Sermon for July 9

The reading

Psalm 150

1 Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty

2 Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!

3 Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!

4 Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!

5 Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!

6 Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

The message

Today is the last Sunday of our 5 week series with the Psalms.  Fittingly enough, we end the series with Psalm 150, the closing song in the book of Psalms.  Over the past weeks, we have heard Psalms of lament, praise, help, invitation and trust. We learned a little about the order and structure of the psalms, their role in worship and their expressive power.  As we met in class after worship each week, we looked at the psalms in depth, attempted to rewrite them for today and went off on lots of tangents, discussions about church today, faith and how we live out God’s gift of grace.  In many ways, those sorts of conversations are where the psalms come from, the experiences and trials lived through by people of faith, the things that happened in the daily lives of God’s people.   In translation from the original Hebrew many of the poetic aspects of the psalms like rhyming and alliteration are lost but this ancient songs for use in the temple worship still inspire patience, faith and trust in God.  

Psalm 150 is a call to worship, an invitation to communities to give praise and worship to God.  

There are several calls to worship in the collection of Psalms in the bible but Psalm 150 is different.  It is missing something found in all the other psalms that call people to worship.  Psalm 150 gives no reason to praise the Lord.  In all the other calls to worship, people are invited to worship God because God is great, because God is deserving of praise, because God has answered prayers, because God has saved an individual from a crisis, Because God has released someone from despair and loss or because God has rescued a community from suffering.   We heard the entire psalm and Psalm 150 offers none of those reasons or any other.  It is a call to worship and praise God, the community is invited to trust the singer, the reasons are personal,  left to the hearer to think about.  

Back in High School, I spent a few seasons on the school football team.  I was honestly never that good.  A lot of people (like my wife) see the game as a bunch of huge guys just running into each other to move a ball.  In some ways, that’s true, the point of the game is to the get the ball from one place to another. Beyond that, it’s actually a complicated game that has a lot of rules and regulations.  There are virtually limitless plays and patterns that the 22 people can have parts in. Playbooks for a team can have 1000s of possibilities and variations.  In addition, there are right ways to tackle, hold the ball, run, line up and put on equipment. There are rules about every aspect of play, what counts as a catch, what is out of bounds and what each player can do.  There are penalties when these rules are broken (and the violation is seen by the ref).  Each time you line up for a play, you need to be aware of many things, where they are on the field, where the opposing team is, what play is going to happen, where to line up and move, when the ball will be snapped and possible last second changes.  The good players were able to keep track of all that, could naturally incorporate all that stuff into their thinking and still get the ball from one place to another.  People like me got lost in the details, trying to get everything right and being too distracted. 

We could say many of those same things about church.  We have a lot of rules, the doctrines of the Reformation and the ELCA, what we believe, conflicts when those things differ, scripture, the history of a community, building and church, the relationships we have (or do not have) with the people in the seats next to us.  There is an order to lighting things, putting them out, reading and singing.  There are places assigned for everything. I have 15 or 20 of the thousands and thousands of books about worship.  Then there are the day to day management issues that come up, the oversight of a school, all different city agencies up in our business, there are checks to write, bills to pay, exemptions to maintain, mail to pick up, supplies to order, other congregations to work with, support, pray for and collect rent from, doors to open, roofs to fix and walls to paint.  There is community work, community groups and maintaining relationships. There are lots things I don’t like doing, was never trained to do or get me frustrated. Beyond all this, we are here to Worship God.   

The psalms are a gift given to us to help with that work.  It cannot only happen on Sunday morning though, all that other stuff can get in the way. A commentary on our reading tells us,  The psalms as a whole are not meant primarily to be sung in worship (despite what I have been saying for the past 5 weeks). Rather, we are invited to come to worship in order that we might sing the songs in daily life. So, when we are wallowing neck deep in the mire of life, we are invited to sing the songs of lament: O Lord, have mercy. When we are experiencing the grace and joy of life, we are invited to sing the songs of praise: Thank you God! When we are in a tough spot, but remember God's presence, we are invited to say, "I trust you O God, you are with me." And when we see God at work in the world, we are invited to point to God's invisible hand at work and say, "Praise the Lord!