I have a confession and I'll trust you to keep it confidential. This is just between us. Don’t tell anyone. I’m being a bit vulnerable, but here goes: As a child I went through a period when I hated musicals. I thought they were the goofiest things ever made.

Of course early on, I only saw them on television screens. I remember the evening when forced under the threat of going to bed I had to watch grown men and women marching around singing in the middle of their conversations. I launched into a laborious monologue to my mother. “This is the most unrealistic thing I’ve ever seen. No one stops in the middle of what they’re doing to sing. No street is ever covered with dancing businessmen and swinging brief-cases. Who except a nut sings in the rain? And certainly no self-respecting rancher is ever going to break out into melody: “The farmer and the cowman should be friends, Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends. One man likes to push a plough, the other likes to chase a cow, But that's no reason why they can't be friends.” Please.

You have to admit, singing is one of the strangest things we humans do. Most other activities have a functional outcome. You eat to live, you work to pay for what you eat, you talk to communicate with people you need, you dress in order to be decent (and stay out of jail), you read in order to learn, etc. You sing… to what?

To feel & let the world know what you feel, of course. What my young and rationalist-wannabe mind had yet to comprehend is that some things are too large for plain words. When things are too large to fit in conversation, when experiences cannot be squeezed into paragraphs or stuffed into prose, there’s one thing to do: sing.

Or, in some cases let others sing for you, and you listen with your heart… for you know that the love song paints a picture words can never sketch. You know that a good song travels from the ears to the heart, and only later to the brain. And you know that the hymn’s blended text and tune erupt with a joy you could never put on paper… not with a 1000 words.

Or I hope you know this. The Psalmists believe it is essential to know this. It is part of our spiritual heath. Music is not incidental. It’s not what you have to go through to get to the sermon, it’s not just preparation, it’s not just the work-up. It’s the expression of worship.

[Summer Psalm series]

This Psalm is for the director of music. And as such it is filled with imperatives, commands or instructions, if you will. Here they are:

Shout, Sing, Make praise, Say, Come, See, Worship, Listen… 8 instructions in 20 verses. This is an instructional Psalm for the ones leading worship. Do this.

I see in this Psalm the trajectory of our own worship. It begins with the exclamatory and ends with the reflective. Starts with praise, and it ends with listening.

Our worship, after the gathering, moves to the praise of God. We do this in song and prayer. We listen to pipes, strings, and various instruments. This is the start of our worship, and it’s the right place to start. For all of us, all of us, alive have reason to praise, to shout in song, to sing in joy.

Two reasons, made explicit here.

1) The sheer majesty and mystery of God’s power and providence – in creation and history (v. 5-7).
2) God is present in, through, and after our suffering (vs. 10-12).

In other words: God’s power in our story, God’s presence in our suffering.

Praising, singing, even shouting in joy, brings us into visceral contact with that grand mystery of God’s providential work in our lives, of God’s presence, even in the dark days.

Early days of my ministry… I would travel ever Friday to a nursing home. Some residents couldn’t talk, couldn’t recognize their children from a nurse… but they could sing. There in the darkest days, God was present in song.

I sing because I have a story. It’s a story, the ending of which I haven’t the foggiest, but the beginning I know. I know that God’s love has been a real and sustaining force in my life, I know that the teachings of Christ have helped me, I know that the embrace of God’s grace has given me hope. God has dried out the path, smoothed out the way of my redemption. So I sing.

Do you have a story? Do you look back with the glasses of faith at a life where God was at work, bringing hope and help?

It’s almost impossible to say it, so we must sing it.

We all have a story of course. The question is whether it is a God-story or a chance-story. The psalmist praised, because back before they were slaves, held in captivity, forced to labor. But God rescued them, drying out the Red Sea, letting them cross, ultimately helping them find the promised land.

You don’t sing about chance-stories. “Well we just happened to find ourselves enslaved, and this dude Moses just had a strange hankering to march around in the wilderness for some 40 years, and so we just all, on a lark, decided to go along, and…” Write a song about that.

No, it doesn’t work. But what does work: “Go down, Moses, say let my people go!” [insert melody!]

Same is true in your life. Either the God of the universe is at work, shaping the broad parameters of your life, or you are a product of a random set of events, and your consciousness is but a momentary experience, soon to be snuffed out as your random molecules disintegrate. Try singing that.

Let me be the first to admit, that I have problems with the way some people tell their God stories. “I was driving down the avenue of life, and I was in desperate need… of a parking spot. And miracle of miracles, right in front of the spa, where I so desperately needed a pedicure, a spot opened up! Praise God!” (Please!)

Another reason to sing… Most good songs are about the big stuff. Most good songs, even if they’re about the small stuff, you know they’re about the big stuff. Did you note what Jesus told his disciples in today’s gospel lesson? Don’t rejoice because the demons listen to you (seems like a reason to me!), but rejoice because your names are written in heaven. Sing about the big stuff.

I’m not sure about parking spot theology. I believe we are subject to the laws of this universe, and that very rarely does God break the normal chain of causality. But I do believe, we’re not all here by accident. And so this is why I have to sing. I can’t make complete sense of it all, but the thought that all this glory is just the chance happening of molecules… well that’s crazier than ranchers and cowmans being friends and then prancing around singing about it.

So, while I think science does a great job telling us how, it doesn’t tell us why. For that story, we need God. And God is too large for us to figure out, walk around and chart, to grand to take any measurements. But we can look up, and sing.

To sing is to recognize that at best we can only say a bit about God, and that we must resort to the expansive support of song, of that divine interchange between melody and harmony, to carry our feelings.

To sing is to see that paragraphs and pages of prose will only prolong a sense of the inadequacy of our tongue to talk about God, we must croon his character, intone his inscrutable mystery. To sing is reach into the soul’s last resource for saying what needs be said in a way which says: this only scratches the surface.


As a pre-pubescent child, watching Curly in a Surrey with fringe on top, I didn’t yet know that words were as weak as a newborn calf with 3 legs. I hadn’t yet encountered unrequited love, so painful that only poetry and song will get at the ache. I didn’t know that many experiences of life are so real they can’t be talked about. I didn’t know that some musicals have more reality in them than some historical dramas. I didn’t know God had given us a means of talking from our hearts. I didn’t know. I do now. Let’s sing.