This post on using Christian psalm collects in our Psalms for All Seasons Sunday school class (with Psalm 130 as an example) is a sequel my earlier post on Psalm 130 and the post on my Psalm 130 Lenten Litanies of Confession and Assurance.

My daily prayer book for the past 13 years has been Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer, which is an abridgement of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Book of Common Worship. Each psalm in the book is followed by a short prayer, or “collect,” that interprets the psalm in an explicitly Christian manner. These have spurred my imagination about the psalms and I went looking for more of them to share with our class. Each week we pray and discuss several of them.

I’ve found these psalm collects in four books: (1)  Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer; (2) Psalms for All Seasons; (3) Reading the Psalms with Luther (Concordia Publishing House, 2007), which contains a brief introduction to each psalm and one or more prayers by Martin Luther; and (4) Eugene Peterson’s Praying with the Psalms (Zondervan 1993), which contains a brief psalm-based devotion for each day of the year. (In my Minor Prophets class I used prayers by Calvin, which can be found in his commentaries. However, his Psalm commentaries have no prayers.)

By way of illustration, here are the five prayers on Psalm 130 we used in class:

The prayer from Psalm for All Seasons (p. 848) understands “the depths” as “the depths of our sin” and contrasts them with “the height of your mercy and the breadth of your forgiveness” that lead to “new life in Jesus”:

When we realize the depth of our sin, O God, we are driven into dark despair. It is only when we realize the height of your mercy and the breadth of your forgiveness, that we begin to see the dawning of new life in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to you, O Lord our Redeemer. Amen.

The Psalm 130 collect in Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer (p. 364) has God joining us “in the depths of our darkest despair, in the suffering of Jesus Christ”:

O God, you come to us in the depths of our darkest despair, in the suffering of Jesus Christ. By the rising your Son, give us new light to guide us, that we may always praise your holy name, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Luther’s psalm collects often address Reformation theological concerns and his own struggles. His Psalm 130 collect (p. 316) focuses on Jesus’ “sacrifice for our sins”:

God, our Father, who is rich in mercy and with whom is plenteous forgiveness, remember not the sins of our youth, nor our transgressions. Blot them out for the sake of Jesus Christ, Your beloved Son, who became the sacrifice for our sins. For the sake of His crimson blood let our sins be forgotten, and let them be imputed to us no more. Amen.

Eugene Peterson has Psalm 130 spread over three days and includes original prayers for two of them. The prayer for vv. 5-6  connects the waiting for the Lord like watchmen waiting for the morning in the psalm to Jesus’ disciples’ failure to watch and pray in Gethsemane and our failure to “stay awake to your commands and alert to your presence”:

You, Lord, commanded disciples to watch and pray, and not long after, you found them sleeping. I have similarly failed to stay awake to your commands and alert to your presence. Forgive my sluggishness and help me to make the most of the time. Amen.

Peterson’s prayer for vv. 7-8 calls on God to “let down the rope of your redemption and pull me to the heights”:

Father, into the depths of my need—my sin, my loneliness, my guilt, my failure, my inadequacy—let down the rope of your redemption and pull me to the heights where I may live completed and whole in Jesus Christ. Amen.