This summer we’re preaching through the Psalter. At the outset of the series, I sent our preaching team a brief set of notes laying-out some general rules for how to preach the Psalms.
The problem is this, ours is not a widely poetically literate culture. Poetry has become, in the past century, so abstract and so experimental that it has left us with very little in the way of ability to follow things like rhythm, meter, poetic structure, etc. The irony is that these are not at all hard or complex things to follow —they are actually very simply and, as Dana Gioia once reminded us, we are designed by God to follow them (the same way that bees are designed to follow ‘dance patterns’ to follow the trail to nectar). We ‘get’ poetry when it comes to us in the form of hip-hop, rap, or country music, but we get all clammy and confused when the Bible speaks in a poetic form.
Here then are a couple of the rules for reading and understanding the Psalms which I gave to our team, with a few modifications:
Sing them. Over and over and over. Just like any other poem, song, or rhyme, there is no way to “climb-out” of the music and “onto” the meaning. You want to understand Treacherous Three’s Feel the Heartbeat? Learn it and sing it. You want to understand Drezus’ Warpath? Learn it and sing it. You want to understand Daoiri Farrell’s Craggan White Hare? Too easy! Learn it and sing it until it flows form your inner most being.
So also, you want to learn the meaning of the Psalms? Sing them, learn them, commit them to memory. Let them flow from the well of your spirit.Augustine says that the songs are the songs of Christ-and-the-Church. We sing them in Him, He sings them in us. One can think of polyphony in which a single song has multiple melody lines –not just a dominant melody and an accompanying harmony. Two melodies. As you interpret the Psalm look for the two melody lines: the church’s (which is made sense of in her Lord) and the Lord’s (which is made sense of in the life of his people). Note: there is no word or line that both voices do not sing.
Application: “This is what the song means when you sing it, church. And this is what the song means when Christ sings it over you.”
You cannot understand everything all the time all at once. Take your time, be at peace. Meditate at the pace of eternity. Limit yourself to small things: find one or two major themes, images, leitmotifs, movements, words, or narrative threads from the song and expound those.
Struggling still? Here’s a simple tool: Read the daily lectionary lesson from the Bible, and answer this question: How does today’s lectionary psalm make sense of today’s Bible lesson?
When you study the Psalms pay attention to the structure of the psalm. That structure is not merely additive to the meaning, that structure will point you to the meaning. In poetry and music structure modulates and tunes the content.
Are you a commentary person? Forget all other commentaries on the Psalter except for Augustine’s Exposition on the Psalms. But do not use it as an “answer key” (e.g. “these are the answers”) but rather as a “tuning fork” (e.g. “this is the key in which I should be thinking’) —-less of “this is what this means” and more of “am I in tune with the church’s voice?”
Four words: Quadriga, quadriga, quadriga, quadriga. Don’t know what that means? Here’s a brief explanation of the classical Christian way of reading Scripture
Remember, always remember, the Psalms describe real, plain things even as they reach beyond them into deeper meanings. The plenary sense (that is, the ‘deeper meaning’) only works if the plain sense works too. Allegory only works if both ends of the analogy are real things. I can only say “this is like that” if there is both a “this” and a “that”. This is what medieval commentators missed in some of their exegesis of the poetic books. “Kisses” in The Song of Solomon can only mean “the loving union of my soul with the Word of Christ” if they first mean the placing of lips on the body of another. “Leviathan” in the Psalms can only mean “the Satan, the devil, the Evil one, all evil ones” if it first means “monstrous creature of the deep”. And “chariots” can only mean “all the martial powers I am prone to trust besides Jesus” if it first means “military war cart most likely with razors on the spokes and archers in the car, ANE equivalent of light tank.” It must mean both or else it means nothing.
Sing the psalms, meditate upon them, turn each word over and over, make them the hymnbook of your life.