Parson to Person -- by Rob Elder

Sunday, November 9, 2008

This Gift of Love — Part II: “Give Proof, Before the Churches...”

This Gift of Love — Part II:
“Give Proof, Before the Churches...”

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder

November 2, 2008
Acts 20:32-38
II Corinthians 8:16-24

This is the second in a series of sermons on Paul’s New Testament words concerning stewardship. As we survive another election cycle with much conversation about the merits or demerits of taxes, we also might remember the words of the Frenchman who learned that his government planned to impose a tax on dogs: “Poor dogs!” he said. “They want to treat you like human beings!” At times like this, we may be in a good position to recall that while it is good to have money and the things money can buy, it is good to check up once in a while to make sure we haven’t lost the things money can’t buy.1

The book of Acts describes Paul’s ministry in three distinct phases: [1] as a missionary to Jews and Gentiles, [2] as a founding pastor visiting churches on his way to Jerusalem (with the collection for the saints), and [3] as an imprisoned witness defending the gospel from prison in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Rome.2

Today’s passage from Acts was spoken by Paul just before embarking for Jerusalem, where he would begin the long imprisonment phase of his ministry. It was a farewell speech.

During our course of seminary studies, we were once asked to give a title and outline for a sermon we would want to preach if we realized that it was to be delivered as our “last sermon.” I have spent most of my ministry under the assumption that a long future lies ahead of me. I still entertain hopes that that continues to be the case! Still, it is a useful exercise to consider what one affirmation is of such importance to me as a preacher that I would choose to give it as a “last sermon.”

Paul was in a similar position, although for him it was no exercise. He chose to speak on a topic that I’m not sure I would want to leave behind as a farewell homily. Faced with the need to say final words to beloved friends, the 20th chapter of Acts reports that he gave them ... a stewardship sermon!

He had been summoned to Jerusalem, and he suspected that arrest, prison, perhaps even death awaited him. So he stood on the dock in Miletus, with the elders from the church in Ephesus gathered around him. And he spoke of several matters with them before the final parting tears that are so eloquently reported. I think it is more than coincidence that his very last recorded words to them were these:

In all things I have shown you that by so toiling one must help the weak,
remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said,
‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’

This is the only place in all of scripture that we have these words from Jesus. Paul concluded his church-planting ministry with them. More blessed to give than to receive, more like the Lord Jesus to toil for others than to sit back while others toil away for us; more blessed to serve others than to seek their service; even in our age of going out in search of self-fulfillment, more blessed to lose ourselves for Jesus’ sake than to find ourselves for our own sakes; more blessed to give away than to take in.

For those people in Paul’s day, as in ours, who had become proficient at covering up their greed with religious slogans, this was a distinctive and final word from the Lord which Paul alone handed down to us. When we get right down to wondering what Jesus would have us do, when we have preached all the fine, subtle and complex sermons that a career of witnessing may have given us, when all is said and done, what does Jesus move Paul to say to the elders gathered at dockside — tears streaming down their faces and lumps as big as corn fritters in their throats? Give! Finding comes through losing, riches arrive through generosity, kings are made by being servants for others, look out for the one who may not only not strike you as number 1, but maybe not even as number 100.

More blessed to give than to receive? Easily said. More difficult to do. It’s one of those scriptural affirmations that can so easily be turned into a cliché or slogan; a bedtime admonition around Christmastime for those youngsters who are less than willing to let go of hard-earned allowance to purchase presents for brothers or sisters they aren’t sure they even like: “There, there, Junior, as the Bible says,”

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

One thing about slogans and clichés: they very seldom are compelling except to one who wants to unload a set of expectations on someone else. After Papa has told Junior about the blessings of giving over receiving, he may leave the bedroom, go back into the family room, and flip through the day’s mail. Without so much as an ounce of compunction, regret, or anything even remotely resembling a second thought, he may throw away envelopes containing financial appeals from the Heart Fund, Heifer Project, the American Cancer Society, the United Way, who knows what-all else, and, yes, heaven forbid, perhaps even a letter from the church with a pledge card enclosed — all the while muttering to himself, “All they ever do is say ‘Money, money, money.’”

More blessed to give than to receive? Well, yes, but what is a reasonable standard of giving short of pauperizing ourselves? We can only stand so much blessedness, after all!

In spite of all our pious platitudes about the blessedness of giving, honesty compels us to admit how very much like Junior we really are. Junior may feel as much excitement at the prospect of spending his money on a present for his sister as he might for a walloping case of the Asian flu, just as we sometimes feel as much enthusiasm for our own giving as a person contemplating a root canal. Oddly enough, our own reluctance is one of the keys to understanding Christian stewardship of money.

We cannot make our stewardship decisions based only on emotion; at least not reliable decisions. We live in a time when people do or don’t do things based on whether they feel like it. “I feel good about my church pledge” is a sentence more likely to be heard than “I have disciplined myself to return to the Lord a portion of the bounty God has given me.” But Jesus did not say, “It is more blessed to feel like giving than to receive.” No, it is clear that the blessedness comes from making a decision and sticking with it. Whether it feels good or not is beside the point. It is a matter of decision and discipline. We may not much like that word discipline, but it is the root of the word disciple. The two are connected.

Think of the roadblocks that the church in Corinth threw in front of Paul as he worked at collecting the gift for the saints in Jerusalem. They even accused him of taking up an offering only to enrich himself. So in our passage today we heard about “the brother” who was asked to come along from Macedonia with Paul to serve as a sort of auditor, a guarantor that there would be no funny business with the church treasury.

It is not very exciting to talk about pledges, discipline, church accounting practices. But because suspicion and human fallibility have continued to haunt the church since that first world-wide collection, it is necessary that we do unexciting planning to make certain that we discipline ourselves to give, and that our gifts eventually go to accomplish the work they are intended to accomplish.

Paul said, in II Corinthians, “for we aim at what is honorable not only in the Lord’s sight but also in the sight of men.” I believe that in the Christian walk, it is important not only to try to avoid evil, but to avoid even the appearance of evil. That is why we have accounting procedures in the church office, checks and balances for financial and property decisons. It is necessary in a fallible, human world to provide assurance to God’s people that their gifts are entrusted into reliable hands, and will serve the purpose for which they were intended. Having provided for just such assurance, Paul was free give a stewardship address to the Ephesians at dockside in Miletus.

This is the boring, unexciting part of financial stewardship. Erecting the mechanisms to receive and expend money is seldom stimulating work. But when you think about it, if financial stewardship is not glamorous, neither is 90% of ministry. Most of the things accomplished in ministry are done behind the scenes, after months — sometimes even years — of planning. But part of genuine care — of the sort that Jesus desires — requires practical management. Love for others that has no concern for planning has been seen too frequently for us to think otherwise. It can lead to unintended disasters: grain intended for starving people rotting on the dock for lack of transportation to move the grain inland; or three agencies created to address a problem that would be more efficiently resolved by one; or — worst of all — gifts given in good faith finding their way into the pockets of those unscrupulous ones who consider air conditioned doghouses and large buildings with their names on the front to be part of a ministry in Jesus' name.

It is not enough to exhort the people of God to generous giving in response to the gifts God has given us. It is necessary to make arrangements. So we have a commitment committee here at Mountain View Church that is busily making plans, working at their meetings every month to let you know in the most understandable way what our stewardship plans are. You have a deeply committed Session and Session committees, laying plans for ministry in 2009. It may not be overly inspiring, it may not lead to parades in the streets, but it is absolutely essential for the health of this church that we listen to them and try our very best to respond to the needs they are laying out for us.

Stewardship is a lifestyle, not an emotion. Jesus did not tell of the Good Samaritan as one who was compassionate on impulse. He would have urged compassion as part of the discipline of believers. Compassion is more like a pledge to the United Way or the Church commitment effort than the five dollars in the plate which are given entirely on impulse. We must not rely on spasms of concern, and impulses to share. We must make them our lifestyle. It would have made Paul happy to think that just such disciplined planning is still going on in our homes and in the Church to which he gave his life, so that Jesus’ message of blessedness in giving can continue to be proclaimed to the world.

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1 Hoover Rupert, in Presbyterian Outlook , April 7, 1980.
2 see Acts, a commentary by Gerhard A. Krodel, Augsburg Press, 1986, pp. 381-393.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

This Gift of Love — Part I: To Do and to Desire

This Gift of Love — Part I:
To Do and to Desire

There is an old joke among management people about the five stages that people go through in planning and completing any project. They are:

[1] Enthusiasm
[2] Disillusionment and panic
[3] Search for the guilty
[4] Punishment of the innocent
[5] Praise and honors for the non-participants

It’s a joke, but we are familiar with the way these things often go: At a meeting of some volunteer committee or other someone feels moved to offer a suggestion. As a group, the committee begins to catch a bit of enthusiasm for the new idea. It’s exciting. A “we can do it” attitude emerges. Everyone is carried away with the possibilities, and new ones are being listed on the blackboard as fast as they are spoken. The excitement is so palpable that when the moderator asks who would be willing to do this or that, hands go up, “count on me’s” are spoken, and a sense of satisfaction accompanies the close of the meeting. We are finally getting somewhere.

Before too long, though — people being people — disillusionment sets in. Joe promised to make several phone calls about supplies but because of his heavy responsibilities at work, he never got around to it. Now, short on supplies, Amy can’t get the volunteers together to make the posters. Pete was hoping to speak to his service club about the project and ask about some free publicity at the radio station, but called at the last minute to beg off the committee completely. The next meeting of the committee is as depressing as the previous one was inspiring. Establishing blame becomes the chief unwritten item on the meeting agenda.

Eventually one of two things happens: either the committee members throw up their hands and abandon the project, or one person says something like, “we set out to get this done, and I, for one, will do everything I can to see it through. Who is with me?” It may turn out that two or three are, so a handful of people wind up completing a project more through determination than inspiration, and in the end, they are satisfied, but exhausted.

Variations on this theme are played out all the time among people who organize themselves to get things done. Why must it be so? Could it be different? What could make the difference?

One potent answer to those questions lies in Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth. The words we heard this morning concerned an offering that was being collected for the poverty-stricken Christians in Jerusalem. Times were very difficult in Jerusalem, and Paul had spent considerable time and energy during the previous year working to organize what we might call “JERUSALEM FOOD AID” or “HANDS ACROSS ASIA MINOR” day.

Lots of those new, struggling little churches of Paul’s were making efforts to put some money together for the effort. The Corinthian congregation, like the other churches, caught the enthusiasm and earnestly desired to do their part. Their hearts were fully in it. They were filled with enthusiasm for a great work.

Now, a year has passed. Their enthusiasm has lagged, probably some have taken to pointing an accusing finger at others in the church, wondering if they were doing their share. Disillusionment has set in. What their hearts had desired, their wills had not been able to accomplish. Being human, falling short of their enthusiasm, they were having trouble fulfilling the pledge of support made to Paul and Barnabas.

What would be the remedy? The natural response, one I have found myself using, is to find those two or three who could be more or less willingly overworked, and get the project finished in spite of those who made promises but failed to deliver. After the enthusiasms of the many fizzle, what are we left with, after all, but the resolve of the few? That is the way organizations frequently operate. That is how we may have expected Paul to deal with this. But he recognized another way.

Once in a Bible study I was leading, one person remarked that the real heroes of this passage were the Macedonians: the Philippians, Thessalonians, and Beroeans who seem to have had access to another sort of organizing strategy than the one available to the Corinthians. Why?

Remember, Paul pointed out that the Macedonian Christians were poor. Extremely poor. In hard times, the folks on the bottom of the social ladder always suffer the most and this was certainly the case in first century Macedonia. Paul mentioned this not to promote some vague idea about the nobility of poverty, but to point out at the outset that the meaning behind Christian stewardship is never riches or poverty.

The Corinthians were busily accusing each other, wondering who had more or less material wealth to spare for the collection, choosing up sides, comparing one with the other, trying to judge to see if everyone was doing their share. Mean-spiritedness had taken charge. Meanwhile, the Macedonians, with little or no concern for individual welfare — yet sure of their place within the community of faith — were making grave personal sacrifices to contribute for no reason other than a desire to respond to the gracious love in Christ that they had come to know. Anyone who has ever read Philippians cannot help but be impressed by the overflowing expression of joy that characterized that congregation. The Macedonians gave joyfully, even though an outsider might have described them as some of the least able to give at all.

Grace is the key word here. It is perhaps an overused word today which, more often than not, refers to a few words to be mumbled before meals. But that is certainly not the way Paul thought of it. He described the collection for the Jerusalem believers as “this gracious work". When we refer to someone as “gracious", we mean that they have a full command of social niceties. Not Paul. He meant it the way the New Testament means grace. It is a gracious work because of the enabling power of Jesus Christ. Christ is the author and finisher of grace, the one whose grace is described in the hymn as “amazing!".

Paul was reasoning with them. If we first consider the grace of Christ, then quibbling about the response to his amazing and saving love seems entirely out of place. The place to begin in Christian stewardship is not with wealth or poverty, not with sales pitches and snappy flow charts, but with hearts that have been moved by the unmerited love of Christ. Once convicted of the transforming power of Christ, no response we can make seems large enough. Human measure fails us. That is why the Macedonian example seems entirely surprising only if we are still on the needy side of God’s grace. Paul said, “They gave as much as they could, and even more...” (v. 3). It makes no logical sense. Take away our tax exemptions for charitable gifts and what would happen? Not only was Paul surprised, the Macedonians surprised themselves!

Paul mentioned the Macedonians, not for comparison (“If these poor folks could give this much, why can’t you people get with it?”). Instead, he spoke of the Macedonians in order to present a picture of a church in love with its Savior. Love cannot command — Paul even said, “I say this not as a command” — love can only be demonstrated. Having received God’s grace, generous giving seems only the most normal response. No amount of pleading will make folks who have not experienced grace into truly generous people.

A pastor in Virginia once asked, “How would you motivate people to give to the church or some worthy cause when they are apathetic, or fearful, or downright hostile? ’The church is always asking for money.’ Preachers often feel insecure or ashamed, or even demeaned when they must talk about money from the pulpit.”1

Paul knew about hostility. He had a stormy relationship with this congregation in Corinth. Paul knew that no one was likely to support the collection because of the force of his personality. So he said, in verse 9, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” The experience of reading that verse for the first time has been compared to the experience of stepping suddenly into a deep pool while wading in a stream.2 The material and spiritual realms are lumped together without apology. To mention the lofty grace of Christ while seeking contributions for a collection of grubby old money is hardly a digression from the main point. It is the main point! It is the work of Christ that should be the beginning and ending of any discussion of Christians and our money.

This month and next you will be hearing over and over about the church’s need. I hope we’ll all have a clear idea about that need when commitment Sunday comes around on November 23rd. And as we prepare for that day, we desire enthusiasm of the sort that made the Corinthians enthusiastic. I am enthusiastic about it. We want resolve. I am resolved to do everything I can to make it work, and I know the commitment committee shares that deep resolve.

But I pray this will not be one of those human projects with the standard, depressing five stages. Why? Because the grace of Christ must be the beginning and ending of any of our talk about money. Any of us who may be lacking an experience of the grace of Christ will be enabled to give for only secondary reasons — if we give at all: noble motives (“Show how kind and good you are.”), human solidarity (“We are the world.”), personal recognition (“Get a free [hunger walk] T-shirt.”), inner satisfaction (“You will be glad you did.”), friendly competition (The “challenge” gift)...3

So, if you find the grace of Christ is lacking in your life, let’s get to first things first. Jesus loves us, died for us, was raised for us, and can save us. If that word of the gospel rings true to you in any special way today, please explore your awakening faith with a trusted Christian friend or one of the elders or pastors of the church. Once having experienced the grace of Christ, no jingles and fancy promotions are really necessary for successful church stewardship. Just a simple encouragement to respond with our lives and our wealth to the surpassing riches that Jesus has given to us free of charge. Praise be to God, who gives us this abundant gift!

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1 C. Thomas Rhyne, “II Corinthians 8:8-15", Interpretation, October, 1987, 41, p. 408.
2 Fred B. Craddock, “The Poverty of Christ,” Interpretation , April, 1968, 22, pp. 158-170.
3 C. Thomas Rhyne, Ibid., p. 411.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Dressed for Church

Dressed for Church

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved
Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: October 12, 2008

Matthew 22:1-14

There is a version of this banquet story in Luke’s gospel,1 and it is more often read for preaching than Matthew’s edition for some reasons that become obvious if you just read them both.

In Matthew, the king’s gracious invitation to a banquet is received by a unique method of making a response: the invited guests seized the messengers who sought their RSVP to the king’s invitation and killed them. Perhaps they didn’t like the menu — perhaps they’d already had too much rare beef!
Luke has no killing of the messengers in his version.
In Matthew, an enraged king sends troops upon the offending townspeople and has their city burned to the ground.
In Luke, the offended king merely tells his messengers to go invite someone else.
Matthew also has messengers inviting the rabble of the street to the great banquet, but unlike the story in Luke, the king in Matthew’s version seizes someone who was brought from the street into the wedding feast and dresses him down (!) for sporting improper attire.
Luke’s main point is that the gracious invitation of God is extended to everyone, regardless of merit.
Matthew’s point, it seems, is anybody’s guess.

So what should we do? Read only Luke’s version of Jesus’ parable and pretend that Matthew was silent on the subject? Throw away Matthew’s version of Jesus’ story? I think, if we are willing to read with imagination, we can discover additional gospel truths in the version Matthew provides us, and, in the end, there is good news.

First of all, remember parables are stories, not descriptions of historic events. This is a story meant to teach. Additionally, it is an allegory, in which the characters and situations are meant to represent things: the king is meant to be understood as a stand-in for God, the son as Jesus, the wedding banquet as the kingdom of heaven, and so forth. You can probably figure out the rest just by giving it a little thought.

Both Matthew and Luke bring us the first main point of the story. The first people invited to the banquet refused the invitation, so then the king threw open the doors and invited everyone, “both good and bad” to come in and have a seat at the table. This reminds us of something we already know about our faith, which is that God’s grace is available to all, regardless of merit, that the son in whose name the banquet is offered has come to save the whole world and everyone in it. Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself” expresses this truth about the gospel and this story:

“This is the meal pleasantly set...
this is the meat and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked the same as the righteous...
I make appointments with all,
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited...
the heavy-lipped slave is invited...
the venerealee is invited,
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.”

For Luke, the story ends there. The grace of God is extended to all sinners equally, “both good and bad” have been invited. Here is how Frederick Buechner sees the scene:

“...the champagne glasses are filled, the cold pheasant is passed around, and there they sit by candlelight with their white canes and their empty sleeves, their Youngstown haircuts, their orthopedic shoes, their sleazy clothes, their aluminum walkers. A woman with a hairlip proposes a toast. An old man with the face of [King] Lear on the heath and a party hat does his best to rise to his feet. A deaf mute thinks people are starting to go home and pushes back from the table...”2

In other words, when it comes to inviting every sinner to the banquet, we are likely to be surprised at the cast of characters who will be there in response to the inclusiveness of God’s invitation. But Matthew takes us further into the life of the church as we know it and have experienced it. Matthew looks around his church, filled with forgiven sinners, and wonders how people, so graced and embraced by God, can then come to do the will of God so reluctantly, so grudgingly. Beyond calling people into “the banquet” — the church — as both Luke’s and Matthew’s versions of the parable do, what should happen next, how then shall we live? This is where the additional parts of Matthew’s version come to life.

Matthew knew how easily the free and forgiving nature of God’s grace can slide into permissiveness. Once we have received the invitation to salvation which Jesus offers, there is always a temptation to think that we have done everything we can do. Some people think that religious faith is a matter of affirming a certain set of beliefs. Matthew knows that beliefs which do not lead to changed lives are dead in the water. This is the gospel equivalent of the letter of James, which declares that faith without good works is dead faith, as good as no faith at all, or even worse.3 At least an unrepentant sinner has his faithlessness to offer as a reason for failure to respond to the graciousness of God, he needs to offer no excuses for his bad behavior: he never claimed a religious transformation of his life in the first place. But for believers, the transforming power of the gospel should result in changed lives, or else how will the world see the good news lived out in life?

I once heard about a female seminary student who received an assignment in a theology class to write a paper on the topic of “shame.” Inexplicably, she found the paper was too difficult to write. Personal feelings were getting in the way. One of her professors, with exceptional insight, discovered in talking with her that during the year she had been working in a church with a very charismatic pastor who also abused her sexually. It was difficult for her to write objectively about a subject which was so much a part of her present experience. There isn’t much that holds any church together apart from trust, from a shared commitment to make every effort to live by what we say, to back up what we profess to believe with behavior that seeks to match. That shared trust also presumes that when our lives fall short of our faith, we will confess our shortcomings, seek forgiveness and move on. The effort to match up our lives to our calling should always move us forward. So here, in this woman’s experience, at the center of the trust which a church needs to exist, was someone who violated trust and expected permissive grace to let him off the hook.

III

I’m not sure that Matthew’s gospel story is declaring that that pastor will burn in hell, but I can’t believe the love of Jesus is so permissive as to say this doesn’t matter. Someone, somewhere must turn to that pastor at the banquet and say, “What? You are in here with no wedding garment of righteousness? Get out!” That charismatic pastor had mistaken Jesus’ acceptance of all people, good or bad, as also condoning all behavior.

The parable is not meant to empower us to sit in judgment on others we deem unworthy to remain at the banquet, but rather to serve as a goad to us to examine our own worthiness, or lack of it. It is not meant to depress us with a reminder that we have fallen short, a fact of which any honest person is only too well aware, but to encourage us to press forward to ever fuller acts of faithfulness. Justification (the free grace involved in being admitted to the feast) is the first step of faith, the step that God takes toward us. The next step is up to us, and it is the process of sanctification, the goal being to aim at a life which is holy as a response to the holiness which has been given us.

When we’re getting dressed for church — in the spirit of this parable — we need to do more than put on our coats and ties, our shoes and stockings, our skirts and dresses. We also need a special wardrobe, a garment that fits us for discipleship in the kingdom, one that Paul described in Ephesians when he counseled believers to prepare a new wardrobe for kingdom living:

“Put on the whole armor of God...so that you may be able to...stand firm. Stand firm, therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. As shoes for your feet, put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. With all of these take the shield of faith...Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God.”4

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1 Luke 14:16-24.
2 Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, by Frederick Buechner, Harper & Row, p. 67.
3 James 2:14-17
4 Ephesians 6:13-17.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Top Ten

World Communion Sunday

I am the Lord your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of slavery...

We’ve all heard perhaps more than we would have liked of recent debates concerning monuments to the Ten Commandments on public property, debates that seem to me most often to generate more heat than light. Are the commandments simply common sense regulations, universally applicable across religions and cultures, which all people everywhere would do well to obey? The introductory statement suggests not. These were commands issued to a very particular group of people in a very particular time, which they then carried forward into their particular faith as a sort of standard of community behavior. What’s more, straightforward as they may seem, there is no consistent agreement even on something so seemingly simple as the proper numbering. Even Christian groups argue about whether verses 3 and 4 comprise a single command or two. The final command in Exodus places coveting a neighbor’s house ahead of coveting his spouse, while the list in Deuteronomy has it the other way around.

In the 1980s I served the Presbyterian church in Port Arthur, Texas — a town recently in the news along with Galveston because of the devastation of Hurricane Ike. During my tenure as pastor of that congregation we constructed a new sanctuary. The name of the church had recently been changed to The Presbyterian Church of the Covenant because of its history. In 1979 two formerly separated Presbyterian churches in the city were united into one— they covenanted together to become one church family. Because the name of the church included the word “covenant,” at the rear of the new sanctuary we commissioned stained-glass windows depicting the 6 biblical covenants.1 Upon exiting the sanctuary, you could see on the far left the Noah “rainbow covenant” window, then the Abraham window, and, next to the door, the 10 commandments window, known formerly and very affectionately, as the nine commandments window. You might wonder why nine commandments? The artist who designed the window — and it was a modern window for a modern sanctuary — said the Roman numeral “X” representing the 10th commandment was supposed to be there in your imagination, obscured behind a rough bunch of color that was supposed to represent the Sinai mountain. It didn’t matter, though, what it was supposed to represent. Most people who saw it said immediately, “Hey, how come only nine commandments?”

Before that window was altered by the stained glass company to include the Roman numeral for ten, lots of jokes were passed around local ministerial circles in the community to the effect that the Presbyterians were obedient to all commandments except one, and no one could agree on which one it was that we were free to ignore. My favorite explanation for the missing commandment came from the person who said it was missing because the 10th commandment was implied in the name of our church: the Presbyterian Church of the “Covet-not.”

Lots of writers through the ages have had a lot to say about the commandments, however we number them

H.L. Mencken, never a particularly religious man, once wrote, “Say what you like about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

Once, at a National Press Association meeting, Ted Turner declared, in his usual, shy, understated way, “... We’re living with outmoded rules ... and I bet nobody here even pays too much attention to ‘em because they are too old. When Moses went up on the mountain, there were no nuclear weapons, there was no poverty. Today the Ten Commandments wouldn’t go over. Nobody around likes to be commanded. Commandments are out.”

Mark Twain once told of a conversation with a notoriously ruthless businessman, who said to him in passing, “Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where I will climb Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud at the top.” Mark Twain replied, “I have a better idea; you could stay home and keep them.”

While it’s true that we may sometimes possess an uncritical desire to be free of laws and limitations, some sort of law is absolutely essential to the creation of any sort of community. Some things you have to be able to count on. Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Felix Frankfurter could be expected to speak for the importance of the letter of the law, and he once wrote, “If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny. Legal process is an essential part of the democratic process.” On the other hand, speaking on behalf of the importance of the law’s spirit, former Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote “It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.”

Of course, biblical law is not to be confused with civil law. A God-created covenantal community was and is something new. The new thing which came into being at Sinai was a covenanting community based on trust and forgiveness because that was the way God had determined to deal with the community. Freed Egyptian slaves were to acknowledge God by granting each other freedom under the law.

The old oversimplification that the Old Testament represents oppressive legalism while the New Testament supersedes law just isn’t accurate. It is inaccurate because Jesus himself said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”2

What this means as we approach the Ten Commandments in search for understanding is that the law is God’s gift to liberate the human community not to enslave it. To realize the necessity of law, we only need to turn the idea around and consider the chilling alternative: a community of people in which fathers and mothers need not be obeyed, killing is condoned, adultery is permitted, thievery is not prohibited, lying is not unlawful. What sort of covenanting community of mutual trust would be possible under those circumstances?

The law provides boundaries for God’s people, while forming the very heart of Israel’s freedom. Oddly enough, it was failure to obey the very first commandment that most often seemed to be Israel’s undoing, that frequently led to failure in obeying the other commandments, that led to the re-enslavement of the people. “You shall have no other gods before me,” is the primary assertion in the law from which all the rest is derived, and the reason why placement of the 10 Commandments on public property rubs against the anti-establishment clause of the constitution in many people’s minds.

The 10 Commandments represent not only social faithfulness, as found in the last 6 commandments, but our very faithfulness to God. It is all of one piece. One cannot be faithful to God and faithless to neighbor. One cannot make an idol of bricks and sticks, or ministers, or church school curriculum, or a favorite set of hymns, or an accustomed seat in a pew, or flag, or country, or job, or even family, or school, or church, and expect to be declared an obedient servant, a free child of God.

True freedom under the law rests in obedience to the law in spirit as well as in letter. Jesus wanted to make this clear not just through his teaching, but in the offering of his life. In John’s gospel Jesus spoke of a new temple.3 As the disciples reflected later he was referring to the temple of his very self in resurrected form. Those who try to live their lives by the 10 commandments, who know that Christ is our new sanctuary, also know what the church building is and is not. And they also know that the freedom of salvation in any age is not earned by obedience to the law, but by the saving, loving acts of God.

We gather today around the table in community with each other. The word for our celebration is based in community with its name “communion.” The very community we share is possible because of the loving provision of God’s law, and the perfect expression of it in Jesus Christ. So, of course, we gather not only in community with each other here, but in community with our brothers and sisters gathered at the table down the block, across town, throughout the nation, and all across the world. The worldwide community of the faithful is possible because of the faithfulness of one man, Jesus Christ, whose perfection and self-sacrifice have saved us, and made justification through grace under the law possible for us all.

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1 The Covenant with Noah, Genesis 6-9; the Covenant with Abraham, Genesis 12-17; the Covenant with Moses and Israel, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5; the Covenant with Jeremiah, Jeremiah 31:31; Jesus’ covenant “sealed in my blood,” Luke 22:20, I Corinthians 11:25.
2 Matthew 5:17.
3 John 2:13-22.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Low Carb Faith

Some believe in eating anything,
while the weak eat only vegetables.

I guess they had different things to argue about in churches in Paul’s day than ours, like what was on the after-church supper menu. The weak eat only vegetables...? Come again? How is it that vegetarianism was singled out as a sign of weakness? Was Paul an Atkins diet guy, a three-meal-a-day meat eater, a man of low-carb faith? This is one of those times when it’s important to know the story behind the story.

Paul’s words refer to folks in the first century church who would eat only vegetables because they had religious scruples involved with the consumption of meat, most likely meat that was first offered to idols in pagan temples, then sold in the open markets afterward, a common practice by which temple priests raised money. The problem with consumption of meat from the markets was that you could never be sure that the meat you had purchased hadn’t first been offered up as a sacrifice to a pagan god. So some folks decided to forego meat altogether. We know that Paul wasn’t one of them, in fact he seemed to see it as a sign of weak faith: since he didn’t believe pagan gods existed, he had no problem eating meat, regardless of the source.

The issue seems distant from us now, doesn’t it? As with many church controversies over time, this one eventually faded into virtual irrelevance.

Church people across the centuries are famous for our ability to major in minors. If it was decided that meat-eating was inferior to vegetable eating, what would come next? Vegetable comparison, that’s what: broccoli’s superiority to celery, maybe, or green beans over summer squash.

A low carb carnivore himself, Paul nevertheless saw the need to change the subject.

I love the way our passage begins, the first word of Paul’s instruction to them is one of my favorite New Testament words: “Welcome.” Now, we all want to think of ours as a welcoming church, though it strikes some people, I know it does, as a side issue, not the main thing. But it is not a side issue in the New Testament. Just check the forms of the word “welcome” in any Bible concordance and see how busy it keeps you looking up all the references. My concordance lists 59 places in The New Testament where it is used. It is used more frequently than the word “praise” in the New Testament, more than “compassion,” more than “healing,” and more than “comfort.”

This is good news, really. It’s likely that few of us think of ourselves as healers, probably not many claim to be world-class praisers or are recognized for the vast comfort and compassion we hand out to others. But what does it take to be a welcomer? Well, not all that much, just about anyone can do it, all it requires is an extended hand, a heart that is opened just a crack wider, and perhaps saying the word out loud to others every now and then: “Welcome.” Not a difficult task, yet it receives very high praise as an act of pure gospel in the New Testament.

Undervalued, that’s what I think it is. So, Paul says, “Welcome...” But welcome whom? If we are supposed to throw the door open, run out the red carpet, get the guest room ready, whom is it for? Well, that’s the difficult part in the church, isn’t it? Church is like family, you don’t get to choose your family, your family chooses you, at least sort-of. First our family chooses us, then they are stuck with us. In the church, we are the collection of people who have decided to throw our lot in together in this place to be a church. Maybe we have an idea of the way our fellow church members ought to look, how they ought to act, what sort of clothes they should wear, the kind of manners they should have when they are here, whether or not they should have bacon and eggs or granola for breakfast, and maybe sometimes we look around ourselves here in this sanctuary and mutter under our breath, “Well, whatever I had in mind for the way a church family should look, this sure isn’t it!”

Paul reminds us with that opening word that welcome comes before everything else. We don’t get to choose the way our church family looks because welcome is the first word, not some qualifying test. You are welcome here. Sit wherever you like, there are no reserved seats. Whoever you are, whatever baggage — literal or figurative — you carry in here, you are welcome. Maybe you favor a different hairstyle, maybe you like to say your prayers in Portuguese, or Gaelic, maybe you wear the same tie every Sunday, maybe you don’t own a tie, maybe your blouse could stand ironing, maybe you have just a tad too much starch in your blouse, maybe you find gospel hymns objectionable, maybe gospel hymns are your favorites, maybe you prefer a church filled with stained glass windows, maybe you prefer a church with no windows, maybe you think the organ music is too loud, maybe you think the organ music can’t be loud enough, maybe you wish the ministers would do away with their black robes, maybe its the robes that make you feel you are in church, maybe you think a hundred other things and others think a hundred things that are just the opposite.

No matter, the first word to us, as it was to those Romans in this 14th chapter, is “welcome.” If we were to wonder about our main task in the church, we wouldn’t have to go a lot further than that one word.

Now, what was Paul adding to that word? Well, just the sort of thing I have been describing. The Roman church was filled with Presbyterians, people who were entirely willing to disagree about anything and everything. Some in the church had been Jews, some had been pagans, some may have been a mixture of the two. Some members might have had scruples about eating meat because most of the meat you could buy had first been offered at one of the hundreds of pagan shrines. So some would just rather not eat meat than chance to eat something which had been made an offering to a god they didn’t believe existed.

Of course, being Presbyterians, others disagreed, saying that meat offered to gods they didn’t believe existed anyway would do no harm, so they ate meat. Paul called the vegetarians the ones who were “weak in faith.” Sounds pretty critical on first glance, but there is another way to look at it. Paul wrote to the Corinthians also and he used this word “weak” this way: “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world...”1

Hmmm, it sounds as though weakness comes with higher recommendations than we might first have thought. There’s more: Paul also wrote, “For [Christ] was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God.”2 Paul also wrote, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.”3

So when he counsels us to welcome those who are weak in faith, it could just be that their weak faith has eclipsed what we thought was the strongest part of our own. The lesson in that is that we are not worth much to the kingdom on our own, we are meant to be a sociable church, an hospitable community of saints, a gathering of the faithful, not a collection of lone rangers who pay each other little heed, and reserve contempt for those we judge to be weaker or lesser in some way.

Here is the rub: Paul said, “Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” Wow, how lucky for them, the Lord will come along and make them stand, unlike those of us who are able to stand on our own strength...er...no, that wouldn’t be it, would it? No, standing on our own strength is definitely not the main subject of the gospel, not even encouraged in its dark little side chapels. No, before God all are the weak ones, is that not true?

Anyone who thinks they are strong enough to stand before God will one day learn their error. How wonderful that Paul encouraged the building of a fellowship that recognized this from the outset, and set about creating the church as an hospitable place where the welcome did not wait until we became strong, the seat in the pews is not reserved for those who already know their Bible, the singing of the songs is not the personal and private domain of those who know the songs of faith already. If you are today in a church for the very first time ever, you cannot be any less welcome than the person who has occupied a pew in church every single Sunday for the past fifty years.

Paul said, “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.” Exactly. If we did, who would need a church? Who would need welcome, who would need to gather? Faith would be a matter of thinking good thoughts, or obeying certain rules, but it would be something we would accomplish on our own. No, Paul says we do not live to ourselves, and it is a lesson that no people on earth have a harder time learning than Americans, who like to think of ourselves as up-by-our-bootstraps people, self-made, rugged individualists. In the face of this sort of thinking, Paul simply holds up a mirror of ourselves in our death masks. “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

The only hope for us is that we live and we die to the Lord. We throw ourselves on the mercy of God in our living and in our dying, and we join in humility with others in the fellowship, whether their hair is parted the way we like it or not, like a beleaguered ship full of sailors for whom the only hope is the Lord who calms the sea for them and leads them safely home.

Why is welcome such an important word? Why do we do this thing, why do we say hello to each other and offer blessings as our first act of worship, why are we called so forcefully to be a fellowship of welcome and hospitality? It is because we have been welcomed. Carrying a load of trouble? We are welcome in this place where we may set our troubles down. Burdened by a backlog of bad things in our lives which we regret? We are welcome here, regrets and all. This is our home because we have nothing to prove here, only our humble prayer for the love of God and our extension of that love to each other is needed here. That is why we do what we do, for the love of God.

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1 I Corinthians 1:26-29
2 II Corinthians 13:4
3 II Corinthians 11:30

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Do No Harm

Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones.

I recently read that back in some of the bad old days of professional baseball’s Minnesota Twins — one of those forgettable seasons when they were losing lots of games — the team was in the middle of long losing streak on the road, and the manager, Tom Kelly, announced, “Before the game tomorrow there will be two buses leaving the hotel for the field. The 2:00 bus will be for those of you who need a little extra practice. The empty bus will be leaving at 5:00.”

Last week we looked with Pastor Linda at the verses prior to this week’s lesson, in which Jesus called a child and placed the child in the midst of the disciples, reminding them that greatness in the kingdom of God is measured by our care for the weak and powerless ones in our midst. Remembering this takes a lot of practice, looking to the almost invisibly weak ones in our midst is not something that comes without effort.

So today, we move into Jesus’ teaching, knowing that the words “little ones” refer to more than children. The symbol of the helpless child in our midst is meant to open our eyes to the presence of any “little people” in our company, the ones the world tends to overlook in its haste to be impressed by those who find themselves impressive. Jesus presents some of his most vivid teaching in regard to this commitment to the least, last, and lost among us.

Have you ever felt out of place in some situation? Invited to the company party as a new employee, you found yourself standing off to one side, nursing a drink, no one talking to you, too afraid of rejection to initiate a conversation. Does that sound familiar? Coming to a strange church for the first time, you venture to the coffee fellowship time only to discover that it appears everyone but you knows someone there and you feel like a fifth wheel, so you slip quietly out a side door?

It’s not just coffee-chatter social situations that give us that out-of-place feeling. On any given Sunday in this sanctuary I would dare say there are people present who feel out of place and who have been fighting against a strong impulse to stay home or leave. It is so easy to think everyone else has it all together in their lives when we see each other all scrubbed clean, wearing our good clothes, sporting happy-looking smiles. We forget there are people among us who are facing the possibility of unemployment, whose marriages are hanging by a thread, whose children have just presented them with the worst news of their lives, who have a loved one facing death, who can’t remember how to pray. We forget the church is not about greatness but about humble service to the least, last, and lost among us, which at one time or another will likely be any one of us.

Our worship should always carry that element. Our culture encourages the alternative idea that the purpose of worship has to do with what I get out of it. I hear that phrase a lot, a lot more than I like anyway. “I didn’t get anything out of the sermon,” or “I didn’t get anything out of the hymns we sang this morning,” or “I didn’t get anything out the prayers today.” Here’s a news flash I have mentioned before, we weren’t praying to you. Where do we get this idea that the worship of the church of God is about what we “get out of it” as individuals? You won’t find that phrase, “what I get out of it,” much less the sentiment it expresses, anywhere in scripture. Yet to hear some folks talk, you’d think it had replaced John 3:16 as the most well-known verse of the Bible.

What we put into it, now that is a whole other matter. That would be a fun exercise to try. “You know pastor, as I listened to your sermon, what I put into it was this thought...” or “as I sang that hymn, what I put into it was the biggest sound I could make,” or “during the prayer, what I put into it was a special prayer for my aunt Edna...” Never mind what we are getting out of worship today, what are we putting into it? Worship in some consumer-oriented churches, churches that have been advised by focus groups and success-driven church management people about what people want, are all about “what I get out of it.” But the worship of the Church of God is different than the worship of the church of Rob. The worship of this church is for the whole people gathered here. The individual’s thing is not the only thing, or even the main thing. That sounds almost like heresy in an era of personal computers and single serving frozen dinners, but the fact is that worship is not essentially about entertaining and instructing individuals. It is not mostly about getting what I want or think I need. The hard news is that it is not just for me. It’s not about what I believe, it’s about what we, the community of Christ, believe together.

If that is true, then we will see the utter, complete necessity of turning toward the least, last, and lost among us. It is such an absolutely necessary attitude in the fellowship of the church that Jesus resorted to the strongest sort of hyperbole in order to make his point. “Does your hand cause you to stumble? Cut it off! How about your eye? Pluck it out!” This language travels down the difficult road of hyperbole and metaphor, with severed body parts littering the imaginary landscape. Some of you may know that when students are going through trials for ordination to become pastors in our denomination, there comes a time when they must stand before the gathered Presbytery and answer any question the presbyters — elders and pastors — see fit to ask. It can be a terrifying occasion. One age old question, sometimes asked, comes right from our reading. One bright day a young candidate for ministry was asked it, “Would you be willing to suffer great personal injury for the glory of God?” After having suffered other pompous, self-satisfied questions of a few members of Presbytery assembled there, he replied smartly, “Sir, I would be willing for this whole Presbytery to suffer some great injury if it would glorify God!”

When Jesus says it would be better for some terrible thing to happen — that an arm or an eye should be lost — than to miss the opportunity to follow Jesus, the emphasis is meant to be on the incomparable joy of being in the community of Christ and not on the amputation. To know Jesus is wonderful, so wonderful that if a person knew how wonderful, he or she would sacrifice extravagantly in order to know him. When one of our friends says, “I wouldn’t miss my son’s graduation for anything,” we don’t usually follow up their claim saying, “Really, would you give up your house? Your family? Your career?” We know they are speaking hyperbolically. The point is not that our friend will arrive at the graduation ceremony destitute and in rags, without eyes or hands. The point is that they think it would simply be one of life’s not-to-be-missed moments. In the same way, there is nothing on earth of more value than being part of the kingdom, and opening that doorway for others. It is something not to be missed, worth whatever we may have to sacrifice to obtain it.

The thing to know in regard to the weak ones in our midst is that there is nothing in the kingdom scale of items of importance that stands ahead of taking care of the ones who are little in faith, little in ability, little in knowledge, little in experience. Nothing the church fellowship can think to do is more important than welcome and encouragement for those who have little or nothing to offer in return, nothing surpasses the importance of opening the door, of making way for those whom the world scorns as of little or no significance. Jesus really couldn’t be more clear about this. But he went on to try. He shared the wonderful little parable of the lost sheep that was part of our reading. He introduced the parable by declaring, “I tell you that [the angels of these little ones] always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” Whatever he may have meant by that comment about angels, it at least seems clear “that it is precisely the little, and not the big, who have an abiding relationship with God.”1

When Clarence Jordan produced his Southern vernacular Cotton Patch translation of Matthew almost 40 years ago now, he rendered Jesus’ little parable this way:

[Jesus said] “How do you see it? If a man owns a hundred sheep and one of them strays off, won’t he leave the ninety-nine in the pasture and go look after the stray? And when he finds it, I’m sure that he’s more proud of it than of the ninety-nine that didn’t stray. That’s exactly the way it is with your spiritual Father. He doesn’t want a single one of those little people to be abandoned.”2

Every now and then we need to re-ask ourselves Jesus’ question from the Shepherding 101 class exam: “If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?” Would a good, fiscally responsible shepherd leave 99 healthy but vulnerable sheep to manage on their own for a while as he went looking for one that was lost? We have to answer no, don’t we? Who would be crazy enough to hire a shepherd that answered yes?

This serves to remind us that kingdom economics concerning people are not like the economics of the world, the economics we are accustomed to. The very least Jesus expects of us is that we not provide stumbling blocks that drive the odd sheep into the wilderness. It is the odd sheep, the one who seems not to fit, the person who seems most like a nobody in a room full of presumptive somebodies, that person is the very favorite in God’s eyes. And woe to those who do not do all they can to see these things the way God sees them.

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1 The Parables of Grace, by Robert Farrar Capon, Eerdmans, (Grand Rapids: 1988), p. 36.
2 The Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John, by Clarence Jordan, Follett Publishing Co., (Chicago: 1970), p. 61.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

On Breathing and Praising

On Breathing and Praising
Fourth in a Series of Sermons on the Psalms

We once counted the words up in a Bible study I led, and found that the word “praise” is used 12 to 13 times in Psalm 150, depending on the translation we read. Apart from the beginning and ending exclamations of praise, there are ten phrases that begin with the word “praise.” Possibly there are that number of sentences beginning with that word to serve as a sort of memory device. A youngster could learn about praising God by counting off the ten praises on ten fingers. We could try it:

Where should we praise the Lord?
[1] Praise God in his sanctuary;
[2] praise him in his mighty firmament!
Why should we praise God?
[3] Praise him for his mighty deeds;
[4] praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
How should we praise God?
[5] Praise him with trumpet sound;
[6] praise him with lute and harp!
[7] Praise him with tambourine and dance;
[8] praise him with strings and pipe!
[9] Praise him with clanging cymbals;
[10] praise him with loud clashing cymbals!

Then, of course, there is the little addendum letting us know who is invited to the praise party: “everything that breathes,” which, at last count, was just about everyone, “praise the Lord.” And did you notice that the “where” question was answered with two phrases, the “why” question with two phrases? The “how” question, though, was answered with six phrases referring to eight different musical instruments and the earliest-known version of the Jitterbug. Throughout the Old Testament, dance is associated with joy and celebration, and probably played a big part in worship in the Jerusalem Temple. The psalmist was pretty excited about music as a means of praise, and the description of musical instruments for worship here is extravagant.

Some folks once declared — and some still believe — that we ought not have keyboard instruments in church, since they aren’t mentioned in the Bible. What a humorless reading of the intention of this psalm that is! The psalm doesn’t refer to pianos and pipe organs — along with saxophones, English horns, bells, piccolos, zithers, harmonicas and electric bass guitars — only because they hadn’t been invented yet. The list of instruments in the psalm is certainly not meant to be exhaustive but suggestive. We are meant to see that real praise involves a lot of music on the widest possible array of music-makers. Picturing this psalm being sung in the Jerusalem Temple, I have in mind an enthusiastic celebration, plenty of volume, and lots of shouting, singing and dancing.

In my English translation, I count only 71 words altogether in the whole psalm. There are even fewer in Hebrew, only 34 words, since in Hebrew you can say a lot with a single word. And you already know the Hebrew word for praise, did you realize that? That’s right, it is the word “hallelu,” as in “hallelujah!” The other part of hallelujah in Hebrew simply means, “the Lord.” So if you knew the word “hallelujah,” you already knew a complete Hebrew sentence, maybe without even realizing it. Out of 34 Hebrew words which make up this psalm, 13 have the word “hallelu” or “praise” built into them. 12 of the sentences actually begin with that word. It seems clear to me that if we have any intention of getting the most out of Psalm 150, we’re going to have to know about praising!

Perhaps, like most one-syllable words, we think we know what “praise” is when we hear it, but do we really? Did you know that the original meaning of the English word “praise” is “to set a price on”? That’s right, it is a form of the word “appraise,” as in “appraisal,” which anyone who owns a house in this state already knows plenty about. So, for a long time, the word “praise” required other modifiers to make its meaning clear in context. If it meant “price,” then words had to be attached to let us know if our “appraisal” should be high or low. So we hear about “high praise,” “faint praise,” and so on. Knowing the root of our English word, at least we know our word for “hallelu” has to do with value. But the Hebrew word is much richer.

Terms associated with “hallelu” in the Hebrew Bible are such words as “glorify,” “magnify,” “extol,” “bless,” and “rejoice.”

Every believer has to answer the reporters’ questions in regard to our own praises of God. But before we get to asking about where or how, probably we need to have some sense of why. Why praise? Why God? Why me? Psalm 150 dismisses the question with two short phrases: praise God because of his deeds and because of who God is. That may seem less than satisfying, but remember, Psalm 150 follows 149 other psalms with lots of other reasons given for praising God: because, according to previous psalms, by God’s word heavens and earth were created,1 by God’s action, Israel was freed from Egypt,2 because God’s nature is to seek justice for the oppressed and give food to the hungry,3 God turns grieving to dancing and clothes people with joy,4 he grants forgiveness,5 he made known his law to Moses to help guide our lives.6

Why praise God? “Tell me why you love me,” we ask of those who claim to love us. And when they start their list, if it is really love, the explanation soon sounds ridiculous. Explain why there is air, why honey tastes sweet, why the laugh of a baby is so pleasant, why a burst of sunshine after a rainy cool winter day is so refreshing. Eventually all our whys move toward praise because simple thank-yous for specific things just don’t seem to be enough. Words don’t seem enough either, so when we feel praise coming on — whether at a football game or because of a loving kiss — we feel moved toward music and our feet want to dance. When it comes to praise, the arts — music, poetry, and dance — have it all over logic and rhetoric. So where the psalter begins with a celebration of the law in Psalm 1, it ends in Psalm 150 with an adoring celebration of the One who gave the law.

The very first Psalm. Do you remember how it goes? “Blessed are those...whose delight is in the law of the Lord.” The law is about obedience, and before we can do very much about loving God, we first have to know what it means to be obedient — even if the main thing we learn from that is how very disobedient we’ve been. That is what the law is for. But obedience is not the end toward which God is moving us, not ultimately. God is not like the wife of Rumpole of the Bailey, not some fanatical tin pot dictator who requires nothing so much as that she be obeyed. The psalms have moved from the opening in obedience to this closing in praise, because God seeks to move people toward adoration, toward celebration, toward the happy realization that we have a great God who loves us beyond our capacity to absorb it or understand it.

When a young man says he worships the ground his girl walks on, it is pretty obvious that his feelings toward that girl are strong, captivating, that he is overcome by her. Contrast that with our own experiences sometimes when we say we have been in worship. Same word, very different meaning. Rather than strong feelings, we may have failed to feel anything at all; far from being captivated by our love of God, we may only be aware of having been distracted; instead of being overcome, we may have been casual and half-hearted in our worship. Someone once said that, on the whole, the topic of God’s love for us is a great deal safer than the topic of our love for God.

Yet even in our callous, half-hearted distraction, God never fails to love us. Every now and then, the truth of that comes home to us in all its stunning reality, and we sit down and write hymns with titles like “Amazing Grace,” “On Our Way Rejoicing,” “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” We find ourselves in that one certain worship service where worship was, finally, the right word. Every now and then, our praise of God truly sets us free, we really feel it, and we know what it is to sing and to dance and to give heartfelt thanks to God.

A psalm of praise, like Psalm 150, doesn’t express the only mood appropriate to the Christian life. After all, there are many other psalms, psalms of lament, psalms of hope, psalms of supplication and intercession. Yet when all is said and done, the One to whom we have addressed all our laments, hopes, supplications and intercessions is worthy of our praise.

Today is a good day to praise the Lord. And I hope that all our worship together can be characterized by praise. The psalm says that everything that breathes should be caught up in the praise of God. It’s the least we can offer to a Lord as great as ours.

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1 Psalm 33:6-7.
2 Psalm 66:6.
3 Psalm 146:7.
4 Psalm 30:11.
5 Psalm 32:5.
6 Psalm 103:7.