Content related to Psalms 119

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Psalm 119:129-136

Proper 12A

Given a choice, what busy preacher would preach on this reading from Psalm 119?  I mean, it is stanza #17 in an endlessly long, apparently meandering, often boring meditation on a subject that most of your listeners won’t care about at all, namely, the importance and beauty of God’s law. Some brands of Christianity don’t…

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Psalm 119:33-40

Epiphany 7A

Psalm 119 asserts again and again (almost ad infinitum) that the Law of God is the source of joy and delight, because it gives life and light.  But that’s not how the Law feels to most of us most of the time.  And, as we saw last week, that’s not how Paul talks about the…

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Psalm 119:1-8

Epiphany 6A

Whenever I read Psalm 119, alarm bells go off in my head.  For one thing, it feels like a literary monstrosity, 176 verses of boring, repetitious monotony.  The great Old Testament scholar Artur Weiser wrote that Psalm 119 is “a particularly artificial product of religious poetry.  The formal external character of the Psalm stifles its…

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