Singing the Faith – the 46th Psalm

Evensong - 21 June 2026 - Canon Angela Tilby

I don’t usually preach on the Psalm at Evensong, but as we have so many musical visitors this evening, and a splendid psalm (at least I hope you will agree that psalm 46  is a splendid psalm by the end of this sermon) I thought it would be good to do so.

The 150 psalms that we have in the Bible, the psalms that we say or sing daily in the regular worship of the Church, were originally the hymn book of ancient Israel. Written in Hebrew, over hundreds of years, sung at the temple service in Jerusalem, accompanied, as it is indicated in the text, by strings (harp and lyre?)  and perhaps by cymbals and horns, they celebrated God’s mighty acts and called on him for help.

The version of the psalms we sing at evensong in church comes from the Book of Common Prayer and is the work of the 16th century translator, preacher, reformer and Bishop of Exeter, Miles Coverdale. He was not a brilliant translator and he sometimes got the Hebrew wrong. But he had a wonderful ear for the English language and his Prayer Book psalms have a rhythm,  a freshness, and a dignity all of their own. I am very glad that we are able here in Portsmouth to introduce our children, some of them very young, to these extraordinary compositions. I hope the psalms’  witness to the intimacy God has with the world and with every one of us will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Texts that are sung tend to stay in the memory, they somehow go in and stick without effort, and can be recalled years later.

Everything about faith is there in this psalm. Creation, salvation from earthly enemies, and the hope of universal peace. And the metaphor which drives the psalm from the beginning is that of water, especially the sea, which is of course very vivid and obvious to us here in Portsmouth. Our sea is calm and blue one moment, rough and foam flecked the next, only 50 yards away there is the scrape of the sea on the shingle, the ferries and naval vessels and yachts sailing by.

In the first few verses of Psalm 46 we hear an echo of Genesis, a reminder that God made a solid firmament out of nothing, envisaged here as watery chaos. God creates a haven of order and harmony out of the disorder of non-being. There are waters below the earth and waters above, indicated to us by the blue sky  which is itself held up by the earth’s mountains, as though by pillars. ‘

The waters rage and swell, the mountains shake at the tempest of the same’. Whoever wrote this psalm knew about earthquakes and tsunamis. And there are echoes, too, of other chaotic seas, especially in the memory of the Hebrews, the Red Sea, that swelling and deadly flood through which the God’s people escaped from captivity in Egypt.

Our spiritual ancestors, Hebrews, Israelites, Jews,  were not lovers of the sea. For them it always represented chaos, disorder and even a return to non-being. That is why at the end of the Bible, in the book of Revelation, when God makes a new heaven and a new earth there is ‘no more sea’, except that there is a kind of sea, a sea of crystal or glass, mingled with fire, which represents God’s final judgment and victory over chaos.

If the first part of Psalm 46 celebrates God as the God of creation, the second part celebrates the  holy city, Jerusalem.  I remember on my first visit to the Holy Land travelling by taxi from the airport to Jerusalem in the early hours of the morning and being aware of the ground rising as we neared the city and then the first sight of the city ahead. Our psalm goes on: ‘The rivers of the flood thereof shall make glad the city of God: the holy place of the tabernacle of the most Highest.’ Jerusalem is built on high ground. There are no rivers, no sea, only springs where water streams down from above. This is God’s dwelling and the shrine of God’s people, and it is constantly under threat. In the second part of the psalm foreign foes echo the chaos before creation. And there is the assurance that Just as God  triumphed over the primeval chaos of the past so he can be relied on to protect Jerusalem from those who would destroy her.

‘God is in the midst of her, therefore shall she not be removed, God shall help her and that right early. The heathen make much ado…but God hath shewed his voice and the earth shall melt away’. 

There is no sea anywhere near the holy city, but there is a river, a river that flows from the city itself, from the temple. There’s much more about that in other parts of the Old Testament and particularly in the book of the prophet Ezekiel. This is a river of blessing, of holiness and purity and it flows out from the sanctuary, from the place of worship.  Some Christian interpreters have seen this as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, the life-giving power of God released into the world.

The psalm celebrates God as Lord of creation and of history, but he has also triumphed over the future.

And this is perhaps the message of the psalm which we most need today. ‘O come hither and behold the works of the Lord: what destruction he has brought upon the earth’. But don’t misunderstand – this isn’t more chaos. It is the destruction of destruction; the death of death.

‘He makes wars to cease in all the earth: he breaketh the bow and knappeth (snappeth?) the spear in sunder and burneth the chariots in the fire.’

In the third part the psalm looks forward to the end time, the fulfilment of all that God has made and redeemed. And then we come to that wonderful line: ‘Be still then and know that I am God’. We owe that to Miles Coverdale, and its been very helpful to mny down the generations, but unfortunately Coverdale does not get the Hebrew quite get the Hebrew right. The line is not suggesting that we all calm down and go on a mindfulness course, useful though that might be. But ‘Be still’ here carries the sense that we should simply stop: wars , violence, quarrels, disorder. All the human messing about which causes us so much pain and trauma. God has already triumphed over such things and so can we. He is with us and already beyond us in a future of peace and harmony. With you, with me. The God of Jacob is our refuge.

So we end where we began: God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble. Help, deliverance, hope at all times and in all circumstances. God is God, God with us – and for Christians a pointer to the one we call Immanuel, our Lord Jesus Christ. It was this psalm that Martin Luther took as the template for his famous hymn Ein Feste Borg, A Safe Stronghold our God is Still. There is, I think, a relationship between Luther’s tune for that chorale and the tune we heard tonight when the choir sang the psalm.

I hope listening to and singing the psalms, and perhaps saying the daily psalms at home, can give to all of us that confidence and rootedness that we need at this time. Past, present and future are all held within God’s gaze and are under God’s protection. We may be insecure, we may face all kinds of threats, including the threat of war, the challenge to our environment, and all our personal stresses and distresses that we encounter every day.

But God is our hope and strength, a very present help in trouble.

Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour Emeritus