“. . .you will. .
.surround me
with songs of deliverance" Psalm 32
Several years ago I wrote a play in commemoration of the
fiftieth anniversary of the college where I teach. Somewhere in early summer of the year before,
when I was belly-deep in the writing, I was struck with the notion that this
play I was working on should end with music, a specific chorale anthem titled
“O Lord God,” a Russian piece my sister used to sing adoringly, decades after she’d
left the college choir.
I loved that anthem, not only because I knew it stayed so
tenaciously with my sister, but also because I knew it had also been a favorite
of college choirs throughout those fifty years.
But I also loved it because the piece tells a musical
story. It begins in deep anxiety and
begs the Lord to listen to her prayers, offered with daily diligence. And then,
suddenly and remarkably, two minutes in, as if out of nowhere, the music’s trajectory soars in wondrous thanksgiving: “I will sing to
the Lord as long as I live.” A real
musician would know how to describe what happens technically, but it doesn’t take
a professional to experience that, gloriously, the petitioner knows his prayers will be answered.
Because I wanted that music, that particular piece, to end the play, I listened to
it time and time again when I was writing, so often that today even a novice
like me could direct it, I swear.
At the college’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the play
was staged a half-dozen times. I didn’t
attend every performance, but every time I was there I was moved as deeply as
I ever had been at the story of deliverance in Pavel Chesnokov's “O Lord God.”
Many hymns are songs of deliverance. The Christian life
begins, or so it seems to me, in thanksgiving. What happens in Psalm 32 is what happens in
the lives of all believers: once we come
to know the miracle of grace, once our quaking bones have been delivered from the
load of our sins and miseries, once we apprehend the love of God, we can’t help but sing, even the monotones among us, even me. Grace makes all oor solos sound like John Sebastian Bach. Our greatest hits are all songs of deliverance.
I sat there in the blessedly darkened theater and cried
three times, every time the play ended, cried at the incomprehensible clarity
of music, something that can’t be explained really, but certainly can be
experienced. I’d try to tell you what
exactly it is that the music adores, but I can’t. There are no words. The only way to hear it —and understand it—is
music.
That’s why verse seven of Psalm 32 is such a wonderful line. David makes a perfectly understandable claim
here. The story of his life isn’t over,
but the victory has been won. He’s
sinned, he’s confessed, and he’s been forgiven.
“You are my hiding place,” he says, my comfort and my joy;
you are my habitation; you are where I live.
And you surround me—as if this whole world were the superb salesroom of
some eternal electronics store—you surround me with songs of deliverance. Not stories—songs.
Wonderful. Let the
music begin.
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