Any Lesser Gods--February 5, 2020

Any Lesser Gods--February 5, 2020

"Praise the LORD!

 Praise, O servants of the LORD;

 praise the name of the LORD.

 Blessed be the name of the LORD

    from this time on and forevermore.

 From the rising of the sun to its setting

    the name of the LORD is to be praised.

 The LORD is high above all nations,

    and his glory above the heavens.

 Who is like the LORD our God,

    who is seated on high,

 who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

 He raises the poor from the dust,

    and lifts the needy from the ash heap,

 to make them sit with princes,

    with the prices of his people.

 He gives the barren woman a home,

    making her the joyous mother of children.

 Praise the LORD!" [Psalm 113:1-9]

According to the dinner-time prayer I recall from my childhood, God is both "great" and "good."  (Let us thank him for our food.  There.  I finished it.)

Sometimes just saying so is enough--saying that God is great, that God is worthy of praise.  But it is worth it every so often to stop and think for a moment about just why it is that God is worthy of praise.  What's so great about God, after all?

And you know what delights me every time I come across it again?  It's the way the Scriptures zero in on God's way of lifting up the ones who were regarded as nobodies.  The reason God is worth praising comes down to God's way of raising up the lowly and restoring life to those who are written off as unimportant.  God is "great," in other words, because God is "good"--and in particular, that God is good to the folks who go overlooked and disregarded in the world.

Maybe we should even get a bit more specific--this isn't just any old generic, abstract concept of "god" or "deity in general."  This psalm specifically calls on God by the particular name YHWH (probably pronounced something like "Yahweh" millennia ago, and translated as "The LORD" in our English translations).  That's the name God self-identifies with at the time of liberating the enslaved Hebrews from the grip of a cruel and rotten Pharaoh in Egypt.  And ever since then, any time the name "YHWH" was spoken, prayed, or written, it was a clear nod back to God's habit of lifting up the bowed down, freeing the oppressed, and raising to life those who were in the grip of death.

This really is amazing, if you think about it.  The people of Israel and Judah understood that the reason for praising God wasn't just that God was the biggest thing in town--but that this particular God they worshipped was the One who cared particularly for the poor, the needy, the empty-handed, the beaten-down, the broken-hearted, and the discarded people.  The ones looked down on because they had no children, or had no real estate, or had no titles to their names--these are the folks YHWH lifted up, and still lifts up.  

The other ancient empires invoked their gods and goddesses for military victories, or worshipped them because they thought their pantheons had the power of lightning and thunder or fertility and harvest.  They worshiped their gods and goddesses as their ticket to winning in battle, or amassing bigger fortunes, or making a bigger name for themselves.  They saw the "greatness" of their gods as a means to the end of making themselves "great."

But at its most faithful, the descendants of those enslaved Hebrews saw things differently.  They understood that God's greatness was really about God's goodness--and in particular goodness to those who were the most desperate.  Israel and Judah understood that God was worth praising, not as a means for getting something in return from God, but simply because of the beauty of knowing that God cared about the folks who had been left out, left behind, or left alone.

That's the change of focus we are called to practice every day: away from imagining God as a means to our own "greatness" and toward recognizing God's greatness in terms of God's goodness.  The God who claims us is the One whose power is not spent in propping up the already-comfortable or giving victory to empires, but who frees slaves, seats the poor next to the princes, and blesses the broken-hearted.  And any "god" who is invoked just as a means of getting us more money or privilege or power is a pretender and a fraud.  The living God is worthy of our praise because the real and true God brings to life those who are in the grip of death and at the end of their rope.

Any lesser gods shouldn't get our allegiance. Don't give it to them.

The God worth praising--and worth rearranging our lives around--is the One whose greatness is seen in lifting up the ones treated as nobodies, the One who brings life to our many kinds of deadness.

Lord God, you are indeed worthy of our praise, not merely because you are powerful... but because you are good.