Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/915081630509196 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l1Qdjdo148

There were no psalms in Israel in those days.

To be clear, folks certainly had prayers. They gathered at hilltop shrines and offered sacrifices. Surely someone chanted something. A priest would invoke the deity while the offering smoke rose through the air. He would bless the people. And they would all eat. Roving bands of prophets would chant prayers as they went: some memorized together, some extemporaneous, improved in the moment. The priests and prophets were professionals with esoteric prayer books that belonged only to their guilds. But the uninitiated… The people who ate the meat of the sacrifice… The people who watched the prophets pass… they had no psalms.

People had songs to be sure. Each of the twelve tribes had their own songs. They had love songs about shepherds and shepherdesses meeting in the field. They had war songs about chariots being thrown and Chieftains uniting the people in victory. They had blessings from their ancestors that spoke of the virtues of the tribe. These songs often described the wondrous acts of God on behalf of the people in times long past. But they had no psalms.

A psalm is different than a song or a prayer. A psalm is meant for everybody and anybody. A psalm is eternally current; it speaks to God in the here and now. A psalm gives words to people who have no words. Words people can speak confidently to the LORD that expresses the deep feelings of their heart: Words of lament for times when people needed to beat their breasts and wail at their God. Words of petition for times when people needed to ask their God for provision or deliverance. Words of thanksgiving for when they needed to express their deepest gratitude for God’s amazing act on their behalf.

A psalm is found in a psalter, a hymnal. A prayer book that belongs to everybody, which an organized temple with a dedicated scribal school would be in charge of compiling, copying, and teaching. But nothing like that existed yet. There were no inspired Kings composing psalms in their palaces as they plucked their harps. There were no palaces. There were no kings. And there were no psalms.2

Hannah really could have used some psalms. Year after year, when she went to Shiloh with her husband to offer their annual sacrifice, and she went to pray yet again that God would grant her children, she sure could have used words like:

Answer me when I call to you,

            my righteous God.

Give me relief from my distress;

            have mercy on me and hear my prayer.

Psalm 4:1

Then when her husband’s other wife would tease her and provoke her and bullied, she could have used words like:

LORD, see how my enemies persecute me!

            Have mercy and lift me up from the gates of death,

that I may declare your praises

            in the gates of Daughter Zion,

            and there rejoice in your salvation.

Psalm 9:13-14

And when, year after year, she would conceive no children, she sure could have used words like:

How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?

            How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I wrestle with my thoughts

            and day after day have sorrow in my heart?

            How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Psalm 13:1-2

But there were no psalms for Hannah.

Hannah was the wife of a shepherd. Her whole life must have felt like a walk through the darkest valley. And she had been coming to the house of the LORD forever to eat at a banquet prepared in the midst of her enemy. But she had no words to express any of that. Because she had no psalms.

Have you ever not been able to find the world? Have you ever wanted to scream all the feelings, yet couldn’t make a sound?

Maybe you have felt that your desires, your hopes, your longings live trapped in your chest with words that you can’t find. Of that your prayer felt so big, so overwhelming that to name them might crush you. Or to name them would be would be full of too much heartache, that if you name your grief to open yourself up, you might drown in it.

That fear that you are the only one that your prayers are ones that no one else has ever had and it’s just a little embarrassing–whether you say it to a person or even to God–so you stay quiet.

Have ever felt like Hannah? With a lack of words, and maybe no confidence that they are being heard?

Because I think sometimes praying honestly is hard, and my prayers are not important enough in light of the needs of the world, that my needs don’t even really matter. Or are they too big too for just one person? Too silly? Are there correct words that need to be spoken for God to hear?

Sometimes I think that I will write prayers for Sunday morning; words of meaning and depth and insight, and then I get so caught up in my head, convinced that ever word must be precise, that every paragraph has meaning, and not any meaning I didn’t intend. So I stare at a blank page for days before I remember that somebody else has already done the writing of the right words and has done it better.

Have you ever turned to the Psalms as your prayers? Gone to words of other people who have offered up prayers. Poets who are able to put into words the ineffable experiences of your own soul?

But here’s the thing. Prayer doesn’t have to be precise. There are no perfect words. It is an outpouring of our hearts and our souls and our minds, trusting that the one who made us hears us.

And it’s possible you’ll never find the words and all you can do is scream or cry and trust that you will be heard. That it’s possible the words will never be louder than a whisper and yet we trust that they are heard. And it’s possible you will look foolish but you are still heard by God. It may be ugly and emotional and messy and it will be heard.

No matter the words that pour out of your mouth or your heart or your soul, they are heard and received and beloved by God.

One year Hannah went down to Shiloh, with her husband Elkanah and his other wife Peninnah. She was in such distress, filled with so many emotions, that she couldn’t even take a bite of food. She went to the house of the LORD to pray. She was at the end of her rope. Once more she had gone a year without her miracle. Once more she was taunted by her rival. And once more she had to make petition to a God who didn’t seem to hear her. And this time, as she delivered the vow she had made year after year: that she would dedicate her firstborn to the priesthood if God would just open up her womb, something in her heart changed.

When she completed her formal vow, she kept praying.

What did she pray? Your guess is as good as mine.

She had no psalms. She had no fancy words. No thees and thous. No leadeth me beside still waters, No lift mine eyes to the hills, No How majestic is thy name in all the earth— Nothing —Just her own heartfelt whispers.

She poured out her soul before God: her longing, her pain, her trust. All the things that she had longed to say for so long but couldn’t because she’d been given no words to do it. They just spilled out of her: ugly, messy, and barely audible.

The priest on duty didn’t know what to make of it. He had never seen anyone pray like this. He assumed Hannah was drunk.

But he blessed her anyway with his formulaic blessing: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked him.”

She had heard that blessing many times before. She had no guarantee that this time would turn out any different. She’d certainly not been given some divine promise. But she felt different. She felt a sense of relief having unburdened her whole heart. Somehow she felt nearer to God. Perhaps for the first time in years, she felt truly heard.

And the LORD remembered Hannah. How could God not after such a prayer? She conceived and gave birth to a son named ‘Samuel,’ (which means God Hears). And she kept her vow. When the boy was weaned (at about age 3), she brought him back with her to Shiloh to offer her to the LORD as a priest.

This time she came prepared. As she offered her first born to the high priest, she did so with an eloquent prayer. One she had been working on line by line in her head and heart since the day she found out she was pregnant. Maybe she sang it in Samuel’s ears, feeding his soul as she fed his body in those intimate moments. It went something like this:

My heart rejoices in the Lord.

    My strength rises up in the Lord!

    My mouth mocks my enemies

        because I rejoice in your deliverance.

2 No one is holy like the Lord—

    no, no one except you!

    There is no rock like our God!

3 Don’t go on and on, talking so proudly,

    spouting arrogance from your mouth,

    because the Lord is the God who knows,

        and he weighs every act.

4 The bows of mighty warriors are shattered,

    but those who were stumbling now dress themselves in power!

5 Those who were filled full now sell themselves for bread,

    but the ones who were starving are now fat from food!

    The woman who was barren has birthed seven children,

        but the mother with many sons has lost them all!

6 The Lord!

    He brings death, gives life,

        takes down to the grave,[b] and raises up!

7 The Lord!

He makes poor, gives wealth,

    brings low, but also lifts up high!

8 God raises the poor from the dust,

    lifts up the needy from the garbage pile.

    God sits them with officials,

    gives them the seat of honor!

The pillars of the earth belong to the Lord;

    he set the world on top of them!

9 God guards the feet of his faithful ones,

    but the wicked die in darkness

        because no one succeeds by strength alone.

10 The Lord!

His enemies are terrified!

        God thunders against them from heaven!

    The Lord!

    He judges the far corners of the earth!

May God give strength to his king

    and raise high the strength of his anointed one.

Those words were beautiful wise and wonderful. They had rhythm like a victory song and words like a prayer. But they were different than both of those things. They were words of thanksgiving that were eternally current–words that could be for anyone.

And someone wrote them down. Someone said, “Other people may need this.” And Hannah’s words were copied and recopied and they eventually found their way into a scroll. They were taught, memorized, sung around dinner fires, outside the places of worship, into children’s ears. Then they formed the prayers of people, generations of people, shaped their own relationship with God and their own psalms. People like a young girl named Mary who, a thousand years later, would sing like Hannah of the turning of the world as she poured her own soul out before God after a visit from an angel.

Because these are living words. These are words that are influential. These are eternal words and contemporary and for then and for us. Like jazz, it can be reworked, modified, relevant, and still true.

We can, we should, we need to go before God with all our deep, your needs and longings, pour out our hearts with imperfect words. And we can, like Hannah, just pour out our hearts and souls, in messy, imperfect words or silence, Bad grammatical structure, questionable and mixed metaphors–briging our whole honesty.

And we are blessed with the words of others with songs and Psalms, prayers, words we could borrow when we felt poor, barren, or alone we can turn to the psalms, to Hannah, to the word of others when we can’t find the world to cry out for justice in a broken world, when we want to speak of the world as it should be, the world that is going to change.

Because of Hannah there were psalms in Israel; there are psalms and words for us.