Will Willimon's Lectionary Sermon Resource: Preaching the Psalms

By Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is widely acclaimed as one of the top ten preachers in the
world. In Preaching the Psalms, he provides just what
you need to begin the journey toward sermons based on the Psalms. This guide will stoke,
fund, and fuel your imagination while leaving plenty of room to insert
your own illustrations, make connections within your congregational
context, and speak the Word in your distinctive voice. Guidance from
Will Willimon is like sitting down with a trusted clergy friend and
asking, “What will you preach next Sunday?” Preaching the Psalms
is part of a seven-volume set that also includes lectionary-based
preaching resources for Years A, B, and C (2 volumes per year: Part 1
and Part 2) of the Revised Common Lectionary.

Sermon resources include:

1. Readings
2. Theme title
3. Introduction to the Readings
4. Encountering the Text
5. Proclaiming the Text
6. Relating the Text

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501890970

Bishop William H. Willimon

Will Willimon is a preacher and teacher of preachers. He is a United Methodist bishop (retired) and serves as Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry and Director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Duke Divinity School, Durham, North Carolina. For twenty years he was Dean of the Chapel at Duke University. A 1996 Baylor University study named him among the Twelve Most Effective Preachers in the English speaking world. The Pew Research Center found that Will was one of the most widely read authors among Protestant clergy in 2005. His quarterly Pulpit Resource is used by thousands of pastors throughout North America, Canada, and Australia. In 2021 he gave the prestigious Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale Divinity School. Those lectures became the book, Preachers Dare: Speaking for God which is the inspiration for his ninetieth book, Listeners Dare: Hearing God in the Sermon.

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to the seventh volume in my Lectionary Sermon Resource series. Through this series of sermon resources, keyed to the three-year Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), some of the most helpful work from Pulpit Resource is made available to a new generation of biblical preachers.

This volume differs from the previous six in that it is dedicated solely to interpreting and preaching the Psalms. The other Lectionary Sermon Resource volumes usually treat the assigned Gospel, Old Testament, or Epistle as a source for a sermon. Some preachers, therefore, requested a volume to be exclusively dedicated to the Psalms.

Unlike previous volumes in the series, I offer a selection of psalms for preaching from throughout the three-year RCL. The psalms are listed in the sequence that they appear in the Psalter with annotation of when the psalm appears in the RCL. While I have selected many psalms that appear repeatedly in the psalter, I have tailored my proclamation of the psalm to one specific Sunday when the psalm appears, though you are free, of course, to adapt for other Sundays.

While it is impossible to cover all the psalms in this one volume, I hope that I have given a wide range that will encourage my fellow preachers to use the Psalms in their sermons. Most of my commentary follows the established format of Pulpit Resource, but not all. I’ve abbreviated that format in some cases in order to allow for the largest number of psalms that are possible to treat in one book. You will also find that I’ve included Preaching Workshops that address some of the challenges preachers face in proclaiming the Psalter. Much of my interpretation and proclamation has benefited from the Preaching the Psalms seminar that I taught with Dr. Stephen Chapman at Duke Divinity School. Dr. Chapman helped me make the Psalms more prominent in my own preaching. Introducing a new generation of preachers to the riches of the Psalter was a highlight of my teaching career.

I hope that you will find much material and strong encouragement for your own ministry of proclamation as you join with me in preaching from the Psalms.

—WILL WILLIMON

Psalm 2

Transfiguration A

God Laughed

Theme

Sometimes we’re guilty of giving too much honor, respect, and adoration to earthly matters, particularly when it comes to our nations and national leaders. Politics have become the functional equivalent of God, our major source of security, protection, and hope. How does God look upon our nation and our national leaders in whom we put such confidence and grant such adoration? God laughs. What does that mean for our own assessments of ourselves and our nation and its leaders?

Encountering the Psalm

Why do the nations rant?

Why do the peoples rave uselessly?

The earth’s rulers take their stand;

the leaders scheme together

against the LORD and

against his anointed one.

When we preachers interpret scripture in preparation for our sermons, it’s only natural that we look for connections between the text and our congregational context. Psalm 2 presents us with a challenge. Psalm 2 is usually characterized as a royal psalm in which the king is praised. However, it’s important to note that the earthly king of Israel serves as an image of the true regent, Yahweh, before whom the powerful of the world should tremble (Ps 2:11). This is a psalm addressed to God and to the nations. Where do we read this psalm in a way that we are able to hear these words as addressed to us?

And what’s to be done about these ranting nations?

The one who rules in heaven laughs;

my Lord makes fun of them.

The Lord of this psalm sits on high and looks down—way down—on the world’s scheming, plotting rulers. Everybody on earth trembles before these earthly tyrants; the Lord simply looks down and laughs at them. Psalm 2 is one of those rare occasions when God laughs. It is the only place in the testaments, Old or New, that unabashedly speaks of the laughter of God. What sort of divine laughter do we have here? Perhaps the laughter of God in this psalm is mocking, derisive laughter. Or is the laughter of God a dismissive snickering smile that knows that the rulers of the earth and their nations are no threat at all to God’s sovereignty? Perhaps God’s laughter is that of joyous victory.

Little Israel has a big God. Israel is threatened on all sides by other more powerful kingdoms. And yet in the face of real threats from more potent nations, little Israel stood up, shook its fist, and declared, Yahweh rules.

Where is there evidence that the faith claim Yahweh rules is backed up by the realities of our present time? The psalm gives no answer. Evil still seems to rage unchecked. No answer or evidence is given. But God promises that through God’s Anointed One the ranting nations shall not be allowed to rage and rant forever:

"You will smash them with an iron rod;

you will shatter them like a pottery jar."

So kings, wise up!

Be warned, you rulers of the earth!

The psalm asserts that God engages with the raging nations and actively works to defeat them and their bogus claims of sovereignty. This psalm is the only place in the Old Testament that speaks of God’s king, Messiah, and Son in the same place. These designations will be very important in the New Testament.

What does God do about our evil and our evil ways of organizing ourselves, our nations, and our rulers with their ranting? God laughs. Can we preach that this Sunday?

Proclaiming the Psalm

There was once a college student. School was not really his thing. He wanted to improve his GPA, so he enrolled in a course called Ornithology 101. To his shock, it turned out to be a course in the study of birds. The professor led them in a boring study of the migratory habits of birds. They learned the names of different kinds of birds. It was the worst course he had ever taken in his life.

Finally, the course ended. For the final exam, the professor walked into the class and handed out a sheet of paper. On the paper there were pictures of thirty different sets of birds’ feet. The exam consisted of only one question: Identify the following birds.

Well, it was more than he could take. The student walked up to the professor and smacked the exam—consisting of nothing but birds’ feet—down on the professor’s desk and said, This is the dumbest exam for the dumbest course from the stupidest professor that I’ve ever taken!

The professor was aghast. I’m going to report you to the dean! You can’t talk like that to me. What is your name?

The student took a step back from the professor’s desk, hiked up his pant legs about ten inches, and said, You’re so smart, you tell me.

Now, do you know why that joke appeared in a book I read on how to be a better college teacher? This kind of humor is fun, but it is also serious business. It is of the nature of humor to disarm, to poke fun at, and to puncture pomposity. Little wonder that when some tyrant takes over power in a country, among the first to be silenced and censored are the comedians and the satirists.

Years ago, I was visiting what was then communist-controlled East Germany. I was with a pastor who had suffered terribly, along with his family, because they were Christians. His children had been denied entrance into the state-controlled university because of the pastor’s profession. When I tried to comfort him by expressing sympathy for his situation and saying how terrible it was that the Soviets were oppressing the East Germans in this way, I was surprised when the pastor replied, The Russians are not just our friends; they are our brothers.

What?

The pastor explained, You can get rid of your friends. You can never get rid of your brothers.

I knew he was going to be all right. When you are the victim of political tyranny, you can weep, and that’s okay. But you can also laugh. Nothing disarms the tyrant or makes the tyrant more furious than to be mocked. Pompous political potentates fear mocking even more than they fear losing an election.

I’ve got this on my mind because this morning our scripture is Psalm 2. This particular psalm is interesting for a number of reasons, but this morning what interests me most is that this psalm is just about the only place in all of the Bible where God laughs. Usually, God is portrayed in scripture as quite serious, giving out commands, expressing calm words of comfort, and somberly directing God’s people. But in Psalm 2, God laughs.

The psalm begins with a serious question:

Why do the nations rant?

Why do the peoples rave uselessly?

Then the psalm takes on a serious problem:

The earth’s rulers take their stand;

the leaders scheme together

against the LORD and

against his anointed one.

We’re talking politics here. The nations are run by various forms of politics, that is, politics is the way we organize ourselves and exercise power over one another. The earth’s rulers often exercise power and do politics in ways that hurt ordinary, powerless people. Nations not only oppress their own people, but they scheme against God. A ruler who hurts a nation’s people, especially the most vulnerable people, is usually a ruler who, whether he knows it or not, is scheming against God.

And what is God’s response to these ranting nations and their scheming leaders?

The one who rules in heaven laughs;

my Lord makes fun of them.

God laughs! Apparently, since this is the only reference to laughter by God in the Old Testament, politicians make God laugh. God enjoys making fun of the nations. The laughter being spoken of here seems to be derisive. As we all know, it’s not nice to mock people. Mocking, derisive laughter can be painful and rude—unless you happen to be the God who is doing the laughing.

As the psalm moves on, the Lord threatens the nations, telling them that God is divine, not the nations. God promises to send an Anointed One who will teach them some lessons in power and righteousness that they will never forget. However, the first thing that God does against those pompous, parading, presumptuous politicians is laugh.

One conclusion that we might draw from Psalm 2 is that it is dangerous for us to take the nations and their leaders, including our own nation and leaders, too seriously. I don’t think it would be fair to try to construct a theology of government from this psalm. Nor would it be wise to use it to speak of a biblical view of good government.

However, knowing that God laughs at the nations may encourage us to do the same. Psalm 2 doesn’t really say that we are supposed to do anything. Rather, the psalm focuses on God. God looks at the nations and their ranting, raving, and mayhem, and laughs.

Why am I right now thinking of the children’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes? Tyrants surround themselves with sycophants, yes-men who flatter their egos and tell them what they want to hear. When someone once asked, Why is the president surrounding himself with members of his own family? a political commentator said, Because those are the only people the president can trust to tell him only what he wants to hear.

I confess that in the last few years I have watched less of the serious TV evening news and more of the comedic work of Stephen Colbert. I wish I had more power to change our national political situation. I am sure that I am guilty of giving sovereignty, respect, and love to my country that I should be rendering only unto God. I’m not sure what I can do to make our nation more just in its behavior toward our most vulnerable citizens. I wish our nation would not abuse other less-powerful nations.

Maybe this psalm is telling me that at least I can laugh.

While God laughs at our nations with our flags, parades, honor heaped upon our leaders, and our slogans like Make America Great, what is the divine response? Well, in this psalm, there is rebuke and threats. Yes. But perhaps, out of compassion, the God who is greater also laughs.

When we put so much faith in our national leaders—yes, and I think that faith is exactly the right word for it—and when we look to politics, the Constitution, democracy in action, the national budget, and the military for all of our security, well-being, and hope, God laughs at our bad faith.

When our leaders take us into war, or devastate other lands, or expend huge amounts on military hardware and weapons of mass destruction, promising us that they will provide us safety and security if we will just give sovereignty and our unquestioning loyalty and allegiance to them, God laughs.

Like many United Methodists, I found former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s opinions and actions in regard to immigration to be reprehensible. His policies in regard to immigration (Sessions’s main accomplishment as a senator was to protect Alabama’s borders with Mexico and Honduras) as well as his deceit (I don’t recall) and racial prejudice made Sessions an embarrassment. Though President Trump’s degrading, humiliating comments about his attorney general almost made me feel some Christian sympathy for Sessions, I could understand why some fellow Methodists formally accused him of dissemination of doctrines contrary to the standards of doctrine of The United Methodist Church.

To make his policy of separating immigrant parents from their children even worse, Sessions quoted Saint Paul to justify his orchestrated government cruelty. His interpretation of the book of Romans is lousy. After all that poor Paul suffered (three times beaten with rods, shipwrecked, pelted with stones—2 Cor 11:25), Sessions had the temerity to use Paul to justify his pernicious separation of hundreds of little children from their parents. (I hear Paul saying, Poor United Methodists. Sessions is your thorn in the flesh. Three times I prayed to be delivered of my thorn, and the Lord refused, but maybe you will have better luck being delivered. If the UMC complaint process doesn’t work, try prayer.)

Jeff Sessions, whatever happened to We must obey God rather than humans (Acts 5:29)?

I therefore condemned Sessions’s policies and abuse of scripture. Maybe what I should have done was to take Psalm 2’s characterization of God’s behavior toward errant leaders and nations as a model for my own behavior.

Maybe I should have laughed.

Well, after a good laugh, smirking at the pomposity and the presumption of the world’s nations, God threatens to send the Anointed One, who will come and teach the nations a lesson. There will be a day when God will send a true King, one whom God calls Son, a great sovereign who will rebuke and confront the nations and call them to account, one who will judge the nations as God judges.

You know that God did just that in sending Jesus of Nazareth. The Anointed One came among us, not wearing a royal crown, not marching in a grand military parade, not backed up with a huge military force, but rather coming to us as a seemingly powerless rabbi, who never lifted his hand against us, but instead reached out in love.

That’ll teach them a lesson. That will show them who really sits on the throne. That will knock those ranting nations and raging politicians down a notch or two, God said with a smile.

Relating the Psalm

In his wonderful Psalms commentary in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Clint McCann refers to Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? In that story, a mother is perplexed that her son, whom she considers to be an ineffective intellectual, is unwilling to assume responsibility for the family farm after her husband’s stroke. Instead he wastes his time reading irrelevant books. One day the mother picks up one of these pointless books and it falls open to a letter from Saint Jerome to Heliodorus. It’s an obscure, mystifying tome about trumpets, battle, and some great general marching forth to conquer the world. How silly. Rather than getting on with the real business of things of this world, her son was wasting time reading about conquering kings. We can hardly suppress our laughter.

Yet who defines what’s important and what’s not?

In his book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007), Mark Lilla says that during the Enlightenment, religion and politics went through a great separation. God was left free to go God’s own way while politics was secularized and went its way. By separating politics from God, there would seemingly no longer be strife in the name of God, and we would have more peace and less violence that religion tends to produce. Strong beliefs about God result in violence.

Trouble is, the modern, secular, democratic nation-state has shown that it is every bit as capable of producing violence as the old divinely established monarchies. When God is removed from the discussion, then the nation is free to take upon itself divine-like qualities. The modern nation has thus become, says Lilla, the functional equivalent of God, our only true sovereign, our protector from cradle to the grave, our source of security and meaning.

God laughs at that?

Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Jesus’ disciples asked after his resurrection. That is, Lord, will you at this time finally act like a Messiah, take politics in hand, mount your war horse, raise a royal army, rout our Roman occupiers, and set up Israel as the nation we are meant to be?

Christ meant Messiah, which means the Anointed One (see Ps 2:2), the king, the political/military hero. Politics is power, our only means of transcending the problems of this world. Jesus, when are you at last going to move from spiritual blather to something important—like politics? Jesus responded by telling his followers that it was not for them to know the times for such things. Jesus seems somewhat evasive, reluctant to come right out and say, I’m the Messiah you have been expecting, probably because he knew that their messianic expectations were not for someone like him.

At this point, honesty compels me to say that, if you are one of those people with great love for the government or reverent respect for the military that props up government, you will find Jesus a jolt to your sensibilities. The modern state—with its flags, pronouncements, parades, propaganda, public works projects, and assorted patriotic paraphernalia—does not mesh well with Jesus. Patriotism, while perhaps a virtue, has never been regarded as a specifically Christian virtue.

In truth, Jesus was very political, but not as we expected. After his arrest—by functionaries of the state—Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate, who was seated upon the judgment seat to render a verdict on Jesus.

So, are you king? asked Pilate, sarcasm dripping from his urbane Roman lips. Jesus responded, You have said so, implying that much of this concern about royalty and authority was Pilate’s preoccupation, not his. Then Jesus pronounced, My kingdom is not of this world, or at least, that’s how his words are sometimes translated. Closer to the Greek: My kingdom is not from here.

It’s a mistake to interpret Jesus as having said, My kingdom is out of this world, something otherworldly, spiritual even. Rather, Jesus is saying, My kingdom is not from here, here with all these royal trappings and raw power, here propped up with swords and acting as if it were from God. My reign is not secured by the swords of Caesar’s finest. My authority derives from elsewhere.

I wonder if, in his exchange with Pilate, Jesus meant to make fun of Pilate? The strong government official who thought he was have a serious examination of Jesus was being examined, held up for scrutiny, and perhaps made an object of ridicule.

—Will Willimon, Why Jesus? (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010), 15–16

Psalm 8

Holy Name A, B, C; New Year’s Day A, B, C; Trinity A, C; Proper 22 B

The Majestic God Who Calls

Theme

The majesty of God is not only in God’s creation of a wondrous world but also in God’s calling of us to be coworkers with God and co-creators in the care of God’s good earth. Our great dignity and worth as human beings lie in God’s giving us work to do in the stewardship of the good earth.

Encountering the Psalm

Psalm 8 opens with a vivid depiction of a person standing alone in the evening, staring up at the starry sky in wonderment, overcome with a question about humanity’s place in such a vast universe. The psalm opens with a similar, ecstatic moment. Alone and outside at night, rendered seemingly insignificant by the expanse of heaven, the psalmist exclaims, You have set your glory above the heavens!

When I look up at your skies,

at what your fingers made—

the moon and the stars

that you set firmly in place. . . .

While the CEB, in the interest of inclusive language, renders this passage as human beings, we probably ought to note that the force of verse 4 is more, What am I, a single, insignificant person, that God should take note of me?

what are human beings

that you think about them;

what are human beings

that you pay attention to them?

That’s the question that sets this psalm in motion. The psalmist moves from wonder at the vast cosmos to introspection of the psalmist’s place in the world.

The psalm is a chiasm that hinges on verse 4:

verse 1aPraise to God throughout the earth

verses 1b-3God’s majesty

verse 4Questioning humanity’s place in the world

verses 5-8Humanity’s place in the world under God

verse 9Praise to God throughout the earth

Many psalms begin by calling on the congregation to praise God. Psalm 8 begins (and notably ends) with a direct word of praise addressed to God. When a psalm opens and closes with the same phrase, commentators on the Psalms call this inclusion. Note that when the phrase is repeated the second time, the phrase has taken on additional meaning. So the psalm begins with wonder at God’s creation of the world and ends with even greater wonder at God’s vocation of humanity.

Wonderment at the vast majesty of creation is typical of us. The Romantic view of nature, celebrated so well by Romantic poets, continues to be a widespread human experience. One need not be standing on the rim of Grand Canyon to be filled with wonder at the majesty of creation. Glory!

Verse 2 continues to be somewhat of a mystery for translators and interpreters of Psalm 8. What does out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes mean? Maybe this refers to God’s primal act of pushing back the formless void in creation. We don’t really know for sure. Better not to spend much time over this verse and instead go with the psalm as it moves from wonder at creation to wonder at humanity’s standing before God, the true center of this psalm.

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under their feet,

all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the seas. (NRSV)

Commentators note that the psalmist’s use of the Hebrew mah (what) rather than