Praise

 

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I would post images of my office.  It's a little bit messy, but not too bad.  We've been, and remain, happily busy.

One of the lectionary readings for the week is Psalm 146.  It is a Psalm of praise.

I was reading a devotional out of Daily Feasting, and read this quote by Louis Stulman:

At its core the psalm is a meditation on what it means to praise God throughout life.  it addresses sustaining life commitments that shape attitude, behavior, worldview, and character; in other words, it attends to the building blocks of spirituality.

And then this one by the same author:

Accordingly, praise is more than an isolated act that takes place quickly and over a very short time.  It is durative and continuous, and envelops the continuum of life.  To be sure, praise of God is a fundamental commitment of life, no less essential to the faithful than oxygen is to the lungs.

That brought to mind a part of the training for CLM I read last year.  In the Worship module, it says:

If prayer is the primary means of Christan worship, the praise of our Triune God is one of the primary forms our praying takes.  Our praise of God is not flattery.  We do not praise God to gain something for ourselves,  neither is our praise simply a cathartic outpouring of positive emotion.  Rather, praise is our fully mindful and fully embodied response to our own and the world's experience of the presence and goodness of God.

I don't remember where I heard this or who said it, but I was in a meeting with a pastor (not mine), overhearing a conversation.  He said (something like), "They asked me if we could have a praise band.  I said yes, if we can also have a lamentation band."

So, some questions for our consideration.  I know "praise band" has come to mean a musical group that specializes in contemporary music.  Shouldn't all of our music praise God?  If you read the third quote, then you'll see that I don't mean that all of our music should be an outpouring of positive emotion, but couldn't all worshipful music be thought of as music that reflects our experience with the presence and goodness of God? 

And following that same thought (sort of), if praise is not the outpouring of positive emotion, then shouldn't our music, just like the scriptural psalms, reflect the whole range of our experiences with God, including the lamentations?  And can't lamentations be an expression of the our experience of the presence and goodness of God?  And if the definitions above are correct, then in some ways, couldn't lamentation be considered praise? (We wouldn't need a second band for that.)

Isn't the Sanctuary Choir, singing its traditional music, a praise band?  And isn't the trumpet voluntary at the end of a majestic hymn sounds of praise?  Why do we, in mainline, traditional churches, shy away from the word praise?  Isn't it our main purpose in worship?  And in the same vein, those who say that only contemporary music (and only contemporary music) is praise music are probably wrong.  As wrong as those who shy away from the "praise band."

We should all be praising God.