Have you ever noticed—no one preaches from Psalms. I’m as guilty of that as the next preacher. Sure, we read a nice psalm to begin worship, and we use that one psalm at funerals—you know which one I mean—but I’ve never heard anyone on a Sunday use a psalm as the preaching text. So I decided to go out a preaching limb and do it. It’s summer, no one is in church anyhow—who’s gonna care? I’ve gotta show up, but no one else is around (present company excluded, of course), so I get the benefit of doing the work, without the risk.

To that end, I read a book on Psalms by Walter Brueggemann. Some of you know he is a world class Old Testament scholar who comes up with edgy, toothy insights into scripture. And he loves God. What he does in this book is take these ancient songs, the cries of the Jewish faith, and helps moderns make sense of them by putting them in one of three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation.

Psalms of orientation are the “yeah God” psalms, expressing a sense of well-being, joy, delight, coherence, reliability in God and creation. Psalms of disorientation are laments. All is not well. They express rage, resentment, self-pity, hatred. Psalms of new orientation are cries of surprise as the writer is overwhelmed with God’s new gifts. They’re about transformation, affirming a God who is in charge. At any given point in our lives, different psalms work for us because they resonate; they say “this is how life is.” And which ones work the best changes, because lives don’t stay the same. Truth be told, there are periods in all our lives when things go well, and there are also times when this is simply not true and then again, we find ourselves blown away by God’s goodness, by God’s again turning things upside down for our good.

So, while psalms of orientation say, “things are the way they are supposed to be and God has made them so,” there is one little fly in the ointment. The book of Psalms is the songbook of awhole people and any time two or more people are gathered, things will not necessarily be as well for one person as they are for another. How can we sing songs about how wonderful things are, how absolutely peachy God’s world is, when someone else’s life is fallen apart? Maybe your friend is in the pink of health, but yours is shot, your unemployment benefits have run out, the Oregon Health Plan has rejected you, the sheriff is moving your couch out to the curb, your kids are hungry, and the Resource Center isn’t open until Tuesday. That is a particularly nasty fly in the ointment. How can you join the rest of the choir in singing about how great God’s plan is, when the very people who cut your benefits, helped your spouse file for divorce and threw you out on the street are the very ones explaining to you that, if you were a good Christian, this wouldn’t be happening to you?

We need to engage in a little subversive psalm reading. This means reading these psalms as anticipation rather than as description . “Anticipation” of how things will be, rather that “description” of how things are now. I first noticed Psalm 131, for instance, when my life had just fallen apart. My own heart was not lifted up, nor were my eyes lifted too high, I didn’t aspire to great and marvelous things because life was so darn awful! This psalm helped me imagine myself still little enough to snuggle on my mother’s lap, let me believe it was God’s lap on which I was experiencing that blessed peace. My marriage had fallen apart and who knew if I was going to have a job, but my life really was in God’s loving hands. The all-is-well in my life wasn’t that things then were peachy. They were not , but a subversive reading of this psalm gave me words and a picture to believe that God’s will in my favor would eventually come—not because of me or what I could do about it, but simply and only because God was always God.

That was how I read that psalm long ago. Maybe that’s how you need to read it today. More recently, I’ve had another point of view on it. Maybe it’s the same as yours. That right now all is well, so that this psalm resonates because you know you have limits (your eyes are not lifted too high), you haven’t tried (or failed) at any more than was required of you. This is a peace which you can’t manufacture, because it’s a natural consequence of your trust in God, a trust that gives you hope. Today, maybe you can, with the psalmist, urge other people of faith to learn this hope. Maybe as you read this psalm you find a balance between both a contented peace in the right now and a confident hoping-against-hope that the future will continue to be well. You can rest, knowing it is because of God that you have this assurance.

Today’s other psalm, Psalm 133, has been my favorite for years. Even though I don’t have a beard—and I can’t imagine using a richer image for this psalm—I read this as an extravagant picture of the joy of a family’s harmonious working relations. In fact, this picture of unity is the kind of community to which Jesus called his disciples—and calls us to now. It is a community that functions in health for reconciliation. Yet, if you know anything about the early church, you know this could not have been the real circumstances of believers’ lives. Merely receiving baptism could split a family. Jesus himself warned that his call would turn fathers against sons and daughters against mothers. Even if it isn’t faith that divides a family, families don’t always get along. The very definition of “family” is contentious these days. What is “family,” what is “kin” for this psalm? Is it grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles besides parents and children? Does it mean both custodial and non-custodial parents? Children only until they move out? In our mobile culture, when many people live a full continent away from blood kin, could “family” come to mean neighbors and people of like minds? Does the definition have to involve a marriage license or different genders? Does this image refer to faith families, pilgrims literally or spiritually traveling together? And does the reality of breaches in relationship cancel out the sentiment of this psalm?

This summer has seen many of us reuniting with scattered families-of-origin. My own very extended family gathered for the first time since—well, we couldn’t even figure it out. This psalm could have been the theme song for my dad’s 80th birthday party, but we might have sometimes needed the subversive reading. We got along pretty well for the 5 days, but we all knew there were unspoken tensions. OK, sometimes they were spoken, but not for too long, because the point was to give my dad a wonderful 80th birthday party, which included family harmony. Which makes this psalm both a statement of “the way things are,” as well as a statement of “the way we want things to be.”

But we don’t need to be literal about defining “family” in this psalm. It’s clear that the picture this psalm paints is of the life God intends for us, and that life is a shared human community, whether related by blood, marriage, or faith. Which makes this psalm a counter-cultural warning to the American impulse toward individualism even (especially?) in religion. An especially subversive reading of this psalm says that to be serious about faith is to be committed to community. The implication for you today is to examine the level of your commitment to family. Faith family. You have a vested interest in the good of this congregation—as vested as the interest you have in your own family. If these psalms are correct, your interest in Springwater Presbyterian Church—in the denomination, in Christians all over the world—your interest isn’t just for as long as you live in the community or as long as you are a member of a Presbyterian church. Your interest in the community of faith here is for as long as God loves you. Your interest is for eternity. Oh my. How you live into the implications of that interest is a matter of your orientation, an orientation that relies on God’s commitment toward us that, as Julian of Norwich said, “all is well.” That all will be well. That all manner of things shall be well.