Psalm 66:1-9 Commentary

To read Psalm 66 while bombs are dropping in Israel, Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, and maybe other places is an odd, disconcerting experience.  “All the earth bows to you, they sing the praises of your name.”  Really?  “His eyes watch the nations, let not the rebellious rise up against him.”  Is God just watching, just observing?  Or are we to take away from Psalm 66 that God seeks to influence and actively deal with the nations he is said to be watching?  To bring some peace and justice maybe?  Probably many psalms are as aspirational as anything else.  Psalmists sketch what we wish were the case, what is sometimes the case right now already, and perhaps what will ultimately be the case in the longest possible run when God fully brings in the kingdom.

For now, however, it can make your heart ache to read the positive sentiments you find in the 66^th psalm, aspirational and hope-filled as they may be.  At this present moment in the early summer of 2025 the world seems unusually broken, at home and abroad.  As if that were not bad enough, we know from the history of Ancient Israel itself that not all of even the chosen people bowed down to Yahweh alone.  Last week the Lectionary Psalm for Year C was Psalm 16 and in the commentary we posted here on the CEP website we noted the part of that song that talked about the psalmist’s resolve to worship God alone.  The poet needed to state that resolve clearly because too many in Israel were either trying to worship Yahweh and Baal or Baal instead of Yahweh.  Thus even in the context of ancient Israel the situation vis-à-vis the nation and God was not as rosy as what Psalm 66 depicts about the whole earth.

Then again, maybe Psalm 66 as much as admits it knows that some of the loftiest things it tries to claim about God and the earth and the honor and praise rendered to God are not fully realized in reality.  After all, we have in just this 9-verse snippet of the longer psalm a number of imperative command statements that more or less order all the nations to sing to God, to ponder what God has done, to see and be amazed at who God is.  But the only reason you ever have to order somebody to do something is because you are pretty sure it may not happen otherwise (and may not happen even after you order it so).  When you give your kid a luscious ice cream cone on a warm summer afternoon, you know full well you need not say to the child, “You must eat that.  Now!”  No, no, it will happen.  No need to summon forth an appetite for ice cream.  Broccoli?  Different scenario!

So the same psalm that claims all the earth loves and praises God seems to know that’s not yet really the case.  Not fully.  Maybe not even by a longshot.  In fact, things are sufficiently bad that even such calls to worship the one true God won’t go over big.  At the seminary where I teach preaching, we use Paul Scott Wilson’s “Four Pages” template as a kind of homiletical grammar that gets at the deep structures of what a sermon should be.  As some reading this commentary may know, Wilson builds his approach to sermon-writing around Trouble and Grace, including Page One, “Trouble in the Text.”  Students sometimes claim, however, that this is too restricting and that anyway there are any number of texts on which one could preach where there is no obvious “Trouble” in the passage at all.

Take Psalm 150, a few students have at times noted.  It is all “Praise the Lord” with everything you’ve got and with any and every instrument you could name.  That’s all positive, upbeat, lyric.  Not even the smallest puff of a Trouble cloud in the sky.  But then a few years ago a student from Egypt wrote a sermon on Psalm 150 and perhaps it was her experience in the Middle East that in part led her to the insight she hit upon: True, there is no Trouble in the text but there is a whole lot of Trouble that this text will cause.  Because really Psalm 150—like portions of Psalm 66—orders people to join Israel’s choir and if they have in the past entertained the existence of any other gods, they have to abandon that forthwith.  And today the average Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist or Sikh is really very unlikely to take kindly to this praise imperative regarding the Jewish / Christian God.

Probably the author of Psalm 66 knew that was the case also back in the Ancient Near East.  Granted, psalms like this one did not get posted to Facebook or Instagram or broadcast on religious TV shows that could be accessed by the Egyptians worshiping Re or the Babylonians worshiping Marduk.  So the offense of these praise imperatives did not get noticed by the people most likely to be offended by this kind of thing.  But it is a sign of how far all the nations of the earth actually are from the one true God that such offense could and would be taken.  And that in turn also testifies to the fact that a good bit of what is claimed in Psalm 66 and other such psalms in the Hebrew Psalter really do represent the psalmist’s—and perhaps all of our—fondest hopes and wishes for the world far more than the world as we see it on the news every day.

To preach on Psalm 66, then, becomes an occasion for the preacher to admit what the congregation already too well knows: the world is broken and is more often than not and in more places than not a far cry from looking to see what God has done and rendering up due and proper praise to God for all of that.  As Fred Craddock once noted, we often think sermons need to tell people what they need to hear when in truth many times sermons need to articulate what people wish they could say.  Or sermons need to reflect what the congregation knows to be true of our current state of affairs and so sermons should not sketch a too-tidy view of reality since that is easier to deal with.

But the same sermon that admits all of that obvious stuff still needs the hopes and aspirations of this same psalm.  This is what we need to call all people and all nations to do and to be whether they like hearing it or not.  This is what we yearn for as we watch (a la Romans 8) this creation groan and suffer under the weight of sin and evil.  This is the hope we dare not abandon as a church, even though real life tries to beat such hope out of us six days a week.

Psalm 66 seems too sunny by half just now.  Thanks be to God, though, that in the longest possible run we still have the audacity to believe that the picture sketched by Psalm 66 will not be nearly sunny enough.

Illustration Idea

What was just noted above about how the world steadily tries to erode our hope leads me to recall a famous line from the great preacher and writer James Cone.  Cone was once asked why sermons in black churches are always so long.  Cone replied that for black folks, the world screams at them six days a week that they are second class or are of no account at all.  “So on Sundays,” paraphrasing Cone, “it takes a while to talk people back into seeing who they really are as beloved children of God.”