Psalm 150 "Exhaling Our Praise" Scott Hoezee

Whether it's a Broadway play like Les Miserables or a classic movie like The Sound of Music, most people enjoy a good musical. But have you ever wondered what it is about such productions that appeals to us? After all, musicals are decidedly unlike real life. In The Sound of Music people burst into song constantly--during dinner, while delivering telegrams. That's just how it goes in musicals--people sing at the oddest moments. But if you were standing in line at McDonald's and a woman suddenly started crooning a ballad to her children, you'd take a step back. Or if you were on an airplane flying to Pittsburgh and the man behind you suddenly started to sing, Frank Sinatra-like, "Come Fly with Me," you would no doubt panic at being seated so close to a weirdo!

Life is definitely not like a musical! In our society singing is a relatively rare event, restricted largely to church. If you've ever been at a funeral attended by mostly non-churchgoing folks, then you know how dismal the singing can be. The simple fact is that outside church people just don't get much practice in group singing anymore.

Nevertheless, there is something deep down inside most folks that wants to sing. How often haven't you glanced in your rearview mirror while waiting for a red light only to see the person behind you singing along with the radio with great gusto! At outdoor concerts there are usually lots of folks singing along with the performer up on the stage. And many of us know that singing in the shower is not something that only other people do!

Music touches us on a level which ordinary speech does not reach. Music can soothe, comfort, enliven, and lift our hearts. Why is it, for instance, that at a funeral we can recite something like the Apostles' Creed without batting an eye and yet fall apart when it's time to sing "By the Sea of Crystal"? Why is it that sometimes you can hear the merest snatch of a certain tune and suddenly tears leap to your eyes as you are transported back to a time when your children were young or when you and your spouse got engaged?

Or, in terms of a worship service, why is it that when a teenager wants to rebel, singing is often the first thing he or she refuses to do? Few postures of defiance bother me more than when I spy someone, young or old, who stands in the midst of the congregation, arms folded across his chest, lips clamped tightly shut while everyone around him is singing praises to God. Perhaps such people don't sing because they refuse to let themselves become as caught up in worship as music inevitably forces a person to be.

Because as Psalm 150 makes clear, music is a defining force in Christian worship. Psalm 150 is perhaps the Bible's single grandest statement of praise. It is also the grand finalé to the Book of Psalms. Like that final cascading shower of fireworks and rapid-fire booms, bangs, bursts, and blooms on the Fourth of July so also Psalm 150's grand finalé stuns you with its swift succession of images and staccato flurry of praise commands.

But you must read this psalm the right way to appreciate how much wallop it packs. Since I've mentioned this many times, by now I suspect most of you are aware that when you read the words "Praise the LORD" in the Book of Psalms, you are reading not some dull statement but you are receiving a fiery command! In the original Hebrew the phrase hallelu yah is in the imperative mood. Literally translated it means "Praise Yahweh." But you are supposed to read those words while also picturing a finger wagging in your face or maybe thumping you in the chest. This represents the psalmist "getting in your face." Here the poetic bard is going nose-to-nose with the reader, getting so close you can smell the garlic on his breath as he shouts, "You there! Yes, you! Grab an instrument, open your mouth, and get going! Praise Yahweh! I mean it! Move! Sing! Dance! Show some respect!"

This is the praise imperative. This is the psalmist as army drill sergeant, barking to the world his order to worship. Actually, the structure of Psalm 150 at first keeps you in suspense as to just who is being addressed. From verses 1-5 we receive a rapid-fire string of eleven imperative commands. But only in verse 6, at the end, are we told who is being commanded. And guess what? It's everybody! It's everything that has breath, which includes not only every person on the planet but also hippos and red-eyed vireos.

Because if you've got breath in your lungs, you have received the gift of life from God himself. If you breathe, you show by that very action that you've come from the workshop of a Master Craftsman--the one who snorted oxygen into Adam's nostrils in the beginning and who has now done the same for you. According to Psalm 150 the first thing you should do with that breath is exhale it back to God in praise!

But today, as when this psalm was first penned, this universal call to praise the God of Israel is a scandal and offense to most folks. People don't like to be told what to do, particularly in the area of religion. Religion is a private matter. It's nobody else's business. You believe what you want to believe and I'll do the same. What's true for you does not need to be true for me. So let's just leave one another alone on the subject.

Of course, we properly object to the notion that all religions say pretty much the same thing. We object to the notion that truth is relative such that we're not allowed to assert the truth of our Christian faith. What we sometimes forget, however, is that we also would be offended if the tables were turned. Some years ago I did some research on the history of Christian Reformed mission outreach to Jews living in Chicago during the 1940s. At one point I ran across some angry sentiments from one of the workers at the Chicago mission. It seems many Jewish parents were warning their children to steer clear of the CRC mission and especially of its Vacation Bible School with its enticing array of games and crafts. The missionaries at that time could not understand this hostility from the parents. After all, they were only trying to tell the kids about the truth of Jesus! Then again, if long about 1950 an Islamic mosque set up shop in the midst of a Dutch neighborhood in South Holland and began holding its own VBS-like program with the goal of helping the children become little Muslims, well you rather suspect that this would not be very well-received, either!

The point is that there is an inherent scandal in Psalm 150's strident calls to praise Yahweh. This is not going to be well-received by everyone who has breath. Yet if we believe in this God, if we perceive the power and greatness and grandeur of which Psalm 150 speaks, and if we believe that this very God is the beginning and end of all creatures, then we must find ways to obey and so issue this praise imperative ourselves.

And as Psalm 150 makes clear, it is through music that we will do this first and best of all. Because music does indeed move us and involve us in a way ordinary speech does not, as we said earlier. Yet it is precisely music that has been creating all manner of havoc in the wider church world in the so-called "worship wars" of recent years. Exactly because music is so powerful and so vital, people feel passionately about it.

Indeed, given what Psalm 150 tells us about music's central place in worship, doesn't it make sense that the devil would want to corrupt it, make it a cause of division instead of unity? Because in the devil's ears all praise of God sounds like the vilest of screeching. So if he can stop it, turn it, make people so weary of it they just want to halt it, then the devil has cut down on what he regards as the cosmos' worst noise pollution. The more important something is to God, the more invested Satan is in messing it up.

What that means, however, is that music is something worthy of our thoughtful attention while at the same time being something which, if we're not careful, can become an idol--an idol which can all-too-quickly become a weapon with which to bludgeon one another. It's a razor-sharp fine edge we're forced to tread. Like walking a tightrope, so also here: it's easy to fall off one side or the other. On the one side is the temptation to say that all music is equally good while on the other side is the temptation to say that only one, very narrowly defined form is acceptable and all deviations from that must be shunned.

Ironically, a temptation common to both extremes is to end up making music more about us than it is about God. There may well be something amiss with a syrupy ballad that croons on and on about personal feelings. But there is something equally wrong with crushing a fellow Christian's heartfelt ardor in the name of classical excellence. It may indeed be wrong to dump nearly the entirety of the Christian musical tradition, as some now do. But it may be equally wrong to believe that no music worthy of Christian worship has been written since the eighteenth century.

Because of the glorious ways by which the Church has carried out Jesus' Great Commission, there has been on this Lord's Day, and there will yet continue for the hours to come, an enormous number of worship services that have taken, are taking, and will take place across time zones, cultures, nations, and continents. Some of our brothers and sisters in Christ have today worshiped to Oriental tunes, with flutes and bells creating music that would sound in our ears more like Chinese opera than "Amazing Grace." Some have beat drums and shaken maracas on African savannahs creating music that might sound more like a rap song to some of us than a Genevan psalm. Some have plucked electric guitars and played keyboards playing melodies that some of us would frankly rather not associate with church. And some have played glorious pipe organs that have shaken the flying buttresses of cathedrals in Paris and Chicago.

Not all that music is for every Christian, of course. It would be as difficult, and as unnecessary, for one of Dave and Jan Dykgraaf's Idachi Christians to master a Genevan cadence as it would be for one of us West Michigan Calvinists to figure out how to stomp our feet in a Nigerian liturgical dance. We don't need to enjoy every musical style--nor do we need to represent every musical style in our own services--to recognize that in and through most of them, something of Psalm 150's clarion command is being fulfilled.

I don't know of a less happy phrase than the one coined in recent years: "worship wars." That is an oxymoron if ever there was one! You may as well talk about "Christian pagans" or "pious perverts." It just doesn't make sense! These two words don't belong together. Because according to Psalm 150 our task as believers is not to take our harps, flutes, cymbals, and tambourines and start bopping each other on the head with them but rather to play these many and varied instruments with so much skill, conviction, and above all head-over-heels love for God that the whole world will want to join the chorus!

What Psalm 150 enjoins us to do is to sing and worship and praise God in such a unified and joyful way as to attract others. When we properly follow the praise imperative ourselves, we become a window to God--one through which others will indeed see God.

But lest anyone think I am advocating an "anything goes" policy toward worship, let me also say that for worship to be worship, it needs to be a counter-cultural act. We live in a time of shrunken horizons; a time when many refuse to see or acknowledge, much less worship, a sovereign Lord of the universe. We live in an age of homespun New Age faiths where people bow down at altars to their own selves and not to any "outside" God.

In a time like this any worship service driven by the belief that there is only one Lord whose name is Jesus, any worship service that proclaims there is finally only one creator and redeemer of us all, any worship service that insists Psalm 150 is right to demand praise of all creatures with air in their lungs--any service like that is and properly should be counter-cultural; should be so startlingly fresh as to be offensive at first; should be different from what goes on elsewhere in our media-saturated, self-centered, me-first, entertainment-driven culture. Psalm 150's praise command is, as we said earlier, radical. It should not be made to look simple; it should not look like what people do in lots of places already in society.

That's why it is appropriate to insure that worship remains worship and that it not become a variety show, that it not become similar to a rock concert in the name of attracting attention. To make worship "useful" in the sense of making it a tool or a ploy ruins worship by shifting the focus from God to ourselves. It is perhaps no surprise that some of the worst pop theology of the last twenty years--the theologies that have put away ultimate truth, backhanded sin, watered down grace in favor of promoting self-help schemes--it is no surprise that this kind of theology has in no small measure emerged from the very places where worship turned into a show-stopping spectacle.

Of course, let's be honest: we're not immune to this, either. We, too, face the temptation of treating worship like a concert--in our case a classical concert but a concert or a kind of show nevertheless. Again, the devil is interested in just one thing: corrupting the worship of God. Beyond that he's flexible and will exploit every taste, every preference, and every style to achieve his larger goal. We stand guard against this at every turn lest we, too, end up being a reflection of, rather than a critique of, a culture already drunk on fun and games and passive entertainment.

Because as Psalm 150 makes clear, worship is not about us, it's about God. It's about the God who gave us the very breath we use to praise him in the first place. It's about the God whose grandeur exceeds our finest musical efforts to bring it to speech. It's about the God who created not only the variety of instruments listed in this psalm but who created the whole warp and woof of this creation's diversity. Indeed, just two psalms earlier, in Psalm 148, the psalmist made clear that God is just as surely praised by the crashing of waves on the shore as he is by a human larynx singing a hymn; God is as pleased by the breath exhaled in a liquid run of notes from the Wood Thrush's little lungs as he is by the glorious sounds exhaling from a pipe organ's massive bellows.

We're not alone in the cosmic chorus to the Creator. And even as it would be foolish for the soprano section of a choir to disdain the altos, so we are foolish if we write off the music rendered by the Baptists or even by the English Sparrows who twitter and warble from every other bush. Yes, as we just said, worship can be corrupted. But where Psalm 150-style worship really happens--as it does in the vast majority of services taking place this day--where God truly is given the glory by people in love with his grace and stunned by his grandeur, then that is something for which all believers must be grateful!

Nobody likes to get ordered around. A finger thumping you in the chest is always a tad off-putting. But given what is at stake in Psalm 150, we can be glad not only to receive the praise imperative but to have regular opportunity to obey it in a place like this one so filled with fellow believers who love to sing (and who are good at it); a place so blessed by wonderful musicians who ply their skills to God's glory and to our worshipful lifting up of that divine glory; a place filled with the exhaled breath of God's saints as we hear and obey the happiest command in the universe: Praise the LORD! We do! Thanks be to God, Amen.