2021.12.26 | Witnesses of Majesty
“Witnesses to Majesty”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
First Sunday After Christmas
Dec 26, 2021
Merry Christmas!
If you, like many Christians, celebrated Christmas yesterday or on Christmas Eve and are thinking about taking the tree and lights down, let me just say: Stop!
Santa may have come to your house but Christmas, traditionally a 12-day period that begins on Dec 25, is just getting started. Today is the First Sunday after Christmas Day or Day 2.
And, our scripture lesson today from Psalm 148 reminds us that one of the important things we do during Christmas is to praise God for what God has done. The word praise appears no less than 10 times during the Psalm, which was originally a hymn calling the entire creation to join in praise of the Lord.
This repetition got me curious about what praise is, how and why we praise God in Church, and how we can “practice” praise in our personal lives.
Let’s start with what praise is: The Oxford Dictionary defines praise as “expressing warm approval or admiration of someone.” To me, that seems a little lukewarm when applied to God, who even progressive like us credit with being the source of all that is good and beautiful and just in our world. So I pulled one of my favorite books from seminary off the shelf and found that Brian Wren, a well-known professor of worship and hymn-writer, provides a better definition, one that helps separate praise from thanksgiving, with which it is often confused. He says:
“In Christian theology, as in everyday life, praising and giving thanks are…overlapping but distinct. Thanksgiving is an acknowledgement of something given, said, or done by another that benefits the recipient. Praise affirms and delights in another, whether or not we have cause to thank the one praised.” (1)
Wren’s distinction between praise and thanksgiving gives us a lot to think about. We’re very skilled at counting our blessings and acknowledging the answers to prayers, it’s more difficult to affirm and delight in God, rather than in what God has created, achieved, or done or will create, achieve, or do. I think it’s somewhat like the feeling all parents have for their children, we love and admire them separate from any of their achievements. To do otherwise, to make our love contingent, would seem like a parental failure. So, we praise God for who God is, rather than for what God has done.
One caveat, however, that Wren points out, is that even the pure praise for God is at risk of failing if we put too much emphasis on the fact that it is we who are doing the praising of him. Wren wrote a little parody of praise songs that overly-emphasize the praiser. It goes like this:
Oh, I’m thinking of me praising Jesus
And loving the feeling I feel.
When I think of his touch
I am feeling so much
That tomorrow I’ll praise him for real. (2)
So, good praise is focused on God and not on us, either as the praiser or as the recipient. Our scripture today calls for praise of God by all creation for God’s creativity, power, and permanence, as well as for God’s name, Yahweh, which literally translates ”I am who I am” or . . .who I will be” — thus making it the perfect name for pure praise.
My second question was: why do we praise God in Church? Praise is often the very first thing we do in Church and it is often the very first part of every type of prayer we make. Consider how many times you’ve heard: “We give you praise and thanks…” Praise usually comes first in our liturgy for two reasons: 1) it reminds us of that our primary purpose in gathering for worship is directed to God and 2) it reminds us that God is not Santa, but a spiritual presence that is omnipresent — within us, within others, but also beyond all of us. I would also hazard a guess that the ancient roots of praise in Church derive from a primitive but sensible human belief that we needed to draw the Divine’s attention to us and that praise was the best way to achieve that attention.
My third question was: How can we practice the praise to which Psalm 148 calls us? If you watch as much news as I do, I think you’d agree that this is a very difficult time to practice praising God — there are days it seems that our world is falling apart under the force of rampant disease, growing poverty and economic disparity, political divisiveness, and climate change and rampant environmental disaster. It’s a hard time to praise God, especially if you believe God is responsible by action or inaction for any of what we are experiencing.
With that in mind, I will gently remind you that true praise of God is not thanksgiving for blessings but affirmation and delight in what God is and will be. For example, I was thinking we could praise God for our Covid-19 vaccines but being a beneficiary puts that more in the category of Thanksgiving. The first step in practicing praise is to identify who God is irrespective of you and your situation. The second step is to lift up your appreciation for God in word or song or dance or painting or gardening or volunteering or by whatever means is authentic to you.
A poem praising God by the Bengali poet Tagore reminded me that praise practice benefits from taking the personal pronouns “I” or “we” so we don’t confuse it with thanksgiving. In his poem “Yours,” Tagore makes praise a personal conversation with God, one that feel focused on God rather than Tagore:
Yours is the light that breaks forth from the dark,
And the good that sprouts from the cleft heart of strife.
Yours is the house that opens upon the world, and the
Love that calls to the battlefield.
Yours is the gift that still is a gain when everything
Is a loss, and the life that flows through the caverns of death.
Yours is the heaven that lies in the common dust,
And you are there for me, you are there for all.” (3)
Your praise practice during this terrible time of Covid-19 and the darkness of winter might be just to start every morning, by saying, “Yours is” and insert your thought of God for the day. As I write, it’s stormy out: “Yours is the rain and the wind and the storm that will pass.”
I gleaned another tip from the poet Sara Teasdale. Sometimes praise begins when we focus, truly focus on one element of the world around us, seeing first and then imagining where that element falls in the grander scheme of things. In her poem “Stars,” she writes:
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire;
Up the dome of heaven
Like a great hill
I watch them marching
Stately and still,
And I know that I
Am Honor to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.(4)
For me, it is the last line that truly captures the meaning of praise: We are witnesses of so much majesty, whether it is the stars that shine, the mountains, the valleys or the collective and astounding good of humanity. Every day, we can practice praise by just holding still and looking around for what is majestic in our lives.
And, because I didn’t want to recommend looking for majesty locally as a practice until I gave it a very local try, I went to the park near my house and took a photo of four things I found majestic and praise-worthy. When I dwell on these images, on their grandeur and intricacy, I feel that I am a witness to something greater than myself that exists with or without me and which have a permanence that is uniquely Divine.
If I wasn’t so cautious about taking photos of people, I would have also shared a photo of the people I greeted and talked with, many so open about sharing their joys and their troubles, even though we don’t know each other’s last names or where we live or even what we do. One woman who I hadn’t seen in a long time and who doesn’t know I’m a pastor told me that during Covid, her husband had died and she showed me the plaque the park district had installed in his memory under his favorite redwood tree. As sad as it seems, there is a majesty in that conversation and I praise God for making the love between the woman and her husband, the respect that enables a park district to honor such a request, and the trust that drew we two strangers together for a moment of sharing and reflection.
Yours, dear Lord, is the beauty of creation, the love of humanity, and our innate search for meaning and connection. Thank you for making us witnesses of so much majesty. Amen.
Brian Wren, Praying twice: the music and words of congregational song, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2000, p. 220
Wren, p. 225
Jacob Trapp, Editor; Modern Religious Poems: A Contemporary Anthology, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1964, p. 33
Trapp, p. 45