Our Study of the Great Tradition

Ministries >> Education >> Adult Education

Adult Education: The Monday Evening Psalm Class

6:30 p.m., Mondays during the academic year
In the Martin Luther Room
In the brownstone next to the church
Two doors to the right of the church steps

St. Jerome says that one heard the Psalms being sung in the fields and gardens in his time. Imagine what that would be like, to go about day-to-day life with the songs of Zion in the heart and softly on the lips!

We are slow-going in working our way through the Psalms. At this time, mid-June 2009, we have just finished Psalm 43. We have miles to go before we sleep, since there are a hundred and fifty Psalms all told.

But we are in no hurry. We are glad to linger with the Psalms. The great twentieth-century Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught his students the ancient conviction that the Psalms are somehow the “prayers of Jesus.” In some cases, that is easy enough to see. For example, Jesus’s cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” harkens back to Psalm 22. It is the opening verse of that Psalm.

But there is a broader sense in which the ancient preachers thought that all the Psalms are the prayers of Jesus: they are his prayers in that his Spirit inspired the Psalmist. King David, for example, might have crafted the words of many of the Psalms, using the words and imagery natural for him. Yet the Spirit which moved him was the Spirit of Jesus and was the Spirit of Jesus’s own prayers. The Psalms, then, give us a glimpse into the prayer life of Jesus. When he took himself apart to a lonely place, on a mountaintop, for example, and spent the night in prayer, these were the kinds of prayers he prayed.

And so, in our Psalm Class here at Immanuel, we cherish the Psalms for their importance to our devotional lives. My private pastoral prayers, for example, are usually built upon the Psalms. I try to teach that and illustrate that for the class.

One of the nice things about this class is that you should feel free to attend as you are able. If you must skip some Monday evenings, that’s okay. Simply join us when you can. In the Sunday worship folder the day before, we try to remind people what Psalm we will be studying on Monday evening. And you can always email me to get on track.