Praying the Psalms I

One of my classes this quarter is Worship, wherein we review some of the history of the development of the liturgies in the Western church, the Lutheran confessional writings as they relate to worship, and the related Scriptures. Another part of the class is "practice" - we will demonstrate the conduct of the liturgy. (Not suprisingly, one is not able to pass the class without passing that particular assignment. I guess the church is concerned that her ministers not do this badly...)

Dr. James Brauer, my professor, has also taken the opportunity in this class to encourage us to practice some ancient Christian disciplines as he joins the chorus of our faculty in exhorting all of us to continually deepen our personal devotions. One such practice is praying the psalter.

The psalter is a collection of writings expressing faith in praise and petition. As near as I can tell (because there are diverse opinions on the subject), praying the psalms is an effort to make the Psalms "personal" (i.e. subjective) instead of reading them as a "third-person" (i.e. objective) exercise.

As you can imagine, some psalms are written in such a way that they are easily made prayers. Consider how Psalm 35 (here verse 17): "How long, O Lord, will you look on? Rescue me from their destruction, my precious life from the lions!" The whole psalm can be prayed directly without modification.

But this is not always the case. Consider Psalm 37, which begins:

"Fret not yourself because of evildoers; be not envious of wrongdoers! For they will soon fade like the grass and wither like the green herb." This is addressed to someone other than God. The entire Psalm is like this!

I've found a couple ways of working with such psalms. The first is to note the form of the verse as "third person address" and modify it in my prayer to address God. For example: "Lord, let me not fret myself because of evildoers or be envious of them who do wrong; for they will fade like grass and wither like the green herb."

The catch is that psalms will (often) switch their mode of address mid-stream and without warning. At one moment, the psalmist is addressing God, the next he is pointing to God's mighty deeds and speaking to the people, then he is addressing his own thoughts and meditations (that is to say, he is talking to himself), then he is speaking about others and you cannot tell right away who he is addressing!

In my experience, the best way to address this is to read the entire psalm first and then re-read it as a prayer. While this approach makes for a "clean" prayer, I've abandoned it. In addressing my Father in heaven, I do not find it troublesome to start saying something and only afterwards realize that what I say is nonsense or offensive. At this point, I will just back up and start again with an improved understanding of where the psalmist is going: "Forgive me my shortness of sight, oh Lord. Teach me to read your Scriptures rightly!"

Now this post is all about how to word a prayer from the psalms in a personal way. I have said nothing about what makes a psalm "personal" or how to handle difficult psalms (consider praying Psalm 35:8)! Perhaps I'll take these questions up in another post sometime soon.