Sing Alleluia!

St. Francis Church on May 18, 2013 - when we said goodbyes.

On this Fifth Sunday of Easter, I served at my former parish, St. Francis Church in Holden. The sermon text was Psalm 148.

2500 years ago, which is to say even longer ago than Jesus walked the earth, Heraclitus said that: No one can step in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, nor is it the same person.

I’ve been thinking about this since Pat asked me to come back and be with you during his sabbatical. I left here almost exactly six years ago to the day, after serving as the fifth rector of this great parish for more than fifteen years. It’s a joy to be back among you and yet I do so aware that you are not the same parish I left, and I am not the same priest who left. For those who do not know me, my name is Rich Simpson and I serve on Bishop Fisher’s staff as Canon to the Ordinary…

These are really great readings today – a veritable preacher’s feast. We could be here all day! But lately I’ve been working on the psalms a lot. Or, more accurately, they’ve been working on me. And today’s psalm, Psalm 148, is especially good.

The psalms are really hymns of wonder, and love, and praise. They are prayers that express just about every emotion a person might feel in a relationship with God, which span the same emotions of human relationships. And not just the happy ones! Whether the relationship is romantic or not, as you all know relationships have the potential to go deeper. But relationships are also complicated. I think our experience with God mirrors this and the psalmists reflect all of this. Sometimes the poets are disappointed in God. It feels like God hasn’t held up God’s end of the bargain. Jesus himself, you will recall, draws on one of the psalms, Psalm 22, before he takes his last breath on the cross. My God, my God – why have you forsaken me?

So, I love the psalms because they provide for what my teacher of the psalms, Walter Brueggemann has called “the basis for an earthy spirituality.” They awe us to heaven, but they are also prayers rooted in earth. They lead us through disappointment and failure and hurt that never get the last word, as well through the mountaintop experiences of joy and triumph and hope. Taken as a whole, the psalms can lead to a more purposeful and deeper awareness of who God really is.

At weddings, I sometimes point the young and beautiful (but also a little naïve) couple to their grandparents, to see what the vows they will exchange are all about. Not all rainbows and sunshine. But a commitment to “richer and poorer” and to “sickness and health” that is taken seriously will not be easy.

And friendships are the same, right? Make new friends, but keep the old. I’ve gotten into the habit, in my fifties, of making time each year for at least one long weekend in California with a group of college buddies; guys who knew me before I was ordained. People with whom I share a long history. People around whom I can never get too full of myself.

One thing I’ve learned is that even death doesn’t end relationships. Some of you may recall that my dad died when I was a freshman in college. He was thirty-seven at the time and just last month we marked the thirty-seventh anniversary of his death. He’s been gone as long as he lived now. But here is the thing – and I mean this quite literally. The older I get the thinner I experience the veil between life and death. The saints triumphant are never far away. My father still appears from time to time in my dreams and is rarely far from my thoughts.

And as I watch my two boys, now young men, I see glimpses of him from time to time in their faces or maybe just an expression, or gesture. Many of you here watched Graham and James grow up alongside of Hathy and me. Now they are, at least for the moment, both Jersey boys. Graham is 29 and will receive a Masters degree in Public Policy at Princeton in just two weeks. He’s looking for work to stay around there for another two years as his girlfriend enters into the same program that he just completed. James is 25 and working as a structural engineer in lower Manhattan. He beat his older brother to a Masters from UC Berkeley just one year ago. And while he’s been both living and working in Manhattan for a year now, he’s moving out to Hoboken, New Jersey a week after Graham graduates. So they find themselves in New Jersey, where Hathy and I began our married life, in Madison when I was in seminary, at Drew.

I don’t mean to sound nostalgic. But those of you have been here a while will, I hope, forgive me a bit of that. Our family lived a big and important chapter of our lives around the corner from here and those fifteen years included more concerts at Rice and Davis Hill and Mountview and Wachusett auditoriums than I can count. And Little League games and soccer games, too. But this trip down memory lane is also with a homiletical purpose: because I was talking about relationships and how they change and grow and deepen. Or they stagnate and die. That can happen too.  

Relationships need to be tended to. And so, too, our relationship with God. Where we can get stuck, I think, is when we keep relating to God the same ways that we did in Sunday School or in Confirmation Class. But the psalms are there, I think (and maybe more than any other writings in all of Scripture) to help keep us in relationship; to keep us growing and learning and changing. This is why they play such a central role in the prayer of monastic communities: because they express the joys and the challenges of keeping God at the center of our lives through all of the chances and changes that befall us in this life. Because they speak to the heart and not just the head.

Random fact: did you know you can walk from Egypt to Israel, through the Sinai Desert, in about a week. Really. If you are bored sometime, put it into Google maps (as I did this week) and start just north of the Red Sea. You don’t even need a miracle of parting waters if you begin there and walk across the Sinai Desert. It is 170 miles. Covering thirty miles a day is ambitious, but Google says you can make it in 57 hours. So if you walk for eight hours a day, that’s a week. Moses was a proud man who did not ask for directions, of course. Miriam could have gotten them there faster if he’d only listened.

But clearly there is something more going on here than male ego. Why forty years? Why four decades of wandering? Perhaps the Biblical narrative means to suggest that the journey of faith isn’t a direct route, and that the move from slavery to freedom takes a lifetime. It’s more like that labyrinth behind St. Clare House than it is like the Mass Pike. The psalms get that. And they take us on a labyrinthine journey into a deeper relationship with God. But the last six of the psalms are like the original hallelujah chorus. They are all about praise.

• Psalm 145 – A David song of Praise: “Let me exalt You, my God and king and let me bless your name forevermore.”
• Psalm 146: “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord, O my soul…” 
• Psalm 147: Hallelujah, How good it is to sing praises to our God…” 
• Psalm 148, our psalm for today: “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise the Lord from the heights, praise God, praise God, praise God…”
• Psalm 149: “Hallelujah, sing to the Lord a new song…”
• Psalm 150, the last page of this amazing hymnal: “Hallelujah! Praise God in the holy temple…let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Hallelujah!”

Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah…

There are seasons of our lives when those alleluias may get buried for a while. It’s hard for us to sing praises when we are hurting or we feel abandoned or lost. We “bury those alleluias” during Lent, I think, to represent what that is like when it’s hard for praise to be on our lips. But we can’t hold them in forever. We make our song again on Easter morning and throughout these fifty days. Alleluia. 

Alleluia. Alleluia. We do this because in the end this is most truly who we really are and are meant to be: “Easter people.” One of my favorite lines in the Burial Office is when the priest says, “even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” Sometimes those alleluias are muted by grief, to be sure. But they take us to the heart of our relationship with the living God. And those last six psalms get that.

In the “Catechism” of The Book of Common Prayer (on page 856 if you want to check my source here) the question is asked: “What is prayer?” And the answer is: Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words. And then the question is asked, “What is Christian prayer?” And the answer is that it’s a prayerful response to the Trinity: the God who knit us together in love, the God who redeemed us on the Cross, the God who keeps goading us in love to new and abundant life. One God in three persons.

And then this question: What are the principal kinds of prayer? The answer: adoration, praise, thanksgiving, penitence, oblation, intercession, and petition. Ann Lamott has distilled even those down to three in her book: Help, Thanks, Wow. Sometimes our prayer repertoire can get truncated into just “help prayers.” We can get focused solely on intercession and petition, asking God to do stuff for us or for those whom we love. And those are important prayers, of course. And sometimes we might even pray a prayer of penitence and that’s good too because it can lead us to amendment of life. But it can also keep us stuck on feeling unworthy. We need to remember that penitence is not an end in itself, but the pathway to return to the God who already waits with open arms, in love.  

But I think the Church, and most of us Christians, need more praise on our lips and in our lives, and today’s psalm is a good place to start. It’s cosmic. The whole creation sings “alleluia” every morning when the sun comes up and the birds begin to sing along. And some days we have eyes to see, and hears to hear and some days we even join in the song. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Praise is not a denial of injustice in the world. It’s more like a protest song that helps us to remember that injustice will never get the last word, because even now God is making things new, and because love is stronger than death. Even at the grave, we are invited to get busy living, and to live into becoming an Easter people who dare to sing. Alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.  

The fifty days of Easter keep teaching us to sing alleluia throughout our lives, so that by the time we reach our own end, songs like Psalm 148 will be the songs we know best. How can we keep from singing? Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!