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Summer Preaching Series

We kick off summer, and Pentecost, with six weeks in the Psalms. The Book of Psalms is the prayer book of the Hebrew Bible. Throughout the centuries, faithful Jews and Christians have learned to pray by praying the Psalms. Almost all of us want to pray but don’t really know what to say. Thanks and help are our basic prayers. Beyond that we can use some help.

That is where the Psalms come in. Praying the Psalms can teach us that prayers do not need to be polished or polite or perfect. The language of prayer is honest and personal. The Psalms are passionate words—full of joy and praise, anger and frustration, grief and sadness. In these prayers we learn to lay ourselves bare before God. We learn honesty and vulnerability. We learn to pray alone and with others. We learn to sing praises to God and to shake our fists at the heavens.

The Psalms are all corporate prayers. They are meant to be prayed in community, with others. The life of faith is life with others.

There are different types of Psalms just as there are different types of prayers and emotions. Our series will try to move us through six psalms in a manner that reflects how we might actually experience the life of faith, through the ups and the downs.

Up:  When life is stable and the world seems trustworthy (Psalms 1 and 113), to

Down:  When the bottom drops out and the tradition feels like a lie (Psalm 69), to

Up again: When faith in a trustworthy God and creation are found again, but the experience of disorientation is not forgotten (Psalms 27, 40 and 146)

(This Narrative Lectionary series loosely follows OT scholar Walter Brueggemann’s typology— Orientation, Disorientation, Re-Orientation)