The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
August 29, 2010
Vol. 13 no. 34
Psalms again, this time number 81, and according to the directions to the choirmaster it is to be sung according to the tune “The Gittith.” Don’t bother looking it up in the hymnbooks, for no one remembers a 2500+ year old tune. No matter the tune, it is meant to be sung, although like many of the psalms it changes directions and themes in the middle.
The Psalmist, a fellow identified as Asaph, starts off fast calling on everyone to sing loudly with all you’ve got a song to God. Timbrels, lyres and harps, trumpet sweeten the music; this is not a somber droning of some supposedly holy words. Nobody stands at the pew and doesn’t sing!
“I hear a voice I had not known” he begins in earnest. Who is that knows the voice of God familiarly anyway? He recounts what the voice tells him, how the Lord God remembers responding to Israel’s calls of distress while enslaved in Egypt and how he delivered them. One request - no worshiping of strange and foreign gods - for God alone brought them up out of Egypt.
But, “my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would have none of me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.” This is the story of the Bible, and of the history of the Christian Church, right down to yesterday. God helps us in desperate times, but when we’re not desperate we lean towards to the more exciting gods of money, fame, comfortable things, and you name it. After a while, God lets us choose our own poison and we are convinced that it tastes good.
Concluding with God’s wish that Israel would listen once again, for the rewards would be generous and sweet as “honey from a rock,” the Psalm makes it clear that staying with God is a hard road, but sweet at last.
Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan