Scripture: Psalm 42; Psalm 146; Luke 13:10-17
I confess that this sermon was born out of a sense of duty. I was talking last week about voices of lamentation, particularly those which rise from people who have been abused by people they trusted within the church. I was thinking too of all the voices of lamentation that grow out of that situation, where there is sexual abuse by clergy. And I was reflecting more broadly on all the different voices of lamentation there are around us…and within us, and our need not to shut out or shut down those voices.
As I immersed myself in thinking about all that, I began to feel the heaviness of what I was involved in, not just the specific topic I was mostly dealing with last week, but the heaviness of a more general sense of lament that can so easily, and so insistently, spread itself out over our lives in these times we live in. Even as I was reflecting on how important it is for us not to deny, not to turn away, from the voices of lament all around and within, even as I was reflecting on all the good that can come from stories of lament being told honestly and heard with care and diligence, even as I was reflecting on all this, I was beginning to think that there was a piece of the picture that was missing. I was beginning to wonder: What about praise? We are engulfed in lament. What about praise? Where does that fit in? I was beginning to wonder whether we have lost our capacity for praise, whether I have lost my capacity for praise. I was beginning to feel that after asking us all to focus so much on lament last week, I would have to have something to say about praise this week.
That’s what I mean about duty. As I was doing the sermon last week, my heart was not overflowing with praise, and of course I could not just decide then and there that my heart would be overflowing with praise this week either. But I could decide to at least acknowledge that lament is not the whole story here. There is more, so much more, to the life of the spirit than lament. There is more to life itself than lament. And I was feeling, still feel, the need, the duty to somehow say that out loud this morning, even if for some it may fall into the category of the obvious.
It’s also something of a natural topic—praise—given that I’ve committed myself to using the Psalms as my preaching texts for the summer. It was not hard to ground the theme of lament in the Psalms. The Psalms are filled with lament, and the one Cathie chose to be read last week was merely one of the psalms in which lament was expressed in pretty much undiluted form. But if there is any emotion, any sensitivity, that comes through in the Psalms more than lament, it’s praise. There are 150 Psalms. 81 of them offer or urge praise to God, directly, as in “Praise the Lord!”, as in “enter God’s gates with thanksgiving and God’s courts with praise”, and that’s not counting all the Psalms that may in fact offer praise but don’t use the word. “O lord you are my rock and my fortress, my hope and my deliverer.” If I’m going to preach on the Psalms I better preach on praise. Again, duty.
Of course duty is not an ideal attitude with which to approach the subject of praise. Praise that is offered from a sense of obligation rather than spontaneously, praise that comes from a conscientious heart rather than an overflowing heart, praise that is measured or thoughtful, rather than gushing, is something less than praise. In fact even to be self-conscious in offering praise probably makes it something less than praise. It’s one of those things where it’s a lot better to do it than talk about it. So there’s a certain irony in even giving a sermon on the theme of praise. But then that’s nothing new for sermons. Many sermons, maybe most sermons, are about things that would be better practiced than preached.
But I have other problems too with preaching about praising God. I guess I feel like I’m just not a very good praiser of God. Maybe it’s because I’m such an extreme introvert that I just don’t gush about much of anything. But there are some things that for me do get in the way of praising God.
The suspicion, for instance, that there is something artificial or superficial about praise. When I find myself in an environment where the language of praise is being used freely and where an attitude of praise seems to be expected of me, I can get hostile. And the more a worship leader says, “C’mon now everybody, let’s give God the glory. Let’s lift up our hearts. Let’s praise the Lord”—(you see, I can’t even do a good imitation)—the more a worship leader encourages me to praise God, the more hostile I become, and the less I feel like praising the Lord.
I do realize that this is at least partly my problem. During my last couple of years in Chicago there was a person who came on Sunday mornings at the church I was serving to help lead worship. The church was an all white congregation in a mostly African American community, and in order to demonstrate their desire to become an interracial congregation, they had decided to call an African American pastor to share in the leading of worship.
Ray, the pastor, was a person I had met through his wife, who was someone I had gotten to know fairly well mostly by being in a clergy Bible study group together. Khani knew of our situation and had asked if we would be interested in having her husband join us at the church. He was a Chicago policeman who was also a minister and who was looking for a place to get back into the ministry on a limited basis. She warned me though that Ray was a different person from her. What that turned out to mean was that Ray was the kind of person who when he would ask me how I was doing and I would say “fine”, he would say, “Praise God”. The fact that I clearly was unsure how to respond to this, and that I didn’t use the phrase in normal conversation, probably made us both feel a little uncomfortable.
But I knew I was just going to have to get over it. Ray was a good minister, and in every way a good person. He was capable, caring, sincere, compassionate—and full of praising God. I had a very different style. (People kindly said we complemented each other well.) He had to deal with me. Only fair that I should have to deal with him.
But it wasn’t easy, because although I knew this was partly my problem, I also continued to feel that this “praise place” that Ray seemed to be in was not a place I could comfortably occupy, not just because of some personality quirk, his or mine, or even because of different backgrounds, but because I truly did and do have this feeling that adopting this praise mindset means shutting down our capacity for and our willingness to lament, shutting out the pain of people around us, shutting off the sources of pain inside us, limiting our capacity for deep self-knowledge, for compassion, for growth. I left Chicago before Ray and I had a chance to talk about this. I now wish that I had started such a conversation, because I know I would have benefitted from it. As it is, I find myself carrying on that conversation with myself.
I do feel I need to get better at praising God. But notice that I say I need to get better. I do not say God needs me to be better. Once upon a time I had a problem with that too, because sometimes our language implies, even the language of scripture implies, that God somehow needs or commands our praise. This notion that God wants, or even appreciates, flattery from us used to offend me, or offend my sense of who God is. I frankly wasn’t too thrilled about offering my praise to a god who asked or required that of me.
This one I have managed to resolve for myself. I am now clear and convinced that it is not God who needs our praise. It is I who needs to praise. It is I who needs to find that place of praise within myself and open it up and enlarge it. It is I who needs to find the songs to sing and the prayers to speak, songs and prayers of praise. It is I who need to offer the praise, not God who needs to receive it.
And I am not sure I need my praise to be offered in some direct way to God. I simply need to have the capacity to praise growing and renewing in me all the time, just the capacity to praise, not necessarily the words with which to praise God, but just to respond to the astonishing beauty of some newly seen flower, to be struck with awe at the majesty of some horizon view, or to be stunned by the miraculous gift that another person is for us. I’m not sure it’s so important that I remember every time to praise God for the gift of that beauty or this person. In times of prayer and reflection I will remember that God is not some small-spirited ruler who demands that I bow and scrape and say “o great king this and o great queen that, but rather is that mystery who lies at the end and at the heart of all my praise.
I need to praise, not in order to shut out sorrow, not really to have a respite from dealing with the pain I encounter, but quite the contrary so that I can be open to the causes of lamentation, able to grieve openly, honestly, fully without being overcome with cynicism or grief. I need to praise in order to know that lamentation is not the only reality. In fact I have come to believe that praise is not an alternative to lamentation, but rather that they both spring from the same source. They are both released in us when we are open to the world around us, when we are brought for some reason to some fresh attentiveness, whether it is to the suffering, which is everywhere, or to the holiness, which is also everywhere waiting, waiting for us to see with the eyes of faith.
I used to be surprised, sometimes amused, sometimes offended slightly by the Psalms—there are many of them—where the writer goes to great lengths to tell us how his or her soul is downcast, how utterly without joy or hope she is—and then suddenly up and says, “but.. I will praise the Lord and give thanks to God as long as I have being.” I used to feel like the praise was sort of an afterthought, maybe even tacked on by some editor hundreds of years later who decided that we can’t have all this unrelieved moaning in this poem that might some day appear in the Bible. Better throw in a little praise here. Or maybe the writer was just too conflicted, couldn’t make up his mind whether he wanted to praise God or curse God.
I have since had an attitude adjustment. If praise is to be real, it needs to come from out of the midst of lament. And so it is no wonder that in a Psalm such as #42 we hear: “As a deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God…My tears have been my food day and night, while people question me, “Where is your God?” And then: “Why are you cast down, my soul? Why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise God.” As difficult as it may be to arrive at such a place where lament and praise are offered essentially simultaneously, I now know that this is where I need to be, and it is where I pray to be, where praise and lament are not alternatives, not something we choose as one over the other but whether they are bound together, the one not being offered without the other. That is not where I am all the time. It is where I pray to be.
Likewise I pray to be like the woman in the scripture from the gospel of Luke. It is, taken literally, the story of a physical healing done by Jesus on the Sabbath. Most of the commentaries treat this as a story about Jesus healing on the Sabbath and how he broke the rules and made some people mad. Most of the—I have to say—mostly male commentaries, commentaries written by men, focus on the conversation in the story between two men, Jesus and the religious authority. I am much more interested in the woman, and in the picture I have of her slowly unbending herself and standing up straight for the first time in years. And then it says she praised God. I need to say that I see this not just as a physical healing but as a picture of a spiritual unbending. We could talk some other time about what all might have been involved in that for her, given what we know about society at that time. We could talk about some of what it might mean for us to unbend ourselves, to feel ourselves uncurling in some spiritual way. We could talk about all that some other time. For now it is just the image of this woman standing up, slowly, taller and taller, that grasps my attention.
It doesn’t really matter to me that what she does after she stands up is to praise God. What I see happening here is not just that she grateful. I see her being unbent so her voice can be heard. It may be a voice of praise, as it was in this case. Or it might have been a voice of grief that was unleashed and grew louder and louder as she stood up straighter and straighter. Or it might have been a justice seeking voice. That is another kind of praise, another part of praise as it was in the other Psalm we read, 146. “God sets prisoners free…God lifts up those who are bowed down,” she might have said, quoting Psalm 146, and she might have been thinking of herself. Whatever she said I hear her words as life affirming words, and therefore whether of joy or grief or justice, ultimately words of praise.
And so as I watch this woman stand in my mind’s eye, I see her acting out my prayer for myself and for others. May Christ give us the gift he gave the woman—the gift of being able to uncurl herself, to stand up straight, spiritually tall so that our voices—our voices of lament, our cries for justice, and our songs of praise may be full and strong and clear. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 30, 2002