The Adult Sunday School class spent several weeks this Spring studying prayer using Marjory Hewitt Suchocki’s book, In God’s Presence.1 And one thing that caught everyone’s attention was her discussion of the Psalms as prayer. The Psalms are not only poetry, which they are. They are not only songs, which they are. The Psalms are also prayers, and when we use the Psalms in worship, we are praying.

In fact, the Psalms are some of the oldest prayers that we have. People, both Jews and Christians, have been praying the Psalms for thousands of years. When we pray the Psalms each Sunday in worship, we are joining in that ancient tradition, wading into that ever-flowing stream of prayer that began millennia ago when people first cried out to the God of Israel.

When I was a kid, I had a cassette tape player that I would take in the car with me, and on long car trips I would listen to stories and songs on my headphones. This was part of my parents’ scheme to keep me entertained in the car, and to avoid having to listen to kids’ songs themselves. And by all accounts is worked pretty well.

A lot of the tapes that I had were of bible stories. I had Esther, Saul on the Road to Damascus, Daniel in the Lion’s Den — and of course, David and Goliath. In fact, I had two different tapes of David and Goliath. (Now, this is the part of the story where you get to see just how nerdy of a kid I really was.) As an elementary schooler, I was really disturbed that these two versions of David and Goliath didn’t agree with each other. You see, one of them said that David struck Goliath on the forehead, and the other one said that he struck Goliath “right between the eyes.” That’s not the same! Close, but not the same. So which one was it? In the forehead, or right between the eyes? One of them had to be the true story, and the other one had to be wrong. There was no room for ambiguity in the Word of God, you see. I was quite the little fundamentalist as a child.