Second Sunday of Easter, April 7, 2013

Psalm 150
¹ Praise the Lord!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
   praise him in his mighty firmament!
² Praise him for his mighty deeds;
   praise him according to his surpassing greatness!

³ Praise him with trumpet sound;
   praise him with lute and harp!
⁴ Praise him with tambourine and dance;
   praise him with strings and pipe!
⁵ Praise him with clanging cymbals;
   praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
⁶ Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!

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Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Or since this second Sunday of Easter is usually the Sunday when we hear that that infamous tale of Thomas the doubter you could have answered my, “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” with “Hmm, well, yeah, I mean maybe, I’d like to see it first.”

There are also some congregations which have a tradition of the second Sunday of Easter being “Holy Humor” Sunday. I have no idea where this tradition came from, but they expect some humor out of their pastor, so here is the best religious joke I know: The CFO of McDonalds went to the new Pope and said, “Holy Father, I have a business proposition for you. I’ll give the church 50-million dollars – with which you could help a lot of poor people – if you change the words of the Lord’s Prayer from ‘give us this day our daily bread’ to ‘give us this day our daily hamburger.’” The Pope said, “My Son, I cannot change the holy text.” So the CFO said, “OK, make it 100-million bucks.” So the Pope said, “Well, I have to take it to the cardinals.” So he went to the Cardinals and said, “Cardinals, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is I can get the church 100-million bucks. The bad news is…we have to lose the contract with Wonderbread.” [i]

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Alleluia is the word of the day. It comes from the Hebrew version, Hallelujah, which means “Praise God.” The first part “halle” means praise and “yah” stands for what Ancient Jews believed to be the unspeakable name of God, Yahweh. So say it loud and proud: Hallelujah! Praise God![ii]
 
Psalm 150 is full of Hallelujahs and Praise Gods. 6 verses 13 praises! Each verse answers a question. First the shout, Hallelujah! Then where? In the holy temple and the mighty firmament – in other words Praise God where God lives, in the temple and in the heavens. The implication is that the earth and the heavens meet and so God is to be praised everywhere.

Why should God be praised? For God’s mighty acts and exceeding greatness. There is no need to list all the acts and greatness of the Lord. That is well cataloged in the Psalms, and this being the last Psalm assumes you have read the others and know all the reasons for which God is to be praised. So why? Because God is God. Because God awesome. Because God is the source and author of all goodness.

Then the questions, how shall God be praised, is answered – with any and every kind of music: trumpet, lyre harp, tambourine and dance, strings and pipe, cymbals – clanging cymbals! As we heard with our children today. God is praised in music. When there no longer is vocabulary for all the praise, then we move on to music. Martin Luther once said of music, “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.”

The final question answered in the psalm is, by whom should the praise of God be sung? And the answer is: by all that has breath – everything living. In praise, creation lives up to its created purpose- its highest calling, our highest calling is to praise. Hallelujah!

One of our generation’s greatest theologians is a man named Walter Bruegemann. He’s written extensively on the Hebrew Scriptures and has written particularly beautifully about the Psalms. He says that the Psalms can be grouped roughly in three categories: Psalm of Orientation, Psalms of Disorientation and Psalms of New Orientation or Reorientation.[iii]

Psalms of Orientation sing of the “joy, delight, goodness, coherence, and reliability of God, God’ creation and God’s governing law.” These Psalms are serene, they are happy with their lives and with the way the world is ordered. In this world there is no surprise and no fear and there is a profound trust in God. Listen to part of Psalm 17: My footsteps hold fast to your well-worn path; and my feet do not slip. I call upon you, O God, for you will answer me, incline your ear to me and hear my words. Show me your marvelous lovingkindness, O Savior of those who take refuge at your right hand from those who rise against them. Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me under the shadow of your wings.” Here there is hope, trust, and happiness.

The second kind of Psalm is the Disorientation Psalm. This kind of Psalm is written and spoken by those who know the “hurt, alienation, suffering and death” of human life. These Psalms sing of “rage, resentment, self-pity, and hatred.” And They use extreme imagery to express the depth of this kind of experience. This Psalm demands that we “do not pretend the world is other than it really is. This Psalm does not withhold anything from God. And this Psalm demands that God be present in the dark times of life.” Psalm 137 is a great example: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion. As for our harps, we hung them up on the trees in the midst of that land…How shall we sing the Lord’s song upon and alien soil? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. Let my tongue cleave to the floor of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy…O daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy they shall be who repay you for what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” Pretty violent imagery! These are the Psalm verses we don’t often read in worship because they are dark. But it is too bad because these Psalms are of deep, deep lament. These are the psalms sung by grieving mothers at the bedsides of their sick children. These are the songs of widows at the graves of their buried beloveds. These are the Psalms of despair and grief beyond which one cannot see any light. These are the songs of the disciples as they sat in the upper room when they thought Jesus was dead and gone forever.

The third set of Psalms are the New Orientation Psalms. These Psalms sing of a “turn of surprise when we are overwhelmed with the new gifts of God, when joy breaks through despair. Where there has only been darkness, there is light…[These Psalms sing] about a new gift from God…” God breaks into the world, into the despair making all things new. This is not simply a return to a previous ordering or system of faith. This is a whole new thing that God has created, giving us a new way to look at life and death. These Psalms might be personal or communal or liturgical or just public songs sung in total abandonment in praise of God.
Psalm 150 is a Psalm of Reorientation. It is total abandonment of praise for the one who has given a new order, the One who has newly oriented our lives as individuals and our life as a community. And that can only happen after the Disorientation. Only through the valley of the Shadow of Death as Psalm 23 says can we summon from within a true, deep, Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! This Psalm comes from the depths of praise and joy. This Psalm comes from the lips of ones who know what it feels like to believe God has abandoned us and one who knows from experience that God never abandons us.

This is the kind of Hallelujah that can only be uttered on this side of Easter and can only be uttered when doubt and fear and mistrust and questions have entered the head and the heart, taken up residence and then been assuaged and mollified, when trust has re-entered and God’s love has proved to be more powerful. Thomas then is the personified figure of our doubt and fear and mistrust and questions. He gets to say what all of us have thought before, what the Psalmists cried out when it seemed God had abandoned them – Like Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He is the voice of the one facing doubts and fear and mistrust and questions. How can resurrection happen when darkness and death are so real and so pervasive and so horribly visceral?

The great news about Thomas, and the great news for all of us, is that Jesus comes to him, and to us, with new orientation. Out of the despair and darkness Jesus comes with a surprising – very surprising – new word. And the new word is: Life.

What the Psalms teach us about this Easter greeting is that it doesn’t happen only once. You’ll find these Psalms of Orientation, disorientation and reorientation throughout the whole book. And that is how life works too, right? We are happy, despairing, and praise-filled over and over again throughout our days. And each time, in all the times, God is with us. And especially in our moments of darkest despair and deepest agony, God comes to us in the risen Christ, breathing new life, giving rest for the weary and sight to the blind, wine for the party and strength for the journey.

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!

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[i] I first heard this joke on “The Vicar of Dibley” though I don’t remember which episode. Could look it up but…

[ii] This and the following paragraphs paraphrased from Waltner, James, Believers Church Bible Commentary: Psalms. Herald Press, Scottdale, PA. 2006 It was a gift to me from the author, my pastor for 7 years, who drove to Valpo from Goshen when I was preparing for baptism, who prayed for me in my discernment and even after I chose to be Lutheran, on the occasion of my ordination.

[iii] The following paragraphs explaining the three types of Psalms taken from Brueggemann, Walter, Spirituality of the Psalms. Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, MN, 2002 and http://www.angelfire.com/journal2/boustrophedon/THROUGH_THE_PSALMS.pdf , an outline of Brueggemann’s book.