Praise the Lord!
Holy Trinity – Narrative Lectionary Summer Series
June 16, 2019
Redeemer, Good Thunder, MN
Psalm 113
Have you ever wondered what heaven will be like? I did as a young boy, so much so that I considered killing myself so that I could find out. Fortunately, I quickly came to my senses and realized that if I killed myself I’d be dead and didn’t want that to happen. I’m hoping I won’t find out for quite some time yet. Even so, one of the more popular ideas is that we’ll all be standing around the throne of God, praising God for all eternity. This is no doubt due to the imagery we hear in the book of Revelation. Psalm 113 seems to support that claim, that we are to praise God’s name “from this time on and for evermore, from the rising of the sun to its setting the name of the Lord is to be praised.” Frankly, that would seem to get boring after a while, even for God. And, even though God is due our praise and, quite honestly, I would hope that God has more imagination about heaven than that.
I think there’s a better way into the text—and all of Scripture for that matter—that’s more helpful for us today. A few months ago I led a Bible study on the Bible, where it came from and how to read it. One thing we talked about was how the Bible is like a scrapbook containing a variety of materials. Each of the items in the “scrapbook” contains stories of peoples’ experiences with God. These experiences were so powerful they had to be retold and then eventually written down. Psalm 113 is just such a retelling of an experience. In fact, it was so powerful that they had to write a song about it, because that’s what psalms are, the people’s songs.
Today begins a four-week sermon series on the Psalms. As in introduction, it’s helpful to use Walter Brueggemann’s classification. There are three different types of psalms: psalms of orientation, psalms of disorientation, and psalms of reorientation. Psalms of orientation are how we are oriented God when life is good. Psalms of disorientation describe our attitude to God when life goes south and it’s hard to believe in God anymore. And psalms of reorientation talk about what our faith looks like on the other side of disruption, when we can believe again. Clearly, Psalm 113 is a psalm of orientation, one that confesses this God we worship has done some things that are so amazing we declare no other god even comes close to this one. No god can compare to our God.
As a psalm of orientation, Psalm 113 is the first of six Hallel Psalms sung at joyous Jewish celebrations. Furthermore, it would be the first psalm sung at the beginning of the Passover meal, the celebration of remembrance about how the God liberated the Jewish people from slavery and oppression in Egypt. You can hear the language of reversal, how God raised them up out of the ashes and dust to bring them to their own land. It expresses how this God who is above everything else is also the God who stoops down and gets involved in our lives. Going backward, we can also hear echoes of men and women who, after being childless for years, are suddenly blessed with a child, one that will do great things. We think of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel. Going forward we hear Mary’s song, the Magnificat, which proclaims the “greatness of the Lord.”
Now, I’m aware that there may be some here today who don’t particularly feel like praising God. Maybe you are not in a good place right now and your heart aches for some very good reason. That’s okay. On the one hand, please come back next week when we hear Psalm 69, a song of lament (or disorientation). But on the other hand, can you—all of you, for that matter—think of an experience of God that is so memorable that you’d sing about it? What kind of a praise psalm would you write today, based on your experiences with God? You might not sing it throughout all eternity in heaven, but it would be worth retelling now. Praise the Lord! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment