Preaching the Psalms
I thought I’d reflect on our seven week series on Psalms. In particular the challenges and thoughts I’ve had preaching on some Psalms.
- What I thought would be the biggest challenge at the beginning was working on preaching an Old Testament passage. How do I do this and recognise we live after Jesus? Is it okay to preach a sermon a Jewish Rabbi would agree with? I’ll admit now that I don’t think I had great success with this. One week the Psalm was almost overshadowed by reflections on a New Testament passage. Other times the realisation of our time felt forced and inappropriate. However, I think it got better as I kept two things in mind. Firstly, the goal must always be to preach the passage, not my biblical theology. Secondly, I think some Psalms have quite a direct relevance to us today, without some ‘forced’ NT interpretation being added, which leads me to my second challenge.
- How do I preach the Psalms as a genre? It’s wasn’t often that the preceding and/or following Psalms shed a great deal of light on the context of the Psalm in question. Only Ps 137, of the ones I looked at, had significant clues to determine historical context. And yet, the further I got through the series, the more I realised that the genre of Psalm doesn’t necessitate looking for a specific historical context before being able to understand it. As I mentioned in my reflections on preaching Ps 137, I’d underplayed the importance of the emotional response a Psalm is trying to elicit. Now, I could be wrong on this, so challenge me to think harder about this.
- So, how important is it to attempt to recreate the same affective response? At the moment, I think it’s vital, for without it we can miss out on the Psalmist’s purpose in writing/composing. I’m not suggesting that the Psalms aren’t to challenge our thinking. Rather that our thinking needs to be so changed and challenged that our affections are affected too.
So, as we move on to the next series there’s a challenge from lessons learnt. All preaching ought to be based on the passage expounded and have an affectional response. If you come to evening church at St Matthias, let me know how you think this next series goes.
Hey Josh. I reckon that we need to take seriously the possibility that the Psalms is an edited work. I don’t think that every psalm will be enlightened by those around it, but as the general shape of teh psalter and the type/time of surrounding psalms may be of help. I think that in terms of historical context that where it is given (ie. Ps 3) this indicates that its important, but where its not, it may not be important (particularly if it is not obvious from the psalm itself) and perhaps at these points your right – that we can loosen ourselves from the burden of only ever exegeting through the historical context mindset.
The affection question is an interesting one. Sometimes I get confused between the affection which drives the writing of the psalm and the affective response intended by its author. But I would hope you wouldn’t need to ‘recreate’ that affective response as surely it arises from the word preached truly.
Finally – I think (and I know many disagree with me on this one) that if you preach a sermon which a Rabbi would then you are not preaching christianly. This doesn’t mean you need to have superficial references to NT passages, but your faith in Christ ought to pervade your preaching even of the OT. You are a servant of Christ calling upon people to continue following him and to be transformed into his likeness by the power of the HS for the glory of the Father. No Rabbi can preach like that.
Mike, in case you’re wondering, I agree with you on the need to preach Christianly, which implies faith in Christ shaping everything we do and say.
To flesh out what I meant about an affective response. I was hoping to ‘recreate’ it only, as you suggest through faithfully explaining the Psalm, that we might hear it today as it was meant to be heard when first written. This is what prompted me to think more about how we preach the genre, rather than abstract propositions out of the Psalm.