A TIME TO PRAISE
2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
We just read that wonderful passage in 2 Samuel, Chapter 6 today about David dancing practically naked into Jerusalem. His wife Michal wasn’t too happy with him being naked in the street and all, but David was celebrating. It was important that the ark of the Covenant was being brought back after having been taken away by the Philistines. It was now being brought “home”. It was time sing. It was a time to make noise with all kinds of instruments, and it was a time to dance. It was a time to praise God.
We are celebrating today because worship is a time to celebrate . It is a time to sing, make noise with instruments and even dance but I don’t think we will go as far as David and dance naked over to the mall this morning. It is for us, however, a time to praise God.
C.S. Lewis in his book Reflections On The Psalms has a wonderful quotation on Praise:
The world rings with praise–lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game–praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most…. I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent? The psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. (C.S. Lewis Reflection On The Psalms Fontana Books p. 80)
There is all kind of literature written today about the enormous power of the human mind to shape our lives. It is said that selecting a phrase and training your mind to focus on it throughout the day can dominate your awareness and reshape the person you are. If you take a phrase like “I give thanks that I am serene and peaceful”, repeat it a number of times in the morning and at different times during the day, and keep doing that for a month you will see how profoundly your life is transformed. You actually become aware of more times of serenity and peace in your life. Similarly, you can take the phrase “Let all that is within me praise the Lord”, repeat it in the same way and your life can actually be more full of celebration. You will be more acutely aware of all there is to celebrate in your life.
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Praise has affected my life. I have always sung praises in church and uttered phrases of praise, but when I became intentional to see in my life the things to praise God for, I would have to say that my world changed. I should reword that. The world did not change but was redefined in way that I can’t completely explain. I now commit myself to viewing at least one thing a day as I were seeing it for the first time. This can be a glorious time of praise. The more I praise, the more I find to praise and praise has become a way of life. I believe that it is through our praise that we become more whole people. There is something missing in our lives without it.
How important is that? Let me tell you about the renowned cellist Pablo Casals.
When Casals was an old man, almost 90, he was beset with the infirmities of age, which incapacitated his whole body. But Casals was able to cast off his afflictions, at least temporarily, because he knew he had something to celebrate–his musical gift. This was his daily Cortisone for his creaking joints.
It is said that Casals would walk into the room stooped over, bent, hunch-backed, in apparent pain. He painfully sat down at the keyboard of the piano which he also knew how to play, and slowly, and with great labour, began to press the keys and the pedals, and slowly the music of a Bach creation began to emerge. The fingers straightened. The spine became more erect, and within two or three bars of the music, Casals was moving up and down the keyboard in a rhythmic frenzy. He finished the piece, got up from the piano, and was good for an hour or two, in a state of relative well-being. Casals filled his painful void with celebration and thereby coped with his condition.
(As told in Norman Cousins best-selling book, Anatomy Of An Illness )
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The Psalm that we had this morning, Psalm 24, is called an entrance psalm. It was sung in times of celebration as the people entered the Temple to worship. You can hear the people singing and shouting :
Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.
Who is the King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.
Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of glory.
I get the impression from this psalm that their praise of God for all the glorious things in their history was a way of opening the doors and letting God into their lives and the life of their community. However, we know that the people singing this psalm were already aware of God with them. So by uttering these words it was a way of recognizing together that God was always with them and they were with God at all times. If they had for some reason forgotten that truth it was now in their time of celebration to let God back into their lives and recognize God’s presence with them. That is something to be praised!
How important it is to have that sense that God is with us, and that feeling of God being with us at all times is evoked by our acts of praise. Last year at Synod I was responsible for morning meditations and I told the story of a United Methodist Bishop who always greeted people with “God is good” and the people learned to respond “all the time”. Sometimes even in the middle of a meeting he would just break in and say “God is good”, to which people would reply, “All the time”. Then he would switch it and say, “All the time”, and they would reply, “God is good!” It had become a chant in that UM Conference . The Bishop said that was that no matter how cynical the people became over church politics, they would be encouraged to look beyond to God as the giver of all good gifts, the giver of life itself. He would say it because he hoped it would be taken to heart, and create an “attitude of gratitude” within each one. He kept saying it so that it would becomes the bedrock of their decision making ministry, reassuring then that no matter how difficult the task before them, no matter how bleak the future may appear, no matter how evil humankind has become, God was and is and will always be very good and “worthy to be praised”.
So in a simple act of praise and celebration he would say, “God is Good” and the people would respond “all the Time”
Reflection
I want you to take a few minutes to reflect silently. Think of your lives. In these last few years what has God given you? What resources, what healing, what opportunities, what experience – what is God giving you? How can you fittingly Praise God.
GOD IS GOOD! (ALL THE TIME)
ALL THE TIME! (GOD IS GOOD)
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