Sunday Sermon

Sermon # 1013
Psalm 65
Dr. Ed Pettus

“Praise To You, O God”

Each Sunday we spend a few seconds in silent reflection to prepare our hearts for worship. This time is intended to move us from the noisy, hectic world of the week into a place of reverent peace and into a joyous and thankful attitude of worship. It is a brief moment in time, a silence of anticipation, a stillness that we sometimes think comes before we sing praises.

But perhaps that time of silence is not a preparation to praise, but praise itself. In Psalm 65 there is that moment of silence before the singing, before the shouts. We are certainly not the first to ever practice a time of silence at the beginning of worship. Psalm 65 helps us imagine Jews centuries before Christ, sitting in a synagogue or in an open space while in exile as they worshipped God. Or we might picture the earliest Christians huddled in a secret place reading Psalm 65 as a liturgy for worship. And here we are carrying on that same tradition, the church today in silent reflection.
You see, Psalm 65 begins with a couple of options in the translation. As we read from the NRSV, verse one says: “Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion”. We are uncertain of the meaning of the Hebrew and so the NASB renders it this way: “There will be silence before You, {and} praise in Zion, O God.” One Jewish Bible says it another way: “To you, God, in Tziyon, silence is praise.” Silence is praise to God. Remember that next Sunday when we practice our time of silence” – silence is praise to God.

Whether we read it “praise is due” or “silence is praise”, the point is to praise! The Psalmist knows that the praise it due, because the Psalmist is, as we say in the south, “fixin” to tell us why praise is due. The Psalm begins: To you, O God…to you is due the praise, and what follows that affirmation is gathering the testimony. We listen to that testimony in silent awe, the testimony is given – for to you, O God, shall vows be performed. We will praise you because you are the one who answers prayer. To you all flesh shall come. You forgive our transgressions. The silence praises God, performing vows praises God, coming to God praises God. So the Psalm begins with the threefold expression: to you, to you, to you, O God… “Praise is due to you, to you shall vows be performed, to you all flesh shall come”.

Praise is due to God because of all the things God does: You choose and bring us near…to live in your courts, to be satisfied in your house, your holy temple.
Verse 5 then turns to God’s saving acts and acts of creation…You answer us with deliverance, you are the hope of the earth, you established the mountains, you silence the seas, you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy. Imagine the morning and evening, dawn and dusk calling out, “Praise the Lord!” We awake to the sunrise shouting, “Come and worship!” We enjoy the coming of night with the dusk shouting joy to the Lord. We stand before the wonder of God in silent awe.

And still we wait in silence for the testimony of God’s deeds to be proclaimed, for the Psalmist is not yet finished:
You visit the earth, you water it, you enrich it, you provide grain, you prepare it. You water, you settle, you soften, you bless.

And verse 11 – you crown the year with your bounty, with your goodness and your wagon tracks overflow with richness. Artur Weiser interprets that last phrase as “God’s tracks drip with fatness” (Weiser, The Psalms, p. 466). There is so much goodness given in the earth and to the inhabitants of the earth that it drips in abundance.

You, O God, have done all this. Eleven verses have chronicled God’s forgiveness, God’s provision, God’s awesome deeds, God’s salvation, God’s strength, God’s creation, God’s nurture, God’s overflowing graciousness. And in the final two verses we see the result of God’s work as creation is blessed to overflowing, girded with joy, clothed in flocks, decked with grain. In the end, after waiting in silent awe at this list of what God has done, the Psalmist says: “They shout and sing together for joy!” The praise that is due is given, singing and shouting, joyous celebration, people and creation – all flesh shall come. ---


The author of Psalm 65 imagines the world in a way that constantly leads to praise. God intervenes. God delivers, God saves, God forgives. God is the reason for worship and praise. God answers prayer, God creates, and God visits the earth. The testimony is that praise is due to God because God has done everything.

The implication is that all other reasons that might be offered are false. God alone is the reason for all there is. God is the source of our life. The counter claim to the world’s liturgy of deliverance, salvation, or forgiveness…is that God alone does these things, not any false gods like Baal of the Old Testament times, not Israel itself, not blind luck or happenstance, not economics, not military might, not homeland security. Only God delivers. Salvation is not from us, not hard work, not technology, not financial power, not anything else but God. That is the claim and affirmation of Psalm 65.

We can get so tied up in ourselves that we begin to think that we have done all these wonderful things on our own, that we brought peace, we made ourselves, we passed the test, we made the business what it is today, we did this and we did that, but we fail to give credit where it is due. An even deeper autonomy is imagining, not we , but “I” made all this possible! I made my success, I make my life, or I bring my own salvation.

The Psalm promotes a God consciousness. The message is that we give God praise because we recognize that God is the source of our life and all that we enjoy. One of the reasons for having a Psalm like this is to remind us of God’s deeds among us – because we tend to forget. Israel forgot over and over, they forgot that God had brought them out of Egypt, or that God had gathered them from exile, or that God loved them more than they could imagine.

We hear messages every day telling us God has nothing to do with our lives. This is the message from the world, assumed in every news broadcast, implied in television programs, and promoted in most ads, that God is irrelevant or does not exist or has nothing to do with the modern world. And unfortunately it is evident in the way we sometimes live, worried about so many things. That is why Jesus taught that we do not have to worry about what we shall wear or eat, because God will take care of those things.

Christian musician Phil Keaggy wrote a song about God’s provision. One part says: “Said the robin to the sparrow, “I would really like to know, why these anxious humans beings rush about and worry so.’ Said the sparrow to the robin, ‘Well, I think that it must be that they have no heavenly Father such as cares for you and me.’”

So often we live just that way – rushing about and worrying so as if we have no heavenly Father who cares for us, who forgives us, who has created all to provide for us. The Psalm invites us to think differently, to imagine a world where all praise to due to God and all flesh will one day come, and God forgives, God chooses, God satisfies, God saves.

The example given in this particular Psalm is creation itself. Creation does what it was created to do, shout and sing for joy. Isaiah 55 says: “the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Psalm 65 ends with a creation doxology: the pastures, the hills, the meadows, and valleys shout and sing. You know what happens to us? We get too busy to shout and sing for joy. We forget to praise God, whether in a spoken word of thanks, or in song, or in silence.
Creation just does that naturally – why can’t we? Our lives could be a natural expression of shouting and singing for joy. Not to say that we go around shouting and singing all the time – but what if we sought a life that lived gracefully, faithfully, and joyfully that simply exudes praise for God? Then our lives might gain the same assumption of creation, that God alone makes all the arrangements necessary for our care. The Creator sustains all that is created. This Psalm brings creation to an animated expression of joy and praise. The Psalm lifts the activity of God thus bidding us to give praise where praise is due. Psalm 65 calls us to notice:

To notice God’s provision,
To see God’s salvation,
To receive God’s forgiveness,


And then…
To sing God’s praise,
To shout God’s joy.

Perhaps what is needed is a return to the beginning of the Psalm, a return to the place of forgiveness, which means a return to the place of confession. We live with the assumption that there is nothing and no one beyond ourselves and so we forget to sing and shout precisely because we see no reason to sing and shout. With an absence of God consciousness, God remains nothing more than a belief we call on when we need something.

Psalm 65 is also a national prayer for forgiveness: “You forgive our transgressions.” Israel was a theocracy, they held to the governance of God alone. We do not live under a theocracy but we do live with a national consciousness founded upon the Judeo-Christian tradition. What if our nation were able to confess its sins? What if our government was able to confess? Israel’s confession was a national public act. Of course, we will not see such a confession, not in today’s climate, but we can imagine the possibilities. We can assert this Psalm back into the public consciousness, at the very least back into our own consciousness. That is the call.

Psalm 65 is a Psalm for a nation and a Psalm for the church, a Psalm for us. It seeks to imagine a different reality, one that recognizes and lives with the wonder of God. The Psalm dares to imagine that God secures reliability about life that we can never secure ourselves. The Psalm was probably composed during good times, when everything about life was working out well – no disorientation and no problems. Some will argue that we are in a situation of conflict, whether we talk about war or crime or poverty or the conflicts between the left and right. How does a joyous Psalm reach out to touch our context of anxiety and pain?

Psalm 65 serves as an affirmation in the midst of chaos that God is still providing for us. God is still forgiving, choosing, bringing near, answering, silencing, making, visiting, enriching, providing, preparing, watering, crowning. God is still performing all the verbs of Psalm 65! You, you, you, God, you do it all! That is our song to sing. It is a song affirming life and, if forgotten, if we forget to sing this Psalm, we begin to think that it is not God, but us, or “I”, who have done great things. If we fail to sing this song and others like it, we will profane the very life we seek to celebrate.

God has made all the arrangements. God has made forgiveness possible. God is ready to begin again with us. So, let us begin anew with God, to You, O God, all praise is due! Let us make this Psalm our song of joy, affirming that God provides, God saves, God delivers, and we shall indeed be satisfied with the goodness of God’s creation. Praise God from whom all, all, all blessings flow. Amen.