I love the spirituality of diligently keeping up with a prayer list as a community and lifting those names not only in the newsletter, but as part of heartfelt Sunday morning prayers led by staff. I love the warmth and close proximity of the prayer room which focuses my prayerfulness before and after services, when I’m recording midweek devotions, and whenever I just need to go there to be still and know.
I also love the way this church is accustomed to making the psalms part of morning worship, as well as psalms being embedded in the lyrics of worship songs at Thrive. The psalms call our community to prayer. The psalms are the prayer book of the Church as well as of our ancestors in faith. Jesus had these prayers on his lips and in his heart. Christians keep praying the psalms, and will do so for the expanse of time, in ways that take prayer beyond words.
Whether our personal feelings at any given moment are articulated in a particular phrase, the psalms express the prayers and honest feelings of the whole Church across the world and across time. They give our prayers language and context. They connect us with the ongoing praise and prayer of all creation.
I ran across this good word in my morning devotions, from the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose deep and biblical spirituality led him to stand firmly against the realities of political evil. I share this with you today from his book Life Together.
“The Psalter is the vicarious prayer of Christ for his congregation. Now that Christ is with the Father, the new humanity of Christ - the body of Christ - on earth continues to pray his prayer to the end of time. This prayer belongs not only to the individual member, but to the whole body of Christ. All the things of which the Psalter speaks, which individuals can never fully comprehend and call their own, live only in the whole Christ. That is why the prayer of the Psalms belongs in the community in a special way. Even if a verse or a psalm is not my own prayer, it is nevertheless the prayer of another member of the community; and it is quite certainly the prayer of the truly human Jesus Christ and his body on earth.”
If you are new to praying the Psalms, spend time every morning for a few days praying Psalm 63. That’s a good place to start. Let the words sink in to the very depths of your soul and articulate your thirst for God.