From Disdain To Delight: A Theology of Hallelujah

February 12, 1995

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Scripture: “But his delight is in the law of the Lord....” Psalm 1:2a

The key word here, I think is DELIGHT. It almost jumps out at you from the page as you read along. “His delight is in the law of the Lord...”  DELIGHT is the word the Psalmist chooses....

He could have said “His strength is in the law of the Lord”, or, his reinforcement, or, his certainty, or, his assurance.

He could have said, like Martin Luther, his BULWARK.... Any of those would have fit well. Any of those would have been appropriate or applicable. Instead, he uses a word we typically would associate more with a chocolate fudge sundae than religion.... “His delight is in the law of the Lord....”  What a funny way to think about spiritual obligation.

Did you learn this Psalm by heart when you were growing up? I bet some of you did. “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly....” It’s always good to have a familiar passage as a lectionary reading. I memorized this Psalm when I was in elementary school, I think, so I could win a special Sunday School pin. Norma had done it and I wasn’t about to let her get ahead of me. I could rattle it off without much thought.

The only part that really made much impression on me was the part that said, “the ungodly are not so but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.” I didn’t know chaff from chewing gum, but my ears perked up when my Sunday School teacher gave us some background information on that point. He taught out at the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University and knew that farming stuff.

He explained how the grain, the good, edible grain was separated from the non-edible impurities which clung to it when it was harvested. The farmer in Palestine would take a large, flat surface, a board, or a sieve, or something, and spread that grain out on it. Then he would go out into the open where the wind was blowing, and throw it all up into the air a couple of feet or so. The heavier grain would fall back and be caught again, but the lighter sticks and leaves, the dirt, the clinging residue, the “chaff” would be carried off by the winds that blew across the hills.

They’d be swept away into oblivion, and the grain would be cleansed of impurities.

You can still see farmers separating chaff from grain that way in the Middle East today. The Psalmist uses an old agricultural technique as a metaphor for comparing covenant life, rich life, abundant life, blessed life with the insubstantial quality of godlessness.

The ungodly are not so...they don’t even exist---not for long---they are like the chaff which the wind driveth away...unlike the tree, planted by the river of waters, that bringeth forth its fruit in its season.

I realize now that the 1st Psalm (Psalm 1) is a poem of contrast. It sets in opposing columns for clear differentiation religious integrity and religious indifference, obedience to God and disobedience, honorable living, and dishonorable, respect for the Almighty, and scorn, blessedness and unhappiness, fulfillment and emptiness, productivity and scarcity, joy and misery, success in the broadest sense, and failure, durability and impermanence, good, wholesome grain, and chaff. The contrast is neatly laid out.

It’s no accident that this particular psalm appears first in the Psalter. It was put there on purpose as the introduction to that great body of devotional material we call the WISDOM literature of the Old Testament.

It expresses a philosophy characteristic of a big chunk of the Old Testament perspective. You’ll find it most prominently in the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, but also in the theology of much of the historical portions of Old Testament writing...Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings....

The essence of this theology, in broad, inclusive terms, is FAITHFULNESS TO GOD AND GOD’S WAY PRODUCES ENHANCEMENT OF LIFE...delight....while Covenant irresponsibility inevitably ends in human withering.

Now that’s good, basic stuff. Oversimplify it, even a little, and you wind up with distortion. It happened in the Old Testament, more than once. It happened when SOME Wisdom Schoolers stretched a solid spiritual reality out of shape and turned it into a universal principle. They took a truth and tried to make it the truth, which is the way heresies are usually born.

They said if faithfulness to God produces enhancement of life, if obedience leads to blessedness, happiness...then doesn’t it follow that the blessed person, the happy person, and by close connection, the prosperous person...doesn’t it follow that that person is obviously the faithful person?

And obviously, the miserable person, the beleaguered person, the person who gets all the bad breaks is clearly the recipient of those things because he has NOT been faithful. OBEY GOD AND PROSPER: DISOBEY GOD AND SUFFER.

It’s as simple as that, said the Wisdom School extremists.

Now, we know it not as simple as that. Life doesn’t fall that neatly into such pre-packaged, ready-made categories. Sometimes in real life obedience to God, faithfulness to God leads directly to suffering...and sometimes the disobedient, unfaithful person gets away with murder, both literally and figuratively.

Good things do sometimes happen to bad people, and bad things sometimes happen to good people in real life. We know that because we’ve lived long enough to experience it.

Well, the most sensitive people in Bible times knew it, too, which is precisely why the Book of Job was written, to counteract the oversimplification of the extreme fringes of the Wisdom School.

We have a tendency today to leap to an identification with Job in his struggle against the overneat formula imposed by his “friends”, his “comforters”, who represent the Wisdom School perspective...and we have a tendency because of the extremes of that point of view to play down any relationship between piety and happiness, obedience and blessedness, radical commitment to God and a sense of well being. Because they don’t always coincide, we may be tempted to think they never do.

I want to suggest this morning that there often IS a relationship, that these old Wisdom Schoolers were not entirely off the wall, that they did have something when they called people to a life of obedience and trust, and that if you and I want to live lives that are enlarged, that are enhanced, that are broadened, and deepened, and enriched, we’ll listen to what they have to say with serious attention....NOT that doing so will lead us to physical prosperity and keep us out of trouble...the wisest of the wisdom people never said that....

What they did say was neglect, disdain, deliberate scorn of God and God’s way is a certain dead-end road...and blessedness, substantialness, true fulfillment, delight...DELIGHT---better than a chocolate fudge sundae---comes from affirming and celebrating the way of the Lord.

Psalm ONE is above all a song of affirmation. It deplores the godless life, yes, denigrates it, depicts its ultimate disintegration- the ungodly are not so---but it does so in order to trumpet the positive nature of covenant faithfulness.

Where does that faithfulness begin? What is the foundation of it? Read the Psalm over carefully. Concentrate on the positive side, the “delight” side....

For the Psalmist faithfulness originates in praise and affirmation. “For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous....” He’s that kind of God, worthy of praise, and ready to receive it.

It’s astonishing, maybe surprising, how often in the Bible God seems to ask for a lot of praise and gratitude. You wonder why.

What does that mean, that God is so lacking in self-assurance that he has to demand a constant boosting of His morale, has to keep His self-esteem pumped up?

No, that’s not it. God is not like some tin horn dictator who needs a claque of people around to tell Him how wonderful He is. God asks us to praise Him because WE need to tell Him how wonderful He is.

We praise God because something tragic, something pernicious, something rotten happens to us if we don’t.

Remember the old story of the man who went to see the treasures of the Louvre, the great museum of art in Paris.

He complained about everything. This was wrong, that was bad.... When he came out, he said to the doorkeeper, “Why, there’s nothing worth seeing in there. It’s all a bunch of trash.”

The doorkeeper said, “Sir, these masterpieces are not on trial.”

Good art isn’t poorer for our failure to recognize and appreciate it. BUT WE ARE! It’s that way with God. We need a positive, affirmative spirit. Religion at its best always has that characteristic.

Healthy, modest, happy, genuine, and whole people always do a lot of praising. C.S. Lewis wrote a book on the Psalms. And in one place he observes, “Readers praising their favorite poets, hikers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite games...praise of weather, wine, colleges...children, flowers...even rare beetles, all of this is the mark of spiritual maturity. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible.”

That’s a wonderful phrase. Unhappy, cranky people don’t praise much of anything.

Psalm 1, the First Psalm, the beginning of the Hebrew hymn book, the opening life of the Old Testament Wisdom literature, starts out, “Blessed is the man....”

It’s an affirmation that happiness, fulfillment, joy, even to the extent of delight, is rooted and grounded in praise.

Most people, I’m convinced, are hungry, even desperate for affirmation. There’s not a lot of that floating around in our society right now. Simple civility has to a great extent been supplanted by an “in your face” attitude, which is the very opposite of upbuilding.

The Church is supposed to be the place where you can go for affirmation, where you’re received without question, where you can sing your song without having to go through an audition.

Isn’t that supposed to be the nature of the Christian community? Yet some other environments live the reality of it better than we. It’s a sad commentary when there’s more genuine fellowship in the tavern or the saloon than in the church of Jesus Christ.

Do people who come here for the first time find affirmation?

I heard somebody recently report on a poll that was taken out among the general public, The question was, “What word or phrase would you most like to hear uttered to you, sincerely?” It was a serious question, not you have just won the lottery, or the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstake, but of all the things realistically that someone could say to you, what message from someone would you most like to hear?

What do you suppose people said? This is not limited to Methodists, now, or to church people.... It was asked of a cross-section of the general population...people across the board.

Maybe you can guess. The FIRST thing most people said they’d like to hear was, “I love you”...somebody sincerely saying with conviction, “I love you.”

The SECOND most common response people said they’d like to hear was, “You are forgiven.”

And the THIRD? Sort of funny, in a way, maybe. Number three on the list was, “Supper is ready.” The person I heard tell about that poll went on to add that in a sense those three statements constitute the heart of the Gospel, a positive affirmation of the Good News about God as revealed in Jesus Christ....I love you, you are forgiven, and supper is ready.... WORD AND SACRAMENT...the table of the Lord is prepared for your sustenance.

AFFIRMATION. The Psalmist could have said YES to the gist of it. “Blessed is the man who

walketh not in the council of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.... But his delight...DELIGHT...is in the law of the Lord....”  The heartbeat of authentic religious experience pounds through that.

When are we going to learn to reclaim our affirmative tradition, our Amen heritage? It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anybody say AMEN out loud at a worship service.

But if it really is true that God cares for you...if it really is true that every life is precious in His sight...if it really is true, as the old hymn puts it, that “the heart of the eternal is most wonderfully kind...”, if it really is true that nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, not death, not sin, not past failure...nor anything else in all creation...if it really is true that God so loved the world that He gave...for you and for me, then how can His church, His body, His people be anything but a community of cosmic cheerfulness.

Now, I don’t mean by that a rose-colored glasses, Pollyanna, sweetness and light society. The authentic Christian community doesn’t close its eyes to the ugly realities of the world. It knows there’s pain and hardship, separation and loneliness out there. You can’t scratch the surface of a single family without uncovering those things in some form or another. The Christian community doesn’t deny any of that.

But it also knows that God in Christ gives the power to endure and overcome even the worst of those life-sapping experiences.... Yea, to become “more than conquerors” as Paul says, “through Him that loveth us.”

We’re in the YES business, the AMEN business, the affirmation business, the praise business, because we serve a God who is exceedingly able to do more than our little minds will ever be able to wrap around.

The magnitude of that ought to show all up and down the line....Do you know how you and I can make the Church grow, and be better, and have a more lasting impact on people and the community?

By being apostles of affirmation, by celebrating the positive, every chance we get, by delighting in the law of the Lord.

Praise the good things you see going on; express appreciation for the choir, and the children’s work, and the growing youth program....and the people who go down and work serving meals at the Coalition for the Homeless; and those who tutor over on the West Side, and those who have committed to build a Habitat for Humanity house this year.... Ground was broken yesterday morning. What an exciting thing it was to see the family that will live there and to feel their exuberance.

Affirm those who teach Sunday School, and give their time to lead Kid’s Klub, and those who tithe because they love the Lord and believe in His Church.

Affirmation breeds more affirmation; praise is infectious; Hallelujah leads to more hallelujah......BUT OF COURSE IT WORKS BOTH WAY.

When you turn it around, a negative spirit sucks life out of a community. Businesses know that, maybe better than the Church.

I read an interesting statistic recently about costumer satisfaction. Why do companies lose customers, was the question being addressed. The American Society for Quality Control made a study and found these reasons why companies lost customer business:

• 1% was due to death---you can’t stop that.

• 3% of the loss was attributed to people moving away.

• 5% was because of the influence of friends....

• 9% of the lost customers were lured away by the competition.

• 14% were dissatisfied by the product…

but 68% of the lost customers were turned off and turned away by a bad attitude on the part of a company employee. You think affirmation isn’t important?

Do you know the Wal-Mart employee pledge? Walmart was founded by Sam Walton in Arkansas back in the 1940’s and has grown now to become one of the largest discount chains in the whole world. They have an employee pledge, which I suppose every worker signs. It goes, “I solemnly promise and declare that for every customer that comes within 10 feet of me, I will smile, look them in the eye, and greet them, so help me, Sam.”

Could that help explain why they’re growing?

A theology of affirmation, praise, Hallelujah.... Doesn’t the Church have an even better reason to exude that positive spirit than many discount houses?

We are the custodians of the best news in the world...stewards, if you will, of the glorious message of human redemption. We are heralds of the eternal Hallelujah, we are trustees of the angel’s song.... “Glory to God in the highest...for He has visited and redeemed His people.”

That’s who we are, that’s our calling, and that’s our privilege.

I firmly believe that if our walk with God were to resonate with praise, were to ring with affirmation, were to vibrate with the experience of delight in His law, and action, and saving grace, there is almost no limit to the impact we could have on the

texture of life in this community.

Why not let the power of His hallelujah flow through us unimpeded? And why not let it happen NOW?

I close with this...an illustration and a question. The illustration I borrow from my friend Jim Harnish....

Over 600 years ago, before this continent was even known to Europeans, a group of Christians in Spain, Roman Catholic Christians in Seville, Spain, determined to build a great cathedral Church. Before they began construction in 1401, they wrote a resolution and signed it, all of them, as a statement of affirmation in their faith, and their vision, and their dream in building that church.

The resolution said, “Let us build here a church so great that those who come after us will think us mad even to have dreamed of it.”

There’s something insanely beautiful about it, isn’t there? And somehow, I think the Psalmist would have understood the motivation. I think he would have applauded it. For he, too, knew the extravagance of blessedness, and the surge of delight, and permanence, and wholeness that comes from living a life of Hallelujah.

Question: What kind of church shall we build here?