Sermon 090222

Sermon 02/22/09
Psalm 100

Making Joy

I was by God's side, a master artisan,

delighting God day after day,

ever at play before God's face,

at play everywhere in God's world,

sporting with the children of earth.

Prov. 8:30-31

Happy Mardi Gras! Welcome to "The Party Before We Enter The Forty-days-in-the-wilderness of Lent." This is a time to eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we diet. Let me begin with a warning, however, for this is not just a frivolous romp down Bourbon Street. The boundary between sacred and secular exists mostly in our minds and celebration has a way of changing us when we least expect it. Emilie Griffin writes about the power of this holy day and says;

For a long time now I have been conscious of a deep spiritual power in this festival. It is a spirituality of the marketplace, of the particular, of the here-and-now. . . . I can't help thinking that it fits with the example of our rabbi who ate and drank and made merry with his disciples. Like Christmas, it is a Christianizing of a pagan holiday; Mardi Gras is deeply connected to early earth- and folk-religion. This time of hilarity, like May Day or Midsummer's Eve, brings out the fool in us, the actor who sees life as a work of the imagination. . . . But the spirit of rejoicing in this feast is more like a second Christmas, a time for the people, the working classes, to be temporarily set free form cares and obligations. It is a release from the bondage of winter . . . and a time to cherish friendship and simplicity of heart. The chief attitude of the holiday is one of peaceful revolution. When the spirit rules, the kingdoms of this world are overturned.

(Emilie Griffin, as found in STORIES FOR THE CHRISTIAN YEAR, Eugene Peterson, editor, P.51f)

There is something in Psalm 100 that also invites us into a revolution of praise, a celebration that frees and transforms us. In this hymn of praise all creation is invited to join in and enter into God's presence with joy and thanksgiving. Frederick Ohler wrote the following poem found in his book, "BETTER THAN NICE."

"A Chorus Beyond Hallelujah" by Frederick Ohler

Creative God

The cosmos worships

cleanly

consistently

constantly-

amoebae halve

electron and proton mate

planets pirouette in orbit-

a million atoms in our fingernails

and each one

is

a microcosm

a miniature galaxy!

The animals worship

cleanly

consistently

constantly-

the flight of a butterfly is "plashless" praise

blackbird's song is a psalm

tiger's grace antelope's flight gator's grin worm's wiggle

attest to your deft touch.

They worship you by being what they are-

each a mystery

all a miracle

in their balance variety complexity being.

Were no human animal

ever to pray

You would be abundantly praised.

The birthing growing living dying

grace

beauty

struggle of all the creatures

is a chorus beyond

Hallelujah

and we delude ourselves into imagining that

there would be no life without us

no worship without OUR hymns.

May we join in?

Will we?

We can choose to praise

or curse

or yawn

with the breath of life in us

and that makes it matter.

In creation's chorus

still listen

for our small voice

hear our simple song

and note our part

amen.

I love Ohler's line about how the animals worship God "by being what they are." There is something essential here about the nature of praise and celebration, how it both expresses and reveals our true nature as beings that were created to be exactly who and what we are.

There are many poems and writings about the glories of creation and how they give glory to God simply through the fact of their existence. But there was something different about the following poem by Parker Palmer that captured the spirit of Mardi Gras for me. In this poem, it's the simple, silly, foolish way we sometimes appear to be that is cause for laughter and rejoicing.

"The Monastery Cows" by Parker J. Palmer

Heads slumped between their shoulders

The cows stare as I pass-

Not curious and not quite mean:

Stupid is the only word that fits.

Is that how I look

Contemplating God

To God?

Then laugh

My God

I pray!

Laugh thunder loud and jolt me

From my bovine ways!

Lift my head

Rear me high

And send me spinning

'Round the flowered fields!

The idea of looking stupid or foolish in the service of God goes all the way back to Paul when, in his letter to the church at Corinth, he coins the phrase "fool for Christ's sake." By this he meant that it was in his own weaknesses, limitations, and inadequacies that God's power and grace were most fully revealed. But behind this lies a joyful paradox: rejecting the trappings of esteem that most people strive after one finds the freedom and the joy that is sheer gift.

Wendy Wright reminds us that;

Christianity . . . asserts that divine beauty and ultimate meaning are implicit in every facet of experience, even the most wretched and seemingly God-forsaken, . . . Over and over again that paradoxical truth asserts itself in the spiritual tradition. The holy fools are the tradition's guerrilla theater, impressing that truth upon us in a shocking, theatrical way. God lives and moves and has being in the entirety of the human condition, and most especially in what is lost, forgotten, despised, or cast aside.

(Wendy M. Wright, "Weavings," vol ix, no. 6, Nov/Dec 1994)

This is the paradox and the revolution that a celebration like Mardi Gras offers: God finds what is lost, remembers what is forgotten, loves that which is despised, welcomes those who have been cast aside. This is the foolishness that God invites us into with great joy and revelry. And the party goes on whether we join in or not, as Thomas Merton reminds us. Merton was a Trappist Monk known for his teaching on the contemplative life. One would think that spiritual contemplation would be a very serious thing, something not to be taken lightly. Yet for Merton, all his years of prayer and contemplation led him to the realization that it's all an invitation to play and to dance with God. Merton writes;

What is serious to [us] is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what [God] takes most seriously. At any rate [God] plays and diverts [God's self] in the garden of creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear [God's] call and follow in [God's] mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

For the world and time are the dance of [God] in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomona of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

Thomas Merton, NEW SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION, p. 296f

So let us keep the feast of Mardi Gras and enter into this playful celebration with a more frivolous joy than we usually allow ourselves. We are in the midst of a glorious creation dancing to a tune composed by a God with a sense of humor and grace.

Psalm 100

Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth,

Worship Yahweh with gladness;

Come into God's presence with singing.

Know that Yahweh is God,

The One who made us,

to whom we belong;

We are God's people,

And the sheep of God's pasture.

Enter God's gates with thanksgiving,

And God's courts with praise.

Give thanks to Yahweh,

and bless God's name.

For Yahweh is good:

God's steadfast love endures forever,

And God's faithfulness to all generations.

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