Psalm 65:1-13 (links validated 10/24/24a)

Over the years in my pastoral prayers in public worship services, I have tried to give thanks for very specific things. Not long ago in a prayer I gave God thanks for spicy tacos and crunchy eggrolls. I have given thanks for pears that are so juicy it’s like biting into a water balloon. Somewhere John Calvin once observed that in worship it is perfectly apt to give thanks for well-functioning gall bladders and spleens and kidneys. Not surprisingly, when pastors pray in such vivid ways, people take note. And probably the reason for their pricking up their ears at such specificity is precisely because they have mostly only ever heard very generic prayers that use blanket statements about food and health but don’t drill into the nitty gritty. They say the devil is in the details but in positive ways God is very much in the details too. Psalm 65 points to furrows and ridges, grasslands and meadows, carts heaped high with the fruit of the land. Psalm 65 evokes very specific imagery to pop up into our imaginations. Our own prayers can and should do likewise.

Stephen Ambrose’s wonderful book Undaunted Courage details the exploration of Lewis and Clark who had been directed by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Western territories that would one day become part of the United States. According to their journals, these two men and their team routinely ran across scenes in the natural world that would leave them gob smacked. One day while navigating a river and having just come around a bend in the river, Lewis and Clark were startled to discover the water was clotted with some white substance. There was a colossal amount of it. Turns out these were the feathers of a gargantuan rookery of molting American Pelicans. At other times the sky was so covered with flocks of Carrier Pigeons as to block sunlight (alas, those abundant birds would be extinct very soon). They encountered herds of Bison so enormous, their hoofbeats thunderously shook the ground and today would probably have registered on the Richter Scale of a seismograph. It is all a reminder of how Genesis 1 depicts God in creation: God never created just a few of anything but reams and reams of birds, of fish, of land animals, of stars and planets. When God created the earth, he let it rip and created dazzling arrays of different creatures and in huge numbers as well. And every time God looked at what God had made, he said the same thing: “That’s good!”

I compared the poet of Psalm 65 to Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially images of plotted landscapes and such: Pied Beauty Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

SONG: “I Sing the Mighty Power of God” | Words by Isaac Watts, 1715 | Music (tune: ELLACOMBE)

The song above is a contemplative setting of the opening phrase of Psalm 65 in two languages. It layers the Hebrew dumiyyah with the Latin Vulgate translation of Leka dumiyyah tehillah. In “Mystery of the Missing Silence,” Christian spirituality writer Carl McColman ponders why so many English translations of Psalm 65:1 eliminate or obscure the word dumiyyah that’s in the original text....

My grandson was frantic. He was sleeping over at our house, but he couldn’t fall asleep. It was nearing midnight, and he was afraid he would lie awake all night. Many of us know that problem. My wife said, “Let’s pray about it.” And he said, “It doesn’t work. I’ve tried that, and it doesn’t work.” It’s not just 10 year old's battling insomnia; it’s 80 year old's fighting cancer and 40 year old's living with marital problem and teenagers dealing with sexual temptation. It’s all of us at one time or another. We pray and pray, and it doesn’t work. A sermon on Psalm 65 would address that existential problem head on.