Sermon preached July 11, 2004 by Dave Skidmore
Good morning. Today I will speak in praise of “praise.” But first, I must tell you that I haven’t always appreciated its importance. Before I regularly attended church, I just did not get it. In fact, I think it is fair to say that if I heard someone declare their devotion by enthusiastically exclaiming, “Praise God!”, I would have been somewhat put off. Such enthusiasm just would not have, and sometimes still doesn’t, resonate with me. I was not raised in a household of unbridled enthusiasm. I was raised in a household of the sly aside, the sardonic remark delivered with great self-satisfaction. My aunt once confided to me that my late father’s nickname in the Army, during the Second World War, was “Sergeant Sunshine.” I gather it was sarcastic. I am my father’s son.
I recall having a somewhat blasphemous, if juvenilely humorous, dialog with myself a decade or so ago. It went something like a Saturday Night Live routine: “What’s all this I hear about praising God? Does God have low self-esteem? Is God like a small child, whose crayon drawings must be praised to shore up a fragile young ego? That’s a wonderful picture God! Oh, a purple horse—very creative! What’s that you say? It’s a dog? Well, it’s the finest looking purple dog I’ve ever seen.”
Why, I asked myself, does God need our praise? God is not a four-year-old. I mean, surely, if God is all-knowing, God does not need us to say God is all-powerful. And if God is eternal, God has known this for a very long time.
I think it was a column in the newsletter of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship that gave me the obvious, forehead-slapping answer to my question. It is not God that needs our praise. It is we who need, sometimes desperately, to express our devotion to God through praise. The emphasis on praise in our religion is for us, not for God.
Now, before I go on to talk about our texts this morning, I want to first say what I am not saying; I am not saying the best way to live is to be an always-positive thinker, a cheerleader, a Pollyanna. I have known them. After college, when I worked as a newspaper reporter in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I shared a house with two other reporters. One, at least in memory, was the most positive person I have ever known. He was ever-ready with praise. Neither of my roommates cooked. I cooked a little. Now, if I cooked chicken, the positive-thinking roommate would declare, “This is the best chicken I ever ate!” If I fried some ground beef and onion and mixed in a can of kidney beans, some tomatoes and chili powder, he would declare, you guessed it, “This is the best chili I ever ate!” I basked in that culinary praise until one morning I stumbled downstairs to discover the optimist eating a carton of yogurt for breakfast. “This is the best yogurt I ever ate!” he said. You could see how unadulterated praise could begin to wear thin.
This housemate’s optimism later served him well. He went into politics and was elected to the state legislature in Pennsylvania. But, as much as we admire the optimistic, upbeat person—the person who is “cheerful in all weathers” as was said of the cowboy Deets in Larry McMurtry’s novel “Lonesome Dove”—we recognize that negativity, even cynicism, in measure, has a certain value, if only because without shadow, one cannot perceive light, so to speak. Thoughtless praise and forced cheerfulness soon become false and hollow; praise becomes flattery. And, I suspect God doesn’t like flattery.
Still, I wonder who more enjoyed God’s gift of food. My long-ago, praiseful housemate or a hypothetical hyper-critical gourmet who purses his lips over a vintage wine and declares it almost, but not quite, as good as the wine drunk at a restaurant in Paris four years ago. The habit of analysis and judgment, acquired with maturity, is a two-edged sword. Without it, we’d be more than a bit simple-minded, unfit for life’s hard tasks and difficult decisions. But, at its extreme, the habit of continual, weighing and judgment, teasing out the negative in all things and all experiences, leads to perfectionism and perpetual discontent. Thus, the foodie in search of the perfect meal or the perfect glass of wine is trapped in his own critical mind.
It is not that the negative view of the world is incorrect. I’ve read that psychological studies have found that depressives, with all their pessimism, actually perceive the world more accurately than optimists. However, I wonder how that study defined reality—no doubt only in terms of factors that could be measured and observed. Thus, I suspect that those whose pendulums have swung too far toward negativity also have a skewed, too-narrow, view of reality.
That is where, I believe, the necessity of praising God comes in. Why must we express our love for God in praise? Simply put, to save us from ourselves, to enlarge our view from an arid self-centered narcissism. In short, to make us fit to live.
So, let’s turn to today’s texts and think about what they say about praise and love of God and love of life. Our first reading, sung by Donna in Hebrew, and recited by us all in unison, was the Sh’ma, which observant Jews are obliged to recite in the morning and the night. Hear what it tells us: “You shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.” These words are so central that Jews—and we, as people of the Book—are commanded to “set them upon their heart” and, not only to recite them upon rising in the morning and lying down at night, but to teach them to their children, to speak them both at home and away, to bind them to their hands, to let them be a symbol before their eyes, to inscribe them on doorposts and gates.
Jesus, in the reading from Luke, says much the same thing—with an important addition. When asked by the lawyer what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus replies, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Notice the order here. First comes, “Love the Lord your God,” and then comes the Golden Rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” One flows from the other. Jesus goes on immediately to illustrate loving your neighbor as yourself with the story of the Good Samaritan. By using a Samaritan as the exemplar of the story, when his Judean listeners would have regarded a Samaritan as a foreigner, Jesus emphasized the expansive, rather than narrow, definition of neighbor.
Thus loving God, and expressing that love and devotion in praise, is not just about trying to make ourselves feel good. In the words of the mystic Meister Eckhart that Richard read in the invocation, “Whoever has God in mind, simply and solely God, in all things, they carry God with them into all their works and into all places.”
Why is this so? Why is this single-minded devotion and love of God the thing that must come first and enables us to love our neighbor? It is because God, the Living God of our first hymn, is not an arid abstraction. If, as the apostle Paul says, we live and move and have our being in God, then loving God, praising God means embracing life, embracing the universe and everything in it—loving our neighbor and even our enemy. In a way, we’ve come full circle. We’re back with my long-ago roommate, praising everything we encounter, even the breakfast yogurt. Only now, we are praising these things, these everyday things and everyday moments, these encounters with our neighbor, as manifestations of God. We see the sacred in the ordinary. Like St. Francis, in the hymn we are about to sing, we can speak of all we encounter, whether the rushing wind or the sun’s golden beam or kind and gentle Death, with equal tenderness, as part of the whole.
How do we get to this place of radical acceptance of the universe, this faith in the final harmony of all souls with God? How do we love God with all our heart and all our soul? Moses told us in our final reading today, from Deuteronomy. He said, “The word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”
Praise God. Amen.
Closing Words
Let us close with these words from a song sung by Louis Armstrong:
I see trees that are green, red roses too
I watch them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world.”
Benediction
We worship the Lord in gladness. We praise the God of the rushing wind, the burning sun, the silver moon—the God who makes the rivers to flow. We declare our devotion to God on rising up in the morning and lying down at night. Along with the trees of the forest, we sing for joy.
This is the day we are given; let us go forth and be happy in it. Amen.
Texts:
| Opening Sentences | Psalm 100: 1-2 |
| Responsive Reading | Chronicles 16: 29b-34 |
| Unison Reading | Deuteronomy 6: 4-9, Numbers 15: 40-41 |
| First Reading | Luke 10: 25-37 |
| Second Reading | Deuteronomy 30: 9-14 |