Sermon Worksheet & Manuscript

Robert L. Hutcherson, Jr.

Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church

                                        Sermon Preparation/Delivery

                                                        Psalm 150

“Praise The Lord…and Be Free”

The Rev. Karla J. Cooper, Pastor

April 15, 2007

Sermon Worksheet & Manuscript

TEXT

"Praise the LORD! Praise God in His sanctuary; Praise Him in His mighty expanse.

 Praise Him for His mighty deeds; Praise Him according to His excellent greatness. Praise Him with trumpet sound; Praise Him with harp and lyre.

 Praise Him with timbrel and dancing; Praise Him with stringed instruments and pipe. Praise Him with loud cymbals; Praise Him with resounding cymbals.

 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD!" (Psalms 150:1-6 NASBR)

BODY

Whether it's a Broadway play like CATS or a classic movie like THE SOUND OF MUSIC, most people enjoy a good musical. But have you ever wondered what it is about such productions that appeals to us? After all, musicals are decidedly UNlike real life. In THE SOUND OF MUSIC people burst into song constantly--during dinner, while delivering telegrams. That's just how it goes in musicals--people sing at the oddest moments. But if you were standing in line at McDonald's and a woman suddenly started crooning a ballad to her children, you'd take a step aside. Or if you were on an airplane flying to Conneticut and the man behind you suddenly started to sing, Frank Sinatra-like, "Come Fly with Me," you would no doubt panic at being seated so close to a weirdo! Life is definitely NOT like a musical! In our society singing is a increasingly rare event, restricted largely to church. If you've ever been at a funeral attended by mostly non-churchgoing folks, then you know sometimes how dismal the singing can be. The simple fact is that outside church people just don't get as much practice in group singing anymore. Nevertheless, there is something deep down inside most folks that wants to sing. How often have you glanced in your rearview mirror while waiting for a red light only to see the person behind you singing along with the radio with all they’ve got! At outdoor concerts there are usually lots of folks singing along with the performer up on the stage. Karaoke contests have enjoyed immense popularity in recent years. And many of us know that singing in the shower is not something that only OTHER people do!

Music touches us on a level which ordinary speech does not reach. Music can soothe, comfort, enliven, and lift our hearts. Why is it, for instance, that at a funeral we can recite something like the Apostles' Creed without batting an eye and yet fall apart when it's time to sing "How Great Thou Art"? Why is it that sometimes you can hear the merest snatch of a certain tune and suddenly tears leap to your eyes as you are transported back to a time when your children were young or when you and your spouse got engaged?

“The Gypsy Rover came over the hill,

Bound through the valley so shady,

He whistled and he sang

‘till the green woods rang,

And he won the heart of a lady.”

Or, in terms of a worship service, why is it that when a teenager wants to rebel, singing is often the first thing he or she refuses to do? Few postures of defiance bother me more than when I see someone, young or old, who stands in the midst of the congregation, arms folded across their chest, lips clamped tightly shut while everyone around them is singing praises to God. Perhaps those people don't sing because they refuse to let themselves become as caught up in worship as music inevitably forces a person to be.

Because as Psalm 150 makes clear, music IS a defining force in Christian worship. Psalm 150 is perhaps the Bible's single grandest statement of praise. It is also the grand finalé to the Book of Psalms. Like that final cascading shower of fireworks and rapid-fire booms, bangs, bursts, and blooms on the Fourth of July, so also Psalm 150's grand finalé stuns you with its swift succession of images and staccato flurry of praise commands.

But you’ve got to read this psalm the right way to appreciate how much power it packs. I hope most of you are aware that when you read the words "Praise the LORD" in the Book of Psalms, you’re reading not some dull statement but you’re receiving a fiery command! In the original Hebrew the phrase HALLELU YAH is in the imperative mood. Literally translated it means "Praise Yahweh." But you are supposed to read those words while also picturing a finger wagging in your face or maybe thumping you in the chest. This represents the psalmist "getting in your face." Here the psalmist is going nose-to-nose with the reader, getting so close you can smell  his breath as he shouts, "You! Yes, you! Grab an instrument, open your mouth, and get going! Praise God! I mean it! Move! Sing! Dance! Show some respect!"

This is the praise command. This is the psalmist as army drill sergeant, barking to the world his order to worship. Actually, the structure of Psalm 150 at first keeps you in suspense as to just who is being addressed. From verses 1-5 we get a rapid-fire string of eleven commands. But only in verse 6, at the end, are we told who is being commanded. And guess what? It's everybody! It's everything that has breath, which includes not only every person on the planet but also hippos and three-toed sloth.

How many of you took a breath in the past few moments…raise your hand if that’s you…everybody?  Well, that’s good…for a number of reasons! But where are you going with this, Brother Robert? Why do you ask? Because if you've got breath in your lungs, you have received the gift of life from God himself. If you breathe, you show by that very action that you've come from the workshop of a Master Craftsman--the one who blew oxygen into Adam's nostrils in the very beginning and who now does the same for you. According to Psalm 150 the very first thing you should do with that breath is exhale it back to God in praise!

But today, as when this psalm was first written, this universal call to praise the God of Israel is a scandal and offense to most folks. People don't like to be told what to do, particularly in the area of religion. Religion is a private matter. It's nobody else's business. You believe what you want to believe and I'll do the same. What's true for you does not need to be true for me. So let's just leave one another alone on the subject. Or as the commercial says: “I know where you’re at…and you know where I’m at…so why don’t we just leave it at that.”

Of course, we properly object to the notion that all religions say pretty much the same thing. We object to the notion that truth is relative to the point that we're not allowed to assert the truth of our Christian faith. The point is that there is an inherent scandal in Psalm 150's strident calls to praise God. This is not going to be well-received by everyone who has breath. Yet if we believe in this God, if we perceive the power and greatness and grandeur of which Psalm 150 speaks, and if we believe that THIS very God is the beginning and end of all creatures, then we must find ways to obey and so issue this praise command ourselves.

And as Psalm 150 makes clear, it is through music that we will do this first and best of all. Because music does indeed move us and involve us in a way ordinary speech does not, as we said earlier. Yet it is precisely music that has been creating all manner of havoc in the wider church world in the so-called "worship wars" of recent years. Exactly because music is so powerful and so vital, people feel passionately about it. Indeed, given what Psalm 150 tells us about music's central place in worship, doesn't it make sense that the devil would want to corrupt it, make it a cause of division instead of unity? Because in the devil's ears all praise of God sounds like the worst of screeching. So if he can stop it, turn it, make us so tired of it that we just want to halt it, then the devil has cut down on what he regards as the cosmos' worst noise pollution. The more important something is to God, the more invested Satan is in messing it up.

What that means, however, is that music is something worthy of our thoughtful attention while at the same time being something which, if we're not careful, can become an idol--an idol which can all-too-quickly become a weapon with which to beat up one another. It's a razor-sharp fine edge we're forced to tread. Like walking a tightrope, so it's easy to fall off one side or the other. On the one side is the temptation to say that all music is equally good while on the other side is the temptation to say that only one, very narrowly defined form is acceptable and all deviations from that must be forbidden.

Ironically, a temptation common to both extremes is to end up making music more about us than it is about God. There may well be something wrong with a syrupy ballad that moans on and on about personal feelings. But there is something equally wrong with crushing a fellow Christian's heartfelt love in the name of classical excellence. It may indeed be wrong to dump nearly the entirety of the Christian musical tradition, as some now do. But it may be equally wrong to believe that no music worthy of Christian worship has been written since the eighteenth century.

Because of the glorious ways by which the Church has carried out Jesus' Great Commission, there has been, and there will continue to be, an enormous number of worship services that have taken, are taking, and will take place across time zones, cultures, nations, and continents. Some of our brothers and sisters in Christ today worship to Oriental tunes, with flutes and bells creating music that would sound in our ears more like Chinese opera than "Amazing Grace." Some have beat drums and shaken maracas on African savannahs creating music that might sound more like a rap song to some of us than an anthem. Some have plucked electric guitars and played keyboards playing melodies that some of us would quite frankly rather NOT associate with church. And some have played glorious pipe organs that have shaken the ceilings of cathedrals in Paris and Chicago.

Not all that music is for every Christian, of course. We don't need to enjoy every musical style--nor do we need to represent every musical style in our own services--to recognize that in and through most of them, something of Psalm 150's clarion command is being fulfilled.

I don't know of a less happy phrase than the one coined in recent years: "worship wars." You’ll remember that in a previous message I shared a new word I learned…”oxymoron”…well, here it is again. "Worship wars" is an oxymoron if ever there was one! You might as well talk about "Christian pagans" or "pious perverts." It just doesn't make sense! These two words don't belong together. Because according to Psalm 150 our task as believers is not to take our harps, flutes, cymbals, and tambourines and start hitting each other on the head with them but rather to play these many and varied instruments with so much skill, conviction, and above all head-over-heels, sold-out, on fire love for God that the whole world will want to join in the chorus!

What Psalm 150 enjoins us to do is to sing and worship and praise God in such a unified and joyful way as to attract others. When we properly follow the praise command ourselves, we become a window to God--one through which others will indeed see God.

But let me also say that for worship to be worship, it needs to be a counter-cultural act, as were many of the things our Lord and Saviour Jesus the Christ did. We live in a time of shrunken horizons; a time when many refuse to see or acknowledge, much less worship, a sovereign Lord of the universe. We live in an age of homespun New Age faiths where people bow down at altars to their own selves and not to any "outside" God.

In a time like this any worship service driven by the belief that there is only one Lord whose name is Jesus, any worship service that proclaims there is finally only one creator and redeemer of us all, any worship service that insists Psalm 150 is RIGHT and altogether fitting and proper to demand praise of all creatures with air in their lungs--any service like that is and properly should be counter-cultural; should be so startlingly fresh as to be almost offensive at first; should be so drastically different from what goes on elsewhere in our media-saturated, self-centered, me-first, entertainment-driven culture. Psalm 150's praise command is, as we said earlier, counter-cultural, radical. It should not be made to look simple; it should not look like what people do in lots of places already in society.

That's why it is appropriate to insure that worship remains worship and that it not become a variety show, that it not become similar to a rock concert in the name of attracting attention. To make worship "useful" in the sense of making it a tool or a ploy ruins worship by shifting the focus from God to ourselves. It’s no surprise that some of the worst pop theology of the last twenty years--the theologies that have put away ultimate truth, backhanded sin, watered down grace in favor of self-help schemes—it’s no surprise that this kind of theology has in no small measure emerged from the very places where worship somewhere along the way turned into a show-stopping spectacle.

Of course, let's be honest: we're not immune to this, either. We, too, face the temptation of treating worship like a concert—perhaps in our case not a classical concert but a concert or a kind of show nevertheless. Again, the devil is interested in just one thing: corrupting the worship of God. Beyond that he's flexible and will exploit every taste, every preference, and every style to achieve his larger goal. We stand guard against this at every turn unless we, too, end up being a reflection of, rather than a critique of, a culture already drunk on fun and games and passive entertainment.

Because as Psalm 150 makes clear, worship is not about us, it's about God. It's about the God who gave us the very breath we use to praise Him in the first place. It's about the God whose grandeur exceeds our finest musical efforts to bring it to speech. It's about the God who created not only the variety of instruments listed in this psalm but who created the whole spectrum of this creation's diversity. Indeed, just two psalms earlier, in Psalm 148, the psalmist made clear that God is just as surely praised by the crashing of waves on the shore as he is by a human voice singing a hymn; God is as pleased by the breath exhaled in a liquid run of notes from the sparrow's little lungs as he is by the glorious sounds exhaling from a pipe organ's massive bellows. We're not alone in the cosmic chorus to the Creator. And even as it would be foolish for the soprano section of a choir to turn their noses up at the altos, so we are foolish if we write off the music rendered by the Baptists or even by the sparrows who twitter and warble from every other bush. Yes, as we just said, worship can be corrupted. But where Psalm 150-style worship really happens--as it does in the vast majority of services taking place across the world today--where God truly is given the glory by people in love with his grace and stunned by his grandeur, then that is something for which all believers must be grateful!

Nobody likes to get ordered around. A finger thumping you in the chest is always a bit irritating. But given what is at stake in Psalm 150, we can be glad not only to receive the praise command but to have regular opportunity to obey it in a place like this one with fellow believers who love to sing (and who happen to be blessed enough to be somewhat good at it); a place so blessed by wonderful musicians who apply their skills to God's glory and to our worshipful lifting up of that divine glory; a place filled with the exhaled breath of God's saints as we hear and obey the happiest command in the universe: PRAISE THE LORD! And here at Quinn Chapel, we do! Praise be to God. To twist a phrase from Brother V.J. Herbert…”at Quinn Chapel AME…Praise the Lord…and be free!!”

CHILDREN’S LESSON

Order of Worship

Sunday April 15th, 2007

11:00 A.M.

Opening Hymn…………………………” Praise Him! Praise Him!”, Hymm 92

Doxology……………………………………………………All

Call to Worship…………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson

Hymn……………………………………..”How Great Thou Art”, Hymn 68

Prayer……………………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson

Prayer Response………………………………….”Give Us This Day”

Scripture Reading………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson

Decalogue……………………………………….Bro. Robert Hutcherson

Gloria Patri…………………………………………….Congregation

Sermon…………………………………………..Bro. Robert Hutcherson

Invitation to Christian Discipleship……”Great Is Thy Faithfulness”, Hymn 84

Altar Call/Offertory………………………………………..All

Offertory Response……………………………”All Things Come Of Thee”

Affirmation of Faith…………………………………..Congregation

Benediction………………………………………Bro. Robert Hutcherson