Episode Details

Psalm 148: The Roll Call of Everything

This psalm reads like a conductor tapping his baton on the podium and then pointing, one by one, at every section of the orchestra — except the orchestra is the entire created order. Angels first, then sun and moon and stars, then the waters above the heavens. And then, as if turning from the balcony seats to the floor, he calls up the earth: dragons and deeps, fire and hail, snow and vapor, stormy wind. Mountains and hills. Fruitful trees and cedars. Beasts and cattle, creeping things and flying fowl. Kings and judges. Young men and maidens, old men and children. No one is excused. No one is too small or too strange or too wild. The dragons are summoned alongside the judges, the creeping things alongside the kings. There is something almost comic about the list, and something deeply serious: it implies that the universe is not a machine running on indifferent laws but a choir that has been given a song. And the final verse makes the most extraordinary claim of all — that Israel, this small and often bewildered people, has been brought near to the God whom stars and storms already praise. The whole cosmos was singing before we arrived. We have simply been invited to join in.

00:00 The Heavens Summoned to Praise
01:00 Every Creature, Every King, Every Child