"Praise the Lord"
Dr. George Sinclair, Pastor
1 Kings 17:8-16 (17-24); Ps. 146; Gal. 1:11-24; Luke 7:11-17
June 6, 2010
“Praise the Lord.”
I tried to find another sermon title. “Praise the Lord” seemed, well, it just didn’t fit,or I didn’t want it to fit, because whenever I hear Praise the Lord I think Jim and Tammy Bakker and the PTL Club aka Pass the Loot.
Jim and Tammy Fay broke onto the national cable TV scene about the time faith took hold in me. As a college freshman, I have vivid memories of Jim and Tammy chatting effortlessly about what “the Lord” was doing in their lives and how they just “praised the Lord” for all of his goodness. Little did any know they were also “passing the loot.”
In those same years, I became attached to a group of Pentecostal Christians on the campus of Appalachian State University. The group did not have a formal leader, at least not one formally trained. As I recall, we met in the Episcopal Church, though I’m a little fuzzy on the details. It’s been a long time—almost forty years. It seems we worshipped in their chapel or sometimes the fellowship hall on Sunday nights or Mondays. What I remember from those days is that “Praise the Lord” was frequently heard. In fact, it was tribal lingo. People who “praised the Lord” were “in.” They had been born again. They were baptized in the Spirit. They spoke in tongues. They were the “real” Christians. And they “praised the Lord.”
For a time, I “praised the Lord” with the best of them. It seemed like the thing to do, so I did it. And then one night we were in the Fellowship Hall celebrating Christian birthdays. How do you celebrate a Christian Birthday? We stood in a circle and sang Happy Birthday only we didn’t sing Happy Birthday to Jim or Sally or Kate congratulating them for their born on date. We congratulated them for the day they were “Born Again” by their heavenly father.
I treaded uneasily on this Pentecostal ground. Having been confirmed in the Presbyterian tribe, I was not altogether convinced or enthused, but I wanted to fit in so I sang the Happy Birthday to Being Born Again song but not with utter conviction.
One night after a rousing round of the Happy Birthday to Being Born Again song we were standing around acting like normal 18-19 year olds—chatting and flirting and generally doing what 18 and 19 year olds do on a Monday night—when one guy, a great big fellow, a football player type, hopped up on one of the Episcopalian fellowship hall tables. You know the kind—those ever present church tables that open and close and fold. The big guy jumped on one of those using it like a sofa. And the folding table folded. It collapsed under his weight spilling him onto the floor: “Praise the Lord!” he shouted.
Now it’s funny what you remember when you were eighteen. But I remember that night like it was yesterday. I can see it as plain as day. And I’m not entirely sure why that moment stuck with me, but it strikes me now, as it did then, that praising the Lord for a collapsed fellowship hall table is a misuse of the Lord’s name, a trivialization of God’s praise.
Not long after that episode, I departed from the Pentecostal, Singing Happy Birthday to Being Born Again group. I don’t fully understand why I left, but I did, and ever since I’ve had a bad taste for that kind of Christianity.
Likewise, I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to hear Handel’s Halleluiah Chorus, which is about as far from the Happy Birthday to Being Born Again song as you can get musically, but I don’t like to hear the chorus anymore not because of any distaste for Handle. I think Handle’s Messiah is absolutely beautiful and it moves me to tears, but it’s been ruined by crass commercialization. I don’t want to hear the Halleluiah Chorus sung by chipmunks as mall muzak nor do I wish to hear it used as the punch line to ads selling laxatives, which is what I heard last Christmas.
“Halleluiah” means “Yahweh be praised.” Yahweh is the divine name revealed to Moses by the burning bush commonly translated “I am.” Halleluiah is not an exclamation point.
“Praise the Lord, O my soul.”
The Psalmist is having an argument with himself. He knows he should praise the Lord. But praise is not coming easily. The psalmist must convince himself that he should “praise the Lord” not on his lips only—there to be sure—the singer knows he should sing God’s praise, but true praise comes not from our lips only but our soul, nephesh is the Hebrew word for it. Nephesh is that part of us without which there is not an “us.” Nephesh is what God breathes into clay making clay, life.
The singer finds it difficult to summon praise from his nephesh. So he reminds himself, he teaches himself—“Praise the Lord.” Praise does not come automatically. There’s nothing automatic about praise because life, real life, is hard. It is contested. It is full of trouble. Halleluiah is not an exclamation point for trivia.
There are 150 psalms in the Bible. They are divided into five books. Book 1 begins with King David and continues through the divided monarchy to the destruction of the kingdoms told in Books 2 and 3. Book 4 of the Psalms takes us through the Babylonian exile, while Book 5 recalls return from exile and rebuilding of the Temple.
Lament dominates Book 1 of the Psalms. Fifty-nine percent of Book 1 is lament—“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” By the time we get to Book 5 lament takes a back seat but not by much. Psalms of praise, choruses like Psalm 146, constitute a slim majority, fifty-two percent, to be precise of Book 5.
It is not without reason that we turn to the Psalms at times of death, that we pray the psalms, that we sing the psalms in times of sorrow, in times of anguish, trial, bitterness, anger, questioning. The people who birthed the Bible’s hymnbook knew the human condition. Their praise came in spite of what they saw. Praise, which is true praise, is never glib. Praise is not flattery. God does not need or desire flattery. Praise for the Lord, comes from a different place, for different reasons. Praise is not lip-service. Praise comes from the soul surprised by God. Praise comes from the soul smitten by God. Praise comes from the soul which hungers and thirsts for God.
“Praise the Lord, O my soul! I will praise the Lord as long as I live.”
“I will praise the Lord as long as I live.” That’s what the singer is trying to convince himself—to praise God for as long as he lives, not just in the good times, not just when everything is sunshine. Praise can be fleeting. Any fool can fall in love, get religion, get saved. It is something else again to praise the Lord for “as long as we live,” “till death do us part.” Praise like that is unreasonable. Yes, reasonable people praise God but praise is always beyond reason. Paul put it this way, “Who hopes for what he sees?” If we always hope for what we see, Paul says, we don’t need God we only need to be extremely clever or more so than we were the day before, faster on our feet, more adroit, better managers.
“Who hopes for what he sees?” If we can see it, it isn’t hope. We hope for what we don’t see. That’s how hope works. If hope never reaches beyond our ability, what hope is that? That’s always a temptation, to pare hope down, to keep it within reach, within reason, to make it manageable so that we become agents of change or progress, managers of destiny. After all, didn’t God say—“Tend my garden. Feed my sheep.” Those are management jobs—or so we think. Tending and keeping is within our pay grade. We can handle tending and keeping. But some things refuse to be kept or tended. Even when we are extremely clever, or very good at tending and keeping, things go wrong. The world resists management. Things break. They get messy. And we get messy. We get covered in our mistakes. Drive down to Dauphin Island this afternoon, or in a few weeks, and see just how messy life can get. Even the best managers, even sincere ones, get covered in their mistakes.
“Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals in whom there is no help.” Praise is not only threatened by momentarily allegiance, it can also be mis-located—“Don’t put your trust in mortals.”
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address at the American University. In that speech, Kennedy said, “Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can be solved by man. No problem of human destiny,” Kennedy observed, “is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”
Jon Meacham, writing in Newsweek, said he thought about Kennedy’s remarks as he thought about BP and the Obama White House fighting to avoid a growing list of failing institutions, among them big banks and the Catholic Church. Meacham could have listed but did not cite the “failing” magazine he manages. At any rate, Meacham observes that governments and corporations fail for the same reason that people fail: “they are imperfect, because nothing is perfect.”
The danger of that observation, Meacham admits, is that it may be taken as an excuse rather than an explanation. And right now, especially in view of the oil spill and the energy crisis it represents, we need explanations not excuses, because explanations lead to solutions rather than despair over life’s intractability.
“Do not trust in mortals.”
The psalmist does not say abandon all leaders. The psalmist does not say abandon all institutions. To borrow from Meacham, the psalmist does not say “Life is imperfect, intractable, get over it.” Rather, the psalmist says “Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” The psalmist cries, “Trust God not man.” Trusting God and not man, living with hope, does not mean we abandon the object of God’s affection; namely, the world and our neighbors. Trusting God as our help and hope means we turn even more toward the world and our neighbor, but we turn with our eyes wide open or rather with our hearts firmly fixed on God and not the human institutions and neighbors we love. We don’t misplace our trust.
Anyone who wants a reason to cop out on the human race doesn’t have to look very far. Likewise, it’s easy enough to cop out on institutions—people are no damn good. You can’t trust them or the institutions they build: churches, government, oil companies, banks. When does the revolution begin? The psalmist doesn’t do that. Not trusting mortals who perish along with their plans does not mean sticking our heads in the sand, or running away, or starting over. When we praise the Lord we don’t give up on the world because God does not give up. God remains faithful—forever—most especially to those we least expect to have any reason to be happy or hopeful—the oppressed, the hungry, prisoners, the blind, the bowed down, strangers, orphans, widows—the Lord watches over them all.
We praise the Lord not because people are good but because God keeps faith—forever. We praise the Lord not because everything is right as rain but because God “executes justice.” We praise the Lord because God “reigns forever.” We live with hope. We do not turn away from mortals who can’t be trusted, we turn toward them knowing that the Lord is worthy of praise—forever, for as long as we live. Praising the Lord enlarges our heart. Praising the Lord inspires compassion. Praising the Lord makes us more determined than ever to love mortals for whom the Lord died and rose again. “Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live.” Amen.