The topic of praising God is not something we folks in the mainline Christian community do a lot of talking about, or at least in the places that I’ve served and been a part of over the years. Even when I was a teenager and ensconced within a Southern Baptist setting, I don’t remember a lot of conversations about what it means to praise God and why we humans do it or should do it. Maybe it’s nothing you’ve ever thought about twice, because we often are given the words with which to praise God, in hymns, songs, Scripture readings, like the one you heard a few minutes ago from Psalm 150. Honestly, I had never really thought twice about our praise of God until something early on in my ministry, in which I was told how to praise God in a particular kind of worship service. As you know, I once worked in a large congregation that had multiple and different kinds of worship services during the week. As some point, the Senior Pastor asked/told me that I would be leading up the Wednesday evening service, which at that time was a contemporary worship service with a 30-minute slot for preaching/teaching, usually connected to some clever and contemporary hot TV show of the moment. One time they had a series on relationships based on the Simpsons, another time it was around the first round of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy series, but it was renamed Queer Eye for the Soul. Yes, some of it was a bit much, but I didn’t get to pick the themes or the contemporary connection to pop culture! Anyway, so all of sudden I am leading a Wednesday evening worship service with a 6-piece band, all them quite good, with 6-8 gifted vocalists leading us in a contemporary Christian worship style. This means that in this particular service there was a lot of music for the first 20 minutes of the service for the 200 souls gathered there, with the lyrics projected onto the screen, and lots of repetition, singing the choruses of these songs over and over again. And there were people raising their hands in praise, often standing up with their eyes closed and their bodies swaying. Then I would preach or teach for 30 minutes, do a prayer, and then the service with another round of repetitive choruses, all of which usually were short, uncomplicated and effused with words of praise for God. I had not grown up in that worship style, and here I was leading a worship service that was built around it. It probably wasn’t the best decision the Senior Pastor ever made putting me as the lead on that service – I think he was desperate after a number of our clergy were fired or resigned – since it was pretty clear early on that I couldn’t easily engage in that style of worship – it just simply wasn’t in my bones. One Wednesday he was standing next to me in the front row, with his hands raised and closed eyes, and he leaned over asked me and told/asked me to do the same. I just shook my head “no,” because, frankly, it just wasn’t me, it just wasn’t the way I showed my adoration of the Divine, my praise of the Holy. Needless to say, that experiment of me leading that service was a short-lived one, though I like to think that I wasn’t that bad at the preaching/teaching part of it.
Now, to be clear, just because I didn’t easily fit into that style of worship, one that tended to focus heavily effusive and emotional it its way of praising God, doesn’t mean that I think it was the wrong way of praising Divine – it just wasn’t my way of offering praise to God. One of the things I often say to the confirmands was that Protestant Reformation gave birth to such an incredible diversity in the church, diversity that was there from the very beginning and was just waiting to come out when the authoritarianism of the Roman Catholic Church at that time got challenged in the 16th century. It allowed for new ways of engaging and praising God, rather than the one-size-fits-all way before the Reformation. Some people may find diversity in the church disconcerting, but I find it exciting because it actually reflects our lived experience in the world – get 10 people in a room and you get 12 different opinions, ideas, and, well, 12 different ways of praising God. But that little experiment of me leading a different type of worship service where praise of God through what is called “praise music” absolutely helped me to start thinking about the whole issue of what it means to praise God. Why do we do praise God, however we do it – and why does the Bible often encourage us to praise God, often insisting we do it as an expression of our love of God?
I want to explore that question by looking at our text today, two snippets of Second Samuel, where the drama of Israel’s struggle to become united under a singular king is finally coming to a conclusion. Remember that Israel had actually been divided into two kingdoms, the Northern Kingdom, often called Israel, actually, and the Southern Kingdom, often called Judah, with the 12 tribes of Israel being divided in loyalty to two different kings. After a lot of false starts, the Northern Kingdom finally realized that it would be better to lead by David, the shepherd boy who had so bravely defended his Southern Kingdom, Judah, from the Philistines – and recaptured the Ark of the Covenant, called God’s chest, in our translation today. Today’s text is that crowning moment when the 12 tribes become one again under David’s leadership – and it almost seems anticlimactic after all intrigue and drama and war that came before it. Now, King David and 30,000 troops march into a town to reclaim the newly captured Ark, this potent symbol of Israel and its God. It was the Ark that Moses used to symbolize the presence of God among the people while they were wandering in the desert for 40 years, and it was believed by some to be the very place that God sat on when she was among her people. Here they have this symbol back, after 40 years of being owned by their hated foes the Philistines, and the party begins. Our snippet of this story ends with these words, this act of praise: David and the entire house of Israel celebrated in the Lord’s presence with all their strength, with songs, zithers, harps, tambourines, rattles, and cymbals.
There was so much to be thankful, of course. After so much bad leadership, finally, Israel would be led by a man chosen by God, though, as always this chosen one was as imperfect as all the other people God has ever chosen for leadership in Israel’s history. And really gratitude is the root of all good praise, that sense of gratitude to God for the good gifts he has given us, for all the ways that God shows up to make something whole when it seems like all would be lost. David and the people in our text are ending a long and bloody nightmare where God’s people could not even get along while they were fighting off nearby competitors for power. Finally, they are united, and it is not an accident that the storyteller here introduces the Ark, this symbol of God’s presence, at the very moment when the people of Israel finally become one again. And so they are grateful – and they pull out the instruments, they get the band back together, so to speak, and they celebrate this unity with their praise of God for making it so. Look, all praise of God should be, ought to be, rooted in gratitude for what God has done, and the world God has created. We praise God for the gift of our lives, the goodness all around us, the food on our table, the people in our lives – and sometimes the people absent from our lives! And we praise God for making a way when there seemed to be no way – and that is what the people of Israel are doing as they surround the Ark on its way to the city of Jerusalem. Praise of God, healthy praise of God, the kind found in our Opening Words today, its rooted in the idea that all is gift, all is something we receive from God, even the things we earned by our hard work – the ability to earn something is even a gift from God. I say it almost every Sunday during our invitation to give to the work of the church – all is gift, all is gift – and then we praise the giver of all things, of everything.
But, of course, people sometimes praise God for the wrong reasons. Later in chapter 6 of Second Samuel, during the journey with the Ark to Jerusalem with the band making beautiful music, a man reaches out and touches the Ark, likely by accident and God kills him instantly for this breach, or at least that is what the storytellers want us to believe. What’s interesting about that story is that David is angry, very angry, at God for this act – and certainly there must have a pall cast over the parade to Jerusalem from that moment on, fear muting their praise of God. But fear has often been used by people to force praise of God upon the people. There is a lot of fear-based religion in the world, and it sometimes shows up in the Bible sadly, but fear based praise of the Divine never quite works – fearing God, dreading God is not the same thing as loving God and being grateful to God. A few years ago you may remember that first public cabinet meeting of the Trump administration, and how everyone around the table went around praising the President with this jarring Soviet style rhetoric – praise for Trump, what an honor it was to serve in his administration, how he was going to be a world changer, etc. Around the table they went, prostrating themselves before Dear Leader with their words of praise for his brilliance and his importance. It was so uncomfortable to watch and I can’t imagine how personally humiliating this must have been for these men and women. I am sure these men and women believed in the President’s policies, but I think it’s clear that they feared him more than they loved him. The unwillingness by the politicians in his own party to hold him accountable is rooted in fear of what he could do their personal electoral chances in the next election. The problem is that the moment he becomes vulnerable, when they no longer fear him, they will join the chorus that condemns so many of his actions. So, I think David instinctively knew that Gods’ actions in killing that man who touched the Ark was a bad move, and that is why he showed such explicit anger – and interestingly enough, the storyteller doesn’t condemn David for his anger, not at all. I think that the storyteller here thinks that David was right and God was wrong to do what God did. Praise of God, love of God, that is rooted in fear will, in the long term, never produce in people the kind of authentic praise that comes from the heart, that comes from gratitude for what God has done and will do in our lives. Fear-based praise, like fear-based religion in general, is a dead-end in the long-run, not matter how effective it may be in the short term.
But why does it matter to God that we praise her? Or at least that is what the Biblical text seems to imply all over the place. Why does God need us to praise him? Is God like Trump, this ball of ego that needs to be praised all the time, as seen in the endless rallies he engineers so that he can be adored by others? Obviously, I don’t think that is the case, but certainly it’s an interesting question – why are we encouraged by almost everyone in the Scripture to praise God? I don’t think God is an egoist and a narcissist, and, unlike Trump, doesn’t need an endless parade of sycophants to be able to feel good about herself. No, I think we are encouraged to praise God, however we praise God, because our praise for the Divine is good for us, actually. I don’t think God needs our praise of him, but WE have the need to praise God for what she has done. And this is the reason why: we have a need to praise God so that we don’t we end up believing the lie that this life, this stuff, this world, is all about us, and our accomplishments, that indeed, we should be the ones praised for the world we think we have created, and not God. You find the temptation all around us as Americans, in the falsehood perpetuated on us, by the myth of the rugged individual, who pulls herself up by the bootstrap, without need of anyone else – and to receive help from others is a shameful thing, much less help from God. Think about how that individualism that believes I have what I have because of me, and no one else, how that idea absolutely flies against the whole of the Biblical witness, how it spits in the face of the truth that everything, EVERYTHING is a gift from God, a gift, a gift, a gift. The temptation to praise everything else but God for all that is, the temptation to praise my hard work, her hard work, his talents, my talent, to take credit for the gifts that God has given to us in first place, is why the Biblical witness tells us to praise God instead. Us taking credit, of praising myself, or others, for what they have done, or who I am, the problem with this is that it makes it very easy to dismiss and ignore the pleas of those who need the very gifts God has first given us. You can ignore the poor, the marginalized, the pushed down and pushed out, if you believe that what you have is from you and your hard work, your good luck, your wise leadership – and not a gift from God, the giver of everything. Don’t believe that lie, the Bible seems to say – you are not seeing the world and life as it really is, which is a wild and wondrous gift to you from God. It is no surprise that the poorest among us are more generous by percentage of their income than those who are wealthiest – more than most, they understand that even what little they may have is a gift from God, and thus they need to share that gift with others.
So, the better way, the way to avoid believing the lie that it wasn’t all a gift, is to praise the First Giver, God, and to do so with gratitude for what we have, knowing that it is a gift, and that all is gift. Of course, in the Biblical tradition, we are given gifts not so that we can hoard them, but because they are meant to be given away as a gift themselves. In Luke 12, Jesus condemns a man for hoarding up the grain for himself, not realizing the grain was meant to be given away to the poor, to be gifted to others. I think we’re asked to praise God so that we won’t be tempted in praising ourselves for gifts we were given by God in the first place. Don’t get me wrong – praise of other people is a good thing, acknowledging their goodness, their gifts, their understanding, is needed, more than ever, but that has never been the problem, really. The problem is believing that we should be praised for something that was given to us in the first place – our skills, even our drive, our minds, our whatever. That is the only way you can get praise wrong, to direct the praise to oneself when it needs to be directed to God. All the other ways you praise God, through worship choruses, or more traditionally with hymns, or just saying the word Alleluia, which means “praise,” that you whisper throughout the day, there are just means to this one end – acknowledging reality and reality is this, and has always been this: it is a gift, a marvelous, wondrous, amazing gift, everything that we are, everything we have, every skill we’ve mastered, all of it has been a gift, and if so, then let us praise God forever and ever, with all our strength, with songs, zithers, harps, tambourines, rattles, and cymbals. Amen.
