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Weekly Devotional

September 21, 2009

God’s Peace be with you all.

Psalm 145:1-8   I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever.  ² Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.  ³ Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable.  ⁴ One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.  ⁵ On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.  ⁶ The might of your awesome deeds shall be proclaimed, and I will declare your greatness.  ⁷ They shall celebrate the fame of your abundant goodness, and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.  ⁸ The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

            One of the traditions that I greatly love about the church is chanting.  Not only do I feel a power and closeness to God when I hear the liturgy chanted, but I see chanting as a personal time of prayer.  For me, being a part of a service that is chanted links me with the traditions of the many saints that have gone before us, and there ritualistic way of worshipping.  Last week while I was at Fall Convocation, the musical clinician was a gentleman by the name of Mark Sedio.  He is serving at a very large congregation in Minneapolis, and part of his message to us was about chanting.  What I learned from him is that you don’t have to be able to sing perfectly, or even to hit the right pitch, because chanting relies as much on the melodic roundness of the notes as it does on the pitch.  There is a style to chanting, and slowly, it is being lost because churches are turning more toward a contemporary style of worship.

            One of the things that has gotten lost in our With One Voice (WOV) service is chanting the psalms.  Many of you may remember chanting them before the WOV came out.  Many of the psalms are seen as prayers to God from God’s people.  They are also meant to be sung.  Part of the beauty of “praying the psalms” is singing them.  The full richness in the emotion comes out in the singing, whereas by reading them we often lose the full range of human need and emotion.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:  “What matters is not what we feel like praying about, but what God wants us to ask him for. Not the poverty of our own heart, but the riches of the Word of God must decide how we are to pray.”

            The psalms are one of the first places that I go when I feel like I need to pray and need scriptural guidance.  There are so many different lenses that you can look through as you go about praying with the psalms.  You can look at it as poetry, or from a theological aspect, or through the witness of the Gospel, through themes, your thoughts, and from the words themselves.  They can give comfort, joy, happiness, provide counsel, and relieve our grief.  The psalms truly are one of the greatest assets of the Bible.  If you have never really opened the Bible to the psalms (other than on Sunday mornings), I invite you to do so.  I think you will be surprised at the wealth of prayerful knowledge that they contain. 

In our prayers this week: 

Doris, Mary Netta, Ann, St. John’s Lutheran Church, Joseph, Lisa, Jane, Irene, Kim, and Michael

God’s Peace,

Pastor Judson