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Clinkscales. Preaching the Psalms

Anthony Clinkscales
Dr. Wallace Hartsfield II
ICAM 853 Preaching the Psalms
4 August 2009
Preaching the Psalms. J. Clinton McCann, Jr. and James C. Howell. Nashville: Abingdon
Press, 2001. 129 pp.
Twenty-first century Christian preaching has been shaped and influenced by humankinds
journey through the times and is constantly being redefined. Preaching the Psalms, written by
McCann and Howell has made a very profitable contribution to the study of preaching with
regards to successful use of the ancient Hebrew Psalter. McCann and Howell have come in the
tradition of those proponents of using the Psalter as a source of inspiration and instruction for
corporate worship. However, this unique contribution from an Old Testament professor and
United Methodist senior pastor has suggested that the Psalms, often neglected in preparing the
preached Word, is ideal for dealing with the afflictions of our modern church. Essentially, the
psalms should be regarded as Scripture, with its quite descriptive imageries, poetic structure, and
its bold attempt at the concern of humankind, namely the pursuit of happiness and the problem of
pain. McCann and Howell have been clear with this regard and have not overlooked past
scholarly contributions toward studying and preaching the Psalms. This book offers lucid
examples of the discoveries and applications used by popular theologians and preachers
throughout Christendom. This book gives the beginning preacher, as well as the skilled preacher,
a guide to understanding why we should preach the Psalms, how we can preach the psalms, and
what we are preaching about when preaching the Psalms.
Because of the perceived intention of the Psalms historically and the opinions of scholars
in this regard, McCann and Howell begin by presenting opposing schools of thought concerning
the use of the Psalter. The Psalter was regarded as being used in worship for prayers and songs,
and others suggested that psalms are primarily for singing. McCann and Howell affirm that the
meaning and usefulness of a text are not limited to its original intent or use. Because some
preachers always look for a narrative for sermons, the psalms have been shunned as insufficient
in their literary form and structure. But McCann and Howell suggest that in order to speak
effectively to the afflictions and sufferings of hearers, we can benefit from using the Psalms
because it inherently deals with such issues. All of this is supported by the contributions of past
century scholarship, organizing and categorizing the Psalms form-critically by genre, liturgically

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by intended setting, structurally by meter and strophe, and sociologically by the supplicants
status in society.
Karl Barth wrote: If the congregation brings to church the great question of human life
and seeks an answer for it, the Bible contrariwise brings an answer, and seeks the question
corresponding to this answer: it seeks questioning people who are eager to find and able to
understand that its seeking of them is the very answer to their question. McCann and Howell
suggest that Barths illustration of how this questioning and answering plays itself out is
characteristic of the Psalms. Furthermore, the authors affirm that for the Christian preacher, the
Psalter is not just Old Testament, but part of a unified canon, Old and New Testaments. How we
move with a Psalm to talk about Christ or the church is an art, requiring great care and skill. But
the move has its own biblical warrant.
Included are sermon excerpts from Barth when preaching on the Psalms, as well as
Athanasius and Origen, Bonheoffer and Charles Spurgeon, Henry Ward Beecher and Jonathan
Edwards, Luther and Calvin, Augustine and Jerome, Gardner Taylor and Martin Luther King, Jr.
as cause for preaching the Psalms and tutors for its methodology. The authors note that because
the language of the Psalms can be taken literally or allegorically, interpretations have
traditionally run the gamut of the dogmatic to the pastoral care sermons. There have been
traditional interpretation and spiritualization of psalmic images and claims. McCann and Howell
offer anecdotes that give the reader a glimpse at the context of particular preachers when they
have used the Psalms as a text. Essentially, the authors support the notion that the history of
interpretation of the Psalms teaches us that the Psalter is the inspired Word of God. Moreover,
our understanding and use of the Psalms as Scripture may help us to be able to engage and utilize
other portions of the Bible as Scripture.
McCann and Howell affirm that the reality of incarnation, that is God in flesh, points to
the relevancy of the Psalms. Accordingly, they suggest that God entered into the suffering and
afflictions of our mortal lives in the form of Jesus, and proved that God was truly revealed in that
embodiment. Equally, the Psalms identify a God through the words of praise and thanksgiving,
but also through lament and despair. McCann and Howell acknowledge that our grieves,
doubts, and hopes are not to be overcome as distractions to our life with God, but rather are the
very windows through which we see the truth not merely about ourselves but also about God.
Thus, the Psalms can be effective in preaching, but also in showing us how to pray. McCann and

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Howell suggest that we learn to pray. We like any child must be shaped and molded in ways that
may not suit the childs immediate desires. Furthermore, the Psalter can function as a school of
prayer, inciting subversive, prayerful thinking and living, as radical and comprehensive as the
Torah itself.
McCann and Howell enthusiastically discuss how the imagery of the Psalms makes it for
good hortatory. As they suggest, we could fill a scholarly volume analyzing images from the
Psalms: a despised worm, a nesting stork, a war horse, packs of dogs, sheep grazing, a
watchman, a refiner, wings, the dew, winnowing, skin bottles, the volcano, hail, flowers, a
thundercloud, a stone fortress, a deer sniffing the air for water. They suggest that every sermon
must not overlook the word pictures. McCann and Howell make a bold statement that if the
preacher is tone-deaf or color-blind to word pictures, the sermon will plod about, flat-footed, and
fail to draw the listener into the heart and spirituality of the Psalmist. If the Psalms teach us to
pray, then peoples spirituality can be expanded by learning to explore metaphorical language.
Because of the explosion of symbolism in our media culture, the authors have cited the words of
Tom Beaudoin who speaks to the necessity of being intentional when speaking to any Generation
X pop culture: the task as a GenX theologian is to plumb, inquire, interrogate, associate,
unleash, be playful, and look for traces of theological residue on the surfaces of these images.
McCann and Howell suggest that God is apprehended, not finally through scientific, rational,
controllable categories, but by way of the imaginationFaith is a daring act of the imagination,
as our minds are stretched beyond the prosaic, around all we perceive, and thereby we discover
that we are embraced by gracewe dare not reduce the potential of an image to what the
original Psalmist intended. The authors use poet Rainer Maria Rilke to support this claim. She
said that if you spend time with a book, you may discover ten times more meaning than was
actually expressed by the original author. The images in the Psalms may evoke some inner
feelings that had not previously been noticed. The image then works like an archaeologist,
poking, digging about, brushing away layers of dirt accumulated over time revealing what was
hidden. The authors suggest that any accumulated dirt is not entirely psychological in nature,
but our society and even the church have heaped dirt on the realities, the lives of every person to
whom you preachthe Psalms are constructive: they shape our thinking by constructing a
theological world that underlies and impinges upon the prosaic world we usually perceive,
offering a critique of that reality and an invitation to be set free from that reality.

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McCann and Howell suggest that another approach to preaching a Psalm may be to
capture its inner dynamic, the energy that transports the reader to a new place. We enter the
Psalm at a particular point, in some situation, with a certain mood. But the Psalm leaves us at a
surprising destination; in a situation with an altered moodThe preachers challenge therefore is
to be as persuasive and truthful as possible, hoping that some recognition kicks in as we portray
the plight and hope of humanity. Essentially, the movement from lament to praise, distress to
deliverance parallels a movement from isolation to communityIf the original plea for help was
uttered in isolation, then the thanksgiving illustrates how the lonely lamenter has been restored to
the life of the community and for that moment stands at its center as its latest witness to not only
his own fellowship with God but that of the community as well. This in a sense bears witness
to such movements throughout the Old and New Testaments including Abraham, Hagar,
Rebecca, Hannah, Job, Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus.
McCann and Howell conclude their book by offering some suggestions on how the
Psalms can speak to us in our time and place. They advise us to listen in on the conversation
the Psalms wish to have with the claims of the Christian faith, and perhaps more suggestively
with the claims of contemporary North American culture. They begin by discussing happiness
and its pursuit, and also the irony of independence. In short, if righteousness means to be
thoroughly God-centered and God-directed, then wickedness means to be thoroughly selfcentered and self-directedthe American Dream means reaching a point in life where we can be
totally self-centered, totally self-directed, and accountable to no one except for ourselves. The
irony is in that the phrase, the pursuit of happiness, was taken from The Declaration of
Independence. However, the authors emphasize that Psalm 1 and 2 suggest that happiness does
not derive from focusing upon ourselves and pursuing what we want. True happiness derives
from constant attentiveness to God and the pursuit of what God may want for us and for our
world. In responding to this countercultural invitation of Psalm 1 and 2, the authors first
suggest that preachers have the task of teaching hearers to take themselves out of the center and
to take care of one another and turn to Gods way. Gods way or Gods real world is suggested
as been encapsulated in the Psalms. This is a word sung in the Psalms, a world where happiness
is pursued by constant orientation to God rather than self, where people are attentive to Gods
instruction and find refuge or security in God.

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Another suggestion offered by McCann and Howell is to debunk the Deuteronomistic

formula of retribution and the idea that God helps those who helps themselves; the authors affirm
that we should live by grace, not in classes and divisions based on perceived fortune.
Furthermore, they suggest that for the Psalmist, happiness and suffering coexist. Thus, suffering
cannot be regarded as divine punishment. In addition, if suffering should not be interpreted as
divine punishment, then neither can prosperity be interpreted as divine reward. Because of the
confessed innocence of the various psalmists, the Psalter, like Job, confronts the issue of
theodicy. We have an opportunity to wrestle with the ancient conundrum as to righteous
suffering. The authors acknowledge that suffering is not to be justified, but that it merely
happens. And God refuses to be locked away from the one who suffers, but is most intensely
present in the midst of suffering. On the flip side, the authors note that the Psalms offers some
suggestions as to the origin of suffering, namely the wicked. Moreover, we human beings not
only have the freedom to inflict suffering on ourselves and others, we also have the tragic ability
to inflict suffering upon GodFrom this perspective, suffering, human suffering and Gods
suffering, is to be viewed essentially as a condition for participation in a universe where the
fundamental reality is loveThus, for the Psalmist, this curious coexistence of suffering and
happiness ultimately means that in this universe, as God has created it, to live and to love will
mean to suffer. Suffering will be a sign of ones loving involvement in and with the lives of
others as well as ones involvement with God. It is precisely here that the theology of the Psalms
so desperately needs to be heard in our culture. The Psalms can help us to realize that our loss of
social connectedness, our failure to care for each other, is inextricably linked to our pervasive
tendency to avoid suffering at all cost. Parents and the media have taught us that pain is
undesirable, unnatural, and abnormal. The authors suggest that this fallacious teaching has a lot
to do with high suicide rates.
McCann and Howell suggest that preachers have an arduous task of re-educating hearers
of the meanings of grace and gratitude. Brueggemann has pointed out how the theology of
praise in the Psalms can become the ideology of the proud, the prosperous, and the powerful as
they attempt to maintain the status quo. The authors suggest that the songs of praise and
thanksgiving should be appreciated as both celebration and revelation. The songs of praise in
the Psalms are both celebration and revelation. And when we attend carefully to what they
reveal or teach, then we will not stumble into the mistake of using expressions of praise to

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celebrate our own good fortune or to congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity and hard work
The relief that the Psalmist offers us is that our lives are not simply ours to live, because We
belong to God. And unless we know that our lives are not our own, we open ourselves to the
logic of autonomy and to its inevitable results, ruinous isolation and rampant greed, not to
mention exhaustion.
Overall, I have to commend this contribution made by McCann and Howell. They
supported their thesis with commentary from the giants in the history of Christianity with regard
to the use of the Psalms. They offered examples and applications in order to enlighten readers.
But for the sample sermons Eurocentric language and borderline creativity, I would rank this
book among the best in its area that I have read. The authors did a tremendous job of narrowing
down the problem of humanity and citing solutions that are suggested within the Psalms. The
theological reflections of the Psalms speak to the meaninglessness, hopelessness, and
lovelessness that pervade our society. The authors have offered practical applications that may
assist in the preparation of any discourse, especially one that uses the Psalms as a springboard.
I found it very interesting, not surprisingly, that the authors have a high Christology and
felt the need to connect the Psalms to the Christ event. I would have liked to see them deal with
incarnation as something that can benefit all believers. Too often, Christians hear sermons on
suffering and afflictions, only to be told to place all their concerns on the Lord and leave them
there. At the end of the day, many people do not feel empowered to do for themselves the things
that they are capable of doing. I would like to see how or if the Psalms can be interpreted has a
tool of empowerment of people as God-agents doing the work of God on behalf of themselves
and others. Perhaps because of the overwhelming majority of Christians insisting on Christian
reclaims of Psalmic claims, many feel that we have to read Jesus into the pericope in order to be
effective or authentic. However, the theological claims of the Psalms are clear about the
believers need to accept the autonomous authority of God, endure the sufferings that the faithful
encounter, and maintain a positive mindset in a negative world. If properly taught, the Psalms
serves as an inspirational agitator propelling Gods people to reframe that which attempts to
subjugate or marginalize them; whether it be individuals or social constraints or even the church
itself because they are validated and protected by one who is greater than any one circumstance.