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.