150 Things We Can Say to God

“The book of Psalms is a collection of 150 things we can say to God.”

   So the brilliantly simple first sentence of John Goldingay’s introduction to the collection in The First Testament, his translation of the Hebrew Bible. An apt recognition of the role of the Psalter as Israel’s—and the church’s—prayer book. 

   But can we really say all 150 things? Should we? If so, why does the 1976 Book of Common Prayer omit some portions? And don’t take the easy potshot at the refined Episcopalians. Only the meanest junkyard dog of a pastor—one with an unusual take on what it means to follow Jesus—will zestfully lead a congregation in saying of their enemies, “I hate them with a perfect hatred,” or “Oh, what a blessing to grab their babies by the ankles and smash their heads against the rocks!” (Not familiar with that one? I hope it’s clear why.)

   People who insist on taking the Bible as a flat list of revealed sentences, every one of which  is true (“inerrant” and “infallible”) in the same way, are rejecting the book that God has given us and substituting some sort of Euclidean treatise of their own devising. What a terrible burden and deprivation to feel constrained to read the Bible in that way! The most beautifully and disorientingly variegated and moving book in the world, from which millions have learned not only to wonder at the unfathomable opacity and clarity of the wisdom of God, and to fall in love with the amazing grace of the savior, but also to leap and lurch, fall, writhe, and rise in rhythm with stupefied and repentant, recalcitrant and exultant saints and sinners of old, and also incidentally to elevate the poetic capacity of every language into which the Bible has been translated—and yet some would have us go at it like blindfolded proofreaders who are forbidden to find even one Error in a rough draft of an Information Please Almanac.

   We can say every verse of all 150 Psalms to God because blessed is the character who walked the whole terrain of scriptural Israel, encountering every vexing thing that we encounter, but did not stray (err) into the counsel of the wicked nor stand in the way of sinners, nor wish to smash their babies’ heads on rocks; nor did he take his seat at last with the scornful, but rather at the right hand of the one who knows, to whom all hearts are open and from whom nothing is hidden, but also to whom the unforgiveable is not unpardonable.
   He did not wish to smash those heads on rocks but he knows that sometimes we do, and he wants us to admit it to ourselves, and to  him.
   Is Psalm 137:9 infallible? Inerrant?
   Infallibility is properly attributed not to phrases in a book but to the Love that gave them as provocations and promises, to enlighten, inspire, cleanse (think katharsis), and train us.