Psalm 148

1 Hallelujah! Praise the Lord from the heavens;
praise him in the heights.

2 Praise him, all you angels of his;
praise him, all his host.

3 Praise him, sun and moon;
praise him, all you shining stars.

4 Praise him, heaven of heavens,
and you waters above the heavens.

5 Let them praise the Name of the Lord;
for he commanded, and they were created.

6 He made them stand fast for ever and ever;
he gave them a law which shall not pass away.

7 Praise the Lord from the earth,
you sea-monsters and all deeps;

8 Fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous wind, doing his will;

9 Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars;

10 Wild beasts and all cattle, creeping things and winged birds;

11 Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes
and all rulers of the world;

12 Young men and maidens,
old and young together.

13 Let them praise the Name of the Lord, for his Name only is exalted,
his splendor is over earth and heaven.

14 He has raised up strength for his people and praise for all his loyal servants,
the children of Israel, a people who are near him. Hallelujah!

This year, Monday Matters will focus on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We'll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen.

I could be wrong

I am never free from the possibility of being mistaken.

-Howard Thurman

My hero, Charles Schulz, said that cartooning is preaching. One of his most compelling sermons showed Snoopy at the typewriter on top of his doghouse. Charlie Brown approaches and asks what he is writing. Snoopy answers that he’s writing a book on theology. Charlie Brown responds: “You have to have a good title for a book on theology.” Snoopy smiles smugly: “I have the perfect title.” The title of his theology book? “Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?”

I mention this cartoon in response to a line in the psalm you may have heard in church yesterday, a psalm printed above. It’s a hymn of praise. Everything in creation offers praise for God. Among all the things that offer praise are waters above the heavens. It’s one of several places in scripture where we get a glimpse of biblical cosmology. In those days, people believed that above the sky there was water, as if the sky were a big dome. We now know that is not true. In other words, those early faithful people were wrong.

Throughout the history of the church, people have been wrong about all kinds of things. The church persecuted Galileo for pointing out that the earth was not the center of the universe. More recently, the church has come to admit it has been wrong about many issues. About excluding women from leadership. About the biblical sanction for slavery. Richard Hays, a brilliant New Testament scholar who taught at Duke Divinity School, recently passed away. At the end of his career, he wrote a book with his son (also a biblical scholar) entitled The Widening of God’s Mercy. In this book, Richard Hays acknowledges that he (along with many in Christendom, however well intentioned) had been “wrong about the most essential point of theology: the character of God. In recent years, that is nowhere more apparent than in ecclesiastical debates on sexuality.” He describes how he changed his mind about same-sex relationships. He continues: “We need to return to a more expansive reading of the biblical story as a story about the wideness of God’s mercy.”

Another stellar theologian, James Allison, wrote a book with this captivating title: The Joy of Being Wrong. It’s a rich book which recognizes that grace is available to us, even when we might be off track. He writes: “Representations of God, all of which are marked by a human culture in which death appears as, at the very least, inevitable, are wrong, as Jesus remarked to the Sadducees: “You are greatly mistaken.” The resurrection of Jesus, at the same time as it showed the unimagined strength of divine love for a particular human being, and therefore revealed the loving proximity of God, also marked a final and definitive sundering of God from any human representational capacity…The complete freedom and gratuity of God is learned only from the resurrection, not because it did not exist before, but because we could not know about or understand it while our understanding was shaped by the inevitability of death.”

All of which is to say that religious people need to pay attention to Snoopy and recognize that in the face of holy mysteries, we are called to humility. We need to embrace what St. Paul said: We see through a glass darkly. We know in part. And so we regularly experience the joy of being wrong in our liturgy, when after confession, after we admit we’ve been wrong, we hear most gracious words of absolution.

Some years ago, one day after church, my daughter told me that when I stood behind the altar with arms raised, celebrating the eucharist, it looked as if I was shrugging my shoulders in a way that said: “I don’t know.” She was tapping into something truer than she may have known. The longer I’m on this spiritual journey, the more I believe we approach (on bended knee) mysteries transcending our limited understanding. That means we will be wrong about stuff, like those folks who thought there was tons of water above that blue sky. It makes me wonder (and occasionally fret) about what I’m wrong about that I don’t or won’t realize or recognize.

But fear not. We can still be faithful. In the end, what we know is what St. Paul said at the end of his famous hymn to love in I Corinthians. He said that what remains is faith, hope and love. So we have faith, which is trust that can sometimes feel like a leap. We hope, even if we don’t know what lies ahead. We show love, because that is the power that sustains us, the power at the heart of all creation. There’s nothing wrong about that.

-Jay Sidebotham

PS: If there was such a thing as Tuesday Matters, I’d write more about this psalm and particularly about how all of nature, animate and inanimate, praises the Lord. If you want to think more about this rather amazing concept, I commend to you a new book I’m reading by Karen Armstrong. Title: Sacred Nature.