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In Praise and Thanksgiving
By Patrick D. Miller, Jr.

"In a world that assumes the status is quo, that things have to be the way they are and that we must not assume too much about improving them, the doxologies of God's people are fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope is an authentic stance."

ONE of the most familiar and important of all the theological questions is the one that comes first in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. And Presbyterians are not the only ones who know the answer by heart. What is our chief end, our fundamental purpose as human beings? the first question asks. To glorify and to enjoy God forever, comes the answer. Our life is fundamentally lived in praise of God and in thanksgiving. Doxology is our reason for being-and joy is the final outcome of God's way with us.

Praise and doxology do not arise de novo. The countless hymns of praise, from the song of Miriam and Moses at the Exodus to the hallelujah chorus at the end of the Book of Revelation, arise out of the structure of faith in the dialogue with God. The story of the deliverance of Hebrew slaves and the word of the cross both tell us that cries of human suffering, pain, and need are heard and responded to by a gracious God. But the dialogue does not end there. The anticipation of God's help and deliverance, or the actual experience of it, brings forth a human response as well. Wherever the hand of God is discerned in the accomplishment of some palpable grace-whether a recovery from sickness, the birth of a child, the restoration of a broken relationship, or the realization of peace in the midst of hostility-human beings respond. They respond in a mode of speech: the hymn of praise and thanksgiving. And they respond in a mood of spirit: joy.

I

The form of the hymn of praise is as simple as its logic. It begins in a call to praise, or a declaration of praise. This is then grounded in a reason for praise, an indication of what God has done that evokes such a

Patrick D. Miller, Jr. is Charles P. Haley Professor of Old Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and Book Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY. His most recent book is Interpreting the Psalms (1986).

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response. The call and the reasons may move back and forth, be long or short, but the form and logic remain the same: Something has happened, and the only way to deal with that is in praise and thanksgiving.

I will extol thee, my God and King,
   and bless thy name for ever and ever.
………………….
The Lord is gracious and merciful,
   slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all….

All thy works shall give thanks to thee, O Lord…
………………….
The Lord upholds all who are falling,
   and raises up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all took to thee,
   and thou givest them their food in due season.
--Ps. 145:1, 8, 9a, 10a, 14, 15

O sing to the Lord a new song,
   for the Lord has done marvelous things.
--Ps. 98:1

The logic of faith is a matter of the heart as much as of the mind, of one's demeanor as well as of one's thought. Too often, faith seems dour. But where that is the case, good news has not made its way through. "Do not be afraid. I am with you. I will help you." Such words pervade the Bible, which is full of stories of people who have heard and trusted such news, and thereby have turned from fear and sadness and anxiety to joy and exultation.

Hannah utters her lament for her barrenness and weeps bitterly until she hears the words of Eli: "Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition which you have made." "Then," the narrator reports, "the woman went her way and ate, and her countenance was no longer sad" (I Sam. 1: 17, l8b). There is no child as yet; she is not even pregnant. But her whole being is changed, and the transformation issues forth in song of praise:

My heart exults in the Lord;
   my strength is exalted in the Lord (I Sam. 2:1).

In Luke 2, the shepherds, the poor of the earth, turn from fear to praise and glorify God because of the good news of a savior-even as they walk back to hard life in the cold fields outside Bethlehem.

The whole structure of Exodus 1-15, chapters of Scripture that tell of the salvation event par excellence in the Old Testament, is a movement from lament through salvation to praise. The cry of afflicted Israel goes up to the Lord who comes to deliver Israel from Egyptian slavery. Then, it is reported, when the victory is won and Israel has seen the great work which the Lord has done, they trusted the Lord. And they sang this

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song:

I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
   the horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea.
The Lord is my strength and my song,
   and has become my salvation (Ex. 15:1).

Miriam and all the women sing and dance and play the timbrels as she sings a similar hymn of praise (Ex. 15:21). In the words of the psalmist:

You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
   you have loosed my sackcloth and girded me with
      gladness (Ps. 30:11).

Isaiah 40-55 is filled with calls to praise addressed to exiles whose laments by the waters of Babylon were turned into exultant hymns of joy-even while they still sat by those same waters.

II

Psalm 126 is a particularly good example of this genre and pattern. Here we see a response of faith that remembers the delivering help of God in the past and hears God's word of assurance afresh in the midst of a world that, personally and communally, has fallen apart.

When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion
-we are like dreamers-
Then will our mouth be full of laughter,
   and our tongue with joy;
Then they will say among the nations:
   "The Lord has done great things with these people!"
The Lord has done great things with us;
   we are those who rejoice.
Restore, O Lord, our fortunes
   like the wadis of the Negeb
Those who sow in tears
   shall reap with shouts of joy.
The one who goes forth in weeping,
   bearing the seed,
Shall return with shouts of joy,
   carrying the sheaves (author's translation).

The historical setting out of which this psalm was composed is uncertain. It may well have been the experience of the exile. If it was not that, it nonetheless clearly speaks out of and to a similar situation in which the people are in distress and affliction and Jerusalem has been done in. The psalm has two parts. The first three verses anticipate the restoration of Zion as if one were dreaming. The final three verses pray for that restoration.

The key to understanding the psalm is the recognition that dreams were often regarded as a God-given means of revealing the future and God's plans for that future. What the Lord is doing is thereby known in anticipation. Zion will be restored. We anticipate, they say, the Lord"s restoring Zion, knowing now already that then our mouths shall be full of laughter. The present situation appears through that anticipation in a

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completely different light. It is like the oracle of salvation. The word of assurance has been heard.

The theme and spirit of the song are carried by a double repetition in the song: the action of God (restoring the fortunes of Zion and doing great things) and the community's reaction (laughter and joy). The hope of the psalm, expressed in confident anticipation and equally confident prayer, is that the Lord will restore God's people and God's place. Both sections of the psalm start in hope and prayer for God's transformation of their misfortune, for God's rejuvenation and restoration to life of God's people whose fate is hard and sad. This is a song sung by a defeated people, a people who have experienced national exile and have sunk into profound depression. But the song that arises out of the vision of the action of God has an utterly different tone to it. We can see it in the repetition of the words of laughter and joy. This song of a defeated, downcast community of faith, whose present experience is the sowing of tears, is literally filled with laughter and joy. A song of joy is what I would entitle the psalm, for the note of laughter and jubilation runs from beginning to end. It is a testimony to faith and to the transforming power of the vision of God's redemptive future. The redeeming act of God calls forth a joy in anticipation, and even greater rejoicing in its actualization.

It calls forth another response as well, one that is an important dimension of the act of doxology. It calls forth confession, The nations, who are often the source of Israel's affliction, are here heard praising the Lord and confessing the greatness of the God of Israel. This psalm makes explicit a feature that is common in the psalms of praise, and it is a marvelous indication of the transforming power of God's saving word and deed. Surprisingly, Israel's experience with God can evoke the wonder, praise, and confession of others. Such a notion shatters our limited vision, our tendency to conceive the possibilities of God's way with us too narrowly. Well and good, we may say, for us to praise God for those ways we have experienced God's grace. But is it not somewhat arrogant to suggest that communities beyond our own may find a witness to God's goodness in our being led and cared for? For Israel, however, this is not arrogance. Israel knows what a narrow vision forgets: that good news always creates a ripple of joy beyond the immediate circle of those to whom it is directed. Thus, one must ponder the larger marvel that Israel's confession is an echo of the prior confession of the nations about the great things God has done for Israel.

I have suggested elsewhere that this is why the praise of God is the most prominent and extended formulation of the universal and conversionary dimension of the theology of the Old Testament. What blossoms and flourishes in the New Testament proclamation of the gospel is anticipated in the Old Testament's proclamation of the goodness and steadfast love of God. Similarly, the New Testament impulse to transcend ethnic and national boundaries in calling all persons to

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discipleship to Jesus is anticipated in the Old Testament call to a, worship that is appropriate even on the part of those who themselves may not have known the powerful control of their lives by the God of Israel but who hear intimations of it in Israel's praises.¹

III

A similar pattern of doxological response appears in the twenty second psalm. The psalmist, who has cried out in great distress, receives the Lord's answer in the midst of the suffering and affliction, and then breaks forth into one of the most extravagant songs of praise and thanksgiving in Scripture (Ps. 22:22-31).

As the cry of the mothers and fathers of old was heard, so God has heard and answered the cry of the present sufferer. God has not abandoned the psalmist in silence. The affirmation of the psalmist that God is present and involved is just as strong as the cries of despair. One cannot take the former any more seriously than the latter. Here is one who genuinely experiences God's transforming and delivering power. It is as real as the sense of hopelessness and death.

This creates an unending litany of testimony, an ever-widening circle of praise. At the center of that circle is the one who prayed in agony and now testifies and praises in trust and joy. That testimony and praise takes place before the whole congregation, who are also called to praise because of what God has done for this suffering one. But such doxology is not confined to the immediate congregation. It reaches out to the ends of the earth. The proclamation and praise of the God who delivers in this fashion encompasses even the dead and draws in generations yet unborn. Thus, a wave of praise rolls out from God's deliverance of this one person. The doxology of the lamenting petitioner is public praise, which can and should elicit an astonishingly wide echo of praise. The utterly desolate and isolated individual, a worm, nothing, mocked by everybody, has moved to the center of a universal circle of the praise and worship of God.

Such language-the deliverance of one individual evoking the praise of all the earth-seems surely to belong to the hyperbole of poetic imagery. Let me suggest, however, that once this psalm has become the interpretive clue to the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus, as it seems to me the New Testament so declares, there is then a profound consonance between the words of this psalm and the outcome of God's answer to the one who cries to God from the cross in utter despair. On at least one occasion, the response of God to human pain evoked an unending wave of praise that still sounds forth.

So Paul, in what one may hear as a commentary on this psalm, writes: "And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name,

¹ Patrick D. Miller, Jr., Interpreting the Psalms (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), p. 68.

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that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:8-11). Such words come from a letter, written while the apostle himself was in prison, that is one of the primary expressions of the praise and joy in the New Testament. If it is possible for a letter written to friends to be thoroughly doxological, perfecting the praise of God and overflowing in the joy, it is Paul's letter to the Philippians. It is written by a man who, in the midst of whatever trouble comes his way, knows the assuring word of God: "You do not have to be afraid, I am with you, I will deliver you." The result is a document that "shows the transformation of an existence taken up into the praise of God.²

IV

At this point, some generalizations can be made about the place and significance of doxology. These draw upon the material discussed thus far, but also go beyond it.

1. Praise is fundamentally a social or communal experience and as such is an anticipation of the universal praise of God. I do not mean by this that it is impossible to render praise to God as an individual or private act. The point is rather that in its fundamental character, and certainly as it is described, uttered, and acted in the Bible, doxology is rendered in community. There are two dimensions to this.

First, thanksgiving and praise by their very nature reach out, draw in, encompass, and involve others. Thanksgiving is not private. It arises out of relationship and further enhances and strengthens it. I would dare to say that there are few human acts that serve more to deepen relationships than the expression of thanks. Expressing thanks declares one's gratitude and joy for what someone else has done. But it is not just self-expression. It has an effect on the receiver, too, who finds his or her own original act completed, enhanced, and carried further in hearing and receiving thanks-whether by word or by some responding gesture or activity that signals thanks. Whatever else may have gone on in the relationship between these persons, they are now drawn together in a positive bond of kindness and gratitude. What we see happening in the human activity of beneficent act and grateful response identifies, if only indirectly and partially, what takes place in the relationship between God and human beings in the dialogical structure that begins in the cry for help and moves from God's gracious response to the praise and thanksgiving it evokes.

It is also clear from our human experience that joy is a response that ultimately does not stay contained. It, too, is an emotion to be shared. Whether its character in any particular instance is gratitude, wonder, or happiness, when joy arises within us, it inevitably breaks out. And the

² Daniel W. Hardy and David F. Ford, Jubilate: Theology in Praise (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1984), p. 25.

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joy and happiness of others draws us in Christian community is thus created, enhanced, and strengthened in the joy of praise and thanksgiving.

The second dimension of the communal character of doxology is that it opens up that chain of praise that leads to the whole universe praising God. Psalms 22 and 126, and many others, speak of the capacity of God's help received and acknowledged in any single case as being capable of drawing forth an unending stream of praise. Thus, whenever the congregation gathers to praise the Lord, it participates in a developing chorus that shall, in the end, encompass all of heaven and earth, everything that has breath and everything that is, in the glorifying of God. When Psalm 150 closes the Psalter with a call to everything to praise the Lord, that is not simply a literary ending, it is an anticipation, a prefiguration of the praise of God by the whole cosmos, the end toward which everything is moving.

2. Doxology celebrates human impossibilities that become God's possibilities. The praises of Israel bore Witness to transformations too wonderful for any human capability to bring off. They are what Walter Brueggemann has called "songs of impossibility," setting forth "a distinctive and radical claim in Israel … that conventional definitions of reality do not contain or define what God will yet do in Israel."³ One of the most frequent themes of the psalms of praise is the celebration of God's reversal of the way things are: lifting up the lowly and putting down the mighty, feeding the hungry and giving sight to the blind, making the barren woman the joyous mother of children (Ps. 113:9). All human definitions of the way things have to be in this world are challenged and overturned. The freedom and power of God says that what is laughable from a human perspective (recall Sarah's response to) the announcement that she would have a child) is the way things are going to be when God is at work.

In a world that assumes the status is quo, that things have to be the way they are and that we must not assume too much about improving them, the doxologies of God's people are fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope is an authentic stance. All this is ridiculous, of course, unless one has seen the wonders of God in the past: the overthrow of the mighty and the setting free of an oppressed people, the gift of life in the face of death, fertility where there was barrenness.

Resurrection defies all human categories. So, Christians gather every Sunday to give praise to God for the impossible wonder that raised Christ from the dead. In its act of doxology, the church says to the world that all our presumptions about what can happen are overruled by the wonderful impossibilities that God's power and freedom have wrought.

³ Walter Brueggemann, "'Impossibility' and Epistemology in the Faith Tradition (of Abraham and Sarah (Gen. 18:1-15)," Zeitschriftfur Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 94 (1982), pp. 624-25.

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3. Praise is useless, and that is one of the reasons we do it. There are many ways that the documents of the Westminster Assembly are a theological albatross around the neck of Presbyterians, but I consider the first question of the Shorter Catechism a surprising gift and in some ways a rather astonishing answer to the question about what is the chief purpose of human life in this world. It sets aside all utilitarian goals, all efforts to identify moral purpose or worthwhile functions, and claims instead that our primary purpose in life is doxology and joy.

Here is another side of the reality of grace: there is nothing you have to do but to live in the joy of the Lord. In the face of an insistent pattern in secular and church life that leads us always to live and work to accomplish things, to achieve goals, to live useful lives, and to carry on an unceasing array of programs to justify our existence, the sound of doxology frees us to do nothing but give glory to God. The thing that matters most is utterly useless in a world that measures all activity by its usefulness and human worth by capabilities and accomplishments.

It is no accident that the Sabbath is the chief occasion when Jews and Christians give praise to God, for the Sabbath is God's gift of rest and uselessness. It is our reminder that we do not justify ourselves by our work. The Sabbath is useless time and doxology is useless act-and both are to the glory of God, our reason for being.

And here is where music finds its place. (Not its use, its place.) The sound of praise is music. Doxology and thanksgiving do not gain their full expression apart from music. The stories and psalms of the Old Testament reverberate with the sounds of instruments and singing. As the Psalter reaches its end, it becomes nothing but doxology and every instrument is called to play, every voice to sing the praise of God.

It is strange how much the church worries about justifying the place of music in worship and the church. Do we spend too much on it in the budget? Is it right to pay money to professional singers? Is the music too elaborate? I suppose all such questions have their place. But I am confident, too, that they reflect some reluctance to place at the center something that has no other purpose than to glorify God. "Sing to the Lord a new song" is one of the most repeated lines in the Psalter. The Shorter Catechism suggests that is our reason for being. So let the music of Bach and Mozart, Heinrich Schutz and John Rutter, John and Charles Wesley, Handel and American folk songs, Haydn and Black spirituals, Ralph Vaughn Williams and Isaac Watts ring in our churches. It will accomplish nothing. All it can do is express joy and give glory to God.

4. Doxology is profoundly subversive, undercutting all human structures and every human being as pretenders for ultimacy or absolute devotion. That happens first of all with regard to the possible pretensions that we make for our own selves. Praise places us totally outside ourselves. Thanksgiving, whether to other persons or God, is an inherent reminder that we are not autonomous and self-sufficient, and by its very character directs our positive feelings toward others rather than toward

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ourselves. Praise to God does that in a fundamental way as it directs our love away from self and all human sufficiency. Such praise does not imply that we are unworthy-at least I do not think that is reason for praise of God. Rather, the wonder of God's power and love and grace evokes our admiration and adoration. As we see the beauty of a flower or hear the beauty of a symphony, we may be so caught by it that all attention is directed toward the source of that wonder. In a lovely contemporary hymn, Fred Pratt Green expresses this subversive character of praise:

When in our music God is glorified
and adoration leaves no room for pride,
it is as though the whole creation cried
Alleluia.⁴

Doxology also serves, however, to subvert the claims of any other person or structure to have ultimate place in our lives. It is the most visible regular expression of our obedience to the first commandment. The clearest indication of the idolatrous character of political people or structures is their insistence that citizens or subjects praise them. Praise of God helps us to beware of political leaders whose visage is on posters and walls everywhere and of any party that allows only good things to be said of it. Any community that sings with conviction "All people that on earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice; Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell" cannot give its ultimate allegiance to a Hitler or a Kennedy or a Reagan or a political party of any stripe.

5. Prayer and praise are the most explicit and clearest testimonies to the reality of God in a God-denying or God-indifferent world. Most of our other acts are quite ambiguous and capable of authentic duplication by others for whom the reality of God is a matter of indifference, irrelevance, or nonsense. But doxology and prayer make no sense in a world where God is not present or trusted. The act of doxology is a continuing testimony to another order than the one that assumes we have found all the answers in ourselves and have no other way to go than the path our human minds and wills can identify. One of the reasons we gather for worship on regular occasions is to remind ourselves in prayer and praise that the secular ability to live in a world without taking account of God is neither the last word nor the right one.

6. The praise of God is the last word of faith. It is our "end" in life, the end or goal toward which all our life is set-so the Scriptures, and the Westminster Catechism, and Bach, and Handel's Messiah. All the songs and prayers of Israel contained in the Psalter reach their final climax in praise. In praise, therefore, God gives us the last word. In the structure of faith, God hears the praise of all that is created. The sound of praise is the glorification and enjoyment of God, the true measure of piety, and the proper purpose of every creature. So, first and last, Hallelujah, the Lord God omnipotent reigns!

⁴ Fred Pratt Green, "When In Our Music God Is Glorified," Rejoice in the Lord, ed. Erik Routley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), No. 508.