So Secure You Can Sleep

Since we were first planted, Parish has been a church that has prioritized singing the psalms. The section of our worship service called “God speaks to His people through His Word” always includes at least one psalm (this week it’s a setting of Psalm 149, which is also our Call to Worship), and often we’ll sing several more psalms throughout the morning (this week we also sing from Psalms 51 and 121). During the current sermon series on the first eight psalms, each week the closing musical piece of the morning will be the psalm that was preached earlier in the service. Psalm 3 has not been a text that we have sung many times at Parish, so the setting this week is not very familiar. “O Lord, How Many Are My Foes—Psalm 3” is taken from the Trinity Psalter Hymnal, a joint publication of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the United Reformed Churches in North America in 2018. The text is quite faithful to the psalm, with each four bar phrase corresponding roughly to a verse in the original, expanding on verse 8 a bit to balance out the added length of verse 7. The editors of the hymnal chose to set this palm to Ananias Davisson’s tune DETROIT. This melody from The Kentucky Harmony, one of the first shape note collections to be published south of the Mason-Dixon line, possesses qualities of both loneliness and firm determination which pair well with the sentiment David communicates in Psalm 3. Though it may take a little more work this week, because the words and music are new to us, I pray that singing God’s Word back to Him will drive the truths we have just heard preached deeper into our hearts. —Henry C. Haffner