Joy to the World

Rev. Kate Taber

September 14, 2025

Text: Psalm 98

For years, I worshipped at Christmas Lutheran Church in the Old City of Bethlehem in Palestine’s West Bank. Every Sunday, a faithful group of Palestinian Lutherans gathered for worship, just as we are doing this morning, singing hymns, passing the peace, listening to the word preached, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Every Sunday, they sang the doxology, that ancient praise song: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise God all creatures here below.” It’s even more beautiful in Arabic.

But in that context of occupation, such praise felt incongruous, absurd. The city is surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints, a 26-foot-high concrete wall, and settler highways that were off-limits to most of my fellow congregants.

Praise might feel incongruous for you here today, steeped as we’ve been in news of gun violence, assassinations, global conflict, genocide, deportations, and rising authoritarianism. Yet here we are, at 9 AM, singing of God’s holiness and mercy, and at 11 AM, praying that ancient prayer that proclaims God’s power and glory forever.

So why do we do it? How can we do it?

This psalm, Psalm 98, is a celebration song, painting a cosmic picture of God’s power and triumph, describing God as King, and commanding all of creation to make a raucous symphony of praise. You know it well, actually. It’s been sung as much or more than any other psalm for the past 250 years. You know it as “Joy to the World,” hymn writer Isaac Watts’ version of Psalm 98, now a feature of countless churches’ Christmas services around the world. Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king.

We don’t know exactly who wrote the actual psalm or when, but its language gives us clues that it was written more than a generation after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian Empire.

Do you understand what that means? The psalmist wrote a song of celebration for a refugee people whose only memories were of living in exile. Imagine.

This psalm’s portrayal of triumph and kingship becomes more powerful—or ludicrous— when you realize that it is being sung by a small community of refugees living in the midst of their conquerors’ empire. The psalmist’s audience is well aware that this Psalm is not their reality. Indeed, it is not a description of reality; it’s the promise of a new one. As renowned biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Sometimes in a world where the circumstances are hopeless…celebrative psalms are acts of radical hope (Praying the Psalms, p. 23-24).”

We know that praise psalms would have been sung in community. It was not intended for one singular voice to have to proclaim all alone. You do not have to recite this psalm or anything else on the merits of your personal faith alone. You are lifted and carried by the voices and the faith of everyone around you and who came before you. I remember a seminary friend explaining his love of the traditional Episcopal liturgy that got him through a difficult time in his life and in his faith; he said, “It believed for me when I could not believe.”

So, friends, do we praise because we feel it, because we believe it? Or do we praise so that we might better feel it and believe it? And— does having our community’s voices raised alongside ours bolster our ability to feel and believe it?

This past week I felt compelled to watch the funeral service for 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel, a victim of the Annunciation shooting. Fletcher had cherished experiences as a camper at Cathedral of the Pines Camp, and for the funeral service, the family requested that the camp director lead a couple of Fletcher’s favorite songs from camp. More than a thousand grieving and devastated people sang in unison that old spiritual, “I’ve got peace like a river.” You might know it.

[9 AM: Marie, can you help me out?……….sing several rounds of Peace Like A River ……… I believe that as that gathered group of grievers sang those words, “I’ve got peace like a river,” the words became more true. What was it like for you? Perhaps you began to imagine that what you were saying could become true, or perhaps you realized that it was already true. Perhaps you felt something loosen or lighten in you. Can you feel that in your body?]

[11 AM: The words are simply “I’ve got peace like a river in my soul” on repeat. I wonder— as they sang that line over and over, putting all of their breath into those words, feeling the resonance with all the other voices singing with them, with the music echoing through their bodies, did something shift for them? Could they begin to imagine that what they were singing could become true, or perhaps realize that it was already true? Perhaps something lightened or loosened in their bodies.]

Our bodies matter in our efforts to hope and have faith and to bring the just world we sing of into being. I know, I know, bodies are awkward. There’s a common perception I’ve encountered here at Plymouth that we are a congregation of people who are most comfortable when we stay in our heads. As a white Midwestern child of academics, I totally get it. But slowly I’m learning that our bodies might actually hold the key to our ability to access and spread peace and resilience and joy.

Our bodies hold a different kind of knowledge. The vagus nerve, or the ‘soul nerve’ as trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem calls it, is the unifying organ of the nervous system, engaging your throat, lungs, heart, gut and more. Think of the experience of having a pit in your stomach, your throat catching, your shoulders hunching, your pulse quickening, or your spirit soaring. That’s your soul nerve at work. It is there to spread the message that either you are in danger or you are safe, telling muscles to constrict or release, to move or rest, to activate or settle.

When we are surrounded by input that suggests to our bodies that we are not safe— physical threats but also threats to what we do, say, think, or value—its protective reactions are strong and fast. Our nervous system sends the message to fight, flee, or freeze before any information can reach our thinking brain. I wonder if any of your bodies experienced those kinds of reactions in the last days or weeks. It can look like tightness, pain, collapse, numbness, nervous energy, or disassociation.

If we don’t have the tools to reassure our bodies that we are safe, we will remain in states that prevent us from being present, from healing, from connecting with others, and—from meeting the moment.

Resmaa Menakem wrote in his book My Grandmother’s Hands, “Few skills are more central than the ability to settle your body. If you can settle your body, you are more likely to become calm, alert, and fully present, no matter what is going on around you. A settled body enables you to harmonize and connect with other bodies around you, while encouraging those bodies to settle as well. Gather together a large group of unsettled bodies and you get a mob or a riot. But bring a large group of settled bodies and you have a potential movement — and a force for tremendous good in the world. A calm, settled body is the foundation for health, for healing, for helping others, and for changing the world (p. 151-152).”

I’ve had the privilege of being part of a clergy cohort focused on learning and practicing ways of managing our nervous systems. The practices we’ve engaged in help our soul nerve to slow down its responses, to reach for an internal resource of grounding, and to be fully present with our bodies through discomfort and unease. Then, instead of being unconsciously reactive to what’s happening around us, we can choose our reactions with intention. We can grow. We can face what we need to face. We can become who God is calling us to be. I’m excited to bring the work of our cohort facilitator, Rachel Svanoe Moynihan, to Plymouth later this fall in both a workshop and a class on embodied spiritual practices—join us!

Friends, our spiritual tradition gives us many options for internal resources that can ground us and practices that can help our bodies regulate and connect. Just in this one hour together, we can experience the power of touch, of releasing and joining our energies through unison singing, breathing together in silence, and receiving audacious assurances of hope. And here we can experience belonging, our body’s most sought-after indicator of safety.

The psalmist knew. They knew what it could do for a traumatized, disillusioned people to sing together in unison, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises!” I imagine that the culture they created through that communal repetition of hope and joy cultivated their resilience. It nurtured their sacred imagination for a different future. And we know the rest of that story—they survived the exile. They returned, as all refugees should get the chance to do. They gave us songs and stories and rituals that continue to shape us. Joy to the World!

It’s our turn. How will you settle your body for the work of community-building and transformation? How will you find—and offer—belonging? What Psalm would you write to spark your people’s sacred imagination and creative power? Let’s find out. Amen.