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Christmas Day Psalm

Writer's picture: Danny QDanny Q

James Waters

Psalm 98 is a Psalm about newness. It celebrates the deliverance of God’s people, and takes form in three stanzas. The first stanza beckons that we join in praising God, for God has delivered Israel; i.e., God has rescued God’s people from some potentially catastrophic event or malicious enemy. In doing so, God shows God’s character: loving, caring, protecting, and steadfast.

The second stanza widens the psalms call to worship. It calls upon all the earth to praise God (98:4), though it eventually settles on a more specific call to humanity. The writer of the psalm then taps into the creative spirit of humans, by exhorting the horn, the lyre, the trumpet, and the voice to worship Israel’s God who is the God of the oppressed and king of all.

The third stanza returns to the motif of creation in its entirety worshipping God. Instead of honing in on the creative human spirit, the writer calls upon all creation to join the already-occurring praise that the seas, floods, hills and world is offering up to God. This is not simply poetic; it is a theological claim. It proclaims that God rules all creation, and can even use the chaotic forces such as the seas and floods to create newness.

The aspect of this psalm that piques my interest most, however, especially during the week of Christmas and Christ’s arrival, is the theme of judgement in the third stanza. Specifically, the theme of judgement as a deliverance and salvation that brings equity to all of creation draws me to reflection (v.9). Israel is the writer of this psalm; a psalm penned to remind Israel herself of God’s work and character. But while God is clearly for Israel in the first stanza, the third stanza reveals that God is for Israel for the sake of something more comprehensive. That is, God saves Israel to save the world, and that that salvation manifests itself as a proliferating equity throughout the entirety of creation. I want to ask here, what this means for the God’s people today, and how such a radical equity might manifest. But first, let me give a bit more detail regarding the context and form of Psalm 98.

Scholars call this type of psalm a “Hymn of Praise,” or a “psalm of descriptive praise.” Although it seems a bit obsequious, the psalm does not simply aim to make God feel good about God’s self. No, rather, the composer of this psalm wrote it for a community to sing, not to flatter God but to bear witness to God’s salvific and redemptive work. Hence, this psalm is less about placating God’s ego, and more about remembering the work God has already done, and the response we together must give to God’s gift of outpouring, creative love. This brings me back to the theme of equity.

The Hebrew term used in v.9 for equity is meyshar, and translates most often in the Hebrew Bible as a “straightness” or “evenness.” This definition of equity fits well with a graphic that has been circulating around the web since 2014. In the image below, there are two given examples; one that shows a picture of what equality looks like, and one the depicts, in contrast, equity. The picture showing equality shows three people with the same amount of resources, even though it is clear that some folks in the picture need more resources than others. The graphic depicting equity, however, presents three people rewarded with different amounts of resources based on their need. This is the equity spoken of in Psalm 98.

Hence, when thought of in this way, Psalm 98 calls us to remember two important items. The first is that God has delivered God’s people. God is faithful and true and loving, and we must not forget that as God’s people. The second is that as God’s people we ought to find creative ways to express and respond to God’s work in the world by spreading God’s love and radical equity. We can do that through, art, music, or sermons. However, we can also do this by spreading God’s equity throughout creation with our works of love.

Today our world faces great inequity, and this inequity is not of God. Psalm 98 calls us to remember this graphic above, and in the process, it beckons us to ask ourselves if we are truly responding to God’s love by offering it to others—a love that translates into a radical kind of equity.

When the early church would take offering, it looked quite different than it does in most churches today. Instead of money, most members would instead offer the product of their craft by laying them at the altar: artists would offer to the church art, bakers would offer bread, and seamstresses clothing. Once parishioners made their offerings, members and others who were in need of the items would take them based upon their need. Each took what they needed, and supplied what they could, so that all could experience God’s otherworldly equity. My hope is that this psalm makes us reflect more deeply on how we too could practice that sort of hospitable and loving equity among each other and the world.

Student, Vanderbilt Divinisty Scool

James Waters

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