So, Sing!

This weekend was supposed to be our All-Church Spring Sabbath Retreat. We were packed and ready to go when the phone calls started rolling in - covid exposure yesterday, head cold, awaiting PCR test results, just came down with something... we had to cancel. The disappointment at another event being canceled, another gathering upended, another adjusting of our plans and letting go of our expectations, is profound. 

But there is something lovely and hopeful happening too.

In Minnesota, we've had the third coldest April in recorded history. (The Twin Cities average temp was 46 degrees. It's usually in the upper 50s and 60s). It was darker, and wetter, and windier than most springs too.  We Minnesotans are attuned to our seasons. Our souls feel the shifting. We watch for signs. We relish the rhythms. We can appreciate winter because we know spring is coming.  Spring didn't come.  

Until yesterday.  Suddenly, it is warm, and sunny, and birds are singing, and green things are bursting out of the ground and we are bursting out of our houses in shirt sleeves, and garden stores are bursting at the seams with happy horticulturalists.  It feels like hope.

It brought to mind this message we shared several years ago, so I adapted and updated it and am sharing it again today.  As we embrace this unexpectedly at-home sabbath weekend for rest, renewal, attentiveness to life, presence in our present, may we Sing.

Psalm 98

 
Sing  a new song. 
Try it. 
Something completely new.  
Something you’ve never sung before.
You don’t know the words, you can barely hum the tune, but sing it anyway. 
Try it on for size…no, just jump in and belt it out.  
 
Maybe you don’t sing with the confidence you would if it were the old song, the familiar song, the song that makes sense and feels easy.  Maybe you don’t feel so comfortable with the instruments, or you worry that you’ll be singing alone. 
 
Tell you what – how about if we sing with you?  
And not just us, the whole earth – the chaotic seas will sing too, and they can’t sound more in tune than you do – the floods will clap their messy hands; just make a joyful noise, really, any noise will do.  
 
But make it loud, ok?  
Because the hills are going to join in on this, and really, the world itself, and all those who live in it.  It will be a song like no other, so get ready to sing. Are you ready?
 
This song, it means something.  
This is one reason it is a new song and not the old songs. 
 
It is not a song of proper religion.  It is not a song of patriotism, or a song of war.  It is not a lament for how terrible things are, or a song of social consciousness or commentary.  This song simply can’t be sung by ‘us and them’, or played on bandwagons or soap boxes, and it’s not a rally song, a commercial jingle, or background music in an elevator.   It’s not like the old songs in any way at all, so you need to let all those go if you’re really going to sing this song.
 
This is not a lullaby we’ll be singing, here, this song is more of a wake up and take notice type song.  It is a remember and never, ever, ever forget kind of song.  It is a song for all the times when you were treated unfairly, and not only you, but all of those who were treated unfairly, ever – even by you. 
It is a song for the times you were overlooked and undervalued, the times you were nothing but a number, or a diagnosis, or an accessory, or a liability.  
 
This is a song for the ravaged and destroyed creation; over the parched, burning and starving earth, it sings crashing seas and clapping floods and quenching rain. And where she’s drowning in sorrow it lifts the ground from waterlogged sludge, and drapes it gently over the line to dry in the tender breeze and warm sun. It’s that versatile and powerful a song.
 
This is a song for all the times when evil won, and those times were many and great - countless, or so we thought - it sings right in the face of those times, it thrusts it’s wide eyes and unquenchable joy right up under the nose of those times and opens its mouth and belts out with all gusto right into the shocked and startled face of evil, knocking it down on its bottom to stare up in stunned standstill at the wild and mighty sound of the song.  
 
This is a song of justice that tears through the paper thin fragility of justice and liberty for all, that lifts up all the incidences – every single one – where injustice and oppression were really the rule, where lives didn’t matter as much as money, where people were forsaken for power – the song, you will hear it, has every one of their voices, loud and strong, vindicated and joyful, each forsaken child, every cheated worker, and every single starving, sick, disregarded or devalued human being that has ever been, all the silenced and ignored and unheeded voices will rise together in a sound so great that it shatters glass ceilings into a million pieces, reduces palaces to rubble and grinds diamonds to dust, a sound so powerful it drowns out every bomb and bullet and lie and label, and quakes opens the prisons and graves and sets the captives free.  
 
So get ready, because this is some song. 
 This is not just any song, it is the song of the earth for her king, her Creator; this is a song of all things made right.
 
But you know, this song, actually, is kind of a dangerous song.  
It is not a song for the faint of heart.  
We already discovered you don’t need to really know the words, or even the tune, you don’t have to have practiced or learned this song, in fact, there is really no way to do so, you just sing it.  
But you have to be willing to sing it. 
Are you willing to sing it?  
 
Because if you hear this song you can’t ever go back. 
You can’t pretend you didn’t hear it.  You can’t be the way you were before you sang it.  It changes you, but not just you; it changes everything. So, if you’re comfortable with how things are, I mean, if you don’t really want to see things too terribly different, than you’d better not sing the song. 
Just to be safe.  
 
Because there are no secrets once this song has been sung.  
There is nothing hidden that doesn’t get revealed.  
And all the things that look strong, or sure, or important, they might seem kind of silly and stupid once you hear this song.  
So, if you care a whole lot about those things, better not to sing it, at least not just yet.  Let them get tarnished first, broken in, disappointing. Let the expectations get a little bit dashed and the frustration build a bit, because this song is for everyone and everything, except it is NOT a song for the satisfied.  
 
It is not a song for the secure and the worthy, for the strong and the powerful, and it certainly doesn’t make you right or tell you who’s wrong. 
 It kind of makes a joke of all that, and if that is where you’re at, better to cover your ears and turn away for as long as you can stand it before it overpowers you, because you’re going to be really cut down to size and I can’t imagine that will be a very pleasant experience.  
 
But once you are, there is a place for you in this song too.  
Actually, it’s kind of the only way you can join in the song, is when you know that in singing it, you pass judgment on yourself, but you sing it anyway. 
 
Because – and this is the most important part, maybe I forgot to say this – the song is not about you.  
It’s actually not really about any of us, or anything we know or have done or ever will do.  
It’s about God.  
It’s all about God.  
It’s about what God has done and what God will do.  
It’s about God who does things, and doesn’t just watch it all and keep to Godself.  
But God watches too, and doesn’t miss a thing either, so there is nothing, nothing that doesn’t get made right in this song. 
 
It sounds like kind of a lot, and it is, actually. 
It’s everything.  
Way more than you or I could ever bear. 
Way more joy, and justice, than we would know what to do with in a thousand lifetimes.  
But we don’t really need to worry about it.  
We just need to pay attention. 
 
 The chorus is coming.  And when you’re paying attention, you get to see that it has already started. Here and there it startles you, or makes you cry for no reason, or gives you a weird thrill of recognition and irrational hope. 
 
 We’ve found ways to explain it away, the crazies, the anomalies, the exceptions, the sentimental or insane, but they’re not, really, they’re the song, peaking through the frayed seams, busting through a rip in the knee or a tear in a button-hole of the fabric of our so-called reality.  
 
The stranger stands and shouts a few notes before helping someone off the bus. The man on the overpass with the sign grips the change in his fist and hollers a bit of the melody into the passing traffic below. Neighbors lying side by side through the night echo defiant snippets through train tunnels –the tune bounces off the walls and wraps around the sleeping grandmothers and shopkeepers, while bombs drop overhead. Our own winter-weary bodies vibrate with the symphony of the overjoyed soil as we plunge our parched hands into the teeming universe below and turn our spent souls upward toward the sun. 
 
In fact, all over the world, if we just know how to listen, above us, beneath us, before us and afterwards too, we’ll hear that the song has begun; and the very earth itself is humming in anticipation.  Just lift your gaze to drifting clouds and breathe, or tune your ears to the skittering, chirping creature commotion.  Close down the computer, shut off the phone, turn off the tv and the lights and curl up at an open window as the day slips into night and crickets and katydids hold steady chorus beneath the city sounds. 
The noise is building.
 
And we, you and I, together, we sing the song. It’s what we do.  
It’s why in the world we come together and do this thing called worship that accomplishes nothing at all, as any reasonable person familiar with the old songs could tell you.
We come together to share the song, to remember the truth, to recount the steadfast love of our Lord, the coming and sharing and dying and rising, backwards and upside down, breaking in and spilling out, never ending and always persisting salvation of our God-with-us. 
We warm up our voices and pipe out a few notes in defiance of the deafening silence, in far-fetched musical mutiny to the grating discord of the world around us, and really, on its behalf, because like it or not, ready or not, the song is coming.  
 
So you might as well sing along.

 

Telling the stories that change us

Psalm 40:1-10

Growing up, I used to think I needed a better testimony. It’s no good to just say you grew up a pastor’s kid and kind of always knew God.  I would simmer with righteous jealousy whenever I heard someone really lay it out there, drug addict and homeless, and God saved them from all that and gave them a new start. Or filthy rich, self-serving lawyer who met Jesus and gave it all up to go into youth ministry.  God, of course, is capable of saving people from all sorts of things. Their things just seemed way more interesting, and way more important to be saved from, than mine.

This is our last unit with the Psalms – what Brueggemann calls, "Psalms of New Orientation." In many ways, these are the testimony Psalms. We started the summer with Psalms of Orientation – which praise the reliability of God’s goodness and the order of creation. Then we moved into Psalms of Disorientation – those prayers that invite us into our experience when all trust in God’s goodness and the world’s dependability and order crumbles. 

Now we come to Psalms of New Orientation.  In some ways they are a return to where we began, except that after disorientation there is no going back.  These prayers of the specific goodness of God who saved them from specific trouble, prayed by those who’ve been through death and come out the other side through no fault, or power, of their own. And they give God complete credit for it all.  These are testimony songs.

There is this inexplicable moment in the Psalms of Disorientation, when the Psalm goes from anguish and despair suddenly to gratitude and effusive praise for God’s salvation.  Sometimes that’s because the person or community is healed from sickness, released from bondage, defeated an enemy army, or some other clear, “give me the microphone I’ve got a testimony” type of redemption has occurred.  

Other times the circumstances don’t actually change at all –their reputation isn’t suddenly repaired or their power returned to them, but something has shifted.  They are brought from oppression to freedom, even in the midst of a difficult situation.  

In either case, the credit goes to God.  And what is called for in the moment is gratitude.

These are songs of grace.  Psalms of new orientation can’t come on their own.  They are only the new life after the death, the new story after the old.  They are what is born after what has been lost.  A different kind of trust, a new kind of faith-  one that has been tested and formed, let go and given back as a gift.  Many are directly related to struggles in the own Psalmists’ lives. But many look back to specific acts of God’s deliverance generations earlier, such as God bringing their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt five hundred years before. Retelling God’s faithfulness then becomes a way to celebrate and recognize God’s faithfulness now.  

 “I waited patiently,” our Psalm begins, and God saved me. 

God is the one who acts.  And what we call “waiting patiently” may not have looked so patient at the time. We’ve seen the first half of some of these and it looks a lot more like arguing and blaming and cajoling and begging than patient waiting.  This is like a little kid throwing a tantrum at the store, wanting only to be home, and when it’s all done and he is safely at home, he might say, Mommy brought me home.  I knew all along that she would.

Of course, looking back, we are much more sure that God will act than we might have felt in the moment, but that is our prerogative.  We get to say, “I knew God would do it, and God did.”  That doesn’t make us liars.  It makes us changed.  

The action of God is so powerful and transformative that not only does it change the present and gives us a new future, it changes the past too.  God’s grace is a time traveler; God’s intrusion reframes the narrative.  The action of God was coming all along, even if I couldn’t see it. I waited patiently and God delivered me.  After we have come out the other side, the story that has changed us changes.  

Let me give you an example of this. While I’ve had a lot of wonderful jobs, and plenty of tolerable jobs, I have also had two jobs in my life that sucked the life out of me.  One of them was while Andy was a Ph.D. student and I was the sole breadwinner.  They were both difficult and draining.  I felt trapped - my soul slowly being sapped.  I might say it in a Psalm as,I struggled through frustration and confusion, not knowing my purpose or contribution, but God saved me.  I was a patient and willing recipient of God’s grace.  

Now I wasn’t, actually, at the time, either patient or particularly receptive.  I was impatient and miserable, and I felt stuck.   But looking back at these things, we can say, “I trusted God and God delivered me,” even when it happens the other way around: God delivers us and we learn we can trust God to do so.

Because not only did God deliver me from those places, by my either quitting or getting fired, and not only did God give me ways to make money to support us where I felt happier and freer, but also, it turns out, I received valuable wisdom and meaningful growth from having suffered through those two jobs.  

Truly, not a week goes by that I don’t directly apply skills or insights from one or the other of those experiences. God used them to make me a more genuine human, a more attentive noticer, a more intentional leader, and a pastor who knows that whatever good happens here among us is because of God and not me.  Knowing this makes me far less likely to hang my own worth on how “well” the church is doing, which is much better for you all too.  

So my Psalm of new orientation about this would probably end with something like, I praise you, God! You are relentless about redemption! Praise the Lord, who uses everything in our lives, and doesn’t let even a single drop of it go to waste.

If, as our last round of Psalms taught us, questioning God’s goodness is a valid and vital part of faith, then so is accepting it, celebrating it, and telling about it when you see it and feel it.  It doesn’t stop with the asking, or the saving, or even with the praising, it must come full circle – others must know the truth of your life- the story of your being saved.  We don’t just belong to God, we also belong to each other. Which brings us back to testimony.

Your story is part of the story of God.  It is the story not of one who did it all on their own, nor is it the story of one who lost it all.  It is the story of one who has been saved. Saved by God. Given a new life, new beginnings.  

When you speak of your salvation to others, your humanity that has been lost, overlooked, starved, dead, trapped in the desolate pit, stuck in the miry bog – it is reestablished. Your place is restored, your voice is remade. These Psalms remind us we are no longer defined by our striving or our struggle, but by our participation with Christ in God’s life. 

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, I once was lost but now I’m found!

You put a new song in my mouth, O God, a song of praise and thanks!

But I’m not talking about just a one time conversion experience, rehearsed and rehashed to compare who got the better before and after photo.  There is not just one Psalm of New Orientation.  God doesn’t just save us once.  This happens over and over, throughout our lives.  “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning.” (Lamentations 3:22-23) 

We all have testimonies. We all have Psalms of new orientation inside us.  Many, many of them.  We just don’t know how to sing them, or haven’t thought to.  

We have all been saved by the intervention of a God who leans in close and hears our cries.  But we don’t always recognize it.  And even if we do, we rarely either give God praise or tell others what God has done for us. 

Maybe we’re afraid it’s bragging, or could jinx our good fortune, or isn’t as impressive as a story as it ought to be.  Maybe we’ve been more on the lookout for things like dumb luck, or our own prowess and skill, and haven’t learned how to give God credit- or feel silly or naive doing it.  I suspect mostly it's that we are just moving so fast in this life we don’t stop to notice the hand of God; we're out of practice recognizing it, and expressing the gratitude we feel.

Let’s do it anyway. Let’s assume, like the Israelites did, like David did, that God is involved in it all.  Let’s imagine God is always more present, more available, more engaged, more invested, than we can conceive of.  

Let’s practice with each other waiting patiently when we’re in the pit, and when we’re delivered out of it, rejoicing unabashedly and telling about it to all who will listen.  

And let’s practice listening and receiving each other’s stories of deliverance, being the people who believe you when you say you experienced God. We will be the people who celebrate when you experience life out of death, because we know this is real, and because it points all of us back to the truth of our belonging to God and each other that can only come from God.

Sometimes we might do this with our day or with our week, look for God’s action to express gratitude.  But like the long gaze back of the Israelites, what it might do for us to look back at our lives – ten years ago, let’s say, or twenty, or forty even, and recognize some of the times that God saved us? 

Can you seek out a time in your own story when you felt lost, or stuck, or dead, and newness came, God intervened, hope was born where there was none, and quite apart from anything you could have cooked up?

Can you see where you might have been heading one way and you were led another way instead?

Were you saved from a toxic relationship? 

Given a new start after an illness or injury took away what you thought made you you?  

Did you find yourself in a new place where you didn’t know anyone, and kind and wonderful people came into your life?  

Did a rejection from the school you had your heart set on, or the job that was perfect for you, mean you ended up in exactly the right place that you may never have chosen otherwise?  

Did the pain over losing a spouse, or a child, threaten to swallow you whole and shut you down for life, but somehow, now, you are living, even with joy?  

Were you lost in addiction and released from its grip and every day keep choosing that freedom?  

Did you make a choice that caused great pain to others, and later find forgiveness and a new start?

Were you reunited with a long-lost childhood friend, or reawakened to a discarded passion or interest you got to pursue later in life?  

There is no end to the form these stories of God’s faithfulness and saving can take.  As the Psalmist says, You have multiplied, O Lord my God,
   your wondrous deeds and your thoughts towards us;
   none can compare with you.
Were I to proclaim and tell of them,
   they would be more than can be counted.

Let me be clear that celebrating God’s deliverance doesn’t mean we are saying everything in our life is great right now. This Psalm itself veers back into pleas for help.  Speaking out about what God has done for you in the past in no way undermines a fresh experience of God’s absence, or the need for God’s intervention again in your life. 

This is the paradoxical faith of the Israelites, that they can sing praises for God’s faithfulness in the past, even while begging God to please be faithful now.  It is, in fact, a basis for their pleas.  

So if that is where you are now, in a place of struggle or anger with God, I invite you to do two things.  One, read the rest of this Psalm.  Pray with it this week.  The Psalms are filled with words to bring you into your experience where God can meet you.  This prayerbook has been used by people like us for two thousands years to help us plant our feet and face God with whatever we’ve got. 

But the second thing I invite you to do is to take this moment to look back on your life and seek out times of God’s salvation.  Look for stories – your own stories – that show you who God is and what God does.  

And then we’re going to tell them.  We are going to practice it now: the noticing, the thanks, the telling and the receiving of these testimonies.  Let us sing a new song.

  

We did this together in worship on September 1.  

You can do this at home with these prompts:

I was…

Then God…

I praise the Lord, who…

Try thinking of a half dozen or so.  

Share them with someone. 

Share them here in the comments, if you’re willing.


This is the fourth of a four part series on the spirituality of the Psalms.  
You can read the rest here: 
Part 1 - A life well-lived
Part 2 - Starting and ending this way
Part 3 - Praying the dangerous ones 

Starting and ending this way

Psalm 113

Mary Oliver wrote, in her poem, "Mindful":

Every day,
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leave me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It is what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself over and over

in joy,
and acclamation,
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Like the Psalmists of old, some of us cultivate a life of praise. 

We notice, and we say it outloud.

In our Summer of Psalms series, our text today is another of our Psalms of orientation – those prayers that start us out on the foundation of God’s goodness and reliability, and point us, like Mary Oliver does, to the world’s beauty. These Psalms root us in God’s guidance and care.  Here is where you begin, this psalm of orientation says, Praise the Lord! 

When our psalmist was writing, there was no doubting that God existed. There was no need to convince oneself or others of the mysterious reality beyond what we can see and touch. Nobody saw God as an abstract idea, or a principle in need of defending.  

It was accepted that along with the material ream is the inexplicable that deserves deference, even praise. 

But today we kind of live the opposite way. We find ways to say things are NOT God’s doing. We praise the surgeons, and the treatment protocol. We praise coincidence and good timing. We praise forethought, and complete planning, and we praise sound investments, and even luck.  Rarely when something happens, do we give the credit to God. Rarely is our first instinct to say, “Wow, God! You are so great! You are kind and powerful and good to me! Good job on the world!”

But our psalmist says God deserves to be praised. The psalmist celebrates that God is the Lord over all, who also comes near in love and care. Unlike the deities of the age, the empty idols, or perilous guessing games of reward and punishment, or the intricate dance of avoiding offense and placating evil, the Lord seeks to be in relationship with people and invites feedback. God is involved, guiding and saving God’s people, sharing God’s very name. 

When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, God said, I am the God of your of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God who has been good and faithful to to your ancestors, you can trust me. Go and tell the people I will set them free. 

And  Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” 

God answered Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:1-17)

This is a very confusing name to say and to translate– it’s all consonants, to pronounce it sounds like an exhaled breath, YHWH. Vowels were added, so now it is pronounced, Yahweh, and it might mean, I am who I am, or, I will be what I will be. 

There’s a timelessness to the name of God, a was and is and will be-ness built right into the mystery of it. 

There is also a lack of contingency, a self-definition. God is. God will be. God is being. 

I AM.  That one doesn’t need us. That one doesn’t need anything – so self-contained, so holy, so set apart, so unlike human beings, 

YHWH is high above all nations, 
   and God’s glory above the heavens. 
Who is like YHWH our God,
   who is seated on high, 
who looks far down
   on the heavens and the earth? the psalmist says.  

After a while, it began to feel presumptuous and overconfident to use this sacred and personal name for God, even though God shared the name in the first place. God is too holy, it was decided, and we are not worthy. So far above us is God, that to speak God’s name felt like a violation of that distinction. Better to stick with titles, maintain proper respect.  

Every time the name came up in spoken word or manuscripts, it was substituted with Adonai, “The Lord.” If you look in your bible, anywhere it says The Lord in small caps, it is filling in for where it used to say the very name of God.  

In this little Psalm, that is 8 times.

So when the psalmist says "Praise the name of the Lord," he is saying, Praise the name of Yahweh!  Say good things about Yahweh, applaud Yahweh. Recognize I AM for who God is and what God does!  

And then the psalmist goes on to say who God is, and what it is that God does.  

I AM comes down from God’s seat, high above the heavens. The Hebrew root for this seat is yashab, and gives the poor man a throne among princes, root word is yashab, and the barren woman a joyful home with children, root word, again, is yashab. 

God gives up God’s seat to lift the poor, male and female, all of us, and gives the needy and left out God’s very own place, to be at home alongside God, to have honor among the people and security forever with God.  Biblical scholar Rolf Jacobson summarizes this as God’s “self-emptying, gracious intrusion” into our world. This is who Yahweh is and what Yahweh does.  

We have been given the name of God another time too. God’s self-emptying, gracious intrusion is on display when God comes alongside us and takes on all that would separate us from God and one another, bringing us into a bond with God that cannot be broken. The name God gave us is then is Jesus, Emmanuel, God With Us. 

In the name of Jesus we see who God is and what God does. 

And so we praise the name of Jesus.  

We praise the name of the Lord, for who God is and what God has done.

.  

Today, when a person does something good or great, we praise them. 

The player who kicks the winning goal is praised for being focused and athletic and determined and a great teammate. But we don’t just randomly list those qualities, we praise her for these things after the praise-worthy event occurs. 

The winner of the Nobel Peace prize is selfless and resolute and brave and inspirational, because they did something exceptional that is worthy of lifting up.  And when we lift up their action, we recognize that it says something about who they are. 

Praise is connected to something a person does. And we might say their act reveals who they are.  So we praise them for what they’ve done, but also for who they are, which is revealed in what they do.  

God is just and kind and good because God has shown justice and kindness and goodness to us. This is how Israel praised God.  They recounted, over and over, the things God had done, and what those things revealed about who God is.

But once we praise and honor a person for something great and say how great they are, it’s pretty awful if they disappoint us – if they act differently than the character we’ve praised them for. If we learn that they’ve cheated, or abused someone, or taken a bribe, suddenly our praise feels foolish and hollow.  They are not worthy of it after all; their character is not what we thought it to be. So there is an inherent risk in praising – we are trusting the person is indeed worthy of it and expecting them to continue being so.  

Praise puts an obligation of sorts on a person.  They are not just bound to their own self and their integrity, they are now bound to those who’ve looked up to them and admired them. 

Humans are not really worthy of this kind of honor- nobody is really capable over a lifetime of always being the good and kind and selfless and brave and inspirational people we aspire to be. Even if we are for a moment or few, it’s impossible to maintain that in perpetuity and not eventually let someone down.

But not so of God.  I Am Who I Will Be does not waver in goodness and greatness, in love and care.  God is worthy of praise from the first light of morning to last drop of night’s darkness.

Yesterday I read an article entitled, “The God of Love Has Had a Really Bad Week.” It addressed the crowd at Trump’s rally this week who chanted, “send her back!” about our own Minnesota Senator Ilhan Omar, and wondered where they went to Sunday school and whether they’d been paying attention. It went on to say that for many Christians, including the author’s own brother with whom she is no longer speaking, the God of love has been replaced by a strict, bend-the-knee-or-be-punished kind of “Emperor-God, enthroned in glory.”  It that even though we are using the same bible, we are coming up with different Gods, and we need to get back to a God of love.

We have really bad weeks, we humans.  With occasional, fleeting praise-worthy moments, we mostly live like we’re divided. We are often horrible to each other.  We are sinful and deluded, and we dehumanize others and degrade them.  And we feel justified doing so by whatever conscious fears or unconscious prejudices are guiding us. And then we are shocked and horrified when we see people dehumanize others and degrade them, so we dehumanize and degrade those people, and feel justified doing so by whatever conscious fears and unconscious prejudices are guiding us.

And then we say that God is having a really bad week.

The God of love doesn’t have really bad weeks. 

The God of love is also the God enthroned in glory – above and beyond all the fray and unable to be captured and possessed by us, unable to be bent to our purposes or claimed for our causes, no matter how worthy we think they are or how loudly we proclaim them. 

The God of love is not like us.  

I Am Who I Will Be comes down from on high to be God With Us, to lift the poor and needy from the ash heap to sit with princes, and to give the barren a home filled with children.  God With Us comes into our dishonor and our poverty, our isolation and our impossibility, and give us what is God’s own - a seat alongside God and one another in love and honor. 

This God doesn’t have a really bad week.  

This God is, every moment from now until forever from now [1], worthy of praise.  Because this God is not an empty idol, or a perilous guessing game of reward and punishment, or an intricate dance of avoiding offense and placating evil, or an abstract idea or principle in need of defending.  

God is a real and living being beyond all, who can be recognized and encountered and experienced. God seeks to be in relationship with us and invites feedback. God reveals who God is as a minister, that is, through the act of loving and caring for us, and through us for others. God’s relentless self-emptying, persistent gracious intrusion does not ever stop, not ever, even if we stop paying attention.  

God is worthy of our praise.

So we can begin by lifting up the action of God.  

Praise begins with noticing, What has God done in my life?  

And for us modern people, it begins with risking giving God credit where we might instead want to credit chance or a good idea, or someone’s skill, or dumb luck.  

Imagine that God is more involved than you think in almost everything. 

And imagine that even in the ash heaps of our world and the barrenness of our lives, actually, especially there, God graciously intrudes. 

God is with us, always, always working to bring life out of death.  

This does not deny the experiences of death and horror, but it does say they are not greater or more definitive than God’s love and care. They are not greater than God’s sovereignty, so they will not ultimately win or define us.  

God persists in God’s work of love and transformation, in the smallest, most insignificant things and the greatest, most overwhelming things. There is nowhere God is not, and there is nothing that God fears. 

The God of love is enthroned in glory above all powers both now and forever. 

And God’s love is greater than our hatred and our small-mindedness, greater than our competition and our self-righteousness, greater than our injustice and cruelty, so that love can break through even in those places, between the cracks and up from below, unstoppable, even by the most terrible things we humans can do to one another. 

God comes into the stopping of death with the breath of life. 

The God of love will never stop saving us, coming to us, returning us to God and to one another, where we truly belong.  What God does cannot be undone, no matter how hard we might try, or how loudly we might deny it.

So get on with it!  the Psalmist urges us. Praise the Lord! Cultivate a life of praise!  Start and end this way:

Praise God for every time we are confronted with our sin, and praise God for each moment we remember our belonging. 

Praise God for every glimpse of beauty and praise God for each pause of joy God gives us in this life. 

Praise God for the moments of healing, and praise God for the breakthroughs of hope.

Praise God for the words of comfort the friend said, and praise God for the taste of the ripe tomato right off the vine. 

Praise God for the sore muscles and hard work that made something beautiful, and praise God for the tears of release, the hand held and the pain not borne alone. 

For all things, in all times, Praise Jesus, O you servants of I AM. 

From now until forever from now, for who God is and what God does, Praise the Lord!

This is the second of a four part series on the spirituality of the Psalms.  

You can read the rest here: 
Part 1 - A life well-lived

Part 2 - Starting and ending this way

Part 3 - Praying the dangerous ones 

Part 4 - Telling the stories that change us

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[1]I’m grateful to Alice Worden for this evocative phrasing from a gorgeous Prayer Around the Cross liturgy she wrote for this Psalm.

Telling the truth by accident

Mark 11:1-11

Yesterday we threw a funeral for Norma Shannon. It was like that too, throwing a funeral. She was 93 when she died, and there was joy in the midst of the sorrow.  Death took Norma, as it will take all of us, and even though it was sad, it felt like life gave death a run for its money yesterday. I think every one of us left there a little more grateful to be alive, a little more aware of what a gift it all is.

Earlier this week I told Andy that I first had a funeral sermon to write for Norma and then I’d be working on one for Palm Sunday, and he answered, “so you’ll write a funeral sermon for Jesus too, then.”

I’ve never thought about Palm Sunday like that before, but this might be why it’s a strange one for me. Because in the midst of this celebration of the crowds who think things are just getting started, we know death is coming for Jesus. And he knows it too. He’s been trying to tell his disciples for some time, but they wont listen.

This is a bit of political theater that will be played out for all to see – and God chose to do this; it’s an important part of the story, so we treat it that way, but it’s not clear to us just what is going on because even though we know where this parade is leading, we’re not so far off from the crowds themselves.

Seemingly since the beginning of time, we’ve thought the world was ending. We’ve wanted to be saved from whatever it was we were in, and we’ve pretty consistently created God in our image much of the time, demanding to be saved the way we think we should from the things we think should be saved from. And so you and I take up our metaphorical palm branches when it suits us as well, and stand alongside the crowd, many of whom were thinking Jesus was there to save them from the Roman Empire, to make Israel great again, wanting him to be all these things that he wasn’t, and crying Save us, which is what hosanna means, Save us holy one! and then by the end of the week yelling Crucify him!

And it is at least in part, I think, due to feeling ripped off that Jesus wasn’t all the things they had projected onto him, he wasn’t strong and invincible and ready to lead a revolution after all, and disappointment turns easily to anger, and maybe even a craving for revenge, for making us hope and then letting us down.  

But Jesus was never what they thought he should be – if they’d been paying attention at any point in his life, that is maybe the most consistent theme in all he did and said – the Kingdom of God is not like the kindgoms of this world, and he was never interested in strength and power; instead of courting the elite he hung out with the overlooked and his kind of salvation looked like freeing people from the things that kept them cut off from their neighbor and restoring people to their humanity as beloved children of God, and calling them to go and do likewise.

Jesus is heading toward the cross, but the week begins in this parade. This parade where people lay down coats and take up branches and shout things that may have all sorts of mixed up motives and false assumptions, but even so, were true.

That’s the ironic beauty of this moment, for those who knew, who could see the real truth: What they are saying is completely true, more true than they will ever realize, part of the fabric of all things most true.

Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the lord.

Blessed is the one who saves us; save us please!

In the midst of crazy noise these days where, despite all the other big stories going on in the world, all the human suffering and pain, the places we need saving, our national politics seem to be drowning out everything else.  We are surrounded, it seems, by fear and posturing, shouting and shaming, refusals to admit wrong and the unyielding need to be right, and it feels really big; things feel pressing, ugly, fearful and overwhelming, and I, for one, find myself crying out to God, “Save us please!”

In a world of power and posturing, here is our “king” riding on poverty’s animal straight through the middle of our expectations, nevertheless taking in all the Hosannas, all the save uses that the people raise up, welcoming them to himself.  And when he reaches the temple he glances around and leaves.  Because that is not where this is all leading – it’s not for the center of power or the seat of religion, the place where the movers and the shakers go, where the decisions are made and the plans are unfolded.

It’s leading to the cross.  Where the cries for salvation will be answered for real, and not at all in the ways we all think they should be.

Because beyond everything we think power and might and right salvation should be, this is the way of God. God’s way of love is unrelenting and quiet, foolish and strange. It doesn’t look like how this world looks. It looks like something else entirely.

Whether we think Jesus should sweep in and fix everything, protect our sense of safety and keep bad things from happening, strong-arm our enemies, or make us supernaturally good people, however our version of God’s plan goes or our view of salvation looks, that doesn’t stop God from 1- hearing us, and welcoming into Godself our misguided but very real cries for salvation, and 2- drawing us into the real Kingdom of God, even while breaking down all we thought it was about.

Nothing can stop or change the trajectory of God’s Kingdom. God is bent on loving us no matter what, bent on salvation of the world, bent on bringing humanity close to the heart of God and blessing the whole world with life as God intends it to be in wholeness and harmony. We think enemies should be destroyed or at least silenced, and power should be wielded to make things feel stable so we can build ourselves up and avoid bad things, most especially death, but God instead submitted completely to suffering and death, so that nothing can separate us from God’s love. God has come, God is here, God is holding it all. That is what is really real.

So God chooses this moment of sheer praise and celebration to begin this whole week.  And one invitation in this for you and me is this: praising God reminds us what is really real. When stop whatever it is we are caught up in fearing and believing and doing, and simply lift our heads and acknowledge God in our midst, showing up and suprising us like a peasant on a donkey, when we can stop walking and lay down our coats and pick up our branches, that is, whatever we have at hand at the moment, make it into a tool of worship, even ridiculously so, even with confusion or mixed motives, if we stop and praise God, it reminds us again what is true.

In order for Jesus to proceed into the week ahead, in order for any of them to, something had to be made clear right at the outset. And even if they didn’t know at the time what they were saying, they were going to say it anyway because it is the truest thing –God has come. God is here. Right here Among us. Blessed be the one who comes in the name of the Lord!

Stopping to praise God reminds us what is true. Praising God reminds us what is really real.

In a few minutes we will gather around Marty and give thanks to God for God’s calling on Marty’s life. And because death is coming for every one of us at some point, we will say outloud together that Marty is dying, and you guys, I feel really sad about that. I feel so sad.

But we will also say that God is still God, and that God is with us, and God is with Marty. And in these coming weeks we will be saying, Save us! and meaning all sorts of things by it, and God will hear it anyway, and God will save us because this is what God does and who God is. 

And there is more beauty and hope and love and joy that God wants to impart into Marty’s life, and into all of our lives, as we share them with each other, so we will not be afraid.  And even when we are, a little, still, we will walk with Marty.  Because this is where Jesus is. 

Jesus walks this way with us. Jesus went this way before us in this prophetic parade; this confusing, strange spectacle, where truth was spoken right into illusion, right through delusions, and what was happening was bigger and truer than any of them could have realized at the time.  And so we trust that by facing instead of fearing death, we are also part of something that is bigger and truer than we can realize.

Next week is Easter, and we will celebrate that that death does not get the final word.  We will sing and pray and rejoice in resurrection– even while we are all dying, we will proclaim that in Jesus Christ, death is not the end.  The life and love of God, that we are made for and called into, has already begun and will never, ever end.

So as children of God, claimed by this promise, let us lift up our voices in praise. Let’s stop and acknowledge God with us, right in our midst, and find again our true home in the One who holds it all, who has come to share it all with us, and who never leaves or forsakes us, but instead faces death with us and leads us in life everlasting.  

Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes!

Amen.