The Lutheran Hour
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"Pure Michigan and the Problem of Praise"
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Text: Psalm 103
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Driving along a bleak stretch of Midwestern interstate, I see a sign, a billboard, it says “Pure Michigan.” There’s a picture with it, pristine sand, sparkling waters. I knew a guy from Michigan once. He used to say that, “The best thing about Michigan is that we have ten months of really good sledding.” So when I see these Michigan billboards around, you can understand why I’m thinking, “Come on, Michigan. Really? I think you’re overselling it.” Outside of the sledding is it really that good? But I’d never been to Michigan in the summertime at least, not until this last summer. And let me tell you, Michigan in July—at least compared to Missouri in July—it really is that good. We picked sweet, juicy cherries right off the trees. We strolled through these quaint towns. We kayaked and swam in Lake Michigan. It’s like you’re in the ocean, but the water is fresh and clean and clear.
My wife and I were walking on the beach one afternoon and she says, “Look at that. Just look at that. It’s like we could be in California.” That pure Michigan ad campaign, it’s not just a play to drum up more tourism business. It is that, but there’s more to it. It’s also an example of how people love to speak well of the things they love. It’s what people do. They praise not just their home state, but activities and objects and persons. Everything under the sun you’ll find someone praising it. C.S Lewis said it well, “The world rings with praise.” Everywhere you hear people praising what they find laudable, valuable, beautiful. And we don’t put all our praise in one place. We praise weather and wine, appetizers, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, characters from history, athletes, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles. “Praise,” Lewis says, “is humanity’s inner health made audible.”
In other words, if someone is generous in their praise it’s a sign of a generous heart, someone who sees the best in other people and doesn’t take him or herself too seriously, the kind of person you want to be around. Praising is a common human activity. And if you think about it’s the pinnacle of enjoyment. It’s not something separate from enjoyment. It’s the fulfillment. It’s the completion of joy. For example, when I was in high school there was this TV show. It was back in the day before we had on-demand streaming TV, when everyone had to wait to watch the new episode on Thursday night at 8 p.m. CST. Then the next day at school four or five of us, friends, we’d all sit around a lunchroom table and we would praise all the things we loved about the episode. We’d praise the one-liners, we’d praise the character development, praise the plot twists and the unexpected ending.
What we were doing it wasn’t something additional to enjoying the show. It was the pinnacle of it, the completion of it. That’s what makes binge watching shows on your own only half fulfilling. You don’t have anyone to talk about them with. You’re missing the praise. But then say you stumble across a person who just happened to recently binge watch the same show, even if that person’s a complete stranger, instantly in that moment you become the best of friends sharing in that praise. Praising, it’s a fully human activity, a communal activity, the mountaintop of joy. But like every other mountaintop experience, it doesn’t last. Now, it’s not that the qualities of the praiseworthy thing have vanished; it’s rather that our enjoyment doesn’t last. Our praise is fleeting. You felt it, that surge of appreciation inside you that’s so strong it might burst you wide open if you don’t let it out. But as quickly as it comes, it goes. The lunchroom banter gives way to fifth-period algebra.
Now for something that is so vital for making us fully human, it’s strange that it doesn’t last. Like a lot of things in life, life is a series of letdowns, fading memories, fleeting joys, ephemeral praise. It’s over before it even started. So, is this all there is? Some say so. Some say the universe started by accident, by chance, and one day it’ll all just burn out. But it seems strange, doesn’t it, that we should be so prone to praise an accident? Another possibility is that this prompting to praise, this impulse we feel points to our purpose. It’s why we’re here. It’s why the world exists. And maybe what we’re experiencing now is like the sound of an orchestra tuning their instruments before the concert starts.
How does that sound? Chaotic but beautiful because it points to something greater. Maybe the fleeting nature of our praise shows us that we are not yet the poets we were meant to be. We’re like children in grammar school still stumbling over the syllables and sounding out the words, or like fine wine that still needs to age. That is exactly what this group of inspired ancient poets believed. The poets of Israel who penned the book of Psalms in the Bible, they believed that praising is our purpose. That all things exist for the praise of our Creator. Now, a lot of people get tripped up with this picture of God. Really, that’s our purpose to tell God how great He is? Is God like a celebrity that needs His fan base to feel good about Himself or a dictator who needs his cronies? Or think of it this way, none of us deny that praising comes naturally to us and that praise isn’t an add-on. It’s the culmination of joy. So if there are these finite and fleeting joys, then what if there is a single Source of infinite joy, the Source of praise that will endure? If so, to miss out on that, to be left out, to not have a place at the lunch table or a seat at the concert or a share in that finest of wines, that would be the greatest loss. That would be hell.
And so when God calls us, commands us, prompts us to praise, He’s not doing it for His own benefit but for ours, for the fulfillment of this joy that we long for. That’s the sense of praising God that we hear about in the psalms. The poets of the psalms know that praising God is right because He is praiseworthy. But also that we praise God to our own benefit, for the fulfillment of our own joy.
Psalm 103 is a prime example of this. Listen to it. Listen to how the poet is speaking to himself. He says, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His Holy Name. Bless the Lord O my soul, don’t forget all His benefits. He forgives all your guilt. He heals all your diseases. He redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with steadfast love and compassion. He satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. The Lord made known His ways to Moses, His actions to the people of Israel. The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always chide. He will not keep His anger forever. He doesn’t deal with us according to our sins. He doesn’t repay us according to our guilt because as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His steadfast love for those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on His children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him because He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like the flower of the field. The wind passes over it and it is gone and its place knows it no longer. But from everlasting to everlasting, the steadfast love of the Lord is on those who fear Him. His righteousness is on His children’s children, to those who hold to His covenant promises and remember to do His commands. The Lord has established His throne in the heavens and His kingdom rules and reigns over all. Bless the Lord, all you His angels, His mighty ones who do His Word, listening to the voice of His Word. Bless the Lord you His host, His armies, His servants who do His will. Bless the Lord all His works in every place where He reigns. Bless the Lord, O my soul.”
It’s contagious, isn’t it? It’s the best kind of ad campaign: personal testimony from a fully satisfied individual. Modern people, however, can still feel skeptical. And I get it, I was skeptical about Michigan once. Modern people are skeptical about God, but really I do get it. I feel this skepticism about God. Could God really be that good, what with all the pain in the world? This is the problem of pain. It cuts deep, but it is a knife that cuts both ways. On the one hand, a skeptic can use it to hack away belief in a praiseworthy Creator. But on the other hand, a believer can use it to cut away confusion about why the world is so messed up. The world is the way it is because of misdirected praise, because of disfigured praise and depleted praise.
Our praise is misdirected whenever we lose touch with the source, with God. When we lose touch with God, what we’re left with is an infinite impulse to praise, but finite things that can’t satisfy, things that let us down and leave us cold. And then there’s disfigured praise, praising what is harmful. For example, my group of friends that I told you about, the ones from high school, how we used to sit around the lunch table praising that TV show. We went through a juvenile delinquency phase. We called them pranks, but the truth was we were just damaging people’s property and we praised ourselves for it. As the proverb says, “Those who forsake God’s Law praised the wicked.” When we lose touch with God, our praise becomes disfigured or else depleted. We become cynical, stingy in our praise, unwilling to praise anything other than ourselves and in our ability to find fault. But even that is a letdown.
Pain is a knife that cuts both ways. From the perspective of faith in God, we trust that what we are enduring now are labor pains, growing pains. But from the perspective of distrust in God and faith in ourselves, pain says that the Creator is a fraud and that we’d be better off without Him. The problem of pain and the problem of praise are two sides of the same coin. Both come back to the question of who deserves our praise.
As I have agonized with that question, the only satisfying answer I have found is in Jesus of Nazareth, who is called the Christ. I keep going back and meeting Jesus in the Bible’s biographies of Him: the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There’s a representative scene in one of those biographies, the Gospel according to Mark 10. Jesus has been telling His followers that His mission will include Him taking our pain into Himself. He tells Him that it’s necessary for Him to suffer many things, to be immersed in suffering, baptized in it. To be rejected and killed, and after being killed, three days later to rise from the dead. But His disciples still don’t understand. So two of them, brothers named James and John, they pull Jesus aside and say to Him, “Teacher, we want You to do for us whatever we ask.” He says, “What do you want Me to do for you?” They say, “Let one of us sit at Your right hand and at your left in Your glory.” He says, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I’m going to drink? Are you able to be baptized with the baptism with which I’m going to be baptized?” They say, “We are able.” He says, “The cup I’m going to drink, you will drink. The baptism with which I’m going to be baptized, you will be baptized. But to sit at My right and My left is not for me to give. These places are for those for whom they have already been prepared.”
In other words, the glory of Jesus, His praiseworthiness is fully shown when He sits on the cross between two rebels, one on His right and one on His left. There, God’s Son, because of His great love for us, met us on the cross in the hell of our misdirected, disfigured, depleted praise. But He didn’t leave us there. He rose from the dead to satisfy your desires with good things, that’s why Jesus is praiseworthy. And when you see Jesus for who He is, you see God for who He truly is. And the most natural thing to do is to invite others into this joy like the poet of Psalm 103. He wants everyone, all creation, all people, all creatures to praise the God and Father of Jesus, to bless the Lord. And what’s more, God blesses us. We bless God. We praise God because God blesses us and wants to praise us, intends to praise us. Sit with that for a while. The Creator of the universe wants to praise you to find joy in you. You know how that feels to be genuinely praised by someone.
Dale Carnegie once said, “To be generous in your praise of people and they will cherish your words, treasure them, and repeat them over a lifetime. They will repeat them long after you have forgotten them.” We all crave to praise and to be praised. And God giving Himself to us in Jesus will fulfill those desires for you. Your Creator will complete His joy in you. One day He will send His Son again who will say to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your Master.” When Jesus returns, we’ll hear it. When the instruments are all tuned, the grammar is learned, and the wine is ready.
This last summer when we were in Michigan, my wife Amy and I went to a winery up north in Traverse City, and I didn’t know that Michigan had such good wine. We tasted this bright, crisp Riesling. We said, “Is that one local?” “Yeah,” they said, “Made from grapes grown right here in Michigan.” And then there was this tingling, captivating Pinot Grigio and we said, “This one’s local, too?” “Yeah, that’s Michigan, too.” And then there was this rich, full-bodied red aged in oak barrels. “Where in Michigan is this grown?” We asked. “Oh,” they said, “that’s from California.” Don’t feel bad, Michigan. We don’t put all our praise in one place.
Please pray with me. Dear Father God, help us see Your praiseworthiness everywhere, in every person, place, and thing. Help us think on these things: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, anything worthy of praise, fix our minds on these things.” Through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever. Amen.
No Reflections for September 17, 2023
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“Oh, Bless the Lord, My Soul” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” from Hymns for All Saints: Adoration, Praise, Comfort (© 2004 Concordia Publishing House)
“Oh, Worship the King” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.