The Price of Praise

"...."But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, that ye may shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light." I Peter 2:9 "

The Price of Praise That you may show forth the praises of God who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. We gather, of a Sunday morning, to show forth God's praises. It seems a simple thing to do...even a routine thing that we do...an act in which we have been engaged for much of our lives. Yet, for the most part, praise is an unexamined human activity. "Praise the Lord," commands the preacher. And the people say, "The Lord's name be praised!" or sing, "Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty" or pray, "Accept, O Lord God, the sacrifices of our praise for your great mercies already afforded to us."

But praise requires more of us than mere assent to a preacher's command or a prayer's petition or an anthem's aesthetic pull upon our hearts. Praise, according to Walter Brueggemann, "articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are." To yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude? Praise, thus and in the first place, exacts a price from us. For it is not our want to yield but rather keep control of most circumstances, even and especially the circumstances which surround our worship of God.

Biblically, praise's price almost always is exacted through the experience of pain and vulnerability. Take the psalms, for instance. "The value of this great songbook of the Bible," says Kathleen Norris, "lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them praise is meaningless." I think of the twenty-second psalm which begins with the darkest cry in all of scripture: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?" and then explodes, twenty-two verses later, with praise: "I will tell of thy name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee." Only now comes the preacher's command, with its truth and meaning available to those who have known such abandonment, "You who fear the Lord, praise him! For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and he has not hid his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him. From thee comes my praise in the great congregation."

In other words, our capacity to yield, to submit, to abandon ourselves is strangely wrought in us, says the Bible, by those human experiences wherein we must cry out for the help we cannot give ourselves. So also say our lives. When our lives, to use W. B. Yeats' word, are rent ["For nothing can be sole or whole/ That has not been rent"], then the God who is absent in well-being enters in. Barbara Grizutti Harrison tells of a friend who was unable to yield to the ministrations of friends [ministrations which are, I am convinced, the near side of God's providence!]. "The more he was loved," she reported, "the more his fear grew and the more reprisals he exacted from those who had the temerity to love him. He entertained boorishly the love of his lover and flatmate for years, seeing in the detached unselfishness of his scorned partner a desire to steal his soul. It was not until he had a devastating illness, that burned away the chaff in his soul, that he was able to acknowledge that he was in debt to the man who loved him [the price of praise]....His illness, in which he now chronically and bravely dwells, has enabled him to accept the ministrations of those who love him, and to accept them with comprehending grace."

It is this same comprehending grace, this capacity--wrought in us by pain--to yield, to submit, to forget ourselves in trust and gratitude toward the God who loves us and whose we are, it is this comprehending grace which knows and rejoices in the price of praise. "Yeats has it right. It is the rending that makes life possible. It is the raw, terrible tearing that opens up healing and makes new. And," says Brueggemann, "it is this concrete rending, greatly feared by us, that the grand liturgy masks. The [Sunday morning] liturgy wants us to imagine that new life is possible without the rending. But we know better. We know better in our own experience. And we know better in our tradition of liberation, of being dead and being raised."

The temptation, or rather the rubric for most Sunday morning services of worship is that the pain and vulnerability of human existence be covered over with what Carol Bly has called the "dreadful cheer" of American Christianity, "that blinds itself to pain and makes a falsehood of its praise." Brueggemann calls it the "unmitigated praise of buoyant cultural religion" that "forces upon us a pretense of everything being all right....we sing praise because everything works...worshipping a god from whom we dare expect no serious transformation. Indeed, we prefer a god who has become guarantor of the way things are." As that is the case of a Sunday morning, even God must roll over and go back to sleep at the sound of our predictable praises.

What, then, does praise sound like when sung by a peculiar people, whose wilderness is remembered in the promised land and whose exile is an ever present possibility, a people who have borne the price of their praise, a people who have been brought out of darkness into God's marvelous light? For Israel, it sounds, again and again, like the psalms. Each time the psalm was recited, the community remembered the movement from hurt to hope; every sabbath when the lament was uttered, the people reenacted the transformation and healing which marked their life together. Their speech was always working to "redescribe, rearticulate, recharacterize God. The stuff of God, the speech out of which God is dramatically offered, is no longer static...adjectives; now it is the drastic verbs...of 'rescue, deliver, heal, release, redeem, snatch, feed, guide, give.'...In such singing," says Brueggemann, "Israel no longer lingers over the slow idols who celebrate the status quo.... The recitations of Israel banish such false gods and make possible grateful trust in the living God."

But more, and this, in the second place, is the price of the community's praise, dared in the midst of a sedimented status quo, a praise acted out beyond the doors of a sanctuary. For beyond these doors, our praise of the Living God becomes unwelcome protest. In the midst of a secular society, in contrast to a culture pitiably vulnerable to superstition, in the muddle of organized religion which has abandoned theological substance for psychological banalities, communal praise is protest. Wrought in the pain of those claimed by God but forgotten by the social order, priase is protest, because its very content is contrary to the shallowness, the emptiness, the rank subjectivity, the sedimented power and pretensions of a society or culture or church bowed down to lesser gods. As we more and more become a church which praises God beyond these doors, praises God from out of the corporate pain covered over by cobblestone streets and conforming facades, from out of the lament silenced by proper society, from out of the cries of the abandoned still crucified by the powerful, the price of our praise will be that of a church, in this community, marked by our protest against present arrangements.

Then with Israel we will "sing about and treasure a God who continues to make and unmake, to create and destroy, to fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away. [We will] sing about and treasure a new world, a new social possibility in which swords will become plowshares, spears will turn to pruning hooks, in which you shall not plant and another eat, in which everyone will be content and none shall be afraid. [Our] best doxology...[will be] hope kept sharp by pain still present. It [will be] celebration kept open for subversiveness. It [will not be] self-satisfied endorsement of what is, but the insistence that God and the empire...must pay attention to what will be given out beyond pain into joy." [Brueggemann] Together the cost of our praise will be our yielding to the God who is ever transforming the way things are into a future where none are forgotten.

Though there is one last cost to count for the sake of our praise, the cost spoken by Second Isaiah and made flesh in Jesus Christ. "For my name's sake," says the Lord in Second Isaiah, "I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, so that I may not cut you off." The price of our praise to God is God's anger at our unyielding lives restrained, God's judgment of our self-serving culture deferred. "Week after week," writes Annie Dillard in now familiar words, "we witness the same miracle: that God, for reasons unfathomable, refrains from blowing our dancing bear act to smithereens." But there is a reason, says God in Second Isaiah: for the sake of my praise, I restrain my anger for you, so that I may not cut your off." Such is the price of our praise to God.

But more, says the Lord: "See, I have refined you, but not like silver; I have tested you in the furnace of adversity. For my own sake, I do it," says the Lord, "for why should my name be profaned?" Which is further to say that the same God who restrains his anger is also the God who takes our adversity and turns us toward praise. Not only do we hear of this in Isaiah, but we witness this in Him who took our adversity upon himself, even to death on a cross. Going up to Jerusalem, going up to the imperial city where the gods of religion's status quo reign, he speaks the final cost of praise which soon he will bear. But since he alone must bear the pain, restrain the anger, pay the cost, there are none who can hear. The disiples, said Luke, did not grasp what he said.

Yet in the next town, there is one who does hear from out of his pain: a blind man sitting at the gate begging. The man cries out in his adversity, even as the status quo, the ones in the front of the crowd, attempt to silence him. He cries louder and Jesus summons the man to his side. What do you want me to do for you? Jesus asks. Lord, said the man, let me see again. At Jesus' word, he sees and follows, glorifying God, "and all the people, when they saw it, praised God."

He who would transform this community, grasping at the status quo, is asking us, in our blindness, "What do you want me to do for you? In a sense, these past few years have been riddled with God's transforming power. But in another sense, an unyielding sense, we have yet to be changed. The vulnerability within community which calls forth praise remains guarded. The world's pain that would work in us praise of the living God is still begging at our gate. The praise that is protest against the present arrangements of power is but a whimper behind closed doors. There is much which awaits our yielding, our submission, our self abandonment in favor of our trust and gratitude toward the One whose we are. I say again, as mere parentheses to the price of praise, that our yielding, our submission, our self-abandonment begin with our stewardship. Short of such abandon, our praise will be that side of empty, God bearing the price, restraining his anger.

Therefore I pray that the God who gave sight to the blind man begging at the gate will hear our cries, early in the morning, and call us out of darkness into His marvelous light, that we may show forth his praises, now and forever. Amen.

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