Praise

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
July 25, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 12:1-6
Ephesians 1:3-12

“In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplished all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.

We live, of course, for so many other things: for our bliss, for the sake of the family, for the prolongation of youth and beauty, for the assurance of security and comfort, for the acquisition of wealth, the attainment of well-being. In short, we live for ourselves (live inconsequential, circumscribed lives) when, in truth, we have been destined by the purpose of the God who accomplished all things according to his counsel and will, so that we might live for the praise of God’s glory. In this second of our summer series on prayer, we quit our waiting, abandon our silence, renounce our speechlessness as, in the words of the Psalmist, we prepare to “enter God’s gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise.”

“Praise,” says our old friend Walter Brueggemann in words you have heard before, “articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit, and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are.” Yet if praise begins with our capacity to yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves, we are sunk from the start. Who can deny that our evolved species capacity for praise has devolved in these latter days, and devolved for reasons we would do well to consider if ever we are to sing God’s praises once again?

The first has to do with our inability to let go of ourselves. When I think about the human act of praise off the top of my head, I think of an ordinary expression of appreciation to someone for something. “What a good job you have done,” we say to a child who has just completed a school assignment or to a colleague who has closed a difficult deal. Here we may be taken out of ourselves for a moment or two [that is to say, we may stop thinking about ourselves long enough to notice something remarkable in the other]. Yet such praise seldom finds us yielding, submitting, abandoning ourselves for long. If anything, our praise of another is often a zero-sum game: you have done well, meaning I have not done so well, sin thereby turning the occasion of praise into an occasion that is all about me.

You could say the fault, in the first place Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves! David Brooks, citing data from The Narcissism Epidemic by Jean Twenge and Keith Campbell, notes that “since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation.” His favorite piece of sociological data concerns teenagers who were asked, in 1950, if they considered themselves an “important person.” “Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes…” suggesting, says Brooks with distain, “that we’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.”

Much as we are wont to turn away in disgust from our roots in John Calvin’s stern assessment of human nature, I think it no coincidence that the demise of the church’s dignified worship and praise of God has dwindled as our self-esteem has risen. Wrote Calvin in what is known as his most pastoral version of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the 1541 French edition, “We cannot look closely at ourselves without being struck and pierced with the knowledge of our misery, so that we immediately raise our eyes to God and reach at least some knowledge of him. Thus by the feeling of our insignificance, ignorance, futility, indeed our perversity and corruption also, we recognize that the true greatness, wisdom, truth, righteousness and purity lie in God….We cannot ardently desire God before we have begun to be completely dissatisfied with ourselves.” Calvin’s point is that the true praise of God is hard to come by when we are so full of ourselves.

Keeping our prayers from praise, in the second place, is what John Calvin called our “blindness at mid-day.” It is as though the prophet Isaiah were among us shouting, as we stumble through the waking hours, “Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand.” How else could it be that, walking amid the things of this world with eyes wide open to the beauty and glory of the eternal, we do not see? On one hand, our prayers of praise are paltry because we are God’s spoilt children, wondering why we have not been given more or better or best. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing,” we read at the beginning of the Letter to the Ephesians. Please note, the author does not bless the God who has blessed us in Christ with every material blessing: with health, wealth, children, homes, success or social status. Rather, we have been blessed by God in Christ with every spiritual blessing: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, to name a few. We are blind at mid-day to the blessings that call forth the praise of God’s glory.

And even if we see, we are also mute at mid-day, for reason keeps us from praising the name of the One whom we were made to glorify and enjoy forever. I think of Brian’s middle-of-the-night astonishment under the stars with Vincent, an astonishment that led him to contemplate the vastness of the cosmos. Brian spoke to us of inspiration and we can relate, whereas the psalmist shouted God’s praise to the heavens and the highest heavens; Brian was lost, as we have been, in wonder and, in response, returned home to log on to the computer for hours, going deeper and deeper into the mystery, whereas the author of Ephesians confessed without hesitation that the constellations of stars poking through the otherwise clouded summer sky were God’s blessing, filling him with God’s goodness for the praise of God’s glory. Even if we should be stopped in our tracks by the gift of God’s glory, our reasonable minds make us hesitant to praise the giver. To wit, when recalling her sense of awe as she beheld the Alps, Katherine Mansfield exclaimed, “If only one could make some small grasshopper sound of praise to some one, of thanks to some one—but to who?” [John Baillie]

Then in the third place, if we should find ourselves, in spite of ourselves, moved and overwhelmed in the world and so lost in wonder, love and praise, our praise is as likely to be for an idol we have mis-taken for God as it is for the God we know in Jesus Christ. The human mind and heart are notoriously poor at noticing the difference. How often we are inspired, overwhelmed, moved to praise by a slick politician, a charismatic actor, a sensational athlete, an entertaining production. In fact, much that passes for praise these days in the worship of the church is a desperate act of a dying institution trying to entertain an audience assembled, of a Sunday morning, to worship its own good feelings. Praise bands abound. In a stinging caricature of contemporary worship, Frank Senn, a Lutheran preacher, describes the likely experience of strangers wondering into a sanctuary on Sunday morning:
    Once they have gotten past the gauntlet of assigned hand-shakers on their way into the worship space, listened in amazed distraction to the barely whispered conversations around them while the organist was playing…a prelude, endured five minutes of parish infomercials before they could utter a prayer of confession or join in singing a hymn [or rather join in singing songs…used to promote Jesus-devotion but not praise of the Holy Trinity], listened to a youth speed-read her way through a Bible passage, sat through a half-audible skit on stewardship that took the place of the sermon that day, fumbled with getting out their wallet to put a bill in the collection plate, while trying not to unduly hold up the clipboard with the attendance sheets being passed down the pew…it would be truly amazing if they returned.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the prophets railed against just this spiritual dullness. They were dumbfounded that God’s people were oblivious to and unbowed by God’s glory, God’s majesty, God’s holiness. They were furious that God’s people had forgotten God’s blessing and honor and wisdom and power. Again, we can hear God’s command to the prophet whose lips were touched, moments before, by burning coals: Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed. Spiritual dullness has always been the logical consequence of sated lives: rich in things and poor in soul.

Then, in the fourth place, I fear our shallow attempts at praise are also the lingering consequence of the Enlightenment which made us think awe and reverence were incompatible with reason. The late Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, rightly observed our secular inability (our diminished capacity) to notice, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” Rather we have been schooled to believe that the meaning of human existence lies within ourselves. “The secularist” he said, “may believe in God, may appeal to God, may relate to God his or her highest aspirations, such as liberty, equality and fraternity. But the secularist cannot accept the primordial intuition that the world and human life have their cause, meaning and destiny elsewhere;…and that the world and human life are but darkness, absurdity and death when disconnected from that Elsewhere.”

As we are called to worship in this sanctuary, Sunday after Sunday, we begin with the prayers of praise first uttered by congregants in the sanctuaries of old, people met by the God whose presence called forth awe and wonder, whose blessing led mortals to praise and adore One who was greater than they were. Theoretically, we are no different than our biblical forbears. We were made, says Brueggemann, with “a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted.” We were fashioned, to repeat, with a “primordial instinct that the world and human life have their cause, meaning and destiny elsewhere…[and are] but darkness and absurdity, and death when disconnected from the Elsewhere.” We were purposed, held the Westminster Divines, by the God who chose us before the foundation of the world, who destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, to glorify God and enjoy God forever. This requires time and occasion, dignity and reverence, awe and imagination, yielding and submitting: quitting of ourselves for praise of God’s glory. The capacity for this is not ours, but Christ who emptied himself that we might behold who it looks like to live for the praise of God’s glory.

“At a certain point,” writes Annie Dillard, “you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening….The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. Your take a step in the right direction to pray to this silence….Distinctions blur. Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing.” For you who cannot yield, cannot submit, cannot abandon yourself were destined, in Christ, from the foundation of the world, for the praise of God’s glory. This is the gospel. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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