|
The Price of Praise
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 11, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 48:1-11 Luke 18:31-43
September 11, 2005: two weeks after Katrina made landfall and four years to the day since so much more in this nation than the twin towers collapsed. "It is true," wrote Karl Barth, "that in creation there is not only a Yes but also a No; not only a height but also an abyss; not only clarity but also obscurity; not only progress and continuation but also impediment and limitation; not only growth but also decay; not only opulence but also indigence; not only beauty but also ashes; not only beginning but also end….In all this," he says, creation "praises its Creator and Lord even on its shadowy side." In fact, for all we can tell, "[God's] creatures praise Him more mightily in humility than in exaltation, in need than in plenty, in fear than in joy…." What a strange gift we are given, then, in the No, the abyss, the obscurity, the limitation, the decay, the indigence, the ashes of these autumns; what an exceedingly dark and gracious opportunity lurks above the earth's lamentations as we gather again to sing God's praise. For even as we wake to a world still steeped in deep waters and on a day as bright as the day when terror inexorably marked our common life, nevertheless we rise to praise God together. Praise, according to Walter Brueggemann, "articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are." Praise, in other words, costs us our illusion of control. We balk: to yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude? Yet only if it is the living God we mean to praise does praise, in the first place, exact this price from us as--in humility, need and fear--we cling to the rock which alone can secure our life in any given storm. Biblically, praise's price almost always is exacted through the experience of pain and vulnerability. Take the psalms, for instance. "The value of this great songbook of the Bible," says Kathleen Norris, "lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them praise is meaningless." I think of the twenty-second psalm which begins with the darkest cry in all of scripture: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?" and then explodes, twenty-two verses later, with praise: "I will tell of thy name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee." Clearly it is only after the storm that the preacher's command can be obeyed, its truth and meaning available to those who have known such abandonment, "You who fear the Lord, praise him! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him. From thee comes my praise in the great congregation." In other words, our capacity to yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves is strangely wrought in us, says the Bible, by those human experiences wherein we must cry out for the help we cannot give ourselves. When our lives are rent ["For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent" wrote Yeats], then the God who is absent in well-being enters in. Barbara Grizutti Harrison tells of a friend who was unable to yield to the ministrations of friends [ministrations which are, I am convinced, the near side of God's providence in the No, the abyss, the ashes of creation]. "The more he was loved," she reported, "the more his fear grew and the more reprisals he exacted from those who had the temerity to love him. …It was not until he had a devastating illness, that burned away the chaff in his soul, that he was able to acknowledge he was in debt [the price of praise revealed at last] to the man who loved him…His illness, in which he now chronically and bravely dwells," she reports, "has enabled him to accept the ministrations of those who love him: to accept them with comprehending grace." It is this same comprehending grace, this capacity wrought in us by pain--to yield, to submit, to forget ourselves in trust and gratitude toward the God who loves us and whose we are-that calls us into the community of faith and bows us down together. Though all too often on a Sunday morning, to borrow a line of Emily Dickenson's out of context, "Pain-is missed-in praise." "Yeats had it right," said Brueggemann. "It is the rending that makes life possible. It is the raw, terrible tearing that opens up healing and makes new. And it is this concrete rending, greatly feared by us, that the grand liturgy masks. The liturgy wants us to imagine that new life is possible without the rending. But we know better. We know better in our own experience. And we know better in our tradition of liberation, of being dead and being raised." Still the temptation, or rather the rubric for many Sunday morning services of worship is that the pain and vulnerability of human existence be covered over with what variously has been called the "dreadful cheer" of American Christianity, "that blinds itself to pain and makes a falsehood of its praise"[Carol Bly] or the "unmitigated praise of buoyant cultural religion" that "forces upon us a pretense of everything being all right [in sanctuaries where] we sing praise because everything works…worshipping a god from whom we dare expect no serious transformation. Indeed, we prefer a god who has become guarantor of the way things are." [Brueggemann] But in a creation of Yes and No, height and abyss, growth and decay, beauty and ashes, there is no such god. What, then, does the liturgy look like, the praise sound like when sung by a people whose wilderness is remembered in the Promised Land and whose exile remains an ever present possibility, a people who have counted the cost of their praise, yielding their all? What though the tempest 'round me roar, I hear the truth. It liveth! What though the darkness round me close, songs in the night it giveth. For ancient Israel it sounded, as we have said before, like the psalms. Each time the psalm was recited, the community remembered the movement from hurt to hope; every Sabbath when the lament was uttered God's people reenacted the transformation and healing which marked their life together. Moreover their speech was always working to push language to the limit of what words could say when they dared to speak of God. "The speech out of which God is dramatically offered, is no longer static adjectives; now [the liturgy dares…the congregation sings] the drastic verbs of 'rescue, deliver, heal, release, redeem, snatch, feed, guide, give.'…In such singing," said Brueggemann in so many words, "Israel no longer lingers over the slow idols who celebrate the status quo….The recitations of Israel banish such false gods and make possible grateful trust in the living God." Therefore in the second place, the praise dared by the community of faith in the face of a celebrated status quo is a praise that must be sung beyond the doors of any given sanctuary, sung on the avenue, say, or in the places of pretense and power, where it can only be heard as unwelcome protest. Praise, in the second place, costs the church her control and so her compliant place in the celebrated status quo! Yielding to God alone, it is praise that sends us into the world as those who may live as if: as if the proud had been scattered in the imaginations of their hearts and the powerful brought down from their thrones [Praise Him!]; as if the lowly had been lifted up, the hungry filled with good things and the rich had been sent empty away {Praise Him!]; as if the poor were blessed, as if them that mourn were comforted, as if the meek were not taxed on the earth they would inherit, as if the merciful received mercy [Praise Him!]. Contrary to the pretensions of every principality and power, such a protest of praise has been carried out, according to the Jewish theologian Jacob Neusner "alone by poetry, not by prose; alone by theatre, not by ordinary speech; alone by dance, not by clumsy…shuffling; alone by the silence of disciplined sound we know as music, not by background noise and racket; alone by the eye of the artist who sees within and beyond and not by the vacant stare of those who do not even see what is there." He is speaking of the grand liturgy of worship in the world and so implies that it is the artist, long before it is the politician or the preacher, whose poetry, drama, dance, composition and canvas invite the world beyond these doors to yield, submit, and abandon the self in the trust and gratitude that issues in inchoate praise. Though there is one last cost to count for the sake of our praise, the cost spoken by Second Isaiah and made flesh in Jesus Christ. "For my name's sake," says the Lord in Second Isaiah, "I defer my anger; for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, so that I may not cut you off." The price of our praise to God is God's anger at our unyielding lives restrained, God's judgment of our self-serving religion deferred. "Week after week," writes Annie Dillard in now familiar words, "we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens." But there is a reason, says God in Second Isaiah: for the sake of my praise, I restrain my anger for you so that I may not cut you off." Such is the price of our praise to God. "For my own sake, I do it," says the Lord, "for why should my name be profaned?" So God, within the parentheses of the Yes and the No, the height and the abyss, the clarity and the obscurity, the beauty and the ashes, redeems our every adversity for his name's sake, turning our days again and again toward praise. Not only do we hear of this in Isaiah, but we witness this in Him who took our adversity upon himself, even to death on a cross. Going up to Jerusalem, going up to the imperial city where the gods of religion's status quo reign, he speaks to his disciples of the final cost of praise which soon he will bear. But since he alone must bear the pain, restrain the anger, pay the cost, there are none whose lives are tuned to the grace notes that resound in his words. The disciples, said Luke, did not grasp what he said. In the next town, however, there is one who does hear from out of his pain: a blind man sitting at the gate begging. The man cries out in his adversity, even as the religious status quo-the ones in the front of the crowd--attempt to silence him. He cries louder and Jesus summons the man to his side. "What do you want me to do for you?" Jesus asks. "Lord," said the man, "let me see again." At Jesus' word, he sees and follows, glorifying God: one imagines a dance. "And all the people, when they saw it, praised God." What do we see at the beginning of this autumn caught between creation's Yes and No, her height and abyss, her clarity and obscurity, progress and limitation, growth and decay, opulence and indigence, beauty and ashes? Whether we know it or not, we sit blind at the gate begging. He who would redeem us is asking us in our blindness, "What do you want me to do for you?" Words fail us. In a sense, this past decade together has been riddled with God's transforming power. But in another sense, an unyielding sense, we have yet to be changed. Our vulnerability, used of God to call forth our praise, remains guarded. The world's pain that would work in us praise of the living God is still begging at our gate. The praise that is protest against the present arrangements of power sounds as a whimper behind these closed doors. There is much that awaits our yielding, our submission, our self abandonment in favor of trust and gratitude toward the One whose we are. How much longer, God surely must wonder, can we keep from singing? "It was singing that led me back into the church," wrote Tim Clark, "in much the same way that people who stutter can sing what they need to say. Music must bypass whatever terror it is that revs the heart and befuddles the tongue. I felt, however, a vague sense of disquiet on this particular Sunday. Something else had been bypassed here; some degree of control of my life had been surrendered, in some way I could not define," save that through all the tumult and the strife I hear the music ringing! It sounds and echoes in my soul. How can I keep from singing? Thanks be to God! |