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Psalm 98 ends with a command that makes very little sense on first reading.
After the psalmist has called the people to sing the new song, after the harps and the trumpets and the shouts of joy, he turns to the rest of creation. "Let the sea resound, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing together for joy" (Psalm 98:7-8).
The sea is being asked to resound.
This is the same sea that, five psalms back, was the picture of chaos. "The seas have lifted up, LORD, the seas have lifted up their voice; the seas have lifted up their pounding waves" (Psalm 93:3). The roaring sea stood for everything threatening and destabilising, everything in the ancient Near Eastern imagination that was not under control. And here the same sea is commanded to make noise. Not to fall silent. To add its sound to the worship.
The Lord is not asking the storm to stop before the choir begins. He is asking the storm to join in.
We have treated worship, for most of our recent history, as something that begins after the storm subsides. The Sunday service in many places is calibrated to feel calm. Uplifting music, warm lighting, smiling greeters. The message is never spoken and always felt: the proper worshipper arrives composed, and the storm, if you brought one, should be left politely at the door.
Psalm 98 will not allow that reading. It does not ask the worshippers to put down their suffering before they sing. It asks the suffering itself to make noise. The sea, the rivers, the mountains, every churning and unsettled part of creation, gets invited into the song. The roaring sea is not silenced before the singing starts. It is part of the singing, in the same psalm, before the same throne, and the Lord is the one who summoned it.
The psalmist understood that creation in its fullest sense includes the unsettled parts. The rivers clap their hands rather than flowing silently in tidy banks. The mountains sing rather than being asked to be hills. The sea resounds rather than being domesticated into a pond. Worship that excludes the wild parts of creation has been quietly editing what God made and called good.
The same goes for the wild parts of you. Your anger, your grief, your unresolved doubt, your medicated calm, your unmedicated tremor.
If you have been waiting for your interior to settle before you can really worship, the waiting is over.
The agitation in your chest is not an obstacle to worship. By this psalm's reckoning it is part of what worship incorporates. The trembling hand, the racing thoughts, the depression that has not lifted, the grief sitting underneath every breath. These are not contaminants to be removed before you can sing. They are the sounds the sea is making, and the sea has been invited into the choir.
When you walk into a Sunday service with the storm intact and sit through the worship feeling everything you are feeling, that is worship of a particular kind. It is the worship of someone who brought the actual sea into the room instead of leaving it outside and pretending it was not there.
If you have been performing a smooth interior in church for a long time, you can stop. You do not have to sing the loud parts louder to compensate for what is underneath, or manufacture the smile during the worship set, or pretend the storm has passed.
The Lord knows the actual weather of your interior. He has not been fooled by the performance, and he has been waiting patiently for you to bring the actual you into the room.
None of this is permission to sit in chaos forever. The new song is moving somewhere, and the chaos is incorporated rather than endorsed as a final state. The Lord is doing something with the sea over the long arc of his work in you. He is simply not waiting for the sea to go quiet before he starts.
So if you are carrying mental illness, or grief, or doubt, or any of the unresolved weather of an honest Christian life, bring it with you into worship.
The roaring is not a problem to be hidden. In some way you may not yet fully understand, it has been added to the choir.
Part 1: The Impossible Command
Part 2: A Different kind of Music
Part 3: When the Sea joins the Choir
Part 4: The Body that keeps Singing
