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The Politics
of Praise
Psalm 146
2nd Sunday after
Pentecost
June 10, 2007
Paul Simpson Duke
We
give a lot of time in church to praising God.
Why is that? Plenty of what we
come here for is more useful, isn’t it?
We are here for the deepening of compassion, for guidance, for cleansing
and forgiveness, for the renewal of our sense of purpose, for encouragement and
comfort, for declaring what God wants for the world and what God wants from us. We’re here to be energized for living better
lives and bearing better witness in the world to the justice and healing love
of God.
Yet
so much time is spent on praise. In one
hour of worship every week we sing at least one hymn of praise. We sing the Doxology, the Gloria. We read a psalm that almost always speaks
praise. Praise is always part of the
prayers. The choral music and
instrumental music very often express praise.
The bulletin tells us that even the flowers are given to the glory of
God. And this building itself, more
beautiful than it had to be, wasn’t just built for utility; our forebears
raised it to the glory of God. The
stone, the wood, the mortar joints are visible, steady songs of praise.
And
the thing is, God doesn’t need it.
Imagine a God so small: “Praise me!
Tell me how wonderful I am!”
Laughable! – though I do wonder
this: having sung to the world for ages and ages a song of such beauty and
love, how good it would be for the Singer to hear some echo of the song sung
back.
Still,
it isn’t for God’s need but for our need that we sing. If we live beneath the stars and give no
expression of wondering thanks, if we sense that all things are held in
gracious hands and stifle amazement, if we hear the great music of life and
sing nothing back – it stops us up, makes us numb and dull. It makes us dishonest too. C. S. Lewis said , “Praise is inner health
made audible.” We are not well if nothing
in us opens to expressions of praise.
But
there is more. To a startling extent,
praise is subversive. At its center is a
cry of radical freedom under God. There
are forces, people, institutions, and ideas making ultimate claims on us
all. These powers exert control to shape
and manage our world as they will. But
to live in praise of God is to assert the limits of all other powers, to get
free of their grip and grow smarter about where we put our trust.
Psalm
146 says it very well. Four opening
shout of praise are followed by this:
Do not put your trust in
princes,
in mortals, in whom there
is no help.
When their breath departs,
they return to the earth;
on that
very day, their plans perish. (vv. 3–4)
No matter the claims of any person
or system, no matter the resources and strength, the promises or threats, no
matter how fearsome or seductive they may be, every last one will expire, and
all their strength and promises and plans will vanish. Every person and system that we fear, every
person and system that we had hoped to trust with everything, in the end will
disappoint and disappear.
Have
you picked your candidate for president?
You’ve only got a year and five months – have you found some enthusiasm
for one? Maybe you have, maybe you will;
you choose, you care, you vote. But you
won’t get caught up, will you, in thinking your candidate can save us and never
disappoint us? To praise the One and
only One who will never disappoint is to be sane and clear about the hard
limits on everybody’s promises and plans.
This goes
for all our longings for people who would perfectly satisfy us. The dream dies hard that someone out there,
or some group of someones, could be everything we need, or that the people
we’re already with ought to be everything we need. And since they are not, we are devastated,
disappointed, and unforgiving inside our delusional hopes for perfectly happy
relationships. “Do not put your trust in
princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.”
If we were to place our ultimate hopes only in God , who knows, we might
find it easier to accept our fellow mortals as they are.
To
live the life of praise is to lose our illusions about the ultimate reliability
of any other power. This is the politics
of praise, reassessing where the real power lies and rearranging our final
trust and allegiance accordingly. Walter
Bruegemann says that when Psalm 146 repeatedly asserts what God does, it is
naming “under it breath” the powers that cannot deliver.
The Lord
[not the White House] sets the prisoners free;
the
Lord [not the terrorists] opens the eyes of the blind.
The
Lord [not the free-market system] lifts up those who are
bowed
down.
the
Lord [not the church organization] loves the righteous.
The Lord
[not my fondest dream] watches over the strangers,
upholds
the orphan and the widow.
Praise
the Lord!”1
It’s
easy to say and is often said that faith in God is fantasy. But on such words of praise as these, faith
in God begins to sound like realism.
That better government can save us, that’s
fantasy. That the church could ever get
it right” – fantasy! That science can
save us, that “dialogue” can heal us? – fantasy! But believing that justice, deliverance, and
redemption in the world will only come because of God’s gracious power – and
trusting God to make it so – that’s the closest we may ever come to realism.
And
so it turns out that the praise of God is urgent. And of course it isn’t just about just words
and feelings. It’s about a disposition
of the life, standing on new grounds for gladness, and practicing hope in God
by what we do and by who we are becoming together.
Three
young voices said it here this morning, as countless others have said it on
being baptized: Jesus Christ is Lord. Whether or not we noticed, there’s a
fierceness in those words. No earthly
claims to power now will have any say.
And if we believe it, we are repeating the same fierce and joyous praise
every time we join our voices join saying: “yours
is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”
We
can live as if it were so. Because it
is.
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