Year B, Pentecost 25 Psalm 146
I often direct people to the Psalms
when they are struggling with prayer. Many times people need direction in prayer
and get insecure about what to say or they are just overwhelmed with the
enormity of it all. I understand because I sometimes feel the same way, this
week for instance. The great thing about
the psalms is that they encompass virtually every human emotion: anger, envy,
frustration, joy, fear and utter desolation.
While there are 150 psalms, often times you will encounter several
contrasting emotions in one psalm. I like it because it is true to life. One moment you are on top of the world, the
next moment you are asking God to vanquish your enemies. Some days are like that.
Given the last week, I had hoped we
would have a good lament psalm. One
third of the psalms in the Bible are lament psalms, so I felt that the odds
were in my favor. But no, not this week. This week was a praise psalm with the
first word—Hallelujah. I imagined how it
would sound if I asked you all to say it. It would be a bit like when I ask my
son to apologize for something he’s confident he bears no guilt. Hallelujah. When I think of the word
Hallelujah, I think of Easter and joy that cannot be contained— but it’s more
than that.
When I think of praising God, I
consider the times when it has just come out of me spontaneously, which frankly
has been rarer than I would like to admit.
We praise God every Sunday through prayers, music and the celebration of
the Eucharist. But what I hear when I
spend a lot of time contemplating the word Hallelujah, is singing the Alleluia
chorus. It’s powerful and enthusiastic song of praise. I think so many of think
of Alleluia in that context. But the
word Alleluia appears in all kinds of music.
I was struck by one piece the choir sang in our All Soul’s service last
week. It was a Ukranian piece written in
2007. The whole piece is just Alleluia,
but it’s much more contemplative and less triumphant then you would expect. The author of the piece said he wrote it
after a mission trip to Ukraine. It was
meant to be the “quiet voice of faith, praise and hope in the midst of
suffering and tragedy”. That is how the composer of the piece described it. We
don’t have to associate Hallelujah with joy.
The
Hebrew word is actually an imperative---it’s a command. One commentator described it as a discipline.
That means that even when we don’t feel it, we still say it. We praise God not because of the wonderful
things that are going on in our world.
We praise God because our God is worthy of praise. It’s not supposed to
be easy. It’s not supposed to be
something that we only do when things are going our way and we are grateful to
God for all the blessings in our life. We can’t just believe in a good God when
all is right in the world.
That’s easy to preach, but how can we praise when
we find ourselves in times of despair, when we have lost faith in people, when we
have worked so hard and not achieved the outcome we wanted. We grieve.
We act. We organize. We remember
the verses of this psalm that tell us not to put our trust in rulers, because
they cannot save us…even when we have a really good one who we voted for. They
cannot ruin us, no matter how very bad they are. Only God can save us.
Because we still worship a God who loves us, a
God who gives justice to the oppressed, food to the hungry, sets the prisoners
free, opens the eyes of the blind and cares for the immigrant, the orphan and
the widow. When our human leaders let us
down (and they will, because they are humans---and some of them are very flawed
humans), we cannot lose hope. Our hope
is not based on who we elect or don’t elect.
Our hope has one source—God. So we continue to praise the Lord, not
because we are pleased with what is happening in our nation and our world, but
in spite of it. Let your praise be your
protest.
And I know how hard that is.
Praising God is part of my job description and I still find it difficult in the
midst of division and hatred. There will
be moments when we can’t praise God and instead we pray Psalm 13, “How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day
long? How long
shall my enemy be exalted over me?” There have been many moments over the last
several years when I have asked, “How long?” I don’t care what political party
you are in, I don’t know anyone who believes things are going swimmingly. I don’t know anyone who feels that our
government is doing a great job of standing up for the poor, the oppressed, the
immigrant, the imprisoned, all those people that the God of justice, (the God
of psalm 146) promised to love and lift up.
What I fear more than anything, is hopelessness,
people giving up hope. So I ask that
when we sing our final hymn, we will sing with whatever energy we have left--
these words: “Save us from weak resignation, to the evils we
deplore.. Grant us wisdom, grant us
courage, serving thee whom we adore.” Let us not forget who we serve. We serve
a loving God who cares deeply for all those people the world just tosses aside.
Because of that, we keep saying Hallelujah, even if it’s
barely a whisper. You don’t have to say it with triumph. You don’t even have to say it with joy. Say it however feels right in your soul. You
know how we don’t say Alleluia during Lent? The one exception is at funerals.
Because even in the midst of death and grief, we make our song—Alleluia,
Alleluia, Alleluia. Even when we feel that all is lost, our God continues to
save us and the people we love. Let our
Alleluia be our protest, our protest to the division, the hatred, the misogyny,
the racism, the homophobia---all of those things that create walls instead of
bridges. No one gets to take Hallelujah away from us. Don’t stop praising God. Let our praise be
our protest.
[1] Hallelujah!
The remarkable story behind this joyful word - Los Angeles Times. Quote is from Markus Rathey, a professor at
Yale
