Text: Psalm 145

When we discussed psalms Thursday night in FaithZone, we came to the conclusion that psalms are poems and songs used primarily in worship by a gathered community, though some sound like solitary expressions. These poems or songs express thanksgiving and sadness, joy and anger, wonder and fear, praise and vengeance. They are a rich collection, expressive of the wide range of feelings and experiences of a people, collected and transcribed over several life times.

“ Praise God. It puts everything into its proper place and perspective.” So adjures Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. This seems also to be the advice of the psalmist. This morning’s ancient text, Psalm 145, is indeed a psalm of praise, one of a group of six hymns extolling God that close out the book of Psalms. It surely helps us put things into “proper place and perspective.”

This is that time of year when we are inundated with advertising that urges us to buy, buy, buy, so we can celebrate properly what have come to be known as “The Holidays.” This morning the lectionary gives us an opportunity to step away from those pressures to look for a perspective that would better serve us through the seasons leading to Thanksgiving and Christmas. “Praise God,” the old rabbi urges. “It puts everything in its proper place and perspective.” How do you think we would fare this year if we bought less and curtailed the freneticism of our celebrations long enough to engage in a little prayer and praise directed toward the One who makes it all possible?

But, who exactly is this God we praise, whose name we bless? How we answer this question has much to do with how we lift our voices in praise and how we live our lives. We are reminded that names are sacred or ought to be. In ancient times people believed that some of the essence of a person or a thing was caught up in its naming. For the people of ancient Israel, even if they thought they really knew God’s name, speaking it was too dangerous. These were people who believed that no one could see the face of God and live. God might have been their God through covenant relationship, but God was still as far above them as the heavens are above the earth. God was a fearsome presence; the holy was more than any human could handle. So, they, like we, were left to create metaphors to speak of God and, as we all know, a metaphor only captures a piece of the reality of the thing it attempts to describe or name.

So, who is the God we praise, whose name we want to bless? If we praise a dark and a vengeful god, we will find our anger feeding on itself, and we will find ourselves singing songs of violence and destruction as we march off to war. If we praise the god of the prosperity gospel, we will find our greed feeding on itself, and we will find ourselves singing songs of selfishness and superiority as we march off in search of material security. If we praise the god of biblical literalism, we will find our narrow-mindedness feeding on itself, and we will find ourselves singing songs of self-righteous indignation and intolerance as we march off in search of sinners to judge. However, if we follow the pathway implied in this psalm, we will find ourselves growing in relationship to the great God of the universe, the God of many holy names, the God who draws us out of ourselves into a wider world, into a reality that gives us both proper place and proper perspective.

As we came to see in Bible study last Tuesday, this psalm places us right in the middle of the tension between transcendence and immanence, that tension which is so much a part of our faith tradition. Though it may be a challenge for us, the psalm moves easily between praise for the infinite majesty of God and the intimate love of God. In one breath the psalmist speaks of God whose “greatness is unsearchable” and, in the next, of God who “upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.” It reminds me of the ancient prayer I have quoted before, “Oh God, how can we know thee? Where can we find thee? Thou art as close to us as breathing and yet art farther than the farthermost star.”

For all you Hebrew-speaking puzzle lovers, you might be interested to know that in its original language, the psalm is an artifice, an acrostic. Each line begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in order. Even so, in his commentary, Mitchell Dahood, says of this psalm that “The acrostic pattern seems not to have obstructed the lyricism of the psalmist, for the hymn effuses originality and warmth.” He goes on to say of the psalm that “It is remarkable for number of divine names and appellatives; it may be fairly described as a litany of sacred names” (Mitchell Dahood, Psalms III, 101-150, The Anchor Bible, p. 335.) Drawing from his translation, I found the following names or descriptors of God:
King Eternal and Everlasting
Yahweh, the Grand
Majesty
Strong One
Master of goodness and justice
Yahweh, the merciful and compassionate
Yahweh, slow to anger and kind
Yahweh, the sustainer and uplifter
Yahweh, the just and kind
Yahweh, the near who hears
Yahweh, the savior and protector
And, as we have seen in other elements of today’s service, this is a partial list.

One of my favorite terms for God, I learned from Marcus Borg’s, The Heart of Christianity. To begin, Borg believes that “Without a robust affirmation of the reality of God, Christianity makes no sense” (Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, p. 61.) Then he offers the image of God as “the More.” Taking this notion from William James, he says, “In a religious worldview, there is…a ‘More.’ In addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience and as disclosed by science, there is a ‘More,’ a nonmaterial layer or level of reality, an extra dimension of reality” (Borg, p. 63.) Whatever we think we know about God, there will always be more. That’s why traditions that think they have God all figured out, people who think they have God in their back pockets are always headed for trouble, often doing more harm in the world than good along the way.

In the rather simple beauty of this psalm, we find perspective in praising God, perspective both on God’s holy names and God’s holy ways. But we also see that perspective does not mean possession, that seeing something does not mean we have the whole picture, that insight is not full comprehension. So we find our proper place is characterized by humility, by the recognition that we see in a mirror dimly, that there is – and always will be! – more for us to learn.

However, this does not need to keep us from praising God. We can still bless God’s holy names. We can express gratitude for what we do know and have and are, for surely all this and more is gift from God. In his Theology of the Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann teaches that Yahweh is “the One whom Israel knows to be utterly reliable and who makes life possible for Israel” (Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy, p. 218.) He goes on to say “…Yahweh as governor acts powerfully and decisively to establish an ordered, reliable place of life. Clearly this willingness and capacity to act in powerful ways is of paramount importance to Israel (and to the world), for without this ordering capacity there would be no chance of life” (Brueggemann, p. 273.)

Later he says, “There is a generous reliability to the order of the world, on which human beings can count. The world is ordered by Yahweh so that it provides what all human creatures must have to live…Thus human creatures live in a world that leaves them elementally free of anxiety, because of the goodness, reliability, and generosity of Yahweh…Yahweh is not hostile toward humankind and does not work in enmity, but is positively inclined to sustain, heal, and forgive…Yahweh’s profound commitment to fidelity and compassion generates life-space for wondrous human freedom in the world, freedom to eat and drink and exult in a world of goodness” (Brueggemann, pp. 456-7.)

Now of course it’s much easier to make this kind of affirmation of providence as people of privilege, living in relative comfort and wealth. A base community in Latin America or refugees fleeing Burma or the Sudan or Mexico might not have the same response to this psalm. In fact, they might choose to focus on another psalm such as number 22 or 137. They might also choose other names in order to call upon God. If we were to stop right now and take a stab at writing a psalm for us, what might we say? If we chose the refrain, “Praise God and bless God’s many names,” what would be our verses?

Again, I’ll suggest that this psalm invites us to stop in our headlong rush toward “The Holidays,” with all their glittery trimmings, to look for proper place and perspective. In such a time for reflection and in the many names of God, we might come to see that praising such a God has implications for our stewardship, for how we support the work of our church, our faith community, our appendage of the Body of Christ. We might see implications for how we go about giving - and living - thanks in a season called thanksgiving. Perhaps we would see implications for how we go about giving gifts in a season called Christmas, when love is supposed to come into the world once again in the form of a vulnerable, defenseless child, dependent on us for care and survival. Perhaps we would fall on our knees, hearing angel voices, only to be lifted up by the great God of the universe, the very One whose greatness is unsearchable, bending down to uphold us like a strong mother, to raise us up like a warm father. Perhaps we might yet learn to praise God in ways that put everything into its proper place and perspective. Amen.