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To you, Lord, I called; to the Lord I cried for mercy: “What is gained if I am silenced, if I go down to the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? Hear, Lord, and be merciful to me; Lord, be my help.” You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent. Lord my God, I will praise you forever. (Psalm 30:8-12)

Jesus said of his disciples at the time of his triumphal entry: “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.”  Praise is a necessary aspect of being human.  It is so fundamental, in fact, that psalm 30 uses it as a reason for the Lord to intervene with mercy.  For who praises God from the grave? 

Harkening back to some earlier psalms, there is a realization that the silence of God toward us can feel like death.  But psalm 30 suggests that our silence is also significant.  Our participation in giving voice to the praises of God is essential to life. 

And so the psalmist cries out for mercy not by making any claim to their own goodness or deserving, but rather to the silence that results when a faithful person no longer proclaims the saving work of the Lord in praise.  Because that is a loss of the necessary vitality of life and a diminishment of the glory that is due to God.  So will God not step in with mercy and help so that his very own mission in this world and through his people may go on?

Jesus expands this notion beyond where the psalm does: not only is human praise necessary to life, but the praise of God is a necessary work of all of creation—including the dust and the stones. 

We, together with everything else in the world, are created to give thanks.  We are created to tell good stories of God’s faithfulness, provision, and salvation.  We are created to point back to God in all that we say and all that we do.  We are created to witness to God through our words of praise and our grateful living that is ever more fully conformed to the likeness of Christ.  This is the mission of God that continues and broadens in the work of Jesus. 

Psalm 30, therefore, is deep at the heart and foundation of everything it means to be a person of faith.  Not only because it places witness and praise of God at the heart of human life, but also because it tells the story of God’s faithfulness in praise. 

God does save.  He does bring from death to life.  He does turn our wailing into dancing, clothes us with joy, and transforms our silence into singing.  Not merely so that we can sing his praises, but so that we might know, deeply and personally, the song of God that is ours to sing! 

And as we do: all creation joins, and all the world listens in as the mission of God in Christ goes forward into the world in the power of the Spirit.