My current message series at Christ Church is titled RealPsalm. The Psalms are so amazingly authentic in their expression of human spirituality and longing. There are hymns that simply sing the praises of God, prayers for help for individuals, communal prayers for help, questions about faith, songs that invite us to glorify God, songs for pilgrimage, and prayers of confession. The gamut of human emotion is expressed in the Psalms, from unbelievable pain and suffering to unfettered joy. The people who collected the Psalms into their current form of 150 did not edit out the raw and the real, the sadness and the joy. There they are. Take them for what they are.
And just exactly what are they? What are we to do with the Psalms. The Psalms don't contain a lot of historical narrative (although several do recount the wonderful acts of God through the Exodus). They're poetry. They're songs to be sung. They are prayers to be prayed.
For centuries, the Church has used the Psalms as its primary prayer book. Countless Christians have spent the wee hours of the morning, the middle hours of the day, and time just before retiring to recite the Psalms, not as an act of religious obligation, but as a cry of the heart. Sometimes when we pray the Psalms the particular mood of the chosen psalm does not fit our mood. We might be in a different place. However, there are Christians somewhere, I promise, who are feeling just what the psalmist felt. We can join them in the Communion of the Saints.
Praying the Psalms will probably not be our primary way of praying, but it is a powerful way to be sure that our prayers are fully formed. Too often our personal prayer devolves into a shopping list of needs and wants we desire God to fulfill. God is certainly interested in our needs. However, praying the Psalms elevates our prayers, taking our very real and ordinary lives into an extraordinary experience of the Holy. The Holy Spirit inspired the Psalmists, he can also inspire us to become the people God is calling us to be.
That's the beauty of the Psalms. They are so real and approachable, but praying them lifts us up to new heights of experiencing God's presence, mercy, and grace.