Preaching and Teaching the Psalms by James L. Mays. Edited by Patrick D. Miller and Gene M. Tucker. (Westminster John Knox, 2006 ISBN 0664230415) $19.95…now $13.93…30% discount until December 15, 2006.

Preaching and Teaching the Psalms by James L. Mays. Edited by Patrick D. Miller and Gene M. Tucker.

As the title indicates this volume is designed to be a working resource for the Church (and seminaries). Dr. Mays, professor emeritus of Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, is also the author of the Interpretation series commentary on the Psalms, published in 1994, which is a highly readable yet more technical and more thorough book.

The current work is divided into three sections. The initial section collects seven exceptional essays by Mays, written between 1990 and 2006. While not intended to be systematic in organization, the essays cover themes ranging from the doctrine of God the Creator in the Psalms, to the liturgical and educational focus of the Psalms in the life of a congregation, to the anthropology of the Psalms. Mays also relates the Psalter to the struggles and joys of the individual, while always moving beyond a privatistic understanding of faith. Often he illuminates the metaphorical images in the Psalms, agreeing with John Calvin that the Psalter is a “mirror” or “anatomy” of the life of the soul and of the pilgrimage of faith. Without being supercessionist or triumphalist, Mays shows the importance of the Psalms to the life of Jesus and the development of Christian tradition and life.

The middle section of the book, “Interpreting the Psalms,” focuses on both historical and contemporary issues of discernment in addressing a variety of the Psalms (laments, blessings, the reign of God, human glory and human sin). For example, commenting on Psalm 23, Mays invites the reader/hearer to “note that the psalm does not foster a rosy view of life, a cheap optimism, an unrealistic faith. The psalm knows that we will all ‘walk through the valley of the shadow’. . . ‘the table is set in the presence of my enemies,’ Life is vulnerable, and faith is conflicted. Just because that is so, we need the shepherd. John Calvin said, ‘There is a great difference between the sleep of stupidity and the repose of faith.’” (pg. 119)

The third section consists of seven sermons by Mays on seven different Psalms. To my knowledge these have not been published elsewhere, and they are profound and inspiring to any thoughtful preacher or teacher. In considering Psalm 98 as a text for Advent, Dr. Mays affirms, “The bleak midwinter is not the final truth about the world. Human life cannot be reduced to a biological process of the survival of the fittest. It is not some Spanglerian organism in which cultures grow, mature, and age to die. History is not an inexorable dialectic of materialism worked out through class struggle. It would be and is all these things apart from God. But the psalm sets against them the great contradiction of the child—the king whose appearance is the light that shines in the darkness.” (p. 177)

This book is a treasure which one can ponder often, without fully mining the depths of insights. Dr. Mays might say that this is simply because of the riches of the Psalter itself, but seldom have preachers had the opportunity to learn so much from one who has so passionately and so skillfully loved both the academy and the Church for so long .