FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
NOVEMBER 24, 2002

DOXOLOGY >
John M. Buchanan

The world is alive with your goodness, O God,
it grows green from the ground

and ripens into the roundness of fruit.

Its taste and its touch

enliven my body and stir my soul.

Generously given

profusely displayed

your graces of goodness pour forth from the earth.
As I have received

so free me to give.

As I have been granted

so may I give.

J. Philip Newell
Celtic Benedictions

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CiTY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

DOXOLGOY
November 24, 2002

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 67
Matthew 6:25-33
Psalm 100

“Make a joyful noise to the Lord.”
Psalm 100:1 (NRSV)

Blessed art thou, O Lord, our God.
In this season of Thanksgiving, we come to you with grateful hearts.
Speak the word your have for us this day.
Startle us, again, with your goodness and mercy and grace,
and the goodness of the world, our home: in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

For more than a century, week in and week out, the people of this congregation have begun their
hour or so together by standing up and singing the Doxology:

Praise God from whom all blessing flow.
Praise him all creatures here below.
Praise him above ye heavenly hosts.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

We did a little research and came up with a worship bulletin dated October 14, 1900, the oldest
one in our archives and there it was, at the beginning of the service, exactly where it still is...

Doxology, the word itself, means praise. The tune we use was composed in 1551 by Louis
Bourgeois, John Calvin’s choirmaster in Geneva. And in 1560, William Kethe, a Scot and friend
of John Knox, took Bourgeois’ tune and wrote a paraphrase of Psalm 100 and the resulting hymn
is “Old Hundredth”—the oldest hymn in English still in use. We'll sing it later this morning, on
this Sunday before Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims would have sung it, in all probability, at their
Thanksgiving feast.

All people that on earth do dwell

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.

Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell,
Come ye before him and rejoice.

Many of us have sung the Doxology once a week all our lives. It occurred to me that I have sung
this tune and these words more than any other. Just for the fun of it, I did the math. If] started

singing at the age of five—in those long ago days before church nurseries, when children sat,
wiggled, struggled, and suffered through worship, sitting beside their parents—if I started singing
when I was five and missed a few Sundays every year, and few years during college, I’ve

probably sung the Doxology something like 3000 times, which is probably about as useless a bit
of information as you’ll receive today.

Garrison Keillor’s wonderful monologues on A Prairie Home Companion are often about
religion and regularly, I find, about grace and gratitude and doxology. In a particularly delightful
piece he explained that “car ownership in Lake Wobegon is a matter of faith.” Lutherans drive
Fords, bought from Bunson Motors, the Lutheran car dealer, and Catholics drive Chevrolets from
Main Garage, owned by the Kruegers, who are Catholic. The Brethren—Keillor’s own people—
being Protestant, also drove Fords but distinguished themselves from the Lutherans by attaching
small Scripture plates to the top of their license plates. The verses were written in tiny glass
beads so they showed up well at night. The favorite was “The wages of sin is death” (Roman
6:23). Keillor’s father’s car sported a compass on the dashboard with “I Am the Way” inscribed
in luminescent letters across its face, which he said were “clearly visible in the dark to a girl who
might be sitting beside him.”

But the real champion among the Lake Woebegon Church of Brethren people was Brother Louie,
whose four-door Fairlane was a rolling display of Scripture—on the license plates, across the
dashboard, on the sun visors, arm rest, floor mats, ashtray, and glove compartment.

Louie’s tour de force, however, was the car horn. He found a company in Indiana that advertised
custom-made musical car horns. Louie’s hom played the first eight notes of the Doxology. It
sounded like a trumpet. He blew it at pedestrians, at oncoming traffic, while passing, and
sometimes just for his own pleasure. “On occasion, vexed by a fellow driver, he gave in to wrath
and leaned on the horn, only to hear ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” It calmed him
down right away” (Lake Wobegon Days).

My favorite Doxology story is a baseball anecdote. In 1988, the Los Angels Dodgers won the
National League Championship and the World Series. The Dodgers had a great pitcher by the
name of Orel Hersheiser, a mild-looking young man whose nickname was “Bulldog” because of
_ his fierce competitiveness. In 1988 Hersheiser won about every award a pitcher can. He pitched
63 consecutive scoreless innings, still a record. In the World Series, he started and won several
games. Orel Hersheiser was the Most Valuable Player and the toast of the baseball world. He was
a guest on the Tonight Show. Johnny Carson was interviewing him and asked how he,
Hersheiser, seemed to stay so calm and steady and focused in those incredibly tense, pressured
situations, out there on the pitcher’s mound, alone, with 50,000 screaming fans and millions of
people watching on television. Hersheiser’s answer stunned Carson. “I sing a hymn,” Hersheiser
said. “I’m a Presbyterian and so I sing a hymn to myself out there that we sing every Sunday in
church.” Carson was momentarily speechless and then asked if Hersheiser would sing it—on
NBC-TV—and he did. And what he sang, of course: “Praise God from whom all blessing
flow’-—the Doxology.

I don’t suppose you and I think much about it when we rise weekly and begin worship together
by singing the Doxology, but what we are doing in that act is profoundly important. We are
saying what we believe and trust at a fundamental level in our souls. We are declaring our
ultimate loyalty and devotion. And we are declaring who we are as individual men and women
by singing our praise to the One who created us, from whom all blessings flow, and whose,
finally and ultimately, we are.

The Bible is a consistent and persistent advocate of the act of praisé and giving thanks. Praise is
basic to what the Bible is about. In fact, the Bible is insistent, almost pushy about it. We are
commanded to praise God, to fall down on our faces, to sing, shout, clap our hands, wave
branches, blow trumpets, pluck strings, bang cymbals together—loud, clashing cymbals. We are
commanded to “make a joyful noise” for God and to join our voices with the sounds of nature,
with thunder, and noisy wind, crashing waves—what biologist Lewis Thomas once called the
“grand canonical ensemble of nature.” All nature sings in praise to God. Little hills shout, trees
clap their hands, and forests sing a nughty chorus. I’ve never actually heard that, but I have sat
back and looked up into a stately tall beech tree and been moved to wonder and gratitude.

Poet Wendell Berry lifted his eyes to a grove of magnificent trees and wrote:

Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light,
Patient as stars, they build in air,
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout leaves upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing in this place.

(“A Timbered Choir’)

C. S. Lewis thought that what we need most as humans beings is Doxology. He wrote that “God
is that object to admire which is to be awake, .. . not to appreciate which is to have lost the
greatest experience, and in the end to have lost all.” Lewis said that our lives are incomplete and
crippled if we are tone deaf and have never been in love, never known true friendship, never
cared for a good book, never felt the morning air on our cheeks. “Praise is inner health made
audible,” Lewis said.

All of that is what is going on when we open our lives and spirits to Doxology. And there is a
sense in which it is a countercultural act, an affirmation that is subversive to the values of
materialistic, consumer-based culture. We live and move and have our being in a culture that
evaluates us, places us in the social spectrum, defines and identifies us on the basis of what we
car, own, and consume. And over against that prevailing ethos, this simple radical act says |
belong to God. My ultimate loyalty is to God. My most basic identity as a human being comes
from the One who created me and who is the life and love behind all of creation.

“We need the biggest dose of God we can get,” writes Marva Dawn, a professor of theology at
Notre Dame, “to shake us out of our societal sloth and summon us to behold God’s splendor.”
Sometimes that’s hard to do, living in a city. We are removed from the natural world the Bible

talks about. And besides, our religion has been suspicious of nature as fallen creation, the arena
of temptation, worldliness, and sin.

There is a current movement in Western Christianity, however, to recover the ancient church’s
and Israel’s and the Bible’s focus on creation, nature, the world as a place to see God and know
God. It is part of our own roots in Celtic spirituality. When Christianity encountered the
indigenous people of northern Great Britain and Scotland in the second and third centuries, there
was a wonderful mixing of Christian theology and Celtic custom, focused on nature. Celtic art,
music, jewelry, and literature flourished in the early Christian monasteries. The wonderful Celtic
crosses that have become a symbol of Presbyterianism are the product of Celtic art and Christian
theology. Celtic Christianity emphasized the goodness of creation, all of it, including human life
and the gracious goodness of God, which can be seen in the natural world as well as in the life,
teaching, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Historians of religion tell us that the Celtic way
of perceiving the world, that Celtic style of spirituality, was pushed aside in the fifth century by
the orthodox Roman theology, which emphasized original sin, the fallenness of creation, and
therefore the otherworldliness of Christianity and the Christian church. Much of the church’s
discomfort with the world, with humanness, with human sexuality, comes from that theological
conflict. Priests in the Celtic church married, for instance. Rome insisted on celibacy and, of
course, prevailed. A good illustration of the two ways of viewing the world and the faith has to
do with contrasting images of a newborn. Roman Christianity, under the enormous influence of
Augustine, saw in a newborn original sin, total depravity, a fallen human being who needed to be
rescued from sin and death. Celtic Christianity, on the other hand, saw in the face ofa newborn,
something of the face of God, “the unsullied goodness of creation,” is the way J. Philip Newell, a
leading Celtic theologian puts it.

Both ways of perceiving are true, but happily, after centuries of Christian suspicion of the
natural, material world of the flesh, we are recovering the earlier emphasis on nature as the
theater of God’s ongoing creativity and redemptive grace. Scottish theologian George McDonald
writes, “We should look not only to the Scriptures and the church to know God, but to creation as
well.”

On the day I was reading that, I had an opportunity to do it. [held on my lap, at bedtime, a six-
year-old. He gets to choose the “before bed book” we’ll read and had visited the appropriate shelf
of children’s books. He didn’t like the choices there and so he moved one shelf over and of all
things picked up The Hand of God: Thoughts and Images Reflecting the Spirit of the Universe. It
was published by the Templeton Foundation and contains amazing pictures of outer space taken
and transmitted by the Hubble telescope. The pictures are colorful, amazing, and dramatic—
pictures of exploding stars and galaxies, bright lights against the absolute blackness of space. I
didn’t think he’d stay with it long, but he did; couldn’t see enough, in fact. We oooed and awed
through the whole book, and it was, I concluded, as good as an hour in church.

Michael Reagen was the editor and publisher of the book, and in the forward he wrote,

My overwhelming impression [at first seeing the Hubble photographs] was one of awe at
the majesty of the universe and a sense that I was witnessing the hand of God at work on

a scale that was mind-boggling. ... When I look at this material I have a great sense of

relief, an almost surreal sense that it’s going to be okay, we are not alone, and there is a
God. ,

Doxology. It is our oldest, most basic religious practice, theological tradition, and personal
affirmation. The prayer Jesus taught his disciples begins with it: “Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name.” One of the oldest and most sacred traditions of our Jewish nei ghbors is
based on the ancient prayer of David, in 1 Chronicles 2a: “Blessed are thou, O Lord, our God.”
We’ve heard our friend, Rabbi Michael Sternfield pray it here in our sanctuary. The Hebrew is
easy: “Baruch atah Adonai” — “Blessed are thou, O Lord, our God.” The ancient Jewish custom
is perfect for Thanksgiving week. The faithful are encouraged to pray the prayer 100 times
daily—all day long: “Baruch atah Adonai” and then fill in the blanks with the good stuff of life
and the world as we encounter it [See Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time, p. 210).

* Baruch atah Adonai, blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, for this day

¢ Baruch atah Adonai, blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, for the sun coming up over
the lake

¢ Baruch atah Adonai, blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, for my life and body, for my
heart and lungs, which have been faithfully doing their job all night long

¢ Baruch atah Adonai, blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, for bright stars, the moon
over the lake last night

¢ Baruch atah Adonai, blessed art thou, O Lord, our God, for trees and flowers, for
birds, for that dear friend, for this precious child

¢ Baruch atah Adonai, for the beauty of that hymn, the taste of this food, for the voice
of that dear friend, the touch of my beloved’s hand

The remarkable thing about the biblical command to praise and thank God, to make a joyful
noise and come into God’s presence with thanksgiving, is that it is mostly written by people who
had precious little to be cheerful and joyful about. Many of the most glorious psalms of
thanksgiving were written at times of tragedy, exile, and suffering. In fact, there is something
about doxology that is more powerful and more authentic when it is experienced and expressed
not in the good times, when it’s easy to be grateful, but in the not so good times. There is
something absolutely authentic when words of gratitude are uttered in the face of loss and
diminishment and tragedy, something almost magnificently defiant about gratitude in adversity.
That, after all, was the way it was originally.

Peter Gomes, reflects this in his new book, The Good Life: “That first winter in New England
was a terrible one for the Mayflower pilgrims, who were hardly prepared for the ferocity of the
weather and the hard work of establishing a new colony. More than half their number died that
winter in what they called ‘the starving time,’ where a ration of five kernels of com was
apportioned to each adult for a meal.”

It was the next year, when a successful harvest was in, that they set aside a day for Thanksgiving.
It’s important to remember that just a few months before they were facing starvation, digging

graves in the rocky soil for their children, wives, husbands; that as they sat down to eat a
Thanksgiving feast together their hearts were still broken from the grief and trauma.

Gomes, who grew up in Plymouth, says that a local custom is that on Thanksgiving Day, in the
middle of the bountiful tables, five kernels of corn placed on a red maple leaf are set at each

place to remind people, who now enjoy a good bounty, of the “starving time” of long ago (p.
151).

For some of us, Thanksgiving will be a time of joyful reunion with dear ones, a time of being
together with precious friends, a time of feasting, laughing, rejoicing, a time when doxology,
“Baruch atah Adonai,,” will fall easily and gracefully from our lips. For others Thanksgiving will
be lonely, a time of loss and grief, a heightened time of anxiety, perhaps fear and worry. For
those, particularly, doxology, thanksgiving, will be an occasion of integrity and faithfulness and -
blessing. /

For all of us, it is an occasion to praise God from whom all blessing flow, to express our
gratitude for love and mercy beyond our comprehension, for all the blessing of our life, for Jesus
Christ, our Lord, and for God’s amazing grace in our lives.

All people that on earth do dwell,

Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.

Him serve with mirth, his praise forth tell.
Come ye before him and rejoice.

Amen.