Psalm 136:1 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Thanksgiving Wednesday, November 25, 2020 “For His Mercy Endure Forever”
Twenty-six times. I counted. I am not sure whether any of you were counting. I will even admit, I wasn’t totally sure how well it would go over, and how people would feel about saying the same phrase over and over for a total of twenty-six times in our worship service this evening: “For his mercy endures forever.” That is the Psalm. Psalm 136 is twenty-six verses, none of them particularly long, and all of them ending with the very same refrain, “For his mercy endures forever.” There is a lot that we don’t know about how exactly Psalms were used—the particulars of the music or the accompaniment, for example, and even the precise pronunciation of the Hebrew words as the ancients would have said them. But there is no mistaking the structure of this Psalm. The first verse is common to many Psalms: “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. For his mercy endures forever.” But no other Psalm takes the last portion of the verse and repeats it again with every single verse that follows. It makes many assume that this Psalm would have been sung by antiphonal choirs, one choir on one side singing the changing, sometimes almost narrative portion, the first half of each verse and another choir on the other side singing the refrain again and again. We at least got a sense of that as we read it together responsively this evening. So, is it too much to repeat that line twenty-six times? Did you get an uneasy feeling somewhere around verse three or four wondering just how many times you would be asked to say it? Did you want at some point to just stop and say, “I think I get the picture; we don’t have to keep repeating ourselves”? I understand. We have certain attention spans and preferences and (yes, I need to mention it) sinful natures that don’t agree with so much repetition. But repetition itself is a message, isn’t it? It makes a point. It drives it home. This Psalm has a clearly enunciated focus that would be almost completely impossible to miss: “For his mercy endures forever.” And interspersed with those refrains are lines and verses that lay out a number of reminders of the mercy of God, specifically his mercy as he showed it to his Old Testament people. At first the Psalm addresses creation. It recounts how God made the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon. It reminds us of his wisdom and understanding. It reminds us that he created the world for his people and for their benefit. The sun rules the day. The moon rules the night. The cycle continues predictably and allows us to work and to rest and to depend on it and other cycles, like the seasons, that allow people to grow crops and raise animals. What mercy God shows all people in creating and preserving his incredible creation. What mercy he shows in giving people physical blessings. As we think about and as we celebrate a national holiday of Thanksgiving, I think this is what most people associate with that holiday. We celebrate in the late fall as a recognition of the harvest that has come in all over our country. We pause and count our blessings, and physical things are probably the blessings that come to mind most readily. What are you thankful for? I am thankful for food and clothing, my home and family, my friends, my toys, my money. And it is good to be thankful for those things. It is good to realize and acknowledge that all of those blessings come from God, a fact that is not recognized by many who celebrate this holiday. God created everything in the universe around us, the things that we see and notice and the things that we do not. He set the pattern of days and weeks and seasons and years for our benefit, the cycles of cold and heat, the moments for planting and for harvesting. He gives us the ability to work and earn a living. He gives us the wisdom and the talents that we use in our lives and livelihoods and relationships. We have much to be thankful for. Having some sort of warm feeling about thankfulness and appreciating what we have is not the same as thanking the Lord and Creator of the universe for the blessings that he has given us. That’s what we intend to do this Thanksgiving. “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. For his mercy endures forever.” Another section of Psalm 136 speaks about the history of God’s people, Israel. Specifically, it is a recounting of how God brought them out of slavery in Egypt and ultimately gave them their own land, a land that centuries earlier he had promised to give to them. It recounts God striking down the Egyptian firstborn children, the last of ten plagues. It revisits the Red Sea that was divided in two for the people to walk through as they escaped Pharaoh, Egypt’s ruler, and his army. It recites how the people traveled through the wilderness, defeating kings