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There is a sentence in Psalm 98 that almost nobody slows down for, and it is one of the strangest things in the Psalter.
After the psalmist has called the people to sing the new song, after he has commanded the harps and the trumpets and the shouts of joy, he turns to the rest of creation and gives a command that, on first reading, makes very little sense.
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).
Read it slowly.
The sea is being asked to resound.
This is the same sea, in the same Psalter, that just five psalms earlier was the picture of chaos. The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring (Psalm 93:3). The roaring sea was the image of everything threatening, everything destabilising, everything in the ancient near-eastern imagination that was not under control. And now, in Psalm 98, the same sea is being commanded to make noise — not to be silenced, but to resound. To add its sound to the worship.
The Lord is not asking the storm to stop before the choir begins.
The Lord is asking the storm to join in.
The church has, on the whole, been bad at this verse.
We have, for most of our recent history, treated worship as something that begins after the storm subsides. The Sunday service is, in many places, an environment carefully calibrated to feel calm. The music is uplifting. The lighting is warm. The greeters are smiling. The implicit message — never spoken, always felt — is that worship requires a settled interior. That the proper worshipper has arrived having sufficiently composed themselves. That the storm, if you are bringing one in, should be left politely at the door.
Psalm 98 will not allow this reading.
The psalm is not, in its closing verses, asking the worshippers to put down their suffering before they sing. It is asking the suffering itself to make noise. The sea, the rivers, the mountains — every churning, restless, unsettled part of creation — is being invited into the song.
The storm is not the thing that disqualifies you from worship. The storm has, by divine invitation, been welcomed into the choir.
This is one of the deepest theological turns in the new-song motif, and we have been mostly missing it.
The worship the Lord is asking for, in this psalm, is not worship that has excluded the chaos. It is worship that has incorporated it. The roaring sea is not silenced before the singing begins. The roaring sea is part of the singing. The two are happening simultaneously, in the same psalm, before the same throne, and the Lord — far from being offended by the noise of the sea — is the one who summoned it.
If you have been waiting until your interior calms down before you feel you can really worship, this psalm is the end of that waiting.
You do not have to wait.
The agitation in your chest is not the obstacle to worship. The agitation is, by Psalm 98's reckoning, part of what is being incorporated into worship. The trembling hand, the racing thoughts, the depression that has not lifted, the anger you have not yet been able to release, the grief that sits underneath every breath — these are not contaminants to be removed before you can sing. These are the sounds the sea is making, and the sea has been invited into the choir.
When you walk into a Sunday service with your interior storm intact and you sit through the worship feeling everything you are feeling — that is not a failure to worship. That is worship of a particular kind. It is the worship of someone who has brought the actual sea into the room, instead of leaving it outside the door and pretending it was not there.
The psalmist understood that creation, in its fullest sense, includes the unsettled parts. The rivers clap their hands — they do not flow silently in tidy banks. The mountains sing — they are not asked to be hills. The sea resounds — it is not domesticated into a pond. Worship that excludes the wild and the unsettled parts of creation is worship that has been quietly editing what God himself made and called good.
And by extension, worship that excludes the wild and unsettled parts of you — your anger, your grief, your fear, your unresolved doubt, your medicated calm, your unmedicated tremor — is worship that has been quietly editing what God himself made and is, in Christ, still loving.
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 you are feeling underneath. You do not have to manufacture the smile during the worship set. You do not have to pretend the storm has passed. The Lord knows the actual weather of your interior. He has not been fooled by your performance. He has been waiting, patiently, for you to bring the actual you into the room.
The worship that includes the storm is not lesser worship. It is, in some real ways, the worship the psalmist had in mind all along.
This permission is not a permission to sit in chaos forever. The new song, in its full shape, is moving somewhere. The chaos is incorporated — not endorsed as the final state. The Lord is, in the long arc of his work in you, doing something with the sea. He is not, however, asking you to silence the sea before he begins. He is starting his work in the sea.
If you have been carrying mental illness, or grief, or doubt, or any of the unresolved weather of an honest Christian life, this psalm is permission to bring it with you into worship.
The roaring is not a problem to be hidden.
The roaring, in some way you may not yet fully understand, has been added to the choir.
The next reflection sits with what the new song actually looks like in the body — the small, daily, embodied acts of continuing that are, in their own quiet way, the music being sung.
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
