Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, praise his name; proclaim his salvation day after day. Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
Psalm 96:1-3 (NIV)
New Song, Day After Day
In her first week she put the coffee cups in the recycling, and a man she had met twice fished them back out and made a joke about it so she wouldn’t have to apologize. She had walked past those bins four times a day without reading the labels. Nearly everything she can say about the place she is repeating from somebody else, including the part where it’s a decent place to work.
Three times the word is sing. Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord, all the earth, sing to the Lord, praise his name. Then the asking goes wider: proclaim his salvation day after day, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous deeds among all peoples.
All of it aims at God, and the crowd keeps widening out. All the earth. The nations. All peoples. The nations get called as singers, asked to ascribe to the Lord glory and strength themselves. They also get the news carried to them, his glory and his marvelous deeds declared among all peoples. The psalm asks for the telling and the singing both.
A new song and day after day pull against each other a little, and the psalm asks for both. New is for what God did that nobody saw coming. Day after day is for the mornings when nothing is new, when you have no fresh feeling to bring and the news itself hasn’t changed since the last time you said it.
The woman in her first week has no song of her own. She has other people’s sentences, a job she is learning, and a man who fished her cups out of the bin. Sing to the Lord, all the earth. She is part of all the earth, and she is standing there with nothing yet to sing.
The man who fished the cups out has worked there eleven years. He tells every new person it’s a decent place, in the same four or five words, and she has already started saying it back.
A Prayer to Remember
There is a person in this week of ours who has never heard us say one true thing about you, God. Put us near them on a day when we have time to stay. Give them what they need from someone else if we are the wrong ones to bring it. Go ahead of us either way.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
