Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Trinity Sunday, 26^th of May, 2024

Psalm 29

Psalm 29 initially seems like a strange choice of Scripture for Trinity Sunday. There does not seem to be much that is trinitarian in a hymn about the God of glory who thunders over mighty waters, breaking the cedars and making Lebanon skip like a calf. The explanation may be that Psalm 29 is also allocated for the Sunday on which the Baptism of Jesus is celebrated in all three years of the lectionary. On that Sunday this psalm of mighty waters and flood connects with the waters of baptism. Since Jesus’ baptism is a very trinitarian event, as Jesus is baptised the Father identifies him as beloved Son and the Spirit descends on him like a dove, it is possible that the psalm gains trinitarian resonance simply from proximity.

There have been many Christological interpretations of this psalm throughout history, and I am going to ignore all of them, except to say that an early mistranslation of ‘He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, and Sirion like a young wild ox’ had Sirion, another name for Mount Hermon on the border between Lebanon and Syria, skipping like a young unicorn. There were some wonderful interpretations of this psalm based on the mention of a unicorn, but sadly I must ignore them all since the unicorn was an ox.

I want to ignore specifically Christian interpretations of this psalm, and look at what the original Jewish author might have been wanting to say through it. We may be seeing a psalmist taking a hymn to the Canaanite god Baal and reworking it to describe the Lord, in the same way that Charles Wesley and General Booth of the Salvation Army took popular tunes for their hymns on the basis that the devil should not have all the best music. Baal was a thunder god, like Thor, and it is possible that the hymn on which this psalm is based was used at a New Year festival to celebrate the changing of the seasons and the coming of the rains. The psalmist may have taken that hymn and reworked it to give glory to the Lord, which is what ‘ascribe’ means. ‘Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength’. The beings that surround the Lord in a heavenly throne room, like the one that Isaiah describes in the vision of his call (Isaiah 6:1-8), are told both to recognise the glory of the Lord and to appropriately praise the Lord for it. The Lord does not need them to manifest ‘the glory of his name’; worshipping the Lord in holy splendour, having all in his temple saying, ‘glory,’ is simply the appropriate response to seeing who the Lord is.

Who is he? The Lord is the one who rules over all the waters. The psalmist is describing a thunderstorm that sweeps in from the Mediterranean Sea, travels over the land to the mountains of Lebanon, breaking the trees as it goes, and ends in the Syrian wilderness. The psalmist does not say that the thunderstorm is God; the Lord is not Baal. It is ‘the voice of the Lord’ that breaks the cedars, that makes Lebanon skip like a calf and Sirion like a young wild ox, that flashes forth flames of fire and shakes the wilderness. ‘The voice of the Lord’ is not quite a separate person, like the Wisdom or the Word of God, but it puts some distance between the Lord and the storm; they are not the same thing. The God of the psalm is not Baal. While Baal needed to fight watery chaos every year, as part of the turning of the seasons, the psalmist says that the Lord sits enthroned over the flood and as king for ever. Seasons come and seasons go; God continues to be God. Even so, the fear of confusing the Lord with Canaanite nature gods was so great that this is the only psalm in the Psalter in which the glory of God is said to be made manifest in natural phenomena.

Perhaps the most reassuring way in which the Lord is not Baal is seen at the end. Thunder gods are terrifying. They can strike at any moment, bringing chaos and destruction. Chris Hemsworth may have made Thor an extremely attractive character, but I still would not want him as my god. He is much too capricious. The Lord, on the other hand, the one who rules over all the power of the storm, is also the one who gives strength to his people and blesses them with peace. And so that is how the psalm ends, with the psalmist and of all the people in the temple imitating the heavenly beings by worshipping the Lord and saying ‘May the Lord give strength to his people! May the Lord bless his people with peace!’

The Lord is not Baal, which is a good thing, but you may still be asking ‘So what?’ Yes, the creation is astounding, and the Creator has done an amazing job, but why does anyone need to ‘ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name; worship the Lord in holy splendour’. My problem when I read psalms like this is that every so often a scene from the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life comes into my mind: ‘Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery. But you are so strong and, well, just so super. Fantastic. Amen.’ Is giving glory to God simply dreadful toadying? Even worse, are we doing it in the hope that the Lord who sits enthroned over the flood will not break us like cedars?

I want to suggest two reasons that ascribing to the LORD glory and strength is good for us, as well as being simply polite. The first is that practising gratitude promotes psychological health. Psychologists have found that specific gratitude practices, anything from keeping gratitude journals and gratitude jars to implementing family gratitude rituals, help people to live well. This is not simply good for us; it is good for those around us. A psychologist who asked people who had survived tragedy how she and others could show more compassion for those who are suffering was given the advice, be grateful for what you have:

Don’t shrink away from the joy of your child because I’ve lost mine. Don’t take what you have for granted – celebrate it. Don’t apologise for what you have. Be grateful for it and share your gratitude with others. Are your parents healthy? Be thrilled. Let them know how much they mean to you. When you honour what you have, you’re honouring what I’ve lost. [1]

When we give glory to God, we are practising the gratitude that will help us live with compassion and strength.

The second reason that it is good for us to gather here together to all say ‘Glory!’ is that the world is a dangerous, dark, and difficult place. I have mentioned befire in Reflections, how difficult I am finding watching, reading, or listening to the news when the world seems full of tragedies. Giving glory to God for the natural world that surrounds me reminds me that the world is equally full of beauty. Over the past few weeks, I have been talking with people about the astounding beauty that is Melbourne in autumn, the colours of the leaves and the brightness of the days. It would be easy to take all that beauty for granted; this psalm reminds us that all that beauty has a Creator. Opening our eyes to the beauty also helps us to care about the needs of the world without being buried under them. Last week I read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that ended:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

That is what this psalm wants to remind us; that is why it calls us to join the heavenly beings in their praise of God. We are not being called to Pythonesque barefaced flattery. We are being called to celebrate that nature is never spent and that the Lord who rules over nature wants to give us strength and peace. Amen.

[1] Brene Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (Penguin Random House, 2012), p. 124-5.