In the name of the Risen ☩ Lord. Amen.
“Sing to the Lord a new song.” That opening line of Psalm 98 is one of the more well-known lines from the Psalter and it exhorts us to “shout with joy to the Lord.” This Psalm reminds us that we are to be a people of joyful praise. There’s a novel in which a character says “You say you are a Christian. Then where the devil is your joy?” It’s a fair question – for too long, Christianity’s ambassadors have been puritanical and legalistic killjoys. This Easter season though prompts us to joyfully praise God.
Joy is not a sappy sort of happiness. Joy isn’t something that you manufacture, rather joy is something that finds you. Happiness can be pursued – cars, friends, food, vacations, money: these things can all make you happy. These things, of course, can all be lost, taking any sense of happiness with them. And as we all have known at some point in our lives, we can have all of the ingredients for happiness and yet are absolutely joyless.
Joy is different – joy is what the grace of God feels like. Joy is satisfaction – when you allow yourself to know that you have everything that truly matters, when you know that you are loved eternally and unconditionally, when you know that all manner of things shall be well you are overcome with joy. Joy doesn’t always make sense in the context of the world – you can experience joy in the midst of pain or brokenness. In today’s passage from John, Jesus says “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” This is what Easter is all about – our joy being made complete. And so our response is to sing to the Lord a new song.
There’s no such thing as praising God too much or too often, as singing a new song is how we enter into the joy of the New Creation which began with Jesus’ Resurrection, and so praise is integral to the Christian life. The first thing that praise does is that it connects us to others. Certainly, you praise God when you are alone; but as Psalm 98 illustrates, the vision of praise is fuller than that. Praise is about joining our voices with those around us, with instruments, and with all of creation. In praising God, it truly does not matter how you voted in the last election, or even if you voted at all. In praise, it doesn’t matter if you are rich or poor, black or white, gay or straight, male or female, young or old. In this divided world in which we find ourselves, a little more praise would go a long way when it comes to unity.
Praise connects us to joy because it celebrates that our impossibilities have become God’s possibilities. The Psalm proclaims “He remembers his mercy and faithfulness to the house of Israel, all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.” Knowing what God is like was impossible for us, but in Jesus, God took on flesh and became known in love. Death seemed to be final and hopeless, but in Jesus, we see that life is changed in death, not ended. It can seem that in the grand scheme of things, our lives don’t matter, but in Jesus, we are made a part of the Body of Christ, which matters eternally. Praise orients us to the truth of these marvelous things: that in Jesus, all things are possible.
The great thing about praise is that it is absolutely worthless. Praising God is not about accomplishing a thing and it isn’t useful. In fact, the world would even say that spending time in praise is a waste of time because it’s time that we could be using to get something else done. And we need to be reminded of this – that you are not what you produce and that you are not valuable because you add value to anything, but rather you are valuable because God values you. As Jesus said in John, “You did not choose me but I chose you.” There is nothing that we have to do in order to earn or justify the fact that God loves us – it simply is. And so we are given the gift of being able to do something as seemingly worthless as praise God, and by doing so, we are oriented towards grace.
Praise is so crucial to the life of faith because it connects us to our place in God’s story of salvation. Psalm 98 proclaims that “With his right hand and his holy arm he has won for himself the victory.” This, though, is a subversive claim because it runs counter to the claims that world makes about what success looks like. Psalm 98 reminds us that the Lord is King – not empire, not markets, not reputation. My goal in Easter preaching this year has been to reorient our vision to the fact that, because of the Resurrection of the Crucified Christ, we are now citizens in the New Creation. What happened on Easter changed the very fabric of the universe, but if we are unaware of that change, we miss out on the joy of the New Creation.
We might think of it in terms of becoming a parent. The day that our oldest daughter was born, my life changed forever, but I didn’t actually change – my body was made of the same molecules. I became a father, but you couldn’t tell that from just looking at me. Nevertheless, my priorities shifted, the way I saw the world changed, the way I understood love expanded. While nothing actually changed, absolutely everything changed on that day. This is one way to understand the Resurrection – and why praise is so important. Praise reminds us of this story of the New Creation in which we find ourselves while we remain physically in the world of the first Creation. Songs like Psalm 98 are so important to the life of faith because they steep us in the story of God’s saving grace.
Praise is also important because it witnesses to God’s mercy and love. The joy of faith is like a really catchy song that once you hear it, you just have to join in. Whether it’s Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” Charles Wesley’s “Love divine, all loves excelling,” or Beethoven’s “Joyful, joyful,” once you have that tune in your head, it sticks with you. My just mentioning those songs probably has gotten one of them stuck in your head. So, for one, praise gives us that drumbeat to live our lives to; but more than that, it allows others to see the grace of God in action. Haven’t we all known those sorts of people who are just full of joy? It’s infectious. They remind us of how joyful life can be and of how good God is. So we praise God as a way of joining the divine dance of love and inviting others to join in the party.
Praise is what our faith is all about and Easter invites us into the depths of this joy by singing alleluias as often as we can. And I am convinced that if we focus on praise, all the rest will fall into place even more marvelously than we could have imagined. Doxology, the fancy word for praising God, is the purpose and task of the Church. Everything else is a distraction. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t feed the hungry or visit the sick, but it does mean that we do those things as a means of praising God.
A few weeks ago I had the chance to go to a lecture on a deeply formational book for me called Resident Aliens with its authors, Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon. In preparation for the lecture, I reread the book last month and was taken by their writing about the “confessing church.” They note that some churches are activist – meaning that the Church sees itself as an agent of social change and of making the world a better place. Other churches are conversionist, where the world is seen as fundamentally broken and so the Church is seen as a means of transforming individuals and making them better people. Both of these approaches, they say, and I agree, are lacking.
What they propose, not as a middle ground or a synthesis of those two, but rather as a radical alternative, is the confessing church. In the language of this sermon, we might call it the “praising church.” In this view of the Church, our task is to simply worship Christ in all things. We aren’t concerned with outcome or results because we know that’s all up to God anyway. In the praising church, it’s about faithfulness, not effectiveness. And so because our lives are oriented to God in praise, we then simply do the only thing that makes sense once we’ve starting tapping our feet to the beat of God’s grace.
Those authors are fond of saying that Church’s only job is to be the Church. By that, they mean that the Church is the visible witness in the world to the joy of the Gospel. And so the Church is a community in which promises are honored, enemies are loved, truths are told, the poor are honored, grace is communicated, forgiveness is given, all are loved. Because once the joy of Jesus is in your heart, you just don’t have the room to carry around as much hatred. Once you’ve praised the truth of God’s love, you can’t have a lie on your lips. This is what praising God is all about – simply being the Church. The Church exists simply to praise God and the moment we get away from that is the moment when we lose our direction, start taking ourselves too seriously, and forget about joy.
Easter is about joy, in the fullest sense of the word; and praising God is our response to that joy. Our closing hymn today will be one that sends us out into the world singing joyful praise to God, but it might strike you as an odd hymn to be singing today. We’ll sing “Joy to the world.” Isaac Watts, in 1719, wrote the words to this hymn based on Psalm 98. It’s not a Christmas hymn, even if we’ve come to treat it as such. It’s not a Christmas hymn because it’s an everyday hymn – it is always the right season to joyfully sing praise to God and be reminded of the wonders of his love.
Certainly, there are other hymns about joy that we could have sung as the closing hymn today, but I’m betting that “Joy to the world” will be memorable and odd. And that’s exactly what praise is all about: praise reminds us of God’s grace, of God’s victory, of God’s love – all things that we need to be reminded of. And praise is rather odd as it orients us to a different way of being in the world. The Church’s job is to be the Church and your task as a member of the Body of Christ is to simply be the Body of Christ. We will soon celebrate the Eucharist, that great feast of joyful praise, in which you receive what it is that you are to be. It is our Easter joy to always proclaim the song of our faith: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”
