“Praise the Lord!” the psalmist shouts. “Sing to the Lord a new song…in the assembly of the faithful!” And we surely are today. The choir sings what the psalmist-poet writes. Welcome back, choir, incidentally, for the second week now that summer’s over. We missed you while you were gone. And welcome Ann Scott Davis, our newest staff singer.

 

We’ve got it all today. It’s as if we could “dance, making melody with tambourine and lyre!” I wish I had a tambourine…and a lyre…and that I could dance. Well, I do…and, I can. The Psalms are used to carry the Spirit, and carry us! At times their use is to express the joy that God’s people find in their hearts when they consider, if they’re not stones, what the Lord their God has done. This Psalm, the 149^th, and others like it, I’m sure, have been used for precisely that, a good and happy thing.

 

But then there appears to be another thing that this Psalm, the 149^th, and others like it have been used for. The other thing is as a call to arms, which is to say, a call to express God’s vengeance on the nations around it that Israel decides are God’s enemies and theirs. In the middle of verse 6 the tone gets serious, terribly serious: “Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two edged swords in their hands…to execute vengeance on the nations who are their enemies,” the Psalm says, “and punishment on the peoples of the nations, binding their kings with fetters and their nobles with iron chains.”

 

It’s pretty clear that in ancient Israel the Psalms, some of them, like this one, were used for secular and even violent purposes, to encourage war, to build up to it, to rally the troops (and themselves) in the religious fervor of righteous warfare. Like the organist at the ballpark rallying the home team. (Da, da, da, dat, ta-da! Charge!) Like the Democrats and the Republicans try to rally themselves, if not the nation: “Si se puede, si se puede, si se puede…yes, we can; yes, we can; yes, we can…drill, baby drill; drill, baby, drill; drill, baby, drill…we want change, we want change, we want change! Four more years, four more years, four more years… Just wait, pretty soon we’ll hear it all again, all over again.

 

The point is: all throughout history, and not just modern history, faith and the language of faith and faith’s rituals have been used to rally and rile us up, whether for good or for ill, and quite frequently in an adversarial, God-is-always-going-to-be-on-our-side, kind of way. It didn’t just recently start with the Tea Party folks a year or two ago, or with the God is invariably on America’s side folks a few years before that. No, it’s a custom and a habit that have been around for three thousand or so years, apparently.

 

But then in the face of all of it – I mean, sometimes I think we act militantly and militaristically because we think we have to – there comes this: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves…has fulfilled the law.” Wow! “The commandments -- ‘you shall not commit adultery, or murder, or steal, or covet…or anything else’ -- are all summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself…love is the fulfilling of the law.”

 

How different that is from “Let high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands to execute vengeance and punishment, and to bind with fetters and chains.” This table that we’re invited to again this morning is the symbol of the counsel that Paul gives to the Roman Christians: “Owe no one anything, except to love one another!” Now, if we want change, that’s radical change. Do you suppose we should give it a try? I think we should. Come to the table, for all is ready. Amen.