI. The featured speaker was Walter Brueggemann. He invited preachers to “draw the congregation to life as it is uttered and imagined in the Psalter.” The preacher’s task is to see the narrative, the story told in the Psalm. Then he “Invites the congregation to resituate its life in this particular narrative so that it may come to see that this same narrative reading is being performed and reperformed in my life and in our life.”

Lamenting that the lament Psalms are so neglected in churches today, Brueggemann expanded and applied the above process. In each lament there is a mega-narrative, the big story, and a little narrative, personal and community. YHWH is the central and decisive character. each lament is a crises. In this imaginative reading, we may ask, “Whose Psalm is this?” and “Who may properly pray this Psalm today?”

We may perform the Psalms today more that we think. In safe times seeking assurance and comfort, we sing and perform Psalms 23, 46, & 121. In times of confession and restoration we perform Psalms 32 and 51. In dangerous critical times we sing and perform Psalms 77 & 109. We now return to Psalm 77 with its repeated “I, I, I” & “me, me, me, my, my” in verses 1-9. Then comes the crises verse 10, “the right hand of the Most High has changed.” The crises between faith and non-faith. This Psalmist choses faith as his “I, me” become “you, your” in verses 12-20. Yes, I admit that all too often my uplifted hands were doubt and despair about I and me. And I think that the crises in this congregation are “we, us” questions. And they are important questions. But may we perform this Psalm and declare “Your way, O God is holy.”

—Tom Yoakum