"What the Lover Hears"
Praising God for His great love and our very being
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 20, 2001
Text: Psalm 148
It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was taking the subway between Cambridge and Boston on what is famously known as the red line. All of a sudden, a man came in and sat exactly opposite me. He opened up his newspaper and began to read.
I looked over to him and, I must admit, I gravitated towards the headline that was on the newspaper. The headline read as follows: “Happiness Theorist Appointed to Local College.”
Well, you can imagine, with a headline like that, I wanted to read the rest of the article. I began to lean a little farther forward to see if I could finish it when, all of a sudden, two eyes appeared over the newspaper and a rather gruff, Bostonian voice came to me: “What the heck do you think you're doing? If you want to get your own paper, buy it yourself.”
Now, I had in my mind a few choice refrains with which I wanted to respond. I was going to say something like “Well, I'm from Canada and, in Canada, we share,” but the Lord spoke to me and he said: “Don't do that.” Or, maybe, it was just the voice of self-preservation. I'm not sure for, when the man stood up, he must have been nothing short of six-foot-five. I'm really glad I didn't get into it with him.
Anyway, I got off at the Park Street station and immediately walked across the road and purchased, as he had suggested, my own copy of the paper. It was enlightening, because there is now, evidently, a new study of happiness. It is a study of academic pursuit and, indeed, the article makes mention of the fact that we all know what makes life miserable. We have spent years dissecting and understanding what causes us, as human beings, not to have happiness and joy; but one of the things that we have not done, is find out what causes true happiness.
Well, I must admit, sitting on the subway back to Cambridge, I gave great thought to this subject. It seems to me, from a Christian perspective, that the major reason that we human beings are not as happy as we ought to be is, in fact, sin. Now, this may sound like a very outmoded concept to many, and yet, in reality, it is true. It seems to me that one of the greatest sins of all, is that we take this life that we have been given for granted: The joys that we have, we seldom celebrate as we ought; and we continue to recount our miseries, over and over again.
One of the reasons for our doing that is that we have lost sight, I believe, of the great privilege of being able, in this life, to praise our God and our maker. We fail to recognize, when the joys of life come our way, and even when they don't, that the great wonder of praising our God is, in fact, one of the great sources of happiness and joy.
The great theologian, Karl Barth, wrote these words: “The great miracle is not that there is a God. The great miracle is that there is a world.” The great miracle is that this very thing that we call “life,” this very existence that we are given, this very earth, on which we stand, has been created by the beneficence, and love, and grace of God.
Not that God needed to create the world, as some have suggested, but that out of God's grace, out of God's love, out of what we call, in Greek, God's perichoresis, out of the love that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have for one another, this great cosmos was created to be the object of God's love and of God's mercy.
Indeed, the great love that God has in creating us, and in creating this world, and the response that God receives from his creatures, in their praise, is the ultimate source of happiness and joy. The genesis of happiness and joy was that God created us, but, as sinful people, we forget that, and we cease to praise.
Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in that magnificent psalm from this morning, Psalm 148, this psalm that was written when the exiles came back from Babylon to Israel. When they had the joy of returning home after years of desolation and isolation, the people of Israel wrote this incredible Te Deum, this incredible song of praise.
Elizabeth Achtemeier, the great preacher from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, said that this psalm is really about the relationship between a lover and the loved, between what she calls “The Music Lover and Creation." For she argues that Psalm 148 is really Creation's response, Creation's song of praise, Creation's Te Deum to the great God who made it. The people of Israel join with Creation in their song of praise to the Creator, who is the author, and the beginning, and the source of life.
I want to dwell on that this morning, because, on this long weekend, a weekend that has indeed blessed us by being beautiful and sunny, it is worthy that you and I, who gather in this place to worship, take time to understand the power of the Te Deum, of the glory of God, and, indeed, to ”˜re-find' our happiness, first of all by looking at, what I call the “Song of Creation.”
Many years ago, I got into a four-wheel-drive with some friends. We drove from the very tip of the Cape of Good Hope, right up the west coast of southern Africa to the wonderful area known as the Namib, and the Namib Desert.
I will never forget the first night that I was in the Namib Desert. We went to bed in our tents. It was about 40 degrees Celsius, and, naturally, when it's 40 degrees Celsius and you're in a rubber tent, you don't do much sleeping. I tossed and I turned all night long.
I must have dozed off until, around four o'clock in the morning, I was startled by a cacophony of sounds, the likes of which I had never heard before. It almost sounded as if there was construction going on, outside my tent. There was banging, and crashing, and cracking.
I had no idea what was going on, so I got out of my tent. It was freezing cold - I don't know what the temperature was, but it must have been below zero. The sky was completely crystal clear, and everything had a chill to it. What I heard were the rocks in the ground cracking from the change in temperature. From 40 degrees Celsius to 0 degrees Celsius, the stones were actually cracking. After that, the noise dissipated.
Within about an hour, there was another sound, and this was a sound I would rather not have remembered. It was the sound of snakes crossing the crumbled rocks as they slithered across the ground.
There is a wonderful line in the writings of Leslie Newbigin, the great theologian. He was once asked the question outright: “Who hears the jackals jabber at night, and who hears the lions roar when there's no-one around?”
Leslie Newbigin answered: “God does.”
You see, my friends, there is a sense in which Creation itself makes its sounds. It makes its sounds in spite of us. In fact, God, in God's heaven, hears the sounds of Creation and hears them, first of all, as a source of praise. The psalmist picks this up when he says that the things that are above, the angelic hosts, the sun, the moon and the stars, all these things that God placed around, and the boundaries he created, all these things are to praise the Lord.
There is this sense, then, that the heavenly host, all things above the earth, all spiritual powers, must ultimately come before the Lord who is the Creator and the Maker. Even the sun and the moon and stars issue a Te Deum, a praise to God, who listens to the music and enjoys it. He says that even the things that are below the earth are there to praise the Lord, even the sea monsters.
The latter, I think, come from the Babylonian creation myths of Tiamat, the sense that there are fish so deep down in the sea, that we cannot see them, yet who ultimately praise God. Even the flora and the fauna and the flowers that rise from the earth, rise up as a sign of their praise to God.
William Blake, in his Songs of Innocence, has a wonderful line, which goes as follows: “When the greenwoods laugh, there is a voice of joy.”
There is this sense, then, in which all of creation is here, and exists, to praise the Maker; to make a sound to the music lover, who wants to hear the sounds of creation praising him. For, more than that, God's people, Israel, the people of the world, the earth, are also to raise their voice in one great sound of praise, one great voice of joy. The reason that you and I exist, for our very creation as men and women, is in order that we might praise our God with the whole of the cosmos.
This is not, my friends, a philosophy of happiness. This is not some way or some method, whereby you and I can work our way to a greater sense of happiness and peace and joy, by following in some footsteps. This is a call to make sure that we praise the Lord in our very lives and beings.
Last week, I saw my dog praising the Lord - well, only one of my dogs, mind you. He was running around in a circle, chasing his tail. Now, you might think I'm losing it with this, but I thought of something that I had read some years ago, entitled: The Philosophy of Tail Chasing. Have any of you heard of this philosophy? I don't know whether it belongs to Immanuel Kant or Socrates, but somebody came up with it, somewhere along the line.
It is the story of an old dog who meets a young dog. The old dog sees the young dog running around, chasing its tail, and asks: “What are you doing?”
The young dog says: “Well, I have been contemplating the nature of happiness, and I have determined that I have found a philosophy for true happiness. True happiness is found in my tail. For the rest of my life, therefore, I am going to try to chase it in order that, when I catch it, I will have found true happiness.”
The old dog looks at him and says: “Well, I too, young puppy, have tried to find happiness. I too have gone on a quest to find real joy. Like you, I have come to the conclusion, after much examination, that there is indeed, true happiness in my tail. I have found, however, that, when I run around chasing it, my tail is always running away from me, but when I simply go ahead with my life, it follows me wherever I go.”
There is a sense that the world in which we live today is running around chasing its tail, trying to find out what makes it happy. We have a world that is obsessed with trying to find books that will provide a source of joy. The problem is that the source of true joy and happiness, the true meaning of life, is found in praising the one who made us, in making the sound that the music lover can hear.
Sometimes, however, the sound is silenced. Sometimes, my friends, the sounds of the earth are crushed, and they are destroyed. In classic Jewish thought, there is a contrast between life full of vigour and noise and joy, on the one hand, and, on the other, Sheol, the place of death, but ultimately, also the place of silence. There is no sound in Sheol, but there is in life.
At times it seems that we concentrate more on the silence than we do on life. So often, the way in which we, as humanity, approach life, is, in fact, the silencing of it by our sin.
I can't help but think that the destruction of the environment, the destruction of the life that is on this earth, the destruction of those creatures, which will forever disappear because of what we do, is, in fact, sin. It is nothing less than that. It is the silencing of God's creatures, who sing praises to Him. But the greatest sin is the silencing of the voices of one another. One of the greatest sins, I think, that is ever perpetrated, is our desire to silence the praise of another, by taking his life.
My heart has been broken in the last 48 hours by what I have seen in a place called Netanya, a place that Marial and I stayed in many years ago, a beautiful spot on the coast of Israel. I think of people having their arms blown off, and children dying in their cots. Then I hear the words revenge and retaliation.
I hear of bombings and I cannot help but think that God, in God's Heaven, looks upon this earth and says: “If only you human beings would praise me, if only you would exalt me, if only you would understand that I am the author of all that has been made in heaven and on earth, if you would put your sin aside, if you would put your vile differences aside, if you would understand that the purpose of your existence is to give me your praise, what a different world we would have. Instead of the Te Deum of guns, there would be the Te Deum of love. For the music lover wants to hear that song.
This brings me to my third point, namely the conductor's song. There is a wonderful line in the Book of Colossians, and it is in your Order of Service. It is where Paul writes about the role of Jesus Christ. He says, and I quote: “For it was by God's own decision that the Son has, in himself, the full nature of God.”
Through the Son, then, God decided to bring the whole universe back to Himself. God made peace through his sacrificial death on the cross, and so brought back to Himself all things, both on earth and in heaven. In other words, the role of the Son of God was, in fact, to draw the earth, to draw the cosmos, to draw humanity, back into the presence of God.
It was a rescue mission, was the cross, and so was the resurrection. It was a way of saying to the world: “Look, World. Here is what I expect my glory to be. This is what I want you to be. I want you to follow my son, and, if you will follow my son, then blessedness, happiness, joy, grace, love, and the forgiveness that he offered on the cross are yours.”
In this rescue mission, in this desire of God to bring the voices of the earth back to praise, God created the Church. The reason the Church exists, is not just for itself. The reason that we gather to praise, and listen to the glorious music of this organ, is that, with the song of the conductor who calls us to worship God, to love the world in which we live, to bring praise to God Almighty, the ascended Christ says: “I want you to sing along with me.”
There is a wonderful story told, a true one, that in 1873, Father Damien de Voerster was sent by the church to go and minister to the people of Molokai, in the Hawaiian islands. The only problem was that, in 1873, Molokai was a leper colony.
Father Damien went to the leper colony, where he worked his heart out to get to know people. He went from one island to the other. He tried to set up worship services. He tried to establish Bible classes. He wanted the people to love him, and he wanted to love them, but they wouldn't listen to him. He even got some of his friends to build a little church, in the hope that the people from Molokai would come to this church and would praise God, but hardly anyone ever came.
After many years of giving his heart and soul in order that the people of Molokai might be able to praise God and receive some healing, he decided that it was time to return to Belgium, from whence he had come.
So, one night, after having been there for 10 years, he went down to the dock where he was met by a doctor, because he had to see a doctor before he could get on a boat to leave the island. The doctor pointed to some white spots on De Voerster's hands, and asked him: “Do you have any numbness?”
Father Damien said: “Yes, I have had numbness in my hands and feet for the last year.”
The doctor said: “Father Damien, I'm sorry. You will never be able to leave this island. You, too, have contracted leprosy.”
Father De Voerster then went back on to the island and word soon went out that he was like them. One by one, the lepers came and saw Father Damien De Voerster. One by one, they came and they expressed their love and their concern for him. Over the next few days, throughout the week, the people met him, and came and saw him, and embraced him.
To his great astonishment, on the Sunday morning, when he went to the little church that he had built, it was absolutely full of people. There wasn't a single, empty pew. Father Damien looked out and he said to one of the people who was there: “Why is it that you have all come here?”
They said: “Father Damien, now that you are a leper, you are one of us. Now we want to hear what you have to say.”
My friends, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the gospel of God becoming one of us. Now we must hear what he has to say. What Jesus Christ has to say to the world is what Jesus Christ said at the very beginning of his ministry, and proved at the very end: that our very being, our very blessedness, is found in praising our God, from whom all blessings flow.
May we then sing a song to the music lover through Christ the Son. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.