A Sermon Preached by: the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Winnette
November 15, 2009
Happy Festal Shouting, Psalm 89

Before I get into what a Festal Shout sounds like, before I get into the imagery of Psalm 89’s honest relationship with God – I want to back up two weeks.

There is a story about a little boy’s first weeks of school. His family lived within walking distance to the school. Bold little Joe pleaded with his mother not to accompany him. He thought he was old enough to walk without her. His mother fretted. She then cleverly discerned a way around his request. She asked a neighborhood friend who regularly walked with her newborn in a stroller to follow Joe. So the friend daily followed him about a block behind. Joe was making it to school just fine and was regularly joined by a friend. About two weeks past and the friend asked, “Who’s the lady and baby who follows you every day.” Joe responded, “Well, my Mom tells me Song 23 every night before I go to bed. It says Mrs. Goodnest and her daughter, Marcy will follow me all the days of my life. I guess that’s just the way it is. So I just ignore them.”

The 23rd Psalm promises that God’s goodness and mercy follow us always. God’s presence is with us in good times, in ordinary times, and in the dark valley times. Two weeks ago we worshipped giving thanks for God’s eternal promise of presence.

Psalm 89 is a long, long Psalm. I heard that Wednesday’s Bible Study wondered how I was preaching the whole Psalm. I’m not; I have selected the first third of the Psalm for our worship today. But, I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t tell you that its third movement is a heart-wrenching lamentation. The Psalmist laments God’s hidden-ness, laments that God seems to have renounced the covenant with King David. He cries, “Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?”

It’s a conflicted Psalm starting with vibrant praises to God. It sings gratitude. It sings God’s faithfulness. It sings God’s supremacy even over all other gods. It sings how creation praises God, and how God crushed the chaos serpent, Rahab, creating the world. God is mighty, strong, praiseworthy and above all things faithful. “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you.” The Psalm’s center movement replays God’s covenant promises to David and Israel. “I have found my servant David; with my holy oil I have anointed him; my hand shall always remain with him; my arm also shall strengthen him.”

The Psalm shows us how to sing and shout praises to God and then on a dime, it shifts, it shifts from, “(David’s) line shall continue forever, and his throne endure before me like the sun. It shall be established forever like the moon, an enduring witness in the skies.” It shifts to, “But now you have spurned and rejected (David); you are full of wrath against your anointed.”

What a shift in perspective- from praise to lamenting anger. It moves from Festal Shouting to Woeful Wailing. Biblical scholars don’t define it as petty whining though. It is believed to be a Psalm that followed the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the end of the Kings of Israel. The people were captives to the Babylonian empire.

The Psalm’s an emotional whiplashing roller coaster – God’s is Great (“yeah God!”) and God is good (“thanks be to God!”) and then God is awfully disappointing (“Dang it God, Come On!”). Then like Job, like Job after he suffered so horribly, the Psalmist finishes his song with a blessing. Psalm 89 ends, “Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen.” We are jerked back to praise.

So what do we do with the Psalm? Shall we just ignore its third Good Friday movement and go from praise to praise? No, we can’t do that with integrity; our lives have dark valleys. It does us no good to ignore the suffering in the world, ours and others.

Two weeks ago I told you I don’t watch horror films. I also avoid films that show dark realities. The Washington Post yesterday included an article about the movie, Precious.

The movie is about Precious, a 16 year old girl who is poor, abused, and illiterate. She has been raped by her father, abused by her mother, and abandoned by the country’s social systems. Nope, don’t want to watch it. I was reading the story online, and I hit one of its links. I should not have done that; it hurt to read. The link detailed statistics about child sexual abuse – “1 in 4 females is sexually abused by the time she reaches 18 years old, and approximately 57% of the perpetrators are family members. Studies show that 1 in 6 boys will be sexually assaulted by the age of 16. What can we do with this information? What? Despair over it? Ignore it? Faced with such suffering, we can cry, “Why God? Why? How can we stop this? How can you allow this to happen? How can we protect our children?”

The Psalm teaches us to respond before God. Erupt with anger when you feel that God is not honoring the promises, when you are furious with people’s sin. It is far too easy to simply leave the church during hard times. It is too easy to wash our hands of God petulantly believing God left the world slamming the door. We need to lament before our God. If we don’t lament we risk souring inside. Pain and emptiness fester into poisons that trouble our relationships. When we don’t wail, we wander farther from each other ignoring and allowing injustices.

The Psalm teaches us to be honest before God. But we have to be truly honest. We cannot just express the suffering. Express gratitude along with pain. Express your good and bad feelings before God all the time. As we stop hiding and stuffing down our true feelings– we will grow in our relationship with God. And we will grow in our relationships with each other. We will learn to be more honest with each other cutting through the crappy ways we relate and refuse each other. Our hearts then beat louder with compassion and care.

Learning to praise God at all times, we learn to praise each other with gratitude. Henri Nouwen wrote, Celebration means to lift up the gifts of the people with whom we live, to lift them up and say, Hey brother, hey sister, I see something beautiful in you and I want to lift it up. I want to celebrate it. I want you to recognize your goodness. You have a gift of hospitality; you have a gift of gentleness; you have a gift of humour. I want you to recognize it..Real ministry is to say, “I am grateful for you. There is something beautiful in you and I am going to say thank you to you.”

Maybe our lives should be lived as emotional rollercoasters before God and each other. Caring for each other, we suffer each other’s pain and the power of compassion grows. Caring for each other, we celebrate the something beautiful in each other. Maybe our lives should be lived with surprising outbursts of praise and anger and praise and frustration and praise. I’m not sure what a Festal Shout sounds like; I am pretty good at stuffing my emotions. But I want to learn Festal Shouting. I want to learn Woeful Wailing and Festal Shouting – learn honesty before God.

Remember the 23rd Psalm, Mrs. Goodnest and Marcy – God’s Goodness and Mercy are with us always. Our challenge is to hold on to hope regardless of life’s circumstances. Jesus’ teaching is both present oriented and eschatological, luring us to hope in God’s wholeness today and tomorrow. Our lives contain a good creation around us, God’s presence with us, and a promise of future wholeness.

We can live our lives feeling gratitude, almost all the time we can be grateful. Christian friends, there is more to be grateful for in the world than there is pain.
We can teach our hearts to be mindful of good things almost all the time. I say almost because I don’t want to be Pollyannaish, illogically optimistic. There are times we will not be able to hear God, or feel love, or see hope. There are times where the pain of others suffocate us, but be honest before God. The morning breaks daily. Our breasts delight in every breath we take. Our eyes delight in every color they see. Our ears tingle pleased with the sounds of creation’s praises.

Tune your hearts to gratitude. American writer, Willa Cather wrote, “The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.” Tune your hearts to gratitude.

Gratitude is not really a thought. Our thankfulness is a life stance, a fundamental attitude, closer to the heart than the mind. Gratitude is closer to an emotion than a thought. Recall the Psalm, the first movement praises God, emoting How Great Thou Art. The second movement celebrates God’s promises to David. The third movement wails. And the last line sings hope – Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen. As we live gratefully we see more and more joyful opportunities. As we live gratefully we share our God-given gifts and talents turning doubt into song, turning sighs into laughter, turning other’s embarrassment into amazement.
I close with a fun story shared by Pastor Robert Dunham.

There's an old story about a renowned pianist and composer - a grand one who lived at the beginning of the last century - and a lovely thing that happened at the start of one of his concerts. At this particular concert a woman and her young son came to hear the master play. The young boy had only recently begun his piano lessons, and the mother, wishing to encourage his studies, took him to the concert.

The two were seated just prior to the concert, but the mother spotted a dear friend along the aisle a few rows back and went to speak to her, telling the boy to wait in his seat. But, then, what child likes to sit still? And so seizing the moment of opportunity to explore a bit, the boy made his way down the aisle, through an open curtain in a doorway and disappeared.

The houselights dimmed and the mother returned to her seat, discovering as she did that her son was not in his seat. She began frantically to look all around, not paying attention to the curtains opening on stage. But at the laughter of the audience, she looked, and there, seated at the magnificent Steinway on the stage, was her son, haltingly playing the first song he had learned to play: "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

The mother was horrified, and started to get up; but at that same moment the great pianist himself entered from the other side of the stage, putting his finger to his mouth to still the audience. He moved to the piano and whispered in the boy's ear. The boy kept playing, and then the master reached down with his left hand and began filling in a bass part to the composition. Soon his right arm reached around to the other side of the child and he added a running obbligato. Together the old master and this young novice transformed an awkward moment into a moment of grace, and as they finished playing, the audience broke forth in thunderous applause.

Friends, praise God, wail to God, and give thanks. Celebrate each other and shout your love. Amen.