Is There a Third Verse?

A Sermon for the Lent Lunch Series
Monday, March 9, 2026, at First United Methodist Church, Hot Springs, AR

Reading: Psalm 95

“I don’t like that second verse.” My friend Bill told me that during Morning Prayer. It was just him and me. He interrupted the service to make sure I knew that he did not like the second verse. What he meant by that was the second part of today’s psalm, verses 8-11, about hardening our hearts. Maybe we didn’t like it either. It ends with that foreboding message: “Therefore I swore in my anger that they should not enter my rest.” Bill said, “I don’t like that second verse. Is there a third verse?” 

We Episcopalians tend to know this psalm. It’s one of the opening psalms for Morning Prayer, and for many of us it’s a favorite. But we stick to verses 1-7 usually–or the first verse, as Bill would have called it. “Come, let us sing to the Lord! Let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation.” We join our praises with those of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. Holy Scripture takes seriously that our duty and even our delight are found in the praise of God, as we lift our voices as one to the Maker and Redeemer of all things. It is a joy to sing praises to God, to commune with God in worship. This is what we were made for. We like that first verse. 

But then there’s the second. During Lent, on Ash Wednesday and on Fridays, we Episcopalians read all of Psalm 95 during Morning Prayer. We read all of Psalm 95 yesterday at St. Luke’s. That last part has that Lent flavor, does it not, with its warning about hardening our hearts against the voice of the Lord? For like old Pharaoh in the story of the Exodus, we can do that if we’re not careful. Holy Scripture takes seriously our capacity to shut out God, to calcify that heart of flesh that God desires for us, to turn from God’s ways of love and grace and to our own ways of sin and death. 

Psalm 95 holds both of those things together. We hold our joy and the delight of our souls, the height of our praise, the glorious song of the angels that breaks out into our midst–we hold that in tension with our proclivity to turn away, to take our eyes off of Jesus, to sink into the mire of our own making, to want to turn back to Egypt with its illusions of fleshpots. It certainly captures the experience of our forebears in the wilderness. You remember the story? They cross the Red Sea and Miriam picks up a tambourine; the people dance and sing; they are joyful before God. But five minutes later–five minutes later they are complaining; they forget the wonderful deeds of the Lord; they are conspiring to kill Moses and making a golden calf and yearning for Egypt. That’s verse one and verse two. 

They are not alone. If we are honest, we find ourselves there with them. We sing a song of praise to God, and then we spew hatred and deceit. We lift our hands to the Holy One, and then we make a fist and hurt our neighbor. We put on our best for Sunday morning, and we ignore the beggar at the church door. Verse one and verse two. Both are there. 

And so we pray the ancient prayer:
Lord, have mercy upon us. 
Christ, have mercy upon us. 
Lord, have mercy upon us. 

Like you and me, my friend Bill knew about verse two. Like you and me, he had lived it. He was a sinner in need of God’s grace. And like you and me, he had experienced pain and abuse at the hands of others. He was broken in need of God’s love. He told me about all of that as we sat together for prayer. He said maybe he didn’t like it because it was the truth about him; it hit too close to home. “Me too, Bill.” 

“But,” he asked. “Is there a third verse?” Well, you can see in your hymnal as well as I that the psalm ends there. 11 verses that end with anger, with not entering into the rest of God. That seems to be the end. But our older Prayer Book’s Morning Prayer service had a different ending. It had a third verse. It tacked on a couple verses from the next psalm, Psalm 96. The old Prayer Book ends the song this way: 

O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness; *
let the whole earth stand in awe of him.
For he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth, *
and with righteousness to judge the world
and the peoples with his truth.

Psalm 96 tells us that God’s judgment is not about smiting us in the wilderness, but about mercy and reconciliation–and for that we can’t help but sing. The psalm tells us that all creation, from the sea to the trees to the people of God–all creation shouts with joy at the promise of being made new in the light of God’s presence, in the power of God’s love, in the pledge of God’s grace. My friends, there is a third verse–and it’s that we are made God’s children and God will never let us go. There is a third verse–and it’s that we are redeemed by the One who came down from heaven to take our nature upon himself and to suffer death, even death on a cross. There is a third verse–and it’s that sin and death do not get to say who we are, but only the Spirit of God who lives within us and who raises us up on the Last Day. O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory? There is a third verse, and it trumpets a new creation on Easter morning.

My friend Bill welcomed that Happy Morning of the Church Triumphant two weeks ago. By grace he entered the rest of God. He lived Psalm 95–the singing of God’s goodness and the frailty of human nature, held together in tension in one human life. But now he sings a new song–he sings that eternal third day promise of salvation, of justice, of healing and wholeness and new life at last. And so will we.