Cultivating Common Prayer: Praise

Dear Church of the Holy Cross,

I enjoyed having the opportunity to speak to you about Common Prayer and Praise during our zoom call this past Sunday, and I wanted to write a letter to continue that theme through a further reflection on praise, a personal story, a word for our present time, and then a song.  As you’ll see below, this letter has been nearly eight months in the making.  

A Further Reflection on Praise 

According to the Psalms scholar Claus Westermann, praise in the bible is always an immediate, joyful response to a saving deed of God.  Think of the immediate and joyful response of Moses and Miriam, which is recorded just after the Israelites have had the astonishing experience of walking through the parted waters of the Red Sea, and then seeing their pursuing oppressors the Egyptians drowned by those same waters. In a state of awe and wonder verging on disbelief, Moses and Miriam resolutely attribute this act to the hidden hand of the Lord of the universe: “I will sing to the LORD/for he is highly exalted.  Both horse and driver/he has hurled into the sea” (Ex 15:1).  Think also of David, who was lifted out from some hopeless experience of “the depths” and “the realm of the dead”; he responds in praise: “I will exalt you, LORD” (Ps 30:1-3).  Westermann traces this dynamic through all of the Psalms of declarative praise and argues persuasively that authentic praise is grounded in an immediate experience of the awesome works of Yahweh.  

Yet Westermann also points out that if Biblical praise always begins in personal experience, it ends in public proclamation “in the great congregation” (Ps 26); “in the council of the upright and in the assembly” (Ps 111). Israel’s God is the one who enacts mighty deeds of deliverance for his people, both as individuals and as a nation, and those who experience his deeds declare their praise to the world.  This praise is not a one time feeling; it is a witness to the holy and astounding acts of God which simply must be shared with the congregation (in the liturgy) so that others would know “the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done...and would put their trust in God (Ps 78:4,7).  When God is praised in the congregation, it lets the wonder-instilling and faith-nourishing power of those original deeds to be made manifest to others.  Singing the concrete saving deeds of God is generative: it creates the possibility of an otherwise impossible faith in the mighty power of an unseen God.  

A Personal Story

I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;
I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness
from the great congregation. (Ps 40:10b)

Back in August of last year, Keith Breault preached a sermon on Psalm 46 which emphasized the promise that God is “a very present help in times of trouble” (Ps 46:1), even in the trouble and calamity of death itself. Even so, Keith acknowledged that when trouble actually comes, we tend to forget this entirely and return to panic. For this reason God, in his kindness, has given his people songs - the Psalms - as an aid to memorization, to make this truth “accessible and sticky for when we need it.” Perhaps jokingly, Keith also “commissioned” me to set Psalm 46 to music, and so I left passively pondering how I might do that.  

A few weeks after this sermon, I got a call from Sallie at the midwifery office, telling me that our baby’s heart rate had unexpectedly dropped and that she was being sent directly to the hospital.  As I gathered my things and hustled to the car, I struggled to orient myself: “is this serious? How do you pray in these contexts? How do I stay calm for Sallie’s sake yet keep alert in case of real danger?” Searching for some anchor amidst this turmoil, I suddenly remembered that phrase: “God is a very present help in times of trouble.”  I might not be able to know the scope of our trouble or the mode of God’s presence, but this was either a true statement about our situation, or all of Christianity was obsolete.  I took confidence from the former, sent out  an email asking a few people to pray with us along these lines, and then continued on to meet Sallie.

The nurses checked Sallie in right away.  Unable to verify certain indicators of fetal vitality in their initial monitoring, they decided to keep us at the hospital and induce labor.  The Lord of hosts is with us. Sallie woke up in the middle of the night with a premonition of grave danger; God is a present help in times of trouble. The next morning when it was time for the baby to be born, certain complications presented and necessitated a rapid delivery; The Lord of hosts is with us. After trying to facilitate delivery with interventions unsuccessfully, the doctors suddenly indicated that it was too late for a c-section and the urgently coached Sallie through the rest of the delivery (a present help in times of trouble)...

MInutes later, Susannah was born and placed safely on Sallie’s chest.  Sixteen people were in the room at time, including three attending doctors, a surgical team, and a pediatric resuscitation team.  In those final minutes, the doctors had seen the sign a of placental abruption, a condition that could have had dire consequences for Susannah, and it could have proved immensely dangerous for Sallie as well. It turns out Sallie’s disturbing mid-night thoughts had been quite attuned, and yet so had that promise: “God is a present help in times of trouble.” 

It is remarkable how strong the temptation is to look back on this and call it dumb luck.  But to say that would be to deny the remarkable good fortune of Sallie having a midwifery appointment (which she considered skipping) precisely at the time that Susannah’s heartrate dropped.  It is to deny the wisdom of the midwife who noticed this distress, and the doctors who decided to induce labor.  It is to deny the great good fortune that the umbilical cord was unaffected by the 40% placental abruption  It is to deny the fact that I had heard this word of promise (“God is an ever present help in times of trouble”) echo into the midst of our crisis as an anchor for the soul and had found it trustworthy.  It is to deny the perfectly healthy child who passed through this treacherous terrain who probability says could have been otherwise.

From what I’ve been learning about praise and lament in the Psalms, I don’t think the “dumb luck” explanation is an explanatory option for the Christian. Each safe delivery is an occasion for lively praise (“how amazing that fragile humans enter the world at all!”) Each tragic loss or troubled birth is an occasion for lament -- calling on that God of the universe to heal and be present in the deep and mysterious troubles of grief.”  No, even against the backdrop of the inscrutable mystery of human suffering and loss, Susannah’s birth was not dumb luck, it is an occasion for praise, in the “congregation,” to the God who is indeed “a help in trouble.”  
 

A Psalm for our Time; a Psalm for all Times

And now I bring this Psalm to you in the midst of our own bizarre time of trouble. How do we pray for ourselves and others in this time of distress, when we know people are not being spared from death?  How do we lean away from our fear, our anxiety, our irritation, our depression, our uncertainty, and live in light of God’s promised ability and purpose to bring good out of every kind of evil?  How do we move from knowing how we should feel and how we should respond to actually responding in this way?

I don’t entirely know.  But I do know that 3,000 years ago an Israelite writer penned these words in a time when the very foundations of the world - the created and the social order - seemed to be shaken, and that these words in turn were taken on the lips of the congregation of Israel as an authoritative affirmation of their God.  I do know that 2,000 years ago the church discovered, in the resurrection of Christ, that this “help in times of trouble” extended even into the grave, and unto the full curse of our sin.  I do know that just over 500 years ago, when confronting the deep corruption of the medieval church and the added trouble of plague in his hometown of Wittenburg, Martin Luther wrote this same Psalm into a hymn to declare the help of God against a “flood of mortal ills.”  I do know that Keith preached this Psalm as an assurance of God’s promise in every calamity, and that promise proved an anchor for our souls during the dangerous passage of Susannah’s birth.  

And so in light of all this, I set forth this story and composed this song as a witness to the truth that “God is our refuge and strength/a very present help in times of trouble.”  It is my prayer that we emerge from this time, as a Church, with new occasions for immediate, joyful responses of praise for the continual saving deeds of Yahweh, and that we may “show forth our praise not only with our lips but in our lives.” That same ancient God of Jacob is also our God, and this is an unending occasion for praise.

A Home Recording of Psalm 46
(Thanks to Sallie and Johanna for help with this song!)

Happy Eastertide, 
Chris