Six weeks ago we began our journey with the psalms by asking one question. Why worship? The question was grounded in that first reading, a psalm of praise. We considered the psalms in their original context, in a theology where God played favorites and stuck divine fingers into the pie of daily life. We thought about how psalms have been used in the Hebrew and Christian trajectories, their place in prayer, from Christ’s cry of despair and confidence on the cross to the daily recitation of psalms by thousands of Christians each day. Finally, we focused on the meaning of praise and worship for the contemporary Christian, for those willing to let God be God rather than an idolatrous projection of our own desires. I suggested that as God is a powerful force of creativity, compassion and love in the universe, that we praise or worship is an attempt to align ourselves with that powerful force, for it is our source and our telos, our end.
Which is all well and good as an abstraction, but what does that look like in our lives. Is it, as so many conservative Christians would have it, about interior faith and exterior avoidance of sin? Or is there something more?
And so we return, once again, to those early days of faith. Those early believers understood God as arbitrary and capricious, a metaphysical ego that interfered in the creation on a regular basis, often as cruel as the Greek gods in ordering slaughter, in blessing and cursing. One need look no further than the story of Job to see a God that is heartless, at best, and downright cruel if understood from the position of Job’s crushed family. This was a God you bargained with, that you joined in covenant, for the earliest notions of covenant were Ancient Near Eastern treaties between powerful kings and local lords, very much the same as the relationship between lord and vassal under the feudal system. It is no wonder that, though God gave us God’s name, Yahweh, or “I am becoming,†we chose instead to refer to God using that political term, Lord.
The psalms originate during this period, and so we see all too often an appeal for divine intervention. “Smite my enemies,†the psalmist cries, “for I am supposed to be under your protection.†When the enemies win, as they do again and again in the five centuries before Jesus, Israel looks back upon itself, blaming itself for infidelity, for God cannot be unfaithful, when the problem was never the fidelity or infidelity of a tribe of imperfect humans, but rather the very understanding of God.
Thankfully, the Hebrew people preserved their collective memory of slavery, and so built into their faith a non-negotiable commitment to the poor and oppressed, to all who suffered under unjust systems, to immigrants, widows and orphans. And so we see, in today’s reading, a celebration of a God that reflects this commitment, that cares about those at the margins, and that takes action on their behalf.
For those of us in the Christian tradition, this construction of a God with agency and a passive people changed radically with the arrival of Jesus, Hebrew prophet, healer and teacher. In this itinerant rabbi, we believe, the world had a direct experience of the divine. No longer a superhuman warrior-king, God was instead a quiet force for healing and justice, a community activist and non-violent anti-government protester. Certainly God-with-Us in Jesus was on the side of those at the margins. He healed the lame, the leper, the mentally ill. He fed the poor and defended the condemned. More than these things, he offered forgiveness, lifting the weight of sin in exchange for the yoke that harnessed the believer to the good work of the divine in the world.
No longer was it enough to proclaim one’s own fidelity and demand that God intervene, for here was God, quietly challenging as people picked up stones, touching the unclean, in the cemetery with the madman. No longer curses and blessings from a distance. The work of God was personal, intimate, human.
And, before he was brutally executed, as he surely knew would happen, Jesus did this amazing thing. He who had come to embody divine compassion, love and creativity in human form, passed that force on to the church, on to the gathered believers who, through their prayer and sharing of the common meal, became the body of Christ, literally the hands and feet of the anointed one, in the world.
How far we have strayed in the centuries that have passed since Jesus walked among us. Once again we turn to some puppet-master God in hope of divine favor. This carnival sideshow god promises riches and sports championships, hates who we hate, loves who we love, and is the sole property of one group or nation. This is a God who heals some, but not others, who has a divine plan that leads a mentally ill young adult to walk into an elementary school with weapons of mass murder, all because God needed some more angels. It is disgusting.
If our purpose in praising and worshiping God is to align ourselves with the original force of creativity and compassion, of love and growth, of the ordinary miracles of today, then we should know that this is not interior and it is not static. It is not “give my heart to Jesus.†God does not need your heart. God needs your hands.
It is not God who will feed the hungry and heal the sick. It is not God who will protect the immigrant and the orphan or who will set the prisoners free from the corporate prisons. It is not God who will produce ploughshares from the heap of swords, AK-47s and police armored personnel carriers.
The trajectory of our faith, our growing understanding of God and the event of God’s anointed in the person of Jesus, demands that we no longer be passive lumps waiting for divine intervention. We are the divine intervention. This is how God chose to act in the world, through the beautifully imperfect flesh and blood of humanity. That is how God acted in Jesus. It is how Goad acts today.
This is not praise, what we do here. Here we play the mind games needed to psych ourselves up for the real work, the real praise that happens when we change lives, that happens when we place our bodies on the line, when we place our treasure on the line, all to care for those God cares about, all to become creativity and compassion and love and growth in the world. Do justice. This is not where we worship. This is the locker room where we get ready for the big game, where we pray and chant and plan, where we study our play book, and then we go out on to the field, which is out there.
What we do in here only matters if it changes what we do out there.
Here we practice disagreeing without being disagreeable. Here we practice reconciliation and redemption. Here we learn to love those who are not like us. If we cannot do those things here, where we are surrounded by constant reminders of the divine, of God-with-Us, where can we do them? And then we take those skills, with shaky confidence, into the world, for we will need them in a world that is challenging, that is filled with aimlessness and sin.
Mouth without hands is empty praise.
The psalmist writes from another time, when God was what humans made of “him,†before God was with us in Jesus, before the divine in Jesus became the divine in the living church. But the psalmist is right. It is God that sets the captive free, that cares for the oppressed. But God, divine mystery, wild and holy creativity, does it through us. This is our praise. This is our worship. Not here in the locker room of faith, but out there in the world, with scrapes and bruises and dirt and life. And victory. And love. Amen.