Psalm 117 "Singing Along" Scott Hoezee

If you go to a particularly upscale restaurant, especially one in the tradition of classic French dining, you will likely be seated for only a couple of minutes before the evening's gustatory delights get kicked off with something called an amusée bouchée, which is French for "an amusing mouthful." Typically this is a wee concoction, no more than a single bite's worth, that is not on the menu but that the chef dreamed up as a fun, tasty way to whet your appetite for the other treats yet to come. Amazingly, what you may find is that this single bite of food often packs more concentrated flavor than what some restaurants manage to put onto an entire plate! Some while back I had an amusée bouchée that was called a "smoked salmon cone." It was shaped like the world's smallest ice cream cone but with smoked salmon mousse piped into the mini-cone. It was amazingly good, briefly transforming my mouth into the culinary equivalent of a field of flowers.

"Good things come in small packages," the old adage claims, and many times this is true. It is most certainly the case with Psalm 117. By far the shortest poem in the Psalter--the original Hebrew has all of sixteen words--Psalm 117 nevertheless packs a wallop. This ancient poet has concentrated the full flavor of the other 149 psalms into this densely rich little mouthful of a poem. There is much more about God, God's work, and the reasons that exist to praise God than Psalm 117 conveys, of course. But in terms of capturing something of the quintessence of biblical core beliefs, this little ditty is a marvel.

This is all the more striking when you remember that although no form of writing is easy, doing a good job on a very short essay requires even more skill than writing at greater length. You've probably all heard the famous line of Samuel Johnson who, in a letter to a friend, once wrote, "I apologize that this is such a long letter--I didn't have time to write a short one." Some of us know that kind of a challenge.

Most of the writing I do is for sermons, the average length of which is around 2,700 or so words, give or take a couple hundred. When you've written hundreds of such sermons, you get accustomed to working within that space. So when some years ago I was asked to write thirty meditations for the Today devotional put out by the Back to God Hour, I found myself faced with the difficult challenge of saying something decently meaningful each day but in the very short compass of around 200 words each. It took forever! I was constantly writing, checking the word counter on the computer, and then re-writing as it was always too long. Each one probably got shortened up a dozen times before fitting the prescribed length.

I've never before preached on Psalm 117, but some time back in another message I used an illustration that fits this poem well. Because in the world of literature a new genre or form of writing has been developed in recent decades known as "flash fiction" or "short shorts." My wife has an anthology of these mini-stories, each of which is no longer than fifty-five words. But is it even possible to say anything, to tell (or at least to evoke) a story in so short a span? Yes, though it's not easy.

But consider this example: "Standing there in the garden, she saw him running toward her. 'Tina! My flower! The love of my life!' He'd said it at last. 'Oh, Tom!' 'Tina, my flower!' 'Oh, Tom, I love you, too!' Tom reached her, knelt down, and quickly pushed her aside. 'My flower! You were standing on my prize-winning rose!'" Or this one: "The scantily clad hitchhiker knew she was in trouble the moment she stepped into the car. The driver gazed disapprovingly at her costume. 'Looking for some fun?' 'No . . . I'm just going to the beach.' 'Think so? Well, I've got other plans for you, sweetie, and they don't include beaches.' 'Guess I'm grounded, huh Mom?'"⁽¹⁾

In less than fifty-five words these little verbal vignettes manage to evoke a narrative, sketch a scene, and a generate set of emotions. These particular examples also conclude by making you smile because guess what? Short though they are, these stories managed to cause your mind to draw a false conclusion about what was going on.

That's a startling achievement, and yet Psalm 117 is better than even that. In only sixteen Hebrew words this poem captures the goal of creation, the bright center of the universe, and the vocation of all human beings in the world. If we can understand the ins and outs of what Psalm 117 evokes, then we will have learned enough to keep us busy for the rest of our lives, maybe even for the rest of eternity! Let's unpack this lovely psalm.

The first two and last two Hebrew words of Psalm 117 constitute that familiar phrase that is sprinkled throughout the Book of Psalms: hallelu yah. We've transliterated this phrase into the English word "hallelujah," now known the world-over because of Mr. Handel's famous chorus. In secular circles, and maybe in also the way we ourselves use the word, "hallelujah" is a way to express joy, perhaps on a par with saying "yipee" or "thank goodness!" But as we've noted together before, in Hebrew this is actually in the imperative mood. Hallelu is a command meaning "Praise!" It's like barking out an order to someone similar to what you do if you tell your dog to "sit!" The concluding word of yah is shorthand for God's holier than holy name of "Yahweh." So hallelu yah or "Praise the LORD," as the NIV translates it, is a command that tells people what they are supposed to do.

In some psalms that is not terribly obvious, but Psalm 117 helps us to sense the command-nature of this phrase by directing this summons at the peoples and nations of the earth. Who is supposed to be praising the one true God Yahweh? Everybody! When are they supposed to do this praising? Psalm 117 doesn't say but the implication is pretty clear: all people are supposed to be praising God all the time. This act of praise is apparently our job, our vocation, as creatures of the great Creator God.

But why? It's a logical question and one that many people would almost certainly ask were you to imitate Psalm 117 in telling your co-workers or neighbors, "Hey, everybody! Time to get busy in praising God!" "Why should I?" the average person would probably ask. Psalm 117 has an answer: because God's abiding love and faithfulness are beamed toward us forever.

The two Hebrew words used in verse 2 are among the richest and loveliest in the Old Testament: they are often yoked together: chesed and emet. If you've listened to my sermons closely these past eight years, then you know about that first word: chesed is, in my opinion, a single word so freighted with meaning that no one has ever found a good English equivalent. The translation here of "love" is pretty weak. Because chesed may well be the Old Testament's equivalent of what in the New Testament will be called "grace." God's chesed is very nearly the number one reason the psalmists list again and again for praising God.

Chesed is God's lovingkindness, his abiding love, his core tendency to stick with his people even when they don't stick with him; to forgive sin even when such a divine pardon is by no means warranted. Chesed is what sent Jesus to this world, and once the Son of God arrived here in our own flesh and blood, chesed is the grace and goodness that radiated so brilliantly from Jesus' every pore that it attracted sinners, prostitutes, lepers, and tax collectors the way a bright porch light draws in moths on a summer night. The grace of Jesus let people know there was forgiveness available no matter how greasy they'd lived up until the moment they met the Savior. If ever there were a one-word answer to the question of why God sent his only begotten Son to die on a cross, that answer would be chesed.

Indeed, in that famous prologue to John's gospel, the apostle startles the universe with the grand declaration that the Word of God who had been with God in the beginning and who had created every last thing that exists was made flesh. "The Word was made flesh and dwelled among us." But then what does John say next? ". . . full of grace and truth." That line is almost a throwback to Psalm 117 because the other word in verse 2, translated as "faithfulness," is the word emet, and though it can mean "faithfulness," it is also translated as "truth" and is the source of our English word "amen." The "grace and truth" of the incarnate Son of God as John proclaims him is very nearly identical with the chesed wai emet that Psalm 117 chalks up as reasons #1 and #2 for making the praise of God our proper human task and vocation every moment of every day.

We are fixed in the loving stare of a God who has something more than just our best interests at heart. We draw our every breath and live out our every day under the gaze and care of a God whose grace and truth, whose abiding desire to save us and stick with us forever, ensures that we have a very bright future. Set into a gospel context, Psalm 117 shines even more brightly once we see the final climax of this grace and truth in the cross.

This truth and faithfulness, as captured by the word emet, meant that God through Jesus really did want to stick with us in faithfulness, but it couldn't be a blind or false faithfulness. God could not stick with us by pretending there was no such thing as sin. Sometimes a wife manages to keep a marriage afloat for years but only because she turns a blind eye to the rather obvious signs of her husband's infidelity. But God can't operate in so self-deceptive a manner.

The "truth" component of God's faithfulness will not permit an overly rosy view of humanity. So what happens when you have a fiercely galactic desire to abide with people whose sinfulness creates a major roadblock for a holy God? What happens when you combine that desire for faithfulness with a chesed-like abiding love and grace? What happens is Golgotha. What happens is God's solving our problem with sin from his side of things because he knows we'll never manage to do away with it from our poor side of things.

That's why we and all nations and people have to praise the Lord, as Psalm 117 orders us to do. If you can see something of that cosmic grace and truth, you will simultaneously see why this psalm's command to praise makes sense. Ah, but many people don't see this, do they? Were you to issue this summons to praise to any number of people in this world today, they would respond not just with the logical question of "Why?" but would quite probably also respond with the flat refusal of a simple "No, I don't want to praise your God."

What accounts for that refusal? To state the merely obvious, we would say that sin accounts for it. Sin has the double-tendency to corrupt our hearts so that we don't want to worship any being outside of our own selves and also the tendency to render us blind to the goodness of God--some are simply ignorant of God's divine splendor. Many times, in other words, we need look no farther for an explanation of people's refusal to praise God than a given person's own corrupted heart and ignorant mind, both unhappy fallouts of sin.

But if we stop with just that part of the explanation, then our response to the world's resistance to praising God boils down to little more than our thinking, "Yeah, well, that's their problem, isn't it? Nothing I can do about it." So tonight let's go on to admit that sometimes it's our problem. If we fail to declare in plain language the goodness, grace, and loving faithfulness of God--if our silence is what accounts for the world's ignorance--then this is a reality we can do something about. Worse, what if the reason people don't want to obey Psalm 117 is because we, as a church but also as individuals, have ourselves lived in such judgmental and graceless ways as to eclipse from view the God in Christ whom we believe is grace-full and loving? What if we are the ones who keep people from seeing God?

Psalm 117 is exceptionally brief. Yet for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, it has a lot to teach us and contains also no small amount of challenge. Because what this skilled poet pulled off in this psalm is nothing less than a bull's-eye on the target of all true faith: namely, the God of all grace, truth, and faithful love. We either serve this great God or we do not. We either provide the world with a transparent witness to this God or we obscure the character of God by how we live. The call of this psalm, and of the whole Bible really, is clear: everyone should praise the Lord! We have a responsibility to respond to that command ourselves, of course, but also a responsibility to invite others to join the chorus in ways that will make sense to them.

Do we? Frederick Buechner once wrote about two kinds of preaching that just don't work very well. One form is what he termed "tourist preaching." You know how it is if you are in a foreign country as a tourist but cannot speak the native language: what do you end up doing when you have to ask for directions? You speak in English but each time you repeat yourself, you say it a little louder. We operate on the assumption that if only we speak English loudly, slowly, and distinctly enough, everyone in the world will be able to understand us. Doesn't work. The only language people understand is their own. We need to be sure that when we talk to people about God, it is in speech they can comprehend.

The other kind of preaching that fails to connect, Buechner says, is "algebraic preaching." x + y = z is a pretty typical algebra formula. If you know what number is represented by just the "y" of that problem, you know a little something but still won't likely solve the whole equation. If you know what both the "y" and the "z" are, then you can get the "x" pretty quickly. The problem with some preachers is that they lace their sentences with words like "atonement" and "righteousness," thinking that this will lead people to love Jesus. But for a lot of people, theological vocabulary is like an undefined "x" and "y" in an algebra problem: they are going to need something more to grasp the meaning of it all.

Psalm 117 summons us to worship God and to invite others to join the glory song. But our words and our lives need to be consistent with the God of all grace who is the target of all true praise. We cannot tell our neighbors that "God is love and grace" but then go around in life with a sour attitude even as we show so little grace when we ourselves have something to forgive. We cannot make clear to our neighbors why they should praise the Lord by only shouting obscure language a little louder or by assuming that everybody should be able to understand the words of our catechism, hymns, and creeds. Speaking the words of Psalm 117 today requires time, thought, creativity, and cultural translation.

After all, the people who wrote those fifty-five word examples of flash fiction may well have spent as much time on those few sentences as some authors spend on whole chapters in regular novels. The chefs who manage to concentrate a world of flavor in the single bite of an amusée bouchée probably worked as long on that one bite as they might on an entire rack of lamb. The poet who wrote Psalm 117 may have thought as much about these sixteen words as I devote to the 2,500 words of an average sermon. If we want to enter into the spirit of Psalm 117's pithy summons to praise, exaltation, and worship, the least we can do is spend some thoughtful time wondering whether we are helping or hindering God's goal of getting the whole world to see his grace and love, and then responding to what they see with rejoicing. Praise the Lord, Calvin Church! And then let's find ways to help the rest of this city to sing along with us. Amen.

1. From The World's Shortest Stories edited by Steve Moss. Philadelphia: Running Press Publishers, 1995, pp. 57, 105.