Make a Joyful Noise!

I've always loved reading and praying the Psalms. They seem like bite-sized prayers on the kind of topics our hearts yearn to talk to God about: Joy, Forgiveness, Thanksgiving, Deliverance, Fear, Betrayal, Blessing, Praise, Worship, and Human Weakness.

The Psalms unite us with the power of our long faith tradition. Every time I pray a Psalm, I am blown away by the fact that King David and the people of Israel also have held this same prayer in their hands and their hearts. The prayer unites me with God as well as the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before me.

I'm also inspired by the kinship the Psalms have to music. As a singer/songwriter I identify with King David, setting prayers to music and experiencing the joy of how music touches our minds, bodies, and hearts. I can just picture David writing and performing these Psalms for the people of Israel with joyful exuberance:

- Psalm 47:1, "Shout God-songs at the top of your lungs!"
- Psalm 95:1, "Come, let's shout praises to God, raise the roof for the Rock who saved us! Let's march into his presence singing praises, lifting the rafters with our hymns!"
- Psalm 98:4, "Shout your praises to God, everybody! Let loose and sing! Strike up the band!"
- Psalm 27:6, "I will offer in His tent sacrifices with shouts of joy"
- Psalm 98:1, "O sing to the LORD a new song; for he hath done marvelous things"
- Psalm 33:3, "Sing to Him a new song; Play skillfully with a shout of joy."
- Psalm 84:2, "My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God."
- Psalm 68:25 "the singers in front, the musicians last, between them girls playing tambourines."
- Psalm 95:1, "O come let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!"
- Psalm 149:1-3, "Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints. Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the people of Zion be glad in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with tambourine and harp."
- Psalm 150:3-6, "Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet, praise him with the harp and lyre, praise him with tambourine and dancing, praise him with the strings and flute, praise him with the clash of cymbals,praise him with resounding cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD."

How can you not picture a Holy Spirit hootenanny celebration when you read these words? It's like a giant divine feedback loop of praise to God: the Holy Spirit inspires the writer to write the music, worshipers perform the music, and God is praised by the music. No wonder music during the celebration of the Mass helps us "feel" Holy and a mass without music can feel a little meditative and flat.

I've also had the experience, however, of writing spiritual music when I've felt despair like King David in Psalm 51 or like Paul and Silas in Acts, praising God while in prison. For me it happened while driving around the city. Mary came to me through the Holy Spirit and lifted me up to put her Magnificat to music, "The Lord has done great things for us and hallowed be his name!"

There is a sense of catharsis or emotional cleansing that happens when we sing in the midst of our despair. By praising the Lord in the storm one is humbled to say, "I'm really down in the dumps right now Lord, but I know that you are Lord of all things so I praise you for your glory, and know that you will not abandon me."

Praising God in the storm reminds us to take the focus off of ourselves and put it back on God. It's about him, not us. Our suffering may not go away immediately but we know (like the people of Israel) that he has delivered us before and he will deliver us again, so we pray with confidence despite our despair.

This pattern is demonstrated in Psalm 3 where King David's prayer flows from initial despair, "O Lord how many are my foes! Many are rising against me," to confidence, "I wake again for the Lord sustains me,"to finally thanksgiving, "For you strike my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked. Deliverance belongs to the Lord."

In New Testament worship this is the same idea of "offering up" prayers to Jesus and asking for his strength and mercy in our weakness. We know we can't bear this suffering ourselves, but when connected to the wounds of Jesus, we find strength, hope, and meaning. There is "power in the blood of the lamb."