The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

Scripture Readings: Psalm 148

Psalm 148 falls into two main parts, vv. 1-6 and vv. 7-13. In these sections the heavens and the earth, respectively, are called on to give praise, as if we have two choirs responding to each other in antiphonal fashion. The psalm then concludes with vv. 13c -14. Verses 1-6 call upon the heavens to praise the Lord. Eight times the imperative ‘praise the Lord/him’ is used, but it is imperative of celebration rather than dictatorial order, like the conductor’s direction to come in now. The parts are so rehearsed, so ordered that it is like the psalmist announces an unfolding of what is already. The angels, the heavenly host, the sun and moon, shining stars, highest heavens and waters above the heavens are all called to voice their praise. He fixed their bounds; even if we have a different conception of what is and how it is arranged, the psalmist’s point is, as he sees it, everything has its place. Everything seems to be put into place. It fit in the choir of praise.

Verses 7-13 match the call to the heavens with one to the earth. The earthly choir consists of sea monsters, the deeps, fire and hail, stormy wind, mountains, trees, all animals, kings and peoples, young and old. This group consisting of all sorts of creatures, animate and inanimate, joins in the one activity – praising the Lord. The whole creation, all of life participates. In gratitude, we praise. The Psalmist in his poetic vision sees the order even if all that he names doesn’t. We are all choir members whether we sing or not.

As most of you know, I had the wonderful opportunity to go backpacking with my family and Glenda and Stewart Pawsey. We hiked out on the eastern slope of the Sierra up into the high country. It was an awesome trip, which inspired in me praise of our Creator.

Now I will have to admit that our first day of hiking was filled as much with cursing as praise. Hiking at altitudes between 9 and 12,000 feet, with too much stuff in my family’s packs, packed hastily by yours truly on Sunday night, muscles felt out of shape and out of oxygen. But the second day, after climbing over 12,000 foot Bishop pass, and dropping down to a gorgeous lake at the base of a range of jagged peaks, we dropped our packs, set up camp, and went for a very brief swim in the very beautiful but cold lake. I lay out on a rock like a lizard to warm up, my skin and heart invigorated. The sky was, well, sky blue, bluer that the blue in your laser printer, and white puffy clouds floated lazily by. As the sun moved across the sky to disappear behind the western peaks, the colors of everything changed constantly.

I have to admit that I have been at one of those points in life when my faith has felt a little flat. We live in a very rational world, or a world that likes to think it is rational. And God doesn’t always fit nicely into our rational minds. But perhaps it is more about my own routine, as I go through the motions of the mundane, humdrum life, seeing my humanity as a parent and husband and minister, dealing with plumbing and personnel, coming home to eat, pay a parking ticket or Comcast bill, sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher as I ask the boys about homework and catch an hour or two of TV while my wife sleeps on the couch.

And I suspect this attitude of mine has something to do with our family’s year, as two sisters of mine had serious surgery, and both Feliciana’s parents, after a life of hard labor in a poor country, died quickly and tragically. There is a flat part of the grief process, when our world turns small and inward focused, not in a contemplative way, but in a self-centered way. It is just part of the process, this self-centeredness, nothing to feel guilty about, but our vision is narrowed and our feelings go flat. We go through our own motions and our world seems so small and mundane. Why do we need a god for this little life? Perhaps too, in these situations, the reality and tenacity of injustice and hardship, disease and evil, science and reason draws the curtain back, like in the Wizard of Oz, and we sense that our image of God is like a stage show of culture, with ministers like me frantically pulling strings and pushing levers to create an image to believe in.

And I know of no place on earth where the signs of evolution are more visible than the high Sierra, as broad vistas reveal glacial carvings cut out over millions of years. Huge boulders sit in precarious, absurd locations, having been moved by ice over God knows how many years. So vast the span of time for such creation, years seem a poor form of measurement. We are little creatures for sure.

So there I was lying on a rock by the lake, my body exhausted, my faith flat, not really looking for nor even thinking about God. Just relaxing, letting go, breathing in, and from deep within my being welled up a profound sense of gratitude. Gratitude. Thank you, I say, even before I think to whom I am speaking, and my words go out into the vastness.

I am not looking for God. I am not trying to believe or have faith. I am not even thinking of God and up comes the feeling of gratitude. And I want to say thank you. Thank you to something, because my vision has been widened, because this feels like a gift, life feels like a gift, being a part of it all feels like a gift. I want to give thanks and praise and it seems, all around me must feel the same, we family and friends, birds and trees, peaks and clouds join as a choir in thanks and praise. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

A kind and thoughtful atheist might reasonably ask, “ How can you feel God would give you this and leave so many in poverty and misery?”

This gratitude doesn’t originate from a systematic theology. I don’t think this sense of gratitude is about being Christian, or even religious, or even human. But it is the source of our faith humanity, the source of our praise. I think we have this sense of gratitude, when we see ourselves as a part of nature, in purple mountain majesty or on the fruited plain, after a spring rain, or when our mind amazes us with insight, when music touches our soul, when we hold a newborn for the first time, when a community finds itself in prosperity and peace, when a charismatic person like Jesus graciously reflects the harmony and grace available in human life; we can’t help it. It is our rational creation. We don’t decide to have it, this sense of gratitude. After we discover it, we may choose to nurture it. But it comes without our prompting. It expands our mind. It takes us beyond ourselves as a part of something much greater than ourselves. We feel a part of life and we feel grateful. We are moved to praise.

We may say thank you, or praise God, but this gratitude is not a narrow thank you, as in God gave me all this while he left others to wallow in poverty and hardship. It is really not about us in the narrow psychological sense at all. It is not that we are good or somehow loved by God more than others, and therefore we get to have this experience. There is no comparison with other humans based on merit or any self-centered feelings like that. There among the mountain peaks I wasn’t even thinking of myself, for once, when this feeling of gratitude sprang up.

Nor is there a particular, rigidly defined god, not my god, not the god of my religion’s doctrine, not my own personal Jesus giving a good Max a good day or a good feeling. The gratitude and praise is prior to our conception of God. We don’t think of God and then decide to be grateful. We find ourselves grateful and conceive of God as the one toward whom we are grateful, as the one who created in us the ability to feel gratitude.

The gratitude is gracious, filled with grace. It is not mine but I get to share it, share it with the sun and stars, with the mule deer, the bushy tail wood rat, and the yellow- bellied marmot, with the Jeffrey and lodge pole pines, with the meadow stream and jagged peaks.

This gratitude and praise is not logical; it doesn’t erase or hide nor avoid the hardships of life. It is a paradox. It is present even in the ugliness of life and it takes us beyond space and time and gives us visions of eternal goodness and peace. We do not think, “It is logical now to feel gratitude, or I better not feel this gratitude because tomorrow it may rain or my son may fall off a cliff or I could lose my house or job.” Or, “I better wait to feel grateful until everyone on earth lives in peace and prosperity.”

It is one of the great American misconceptions that people in poor countries, and even people going through great hardship relative to ourselves do not know happiness or gratitude. We tend to attach gratitude to possession, and think that if others do not possess what we do, or if we do not possess what others do, then they must not have reason to feel gratitude like us or we must not be able to be as grateful as them. The drive to compare and compete, and our tendency to view even our feelings as something we earn and possess tends to leave Americans looking backward or forward instead of being and seeing what may bring us strength, joy and peace in the moment.

Yet, due in part to our culture’s push toward individualism, materialism, and competition, there are more people who think they do not merit, or deny or must miss the upwelling of this sense of gratitude, more who are lonely and depressed here in the US than in many other countries of the world.

At Northminster, the church I served in Salinas before coming to Berkeley, we helped a group of the lost boys of Sudan get settled in San Jose. Their villages had been systematically attacked by government troops, their parents and sisters raped and murdered. Out tending their herds the boys escaped, traveling over six hundred miles by foot, evading troops, thirst, starvation, lions and disease to make it to a refugee camp in Kenya before being brought to the U.S.

Seven young men came to worship and sang rousing songs of gratitude and praise to the Creator. Then after worship a group of church members took them to the ocean. Upon seeing the ocean the boys immediately and gleefully ran and danced fully clothed into the cold northern California water. Their sense of gratitude, not to the church members, not to America, but just to be there in that moment experiencing the great blue ocean was, in a work, real. It didn’t erase their nightmares, the injustice and evil of Sudan, the need to fight for a world where children are not orphaned, but neither did those things prevent that gracious sense of gratitude from welling up from within them and spilling out with tremendous power.

There are questions unanswered by this sermon. If everything in creation is ordered and participates as a choir singing praise there are implications for our core and participation in creation. What is the definition of this Creator, this Creator of gratitude? What is the nature of her power when there is so much suffering and evil, when we also experience great loss? But I believe that great gratitude is a gift given to humans and all life. And this is the source of our faith and leads to praise. We have been given the gift of feeling we are a part of life, the gift of recognizing profound beauty, and the gift of feeling grateful, and this is a gift that will not die. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord from the heavens. Praise the Lord from the earth. Let all Creation praise the Lord!