When the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant lockdowns first struck in the late winter of 2020, like any other sensible person I binge-watched the Lord of the Rings movies and listened to Stevie Wonder’s catalog on repeat in order to cope. But I also picked up a more spiritual discipline, for myself as much as for my people, in preparing a devotional that I called the Daily Psalmanac.
Over the course of the next nine months or so, I ate, drank, and breathed the Psalms. Though they have always had pride of place in my personal meditation, by reflecting on the psalter so deliberately during that time I noticed that not only their content but also their form began to shape my preaching. In particular, the phenomenon of parallelism.