Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

March 3, 2019

Psalm 150

Praise the Lord!

Praise God with trumpet sound;

Psalms of Praise

I want you to think of a moment in your life when your heart was just overwhelming, when you were facing a beauty you couldn’t believe and your heart opened up in wonder at the Holy One that had fingerprints there.  I want you to think of that time when disaster felt near but instead the car swerved and the tests came back negative and you got a glimpse of how close it is at what could be lost and wasn’t.  And you found yourself repeating, “Thank God, thank God” in a song that just came out of your heart.  I want you to think of a time when you saw a miracle, when a certain conflict was averted, when a heart was changed, when a sobriety was found.  I want you to think of a time when the tides changed and when remarkably justice became nearer instead of further away.  I want you to think of a time when goodness prevailed, when a way was made out of no way, when all of a sudden you had a resurrection story to share of when lost was found, where the impossible was possible, when you could not believe what God could do.  I want you to picture that moment in your mind when you happen to have a pen and paper, or if even better you happen to have at your disposal a choir that is ready to give that moment its proper musical soundtrack.  Because that is the moment that Psalm 150 was written for; that is the moment we are ready to lift up.  It is a moment of praise, a mixture of gratitude and awe and wonder, a moment of praise when you are glorifying in who God is and how remarkable we get a glimpse of it.

So, first let’s start with a definition of what we mean by praise. We often use the word “praise” to mean someone in power telling someone who doesn’t have it that they did a good job.  So parents praise their children, or teachers praise their students or supervisors praise their employees.  Praise used in this way is a word meant to affirm someone else that they are doing well and maybe even might do better, used to guide behavior.  And praise, when it’s used in a different format, when it is done perhaps by the one with less power for one who has more, sometimes it feels a hair manipulative, like someone is trying to curry favor and depending upon the one receiving it making you wonder why exactly King Lear needs such adoring accolades.  And so, since it’s the same word, you may hear “Praise God” and wonder, is that really something God needs, like a king in perpetual need of ego strokes from us minions.  Rev. Emily Heath writes in her book Glorify: Reclaiming the Heart of Progressive Christianity that we do not glorify God because God needs our glory, and we do not do it because God needs fame, God is not a celebrity in need of a good publicist, although frankly God could use some new ones.

Instead, I want you to picture this word “praise” as a new verb, praise as meaning to glorify, to worship, an action of love and relationship where we delight in who God is and in some way in our being, in our actions, in our singing, in our prayer, praises God, glorifies God.  In the mainline progressive church we have a hesitancy around praise and that’s in part because we define ourselves in the negative against an evangelic