Praise the Lord!
Psalm 113
Have you ever wondered why we worship God? Why is that we praise the Lord? Our Psalms are filled with proclamations and invitations to worship and praise God. Psalm 113 proclaims, “Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord; praise the name of the Lord and 150 shouts, “Let everything that breathes praise God.” Let everything that breathes praise God. Psalm 95 sings, "Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our Maker.” Psalm 117 says, “Praise the Lord, all you nations, Glorify Him, all you peoples.” Psalm 147 says, “Praise the Lord, how good it is to sing praises to our God; for he is gracious and a song of praise is fitting.” And I find myself wanting to know exactly why? I mean of course we read throughout the Bible that we are to praise God, but we certainly don’t follow every invitation or command of the Bible. And at the very least we praise God simply because God is worthy of our praise. For God is the one that can create life out of anything, God is the one who proclaims a bold yes when the world says no. And we praise God because God is God and we are not. We might say that we praise God to be put in our place- to remember that it’s not all about us and that God, the God who breathed life into us is God, not the myriad other gods with whom we are constantly bombarded. Our culture invites us to seek life in other gods. We know of the god of things and we hear that it is things that bring happiness and that our possessions define who we are. We know of the god of success and we hear that we are to be defined by our busyness, the schools we attend and the ladders we climb. We know of the god of the nation state and we hear the words of our political leaders received as Gospel. Indeed we praise God to be put in our place; to remember that we are mere human beings. God is God and we are not.
Another reason we worship God is for us to be renewed. Through prayer and inviting God into the very fabric of our being, we are revived. Through our worship and praise here together we hear again God’s promises to be with us through whatever comes our way and we remember that the world is not all it should be, that God has something in mind for each of us and in praising God we celebrate this together. In worship, we open ourselves to the fullness of life God longs for each of us and through praise, we see glimpses, even if just for a moment of the Holy. In some ways, it is through praising God that we are able to see the reflection of how God just might see us- God sees us as precious, wondrous creations and in worship we are renewed with this vision.
Another reason we praise God is perhaps because we simply can’t avoid it. One of my colleagues, Martin Copenhaver says that not praising God would be like sitting in Fenway Park, watching David Ortiz hit one out of the park and then being told, well you can’t cheer. Can you imagine that? For those of us who sadly at this point in the season still boldly claim ourselves to be Sox fans, such an idea would be simply preposterous. We couldn’t help but to cheer, to shout with joy, to scream with passionate madness. We praise God because of the wonder and awe of creation, the intricacy of a flower the complexity of the human body. We praise God because we simply can’t avoid it.
But I also wonder if we praise God because God longs to receive our praise. Maybe, just maybe God needs our praise. It’s not that God is greedy, but if we are to proclaim that God is indeed a God of love, then wouldn’t our relationship with God have to include some amount of mutuality? If you find yourself wondering, well God is God and is the be all end all, keeper of all and order-er of all, then how could God possibly need anything from us? You are certainly not alone. The question about God’s nature has of course been the topic of conversation for centuries. Philosophers and theologians have asserted that if God is perfect then how could it be possible to add to God or contribute to the very being of the Divine?
Perfect, by definition means “completely made” or “finished,” yet we know that a perfect love, the kind of love with which our God operates must be a full love, a real love, a Divine love and surely “even an infinite richness may be open to increase.” I believe that holy love must be able to be added to. Like many other thinkers the eleventh century theologian, Anselm struggled with the notion that God’s perfection would exclude the possibility of a fully mutual relationship. He wrote, “Although it is better for thee to be…compassionate, passionless, than not to be these things, how are thou…compassionate, and, at the same time, passionless?” He was wrestling with the question of how a God of love could possibly be incapable of receiving love and praise in return. Such thought is rooted in the Greek notion of divine impassibility, which seriously conflicted with the biblical notion of Divine Love. Their thinking was that somehow God would be less, if it was possible to contribute to God or to add to God somehow- that somehow God would be less if God sought and longed for love and praise from us. Yet we know from our human experience of love that “love in the fullest sense involves a sympathetic response to the loved one,” which implies that love is exchanged, shared and experienced on both ends. In our New Testament we learn that the Gospel or the Good News can be summed up in the word love. It doesn’t say that it is a finite love, or a one-way kind of love or a sometimes kind of love, or an unresponsive kind of love, we are told that it is just love, real love, holy love. Jesus invited his friends and followers to love God with all our hearts, all our souls and all our minds. He invited us to love ourselves, to love our neighbors and even to love our enemies. So could it be that if God is love, true love, holy precious love, then God by God’s nature must need to receive love in return?
Perhaps you are thinking that you would rather side with the ancient Greeks, that God is the unmoved mover and simply cannot be added to; that God operates with love, extends us radical love, yet is in no need of receiving it in return. You will certainly not be alone. But I believe that if God is indeed a God of love- a true precious love is mutual, full, responsive and vast, then God must be able to be added to. Like that summer I came home from college, exhausted from surviving my first year. I had made it, although on my own accounting of it, it was barely. I felt strong in spirit, yet physically drained. I felt like my mom had prepared me to work hard, in spite of the preparation offered me by my mediocre high school. She had pushed me and prodded me. Tough love had been all around me growing up, but I was aching to tell her- to sit on the porch with her and thank her- to say that you for loving me like that. To say, because of you I am who I am. To say, because of you, I am strong. I am sure she didn’t need it in the technical sense; she would have gone on, continuing to nurture me and guide me. But I think that in sharing my love, not just a one-way kind of love or a sometimes kind of love, or an unresponsive kind of love, but in sharing my love, my mom was added to- in that expression of praise I contributed in some way to her spirit, to the way in which she responded to me, to the way in which she lured me and loved me toward fullness of life. And I think maybe God works like that too. Maybe in our praise of God, when we extend our love in worship, somehow we are actually adding to God, and joining God’s very being. Schubert Ogden writes, “…God must be conceived as a reality which is genuinely related to our life in the world and to which, therefore, both we ourselves and our various actions all make a difference to its actual being.” Maybe praising God actually makes a difference to God’s very being.
Friends, praising God is bold. Because when we praise our God, we are daring to say together that we are willing to put aside our own vision for God’s, as we contribute to and join God’s very being. We are daring to offer God our love and praise, knowing that when we do, God is waiting for us, waiting to hear from us, knowing that the love we extend, the praise we share actually makes a difference to the One who was and is and shall always be. Amen.
Cobb, John B., Jr. and Griffin, David Ray. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press) 7.
Ogden, Shubert M. The Reality of God and Other Essays. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1964) 47.
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