Come, Let Us Worship and Bow Down—Introduction A Four-Week Series Based Entirely on the Psalms

This is part of the worship series, 
"Come Let Us Worship and Bow Down"

Series Introduction 
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

Introduction

In crafting a series that explores the richness of the Psalter for the life of prayer, I considered two approaches. The first was to spend one week on each of the main types of prayer in the psalms—for example, lament, songs of praise, enthronement psalms—choosing one psalm from each category to be that type’s model and the focus for the preaching and worship of that week’s service.

I found two main problems with that approach. First, any given service within the series would be unbalanced in terms of the experience of worship. Do we really want to spend a whole week doing nothing but lamenting? Second, the richness of the Psalter resists this approach, making it difficult to select which categories to look at and which psalm to use within each category.

There are various systems for categorizing the psalms. I find Walter Brueggemann’s the most helpful. He suggests that all the psalms can fit into one of three categories: psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation (see The Message of the Psalms [Augsburg, 1984]). This paradigm helps me immensely when I am reading and praying the psalms, but it is too broad to be helpful in the crafting of a sermon series, primarily because there is such immense variety within each category.

I decided to go with a different approach. For the four weeks of the series, we would use the psalms as the source of every element of the worship service. Instead of talking to the congregation about how to use the psalms in their life of prayer, we would pray through the balanced structure of our worship service—from the call to worship through the time of confession and reconciliation through the hearing of the Word and our response to it in prayer and giving—using the words of the psalms. This approach allows for a wider experience of the Psalter, while permitting each worship service to retain its balance between times of confession and times of praise. It also allows us to approach the psalms as they are primarily meant to be approached—singing and praying them rather than studying them. We shouldn’t approach the psalms in the same way that we’d approach the book of Romans, for instance.

So all the worship elements in the following series are based on psalms, including all the suggested songs, though not all are straight psalm settings. Some are paraphrases, and some of the older paraphrases especially are quick to understand psalms as referring to Jesus Christ. I think that’s appropriate, in the same way that it is appropriate for Paul in 1 Corinthians 10 to assert that the rock that followed the people of Israel in the desert was Christ himself. We are a Christian people, and we use this prayer book of the Psalter in a different way than did the Old Testament people of Israel. For the same reason, I make no apology for following the ancient Christian practice of adding a trinitarian doxology to the end of most chanted psalms.

Since the best way to learn how to pray with the psalms is to pray with the psalms, this series would be an appropriate time to take five or even ten minutes off the regular sermon time and have more extensive times of praise and prayer, using connected groups of psalms. I have suggested such groups as a time of praise to open each service. If your church is accustomed to using praise choruses, you could integrate more of those into this time, since many praise choruses are settings of verses from the psalms.

When planning a series, I try to keep some element of the service the same each week. This is both a way of defining the series in the minds of parishioners and also a way of meeting the needs of those who worship best when worship is repetitive. For this series, I chose to keep the assurance of pardon the same, using a responsive selection from Psalm 103. I also chose to repeat the use of Psalm 51 as the prayer of confession, though I suggest a different sung setting of that psalm for each week. You might want to select one of those settings and use it for the entire series. Or you might want more variety, in which case Psalms 6, 25, and 38 are all possible prayers of confession. I also used Psalm 67 as a responsive benediction throughout the entire series.

I have offered many options for singing each day’s psalm text. You might wish to include more than one setting, using one immediately after the psalm is read, before the sermon, then using another as a response to the Word after the sermon. If the psalm is chanted, so that the entire text is accurately presented, then reading is redundant, but if the psalm setting that you choose is a versification or paraphrase, then reading and singing complement each other.

Note: All responsive readings are taken from the New Revised Standard version of Scripture.

Bulletin Artwork

The image above is available for download in the resource section below. RW readers can use and reproduce the image in bulletins or slides with the following copyright line: Tim Foley © 1998 ReformedWorship.org CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Series Outline

Revised Common Lectionary

Years A, B, C: Sixth Sunday of Easter

Year A - Epiphany - Presentation of the Lord
Year A - Epiphany - Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Year A - Epiphany - Eighth Sunday after the Epiphany
Year A - Lent - Fifth Sunday in Lent
Year A - Easter - Fifth Sunday of Easter
Year A - Season after Pentecost - Proper 3 (8)
Year A - Season after Pentecost - Proper 6 (11)
Year A - Season after Pentecost - Reign of Christ - Proper 29 (34)

Year B - Epiphany - Presentation of the Lord
Year B - Easter - Fifth Sunday of Easter
Year B - Season after Pentecost - Proper 5 (10)
Year B - Season after Pentecost - Proper 8 (13)
Year B - Season after Pentecost - Proper 14 (19)
Year B - Season after Pentecost - Proper 16 (21)

Year C - Epiphany - Presentation of the Lord
Year C - Lent - Second Sunday in Lent
Year C - Easter - Day of Pentecost
Year C - Season after Pentecost - Proper 25 (30)
Year C - Season after Pentecost - Canadian Thanksgiving Day
Year C - Season after Pentecost - Thanksgiving Day