Psalms in Conversation
Wow you have to watch this conversation between Bono (of U2) and Eugene Peterson!
They're asking the same questions I am ...
How do we get real with God, including our emotions?
What do the Psalms sound like in our voice?
What do we do with the anger & violence?
How do we read them through Jesus?
They're asking the same questions I am ...
How do we get real with God, including our emotions?
What do the Psalms sound like in our voice?
What do we do with the anger & violence?
How do we read them through Jesus?
The Psalms re-worked as fresh resources
for all-age worship and personal prayer.
Silvia’s versions of the Psalms are invitations into a dynamic conversation with 3,000-year-old poems.
The Psalms. 150 of them, the greatest resource for prayer and worship of our faith. But do we use them? How do we use them?
Many churches don’t. Many of us have our favourites and ignore the rest. We skip the bits that confuse us. Psalms are not easy; they jump wildly from emotion to emotion and metaphor to metaphor. They have a ‘persecution complex’ and often complain about being attacked by enemies. They’re often ‘over the top’. Some are too long to use in worship and others seem irrelevant to our lives.
Yet despite all these problems we do keep coming back to the Psalms. Despite being written 3 millennia ago in an vastly different culture to ours they still hold unique power to speak to us and to God through us. They are loaded with emotion and physical experience which uniquely resonates with our what we go through in our hearts, souls and bodies. They are packed with vivid images which still have amazing power to evoke worship in us and connect us with the timeless living God.
I have been wrestling with the Psalms this year. These ‘Psalms in Conversation’ are my offering to the wider church to invite people into prayer, reflection and worship in fresh ways through the Psalms. They are conversations between past and present, seeking to apply the ancient words to modern contexts. Some of the Biblical images emerge intact, others are updated (e.g. exchanging bombs for arrows).
They are conversations between us and God, and God and us. One of the most amazing things about Psalms is that they are both words spoken by people to God and by God to people. Scripture is all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but Psalms in particular have been brought alive and made deeply personal by the Spirit for people over 3 millenia in every human culture and language. My versions bring this conversation into particular contemporary contexts; mostly the setting of worship, especially all-age worship, but others choose other applications, such as marriage or bullying.
These are conversations with Jesus Christ. I have been fascinated with the way that the early church found Jesus in the Psalms, and read Psalms prophetically as being all about Christ. Jesus himself quoted Psalms freely and prayed them through and through. He uniquely is IN the Psalms and I believe that the Psalms are uniquely ABOUT Jesus. So many of my reflections on the Psalms link in New Testament material and ask questions of the Psalm from a New Testament perspective.
I hope you enjoy reading them. I hope you go back to the Biblical Psalms and re-read them with fresh eyes and fresh questions.
God bless you as you do.
Silvia
for all-age worship and personal prayer.
Silvia’s versions of the Psalms are invitations into a dynamic conversation with 3,000-year-old poems.
The Psalms. 150 of them, the greatest resource for prayer and worship of our faith. But do we use them? How do we use them?
Many churches don’t. Many of us have our favourites and ignore the rest. We skip the bits that confuse us. Psalms are not easy; they jump wildly from emotion to emotion and metaphor to metaphor. They have a ‘persecution complex’ and often complain about being attacked by enemies. They’re often ‘over the top’. Some are too long to use in worship and others seem irrelevant to our lives.
Yet despite all these problems we do keep coming back to the Psalms. Despite being written 3 millennia ago in an vastly different culture to ours they still hold unique power to speak to us and to God through us. They are loaded with emotion and physical experience which uniquely resonates with our what we go through in our hearts, souls and bodies. They are packed with vivid images which still have amazing power to evoke worship in us and connect us with the timeless living God.
I have been wrestling with the Psalms this year. These ‘Psalms in Conversation’ are my offering to the wider church to invite people into prayer, reflection and worship in fresh ways through the Psalms. They are conversations between past and present, seeking to apply the ancient words to modern contexts. Some of the Biblical images emerge intact, others are updated (e.g. exchanging bombs for arrows).
They are conversations between us and God, and God and us. One of the most amazing things about Psalms is that they are both words spoken by people to God and by God to people. Scripture is all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but Psalms in particular have been brought alive and made deeply personal by the Spirit for people over 3 millenia in every human culture and language. My versions bring this conversation into particular contemporary contexts; mostly the setting of worship, especially all-age worship, but others choose other applications, such as marriage or bullying.
These are conversations with Jesus Christ. I have been fascinated with the way that the early church found Jesus in the Psalms, and read Psalms prophetically as being all about Christ. Jesus himself quoted Psalms freely and prayed them through and through. He uniquely is IN the Psalms and I believe that the Psalms are uniquely ABOUT Jesus. So many of my reflections on the Psalms link in New Testament material and ask questions of the Psalm from a New Testament perspective.
I hope you enjoy reading them. I hope you go back to the Biblical Psalms and re-read them with fresh eyes and fresh questions.
God bless you as you do.
Silvia
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The great theologian and teacher on the Psalms is Walter Brueggaman. This doc is a 'potted summary' of two of his books on Psalms. Great stuff!
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