Tears That Have Already Become Seeds
May 22, 2025 · Psalm 126 (With Shouting Joy) by Brian Sauve · Psalm 126:1-6
When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them. The Lord hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad. Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in the south. They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.
Psalm 126:1-6
Psalm 126 is a song of return. The first three verses describe what restoration feels like: disorienting, almost unbelievable, like waking from a dream. "Then was our mouth filled with laughter." Joy so sudden it surprised them.
But the psalm does not stop at the memory of joy. It moves to petition. "Turn again our captivity, O Lord." The people who experienced restoration are still asking for more of it. They have not arrived. They are holding the memory of what God did and using it to ask God to do it again.
The final verses give the psalm its texture. "They that sow in tears shall reap in joy." This is not a promise that sadness is temporary in the trivial sense. It is the assertion of an agricultural logic applied to grief: something is happening in the weeping, something is being planted, something will come of it. The tears are not wasted. They are seed.
Brian Sauve's setting holds all of this together without simplifying it. The arc of the song, sorrow to joy to celebration, moves through each register honestly. There is a musical memory of lament in the arrangement even as the song builds toward rejoicing.
What Psalm 126 refuses to do is bypass the grief in order to get to the celebration faster. The seeds are sown in tears. The person going forth is weeping. And then he returns with sheaves. The joy comes through the weeping, not around it.
This is one of the reasons the Psalms have been the church's prayer book for three thousand years. They know the shape of human experience. They do not offer a shortcut from pain to praise, but they do insist that praise is where the path leads.
Sauve's song is a way of praying this psalm out loud, with your voice and your body, in community. There is something about singing "they that sow in tears shall reap in joy" that is different from reading it. You are not just agreeing with the proposition. You are practicing the movement.