Praising God & Giving Thanks Are Radical Acts
Psalm 100
November 17, 2024
Rev. Cynthia Cochran Carney, First Presbyterian Church, San Rafael
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship God with gladness; come into God’s presence with singing. Know that God is God. It is God that made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter God’s gates with thanksgiving, and courts with praise.
Give thanks to God, bless God’s name.
For the God is good; God’s steadfast love endures forever,
and faithfulness to all generations.
Psalm 100 New Revised Standard Version
On your feet now - applaud God!
Bring a gift of laughter, sing yourselves into God’s presence.
Know this: God is God. God made us; we didn't make God.
We're the Beloved’s people and well-tended sheep.
Enter with the password: "Thank you!" Make yourselves at home, talking praise.
Thank God. Worship the Holy One..
For God is sheer beauty, all-generous in love, loyal always and ever. Psalm 100, The Message
How would you name this moment in time? This is one topic that a local Presbyterian pastor and Cantor/Rabbi talked about on Tuesday night at the Marin Interfaith Council Visionaries event. I listened to their conversation with great interest. Rev. Rob McClellan (Westminster Pres in Tiburon/Belvedere) and Rabbi-Cantor Elana Rosen-Brown of Kol Shofar were the speakers. I felt so grateful to be there. To be with interfaith community, to share sorrow and hope, to pray in a variety of ways in many names of the Holy.
How would you name this time? The Rabbi offered many meaningful descriptions. Here is a sampling
I don't have a specific name for it though I think it's clear and any one of us who've been deep in listening to post-election analysis also know that we really are entering a new period of time. …. I think there's a deepening what I feel when I think about 2016 versus today. I think there were lessons that we were seeing and we look back in history you know the culture wars of the 90s those were deeply polarizing.. Now is a time when social media and misinformation amplify our difficulty talking to one another. I think in 2016 we were just understanding you know some of how algorithms really worked to … build these islands on the internet where we're talking in Echo Chambers….( So we talk with people we agree with and take in information that reinforces our perceptions, our attitudes)…
There is something else about this time. The text Leviticus 19:18 “love your neighbor as yourself.” What do you do in a world where people are starting to say – No, I'm not only kind of ignoring that exists but when you bring that text to me, I'm not interested in doing that anymore. And in fact that you know that lesson, that spiritual teaching, is not how we get ahead in the world and I'm not interested anymore.
How do we name this time? A time of echo chambers, of not feeling called to love our neighbors, of not seeing spiritual teachings as foundational to our lives and actions. How else might we name this time? Rob McClellan offered these words
Here is what this moment feels like to me. There was a Swedish theologian named Chris Stendall who was the bishop of Stockholm. He said – “Love is measured by the amount of tension it can take, not by how it feels.” To me this feels like a really tense time and we're about to find out how much we really love each other…. I'd say one it's a tense time.
It is also a time of brokenness. I mention brokenness but what's unclear to me and probably in any present moment, is whether the opening we're seeing is a wound or is it a birth canal. Both very painful and I think it probably won't be determined until we act in a way that determines what the pain is we're feeling.
The other thing that hits me about what kind of time this …is it feels like such a noisy time. I've been overwhelmed since we've been talking a lot about the election postelection, the sort of frantic content production which is just an extension of how we seem to operate anyway. So many poems and edicts and essays and I just want to I just want to be quiet. (1)
What kind of moment is this? A tense time as we seek to love. Painful time – a wound, a birth canal. A noisy time.
In the rhythm of the church year and our culture, it is also a time of year we focus on giving thanks and gratitude in the midst of these very challenging realities. How do we sing and pray our gratitude to God in midst of fear, worry, anxiety, grief? The Psalms offer us some clues.
I have been thinking about the book of Psalms the last week. There are 150 psalms in your Bible, taking up a lot of real estate in the library that is the Bible. They run the emotional gamut from despair and longing, to praise and thanksgiving, as we heard today, and everything in between. I have led retreats and invited people to write their own psalms. Some were about everyday life challenges like allergies or sleepless nights as parents, some were about the beauty of nature that was all around us, and some were about our grief and loss. In all of these new psalms, one thing that came through is that God is with us in the midst of all of those things.
Most of biblical psalms are written in the plural collective voice. And plural imperative - We give thanks. You all - Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
We have needed words of poets and psalmists last two weeks in our national life and I have in my personal life. Lament, prayers for wisdom. Good practice to look at this book and discover ones that express where we are.
Today we read Psalm 100. Praise God, Glorifying God is the focus. One of the many psalms of praise and thanksgiving found in the Book of Psalms. There are many ways to glorify God. You can dance, or paint a picture or write. You can hug a friend or take them dinner. You could plant trees and plants that will bloom and bring beauty long after you’re gone.
Our psalm today talks about making a joyful noise. We hear joyful noise when people cheer on their kids at graduations, when your team wins a big game, or when are with others and starlings join in a murmuration dance.
In Marci Glass’ sermon, she reminds us the Book of Psalms is a large collection of poetry, written over a span of more than 500 years. The Hebrew word for Psalm is “mizmor”, which means “something sung”. It’s a word that implies singing in praise, maybe with an instrument.
In the Hebrew bible, the collection of psalms has a different name than we give it, however. It’s the “Tehilim”, which means “praises”. Whether you sing them, as the choir is doing today, or read them, the emphasis, according to the Hebrew bible, is on the act of praising. In most cases, even the psalms of lament have an element of praise involved in them.
Today’s psalm is a Thanksgiving Psalm—-
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Enter his gates with thanksgiving.
All the earth is called to praise. Which means you and me and other human types. It also means ALL the earth—the trees of the forests, the birds in the air, the fish in the sea, dogs, cats, — all creation is called to praise God.
The earth is called to praise because praise is a job description of those God has created. And, , that’s all of us. We, along with the rest of the earth, are a part of God’s creation.
The NRSV translates it as - “Know that the Lord is God.It is he that made us, and we are his;”
Another translation, which we heard today, translates it this way:
“It is God who made us, and not we ourselves.”
Included in that verse is the sense of “God made us. We did not make God.”
We are God’s creation. God’s people. The flock God tends.
This may seem obvious, something that shouldn’t need to be said. Often, though, we forget we are created, that we are a part of a larger creation, all made in love. And you will never meet someone who was not made by God in love.. And just maybe take the time to listen to a person’s story so you can understand it better. You will never meet someone who was not made by God in love. It is God who made us and not we ourselves.
Why are we called to praise God? We don’t praise God because God is an egomaniac who wants the divine creation to focus all attention on God. We praise God because it is the way we are oriented to God and to the world.
John Calvin, in his Commentary on the Psalms, wrote:
“The whole world is a theatre for the display of the divine goodness, wisdom, justice, and power, but the Church is the orchestra, as it were—the most conspicuous part of it; and the nearer the approaches are that God makes to us, the more intimate and condescending the communication of his benefits, the more attentively are we called to consider them.”
Anyone who has been a part of an orchestra, band, or choir knows what a great metaphor this is from Calvin. If we are in an orchestra only for our own selves, to play whatever we want while ignoring the musicians next to us, it will be a cacophony of disaster.
When you see yourself as one of many musicians, you have to pay attention to what the other musicians are doing, listening for tempo, style, and volume. You have to watch the conductor, looking for direction. It orients you to looking beyond yourself. Our call to praise God orients us toward God. And in a world where we could focus our attention in many, many different places, the reminder to orient our lives, in praise, toward God is powerful.
Orienting my life toward praise and gratitude is not an act of putting on rose colored glasses and refusing to see the broken and painful parts of the world. It helps me from letting the broken and painful parts of the world take over too much real estate in my soul, which gives me the energy and the strength to work to make the world less broken, less painful.
Making a joyful noise to God, when the world around us seems hellbent on destruction and pain, is a counter-cultural act of defiance. When we can find joy and praise in the face of death, loss, and human-caused pain, we turn, we re-orient the world toward God. We claim that death and injustice and hate will not win. We sing hope to a world hearing despair.
As people following the ways of Jesus, we are a people oriented in praise toward hope. Hope that the covenant promises God made have been embodied in Jesus’ life, in the larger reality of Christ and resurrection. We can name this moment - a time of gratitude, of hope, and deeper connections. May we make a joyful noise in hope that our work together as God’s people will make the song of the Psalmist true for all people. Amen.
Parts of this sermon were based on: Rev. Marci Glass, “Programmed to Praise,” June 3, 2024
https://marciglass.com/2024/06/03/programmed-to-praise-2/
1 - Link to video of MIC event https://www.youtube.com/live/uaiMOS5t6zM
