I’m going to circle back to the beginning of our Psalms for All Seasons class when we looked at Psalm 122, which the Revised Common Lectionary assigns to the First Sunday of Advent for Year A.

The psalm is written from the perspective of someone standing in Jerusalem, remembering the beginning of the long pilgrimage.

I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD.” Now our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

The pilgrim admires Jerusalem, which unites the worship of the Lord with the justice of the king, and calls for his companions to pray for peace for the city.

The responsorial setting for the psalm in Psalms for All Seasons is “I Was Glad When They Said To Me” (PFAS #122) which is from a composition by David Haas and is written to be sung as a canon.

There are four other settings of Psalms 122 in Psalms for All Seasons. My favorite, which we ultimately sang in church during the First Week of Advent, was “Rejoice, Rejoice, Come Sing With Me” (PFAS #122A). We used it as an opening hymn with Joseph Slegers as our song leader. Each line consists of a leader’s part, followed by a response from the congregation. The response is “This is the house of God” for the first stanza and “We seek the peace of God” for the second. The text doesn’t keep closely to Psalm 122 so we used the psalm as a call to worship and responded with the hymn.

The remaining settings have very different moods. “I Rejoiced When I Heard Them Say” (PFAS #122B/LUYH #508) is a somber hymn by Bernadette Farrell that follows the text of the psalm closely in its five stanzas. The refrain of “Shalom, shalom, the peace of God be here/Shalom, shalom, God’s justice be ever near” could also be used as a response. (Here’s a sample of the song.) 

Much more joyful are “Let Us Go Rejoicing” (PFAS #122E) by Bob Hurd, which doesn’t appear in Lift Up Your Hearts, and “With Joy I Heard My Friends Exclaim” (PFAS #122F/LUYH #66), which does. The latter has lyrics from the 1912 Psalter (but apparently didn’t appear in earlier CRC hymnals) and is set to the English carol SUSSEX CAROL.

Other CRC hymnals include several other settings of Psalm 122, which we didn’t sing in class.

Lift Up Your Hearts also includes a short chorus based on verse 1: “I Was Glad” (LUYH #514), by M. Thomas Thangaraj, who has written hymns in Tamil for use in India.

The gray Psalter Hymnal has one setting of Psalm 122, “I Was Glad When They Came to Call Me” (PH87 #122). The blue Psalter Hymnal has three: “My Soul Was Glad” (PH57, #262), “With Joy and Gladness in My Soul” (PH57, #263), and “My Heart Was Glad to Hear the Welcome Sound” (PH57, #264).

Each week this semester we’ve been meeting in the sanctuary of our church during the Sunday School hour to read, discuss and sing Psalms. Our main hymnal has been Psalms for All Seasons, but anything in a Christian Reformed Church hymnal is fair game.

Our Psalm for this past Sunday (Dec. 8) was 121. We were displaced from the sanctuary by children practicing for next week’s Christmas lessons and carols service so we met in the Sunday School music room and Andrew played on the small upright piano there.

Psalm 121 is assigned by the Revised Common Lectionary to Second Sunday of Lent in Year A so one of the songs we sang may appear in our March 16 service.

Psalm 121 is the second of the Songs of Ascents, which were sung during pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and fits thematically between Psalm 120 and 122. Psalm 120 is about where we start our journey: from our “dwelling among those who hate peace.” Psalm 122 looks back at the beginning of the journey from the perspective of a pilgrim now standing within the gates of Jerusalem. Psalm 121 has the pilgrims anticipating their journey to Jerusalem and the dangers they will encounter.

The first line, “I lift up my eyes to the hills [or mountains]” has several possible meanings. I’ve thought of the hills as the first of the dangers listed in the psalm and a shorthand expression for all of them. “I lift up my eyes to the hills I’m going to be traveling and anticipate the dangers they contain.”

Another interpretation sees the hills as bad for another reason: they are filled with monuments to idol worship. “I lift up my eyes to the idols on the hills, but my help doesn’t come from them but from the LORD.” A third interpretation has mountains, viz., Zion, as God’s home. “I lift up my eyes to the mountains of Jerusalem—and above into the heavens where God is enthroned.”

The rest of the psalm describes the dangers of the journey—stumbling on rocks, heat from the sun, madness from the moon, evil (robbers and such)—and affirms that the Lord will protect us from them. The section about the Lord never sleeping probably references the Canaanite belief that the gods slept and had to be awakened (cf., the priests of Baal in their competition with Elijah). “Your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore” in verse 8 is a beautiful parallelism of “your life” in verse 9.

A good discussion of psalm can be found in Eugene Peterson’s book on the Songs of Ascents, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (1980).

The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes, but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us. (p. 38)

Psalms for All Seasons includes a responsorial setting for each psalm found in the RCL. These consist of short verses we sing as a refrain periodically during our reading of the psalms.

The Psalm 121 responsorial setting is “My Help Comes Only From the Lord” (PFAS #121D), which is one of the strangest we’ve encountered so far and seems rather grim. A refrain from another setting might work better for some services (see below).

Psalms for All Seasons includes seven other hymns based on Psalm 121. Most of them stick closely to the text of the psalm.

Of the older hymns, our favorite was “To the Hills I Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121A/LUYH #331/PH87 #121/PH57 #260), which also appears in Lift Up Your Hearts and its two most recent predecessors. Its lyrics are derived from the 1912 Psalter, the first English language hymnbook authorized for use in the CRC.

Another hymn with lyrics from the 1912 Psalter is the awkwardly titled “I to the Hills Will Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121E), which is set to an Appalachian tune (UNION).

All the other 121 settings in PFAS were written during the past 25 years.

Our favorite of these was Brian Doerksen’s “I Lift My Eyes Up to the Mountains” (PFAS #121H/LUYH #652/SNC #208), which we’ve sung during worship from Sing! A New Creation and which also appears in Lift Up Your Hearts. (The PFAS performance notes note that “The Fine on the G chord does not resolve. This is intentional, reflecting a sense of waiting and anticipation in the text.” This aspect of the song led to a discussion about the effectiveness of this technique and what other songs employ it.) There are multiple versions of the song on YouTube.

The third (of three) Psalm 121 settings that appears in Lift Up Your Hearts is Richard Smallwood’s gospel song “Total Praise” (PFAS #121B/ LUYH #420). Several performances of the song on YouTube are in a gospel style we were unable to replicate with our small group. Here is one by the Howard Gospel Choir. (Here is the official PFAS sample.)

The other English-language hymn is “Our Help Is from the Lord” (PFAS #121I), which has a catchy 6/8 refrain but more difficult stanzas. It might work well with a soloist or small group singing the stanzas. We also thought the refrain might work as a responsorial setting.

The remaining settings in PFAS are a Spanish song, “Alzo a los montes mis ojos”/”Lift Your Eyes Up to the Mountains” (PFAS #121C), and a Korean song “Naega sanul hyanghayo/To the Hills I Lift My Eyes” (PFAS #121F), which has a tricky rhythm. (Its performance notes claims that “This beautifully spare song is better ‘caught than taught.’”) Here is a sample of “Naega sanul hyanghayo.”

The 1987 Psalter Hymnal includes a pair of settings that were not included in the recent CRC hymnals. “I Lift My Eyes Up to the Hills” (PH87 #180) is set to GENEVAN 121 (i.e., the tune the psalm was set to in the 1551 Genevan Psalter). The rhythm was difficult to sing; it is the only tune in the Psalter Hymnal with a 866 887 meter. “I Lift Up My Eyes to the Mountains” (PH87 #448/PH57 #261) was better, but the LUYH editors definitely picked the best of the three Psalter Hymnal settings (“To the Hills I Lift My Eyes”) for the new hymnal.

The Blue 1957 Psalter Hymnal contained three Psalm 121 settings. The one that was not picked up for the 1987 Psalter was “Unto the Hills I Lift Mine Eyes” (PH57 #259); we didn’t try to sing it.

Psalms for All Seasons also includes a benediction (121G) by John Witvliet that would work well as a closing blessing:

May the Lord watch over you—
your going out and coming in,
your sleeping and waking,
your labor and your rest,
your dying and your rising.
Truly, the Lord will keep your life—forever. Amen.