Proper 4
Psalm 96
I love the
beginning of today’s psalm. “Sing
to the Lord a new song.” A new
song.
I’m going to
preach on the psalm today. Not
only do I like that first line, the other readings didn’t really grab me this
week. The Old Testament reading is
basically, “my God can whup your god.”
The passage from Galatians speaks to a specific time in history. The “false gospel” that Paul is
railing against is the teaching that Gentile converts to Christianity had to
become Jews first. Not a pressing
issue today. The Gospel is a
healing story, but we’re going to have healing stories for quite a few weeks to
come, so we can come back to that.
It’s interesting, though, that what Jesus does during “ordinary time,”
this long green season between Pentecost and Advent, is heal people.
Another
appealing feature of the psalm is that it tells us plainly what to do. It instructs us what to do as God’s
people. We are to praise God. This psalm, like many others, is a
summons to praise.
The first three
verses of the psalm contain six verbs in the imperative tense. If you remember your high school
grammar, the imperative tense is the one with the exclamation point after
it. It expresses a command. This psalm commands us to: Sing! Sing! Sing! Bless! Proclaim!
Declare!
We are to sing,
to declare our praise, to God.
We talk so much
about praising God in church, have you ever paused to ask, Why? Why do we praise God? Does God need our praise? Surely God doesn’t need our words to
build up God’s own self-esteem.
God doesn’t need to be affirmed or coddled or stroked, to be told what a
good job he has done.
So if God doesn’t
need praise, if praise isn’t offered to benefit God, why are we summoned to
praise? Because praising God
benefits us. We need to offer
praise to God.
Think about it… Praise is always offered in the context
of a relationship. We forget that
sometimes by watering down our praise of God into something abstract… “The Lord’s name be praised…” True praise is part of a relationship,
spoken as direct communication from one person to another. I praise you. I praise you, O God.
And when we
speak praise to God, we define our place our relationship with God, we reorient
ourselves with respect to God.
Praising God orients us into a position of joyful humility. Not just humility. Joyful humility. Celebratory thanksgiving.
Sing to the Lord
a new song. This psalm is the
psalmist’s new song. What is
yours? What is your song of
praise?
The psalms of
praise follow a typical pattern.
After the summons to praise, they recite the reasons God is worthy of
praise. In this psalm, the
psalmist praises God because God is sovereign over all of the created earth and
all the nations and maintains it in order.
Other psalms
praise God for other reasons. In
Psalm 139, the psalmist writes: I
praise you because I am wonderfully made.
What do you
praise God for? What is your psalm
of praise? I praise you, O God,
for…
For me,
today: I praise you, God for the
beauty of the earth and the wonder of spring. Also this weekend, I praise you, O God, for inspiring valor
and service in those who have offered and continue to offer their lives to
promote and protect freedom.
Remember, praise
is voiced directly to God. It’s
you speaking to God. I praise,
you, God!
Giving voice to
praise is important, but there are other ways to offer praise to God. I love the places in the psalms where
the sea, the fields, the mountains, trees and all creatures sing praise to
God. They obviously don’t praise
God using our language. Just by
being a glorious part of God’s creation, they praise God.
Thinking about
praising God also reminded me of a prayer from the Prayer Book, the General
Thanksgiving from the Daily Office.
It comes at the end of Daily Morning Prayer and Daily Evening Prayer.
[W]e pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies,
that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise,
not only with our lips, but in our lives,
by giving up our selves to your service,
and by walking before you
in holiness and righteousness all our days.
What does it
mean for us to praise God “not only with our lips, but in our lives?”
I think we do
that when we fulfill our vocation, whenever we do the work God calls each of us
to. The word “vocation” has unfortunately
become associated with a very limited meaning—a “vocation” to monastic life or
ordained ministry. But it just
means the work God calls us ALL to do.
Whether that is our life’s work over the grand arc of a lifetime or smaller
tasks within an individual day. I
want to encourage you to think of the half-dozen or dozen mini-vocations God
calls each of us to every day.
With that in
mind, listen to this oft-quoted passage from Frederick Buechner on “vocation” (Wishful Thinking).
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a [person] is called to by God.There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-Interest.By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Whenever we
fulfill our vocation, we praise God.
Today and
always, let us praise God: With
our lips AND with our lives!
