5^th Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 11) “Make a Joyful Noise”

Psalm 100

15 June 2008

This week, as I often do, I pulled out the file on this particular Sunday of the three-year lectionary. In these Sunday files I keep sermons, notes, bulletins for each Sunday, going back—I hate to think of it—to 1975 when I started in my first parish. It’s always interesting to see what I’ve done before in preaching from any given set of lessons; it also helps me see how my own perspective has changed over nearly 35 years of preaching.

This particular file was interesting because it seems these lessons have a tendency to come up at some significant moments. Back in 1993, this was the Sunday that we worshiped for the very first time in our new sanctuary—a grand day, for those of you who remember it. The funniest part for me was watching family after family come in, turn to one another with confusion on their faces, and say, “Where do we sit?” The familiar old place in the old sanctuary was no more, and now everyone had to settle into a new pew somewhere.

Then, six years ago, in 2002, these lessons were read on the Sunday that we said farewell to Associate Pastor Jeff Solheim—a sad day, but an exciting one as he and his family moved on to their own parish up in Oregon. In any congregation there are always comings and goings. Very soon, I’m happy to say, we expect to welcome a new associate pastor—but you’ll be hearing more about that very good news in the next few weeks, so get ready!

Today I’d like you to turn your attention to the Psalm for this morning. It is a familiar one, I suspect—Psalm 100, one of the shortest in the Psalter but also very profound. You’ll find it in the liturgy bulletin on page 4, and you might want to have the words in front of you as we walk through the Psalm together.

First, the context. Picture, if you will, a dramatic scene in ancient Israel. It is a festival day. There are crowds of people in Jerusalem, hundreds or even thousands of people. They have gathered outside the temple, there on Mt. Zion, and there is an air of excitement! The hour approaches for the service to begin, and a cantor calls out the familiar line: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all you lands! Serve the Lord with gladness, come before his presence with a song!” Then the massive congregation responds, “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, go into his courts with praise! Give thanks to him, bless his name!” At this the massive gates swing open, and the people, singing and shouting for joy, enter into the courts of the Lord’s house. That, the scholars tell us, was likely the situation when this Psalm was sung.

The opening line in our translation says, “Be joyful in the Lord,” but the older version is closer to the Hebrew. “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all you lands!” The word has the strong connotation of noise—indeed, the phrase could literally be translated “Shout for joy!” It takes us to a world that sometimes seems far removed from the sedate and calm worship of 21^st century Lutherans! Yet what the Psalmist suggests is that the proper worship of God begins with an excitement and joy that can hardly be contained!

One of my professors in seminary once gave a lecture in which he compared the liturgy of the church to a football game. He had quite a lot of interesting comparisons to make, but the one that sticks in my mind is the excitement, the thrill that sweeps across the thousands of fans in the stadium. Can you imagine a quiet football game? That’s the excitement we should feel about our God, an excitement that should pervade our worship. Sometimes I think we are more like observers at a chess tournament!

You probably remember a few weeks back the Sunday we were without an organist or pianist. We sang the liturgy and most of the hymns a capella—which I thought was really lovely, just as a change. At the second service, we sang the recessional hymn a capella. I stood in the back as the candles were extinguished. Then, suddenly, the organ burst into song! David Worthington had slipped over and played a postlude! I knew he was planning to do that, but when the music began, it took my breath away—after the beauty of just our unaccompanied voices, to suddenly hear the organ respond! “Make a joyful noise”—it was exciting! And that’s how worship should be.

How do you come into his courts? Do you feel, as you drive into the parking lot, that what happens here is going to be wonderful, exciting, uplifting? Do you join with the enthusiasm of a football fan? Do you sing with a loud voice?—not a good voice, necessarily, there’s no requirement of that—but a loud and enthusiastic voice? Or do you bring a ho-hum attitude, a sense of “why am I here?” If you go to a football game with that attitude, you likely won’t have much fun; you have to let yourself be there, let yourself be fully engaged! It’s that way with worship as well.

Notice also who it is that is addressed in this opening shout of the Psalm: All you lands! That’s remarkable in the Old Testament; the Old Testament writers don’t usually give much attention to any land but Israel. Yet here, as they gather to worship, there is a different sense—a sense that the God of Israel invites all nations to worship him. I wonder sometimes if we really expect and welcome that idea. It means, you see, welcoming all people to join us in worshiping God: people of all colors, accents, backgrounds; people like us and unlike us; people who are rich and poor, old and young. Are we ready to welcome all to join us in our worship? If not, then this Psalm is not for us.

Then the Psalmist turns to Israel itself. Know this: The Lord himself is God, he himself has made us and we are his. For me this calls to mind the Catechism: “God has created me and all that exists.” Again, the Lord Jesus came, suffered, died, “so that I might be his own!” And again, the Holy Spirit “has called me through the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and sanctified and kept me in true faith.” God has made us; we are his.

I don’t know any line in the Bible more important for us to know in the depth of our hearts. Sometimes I think we forget that God made us. Oh, we know it intellectually. We speak of God as Creator. But what is so fabulous about the Catechism’s approach is that Luther starts with “God has created me”—that each one of us is the crowning creation of God, the most precious creation of God. We often get to thinking about the way we are, and we wish God had done something differently with us. Maybe we wish God had made us taller or slimmer or less awkward or more musical. But the Psalmist reminds us that what we are is what God created, and it is good.

There’s a story from the middle ages about Emperor Henry III. One day he was out hunting. He came by chance upon a little country church. He went into the church, posing not as the Emperor but as a simple soldier. The priest was a man quite badly deformed—a man known for his piety, but so unsightly as to be thought almost a monster. As the Emperor listened to the priest say mass, his mind began to wander. He wondered why God, from whom all beauty proceeds, would permit so deformed a man to serve as a priest.

But as the mass proceeded, Henry was startled out of his daydreams when the priest came to the text, and said, in a very loud voice, “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” That verse struck the Emperor to the heart, as he realized that each person, each individual, is created and loved by God. God, who made us, does not make mistakes. We are his! We are his people!

And that, you see, is what allows us to enter his gates with thanksgiving, to go into his courts with praise, to give thanks to him and call upon his name. When we view things aright, we see that God’s intention is precisely this: to gather his people together in order to praise him. We are God’s people, and that is why we are invited into his house.

The Psalm closes by proclaiming that the Lord is good! When Luther translated this phrase from the Psalms, he usually liked to use the German word freundlich—literally, “friendly.” The Lord is friendly. For Luther, living at the close of the medieval period when God was often viewed as fearsome, that was the grace that could be heard in this verse. The Lord is good to us because he is our friend, and he loves us. Luther put it this way: “You must not read the words ‘good’ and ‘his steadfast love’ with dull indifference. Nor dare you skim over them . . . No, you must bear in mind that these are vibrant, significant, meaningful words; they express and emphasize one them: God is good . . . From the very bottom of his heart he is inclined to help and do good continually. . . God abundantly and convincingly proves his friendly and gracious favor by his daily and everlasting goodness.”

This, then, is the God revealed in this Psalm: A God who loves us, calls us to be his own, gathers us together, who loves nothing more than to hear us sing and shout with joy. For the Lord is good, his mercy is everlasting, and his faithfulness endures from age to age.